Oh I know, I haven’t written in a while. All I can say is that it’s been a long year. But here I am back, just like the proverbial bad penny.

See the kid in the photo? Yes, that’s Anon back in the fall of 1952. I look smug, don’t I? ‘All the way with Adlai.’ There have been times in my life when I’ve felt as if I were the herald of lost causes.

Not long ago, I asked a friend who he was going to vote for president. He said that he wasn’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton, “I just don’t like her.” I replied that you don’t have to ‘like’ the candidate you’re voting for – you just have to know that he or she can do the job and do it well.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about why I’m so sanguine about politics and politicians. I suppose it goes back to the evening of the 14th of July 1960. Well, let me set this up for you.

It’s the afternoon of the 10th of July and we’re headed down to the Los Angeles airport. Governor Stevenson is due to arrive any minute. He is going to fight the upstart Senator from Massachusetts. The ‘we’ is my aunt, my mother and I. We join a group of people waiting on the tarmac of the far runway off of Imperial Boulevard. We park and join a small group of people. Teresa Wright is cheerleading the group and we try to decide to sing “Happy Days are Here Again,” or “The Gang’s All Here,” when the Governor arrives. Someone complains about the “what the hell do we care,” in the latter so it’s decided that we’ll go with “Happy Days are Here Again.”
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Some days there’s nothing more to say.
Could it get any worse? Oh, yes.
Will it get any worse? Probably.
Will we survive the Bush administration? Hope so.
Is this the end of life as we know it? Who knows?

But, we do need to take our collective heads out of the sand and face up to what is going on.

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and support Kiva.

And, of course

Well, go figure the French. They stand in defiance of everything ‘Bush,’ and then turn around elect a man who states frankly that he plans on licking Bush’s boots. If only Ségolène Royal had been willing to say what the French electorate wanted to hear on policy issues . . . But, she wasn’t willing to do that. Yes, she moved to the middle, but she wanted a kinder, gentler France. The French wanted a more modern and productive France.

Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, presented himself as the very essence of a very a very modern American of the western variety. He even posed for photos riding his white horse on a ranch in southern France. He promised to forge closer relations with Washington. Ah Madame France, où est vous?

Meanwhile, across the Channel, Tony “the poodle” Blair is on his way out. The closer Blair got to Bush, the more he was reviled by the British. Now, what will Blair do for the rest of his days? What can he possibly do to change history? The short of it is he can’t and he’s too intelligent to deny that history will write his epitaph.

And yet, intelligence seems to fall by the wayside when hubris corrupts the soul. Hubris has the power to turn intelligent human beings into idiots who have lost the ability to be self-critical. It’s the only thing that can explain how normally reasoning people get caught up in the most egregious kinds of scandals we’ve seen during the Bush administration.

So, now we can only wait to see if M. Sarkozy loses his way. Will he fall prey to the beast called hubris? He appears to have already taken on the role of the new French poodle. However, not even Nicolas Sarkozy will follow the “loyal Bushies” to the chasm, I suspect. Only time will tell. In the meantime, we can hope that he will refrain from calling the French of foreign descent, “scum.”

Please give what you can to Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and support Kiva.

And, of course

*Mais c’est dur à supporter,
Un salaud préfabriqué
Qu’on habille de votre peau
Et qui porte vos chapeaux.

But it is hard to support,
a prefabricated bastard
Whom one equips with your skin
And which wears your hats.

Let’s take this nice and slow. Say we’re both in charge of something, like a nation. We hold co-equal status according to our Constitution. I’m the President and you’re the Congress. Now, say I want to do something that you don’t want me to do. For argument’s sake, let’s say I want to continue a war that you don’t want me to continue.

It might seem easy, if I also hold the title ‘Commander-in-Chief.’ Aha! Well, when it comes to war, I would seem to have the trump card. But, also for the sake of argument, let’s say that I am just about the only person who wants to continue this war. Even my supporters aren’t all that thrilled about my war these days. Counter-balancing my power, you have control of the public purse. hmmmm . . . This is starting to get interesting.

Let’s go even farther: let’s say that all the reasons I gave you for going to war in the first place were wrong. We’re not going to get into whether I lied to you or was given bad intelligence. We’ll just leave it at all the reasons I gave have evaporated into the fog of war. There supposed to be weapons of mass destruction (read: atomic). There were none. There were supposed to be biological weapons. There were none. There supposed to be Al Qaeda training camps run by Saddam Hussein. There were none. There was supposed to be contact between the Iraqis and Mohammed Atta. There was none. There was supposed to be an Al Qaeda presence in Saddam’s Iraq. There was none then, there is one now. The only place where foreign insurgents were known to be before the war was in the north of Iraq, an area controlled by our good friends, the Kurds. (more…)

Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel . . . . If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so . . . but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?*
-Joseph Welch 9 June 1954
Army-McCarthy Hearings
Washington D.C.

There is something to be said for consistency, especially when it comes to the law. You’ll remember that Lady Justice is blindfolded: symbolising everyone’s equality under the law. Yes, she has those scales to complete the image of equality; but in her other hand she has that awesome sword. Lest we forget that not only is justice is blind, she’s also swift with that sword for miscreants who tread on her hem.

So, Americans live under the ‘rule of law.’ This was considered superior to the ‘rule of man’ by the framers of the Constitution. They were looking not so much at the chaos of a Hobbesian universe, as they were looking at the monarchical option. They wanted a way away from a mercurial monarch and toward the regularity and constancy of the Law.

All right, enough ancient history, let’s examine the recent past. When Bill Clinton was impeached (read: indicted). The conservatives said that it was for his perjury in front of a grand jury. They assured anyone who inquired that it was not, repeat not, for that salacious affair he had with the young woman with the thong. Of course, they did dwell on all of the gory details from the dress to the taped phone calls. Ah, those were the days. (more…)

Since late January I’ve withdrawn to my little cave in the side of the mountain. I can’t explain it. Maybe I was just recharging. Maybe I couldn’t look beyond the rim of the chasm anymore without wanting to jump. As is so often said, “It’s nothing personal,” I just had the feeling that everything on this 3rd rate little planet, circling a 5th rate star, was swirling down a huge black hole.

It’s not as if anything has changed, but I’ve upped my Prozac and I’m looking at things a little different now. Now, different should not be read as rosy. Different is different, not better. It appears that approximately 24,000 more soldiers will be sent to Iraq in the next few months. Democrats are so afraid of being labeled as defeatists (or “cut and runners”) that they’ve packed their balls away for the time being. Frankly, I thing that they should take their Conservative critics up on their challenge to do more than pass non-binding resolutions. Finger-wagging doesn’t stop an administration bent on accruing more power for themselves than Croesus had gold. (more…)

Mr. Bush gave his State of the Union (SOTU) speech on Tuesday night. He got very high ratings. Some 45 million people were watching to see what he was going to say and propose for our republic. I don’t know what they were expecting or hoping for; but I do know what they got.

It was one of his shorter speeches, lasting only 49 minutes: It just seemed longer. Unlike his last speech to the nation, he didn’t admit that any mistakes had been made in Iraq. Of course when he did say the “mistakes had been made,” in his previous speech; he said it in the passive voice so that the blame couldn’t be placed at the clay feet of this administration.

He couldn’t avoid the subject of Iraq: it took up half of his 49 minutes. But, this time he was asking the newly-emboldened Democratic Congress to give war a chance (An aside here: he referred to Congress as Democrat, leaving off the “ic.” This is Republican tactic designed to annoy Democrats. Somehow it’s supposed to deny Democrats the ability to be democratic. What it is, in reality, is petty. It shows Republicans for what they are. Shall we now call Republicans, “Republics”?).

Returning to the SOTU: there were some subjects that came up more than in the past. These subjects were health insurance, oil, Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and deficits. What was even more interesting were those things that came up less or not at all in Tuesday night’s speech: surpluses, Social Security, taxes, and the economy. Finally, Osama bin Laden was mentioned just once. Yes, he is Osama bin Forgotten as far as George W. Bush is concerned. (more…)

This graphic was with an article in the New York Times on 17 January (click on the link for a better view). I hardly know what to say after studying it. We were warned almost ½ a century ago by President Eisenhower about the pitfalls and folly of letting the military-industrial complex grow larger. We now work to feed the beast. What is criminal is what we could do to improve life in our country (and the world) if we didn’t feed this beast.

True, this graph is about the cost of the war in Iraq, but Iraq is merely a manifestation of the iron grip that the military-industrial has on our economy, our lives, and our very souls. It isn’t that we could have funded universal health care, or universal preschool, or ensure our security by enacting all of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations, or conquering cancer, or immunize all of the children of the world against childhood diseases: we could have done it all and have a chunk of change left over. (more…)

Have you ever written a paper in a word processing program and had the damn thing tell you that you were writing in the passive voice? Well, Mr. Bush’s speech the other night would have brought the ‘passive voice’ flag up often. “Where mistakes have been made the responsibility rests with me.” That is the cleverest use of the passive voice that I may have ever heard. He appears to take responsibility; while, in fact, pointing the finger at unknown others. What is he saying? That others have made mistakes; and he is magnanimously stepping up and accepting responsibility even though, mind you, he didn’t make the mistakes. Of course, if he had said, “I have made mistakes,” he would have been taking the blame, but only grown ups do that.

In this administration, no one takes responsibility. Advancement is based on who one knows, not what one knows. Diligence is punished, and incompetence is rewarded. Americans going to Iraq to work in the interim government were vetted by their allegiance to the Republican Party and the agenda of the religious right. People were questioned on who they voted for and whether or not they supported Roe V. Wade. This is the same administration, remember, that has been trying to disembowel the civil service in the U.S. in order to return to a spoils system in bureaucratic appointments. But, I stray from the point of Mr. Bush’s speech.

In his speech Mr. Bush made many claims. Let’s look at just a couple: (more…)

Just a few thoughts now that that our long national funeral has ended. There’s a lot to be said for loyalty. However, one must always question what they’re loyal to: is it to their ‘school,’ or to their ‘tribe,’ or to their nation? It might seem an odd question, but bear with me.

After Gerald Ford died, we found out that he had not supported the war in Iraq. He told this to Bob Woodward in an interview 2 years ago with the caveat that it not be revealed until after Ford’s death. So, where was his loyalty, in the end? Was it to the country? Or was it to his school, his tribe?

Do you find it odd that I call the Republican Party a tribe? Well, what do you call it when someone puts his loyalty to his party above his loyalty to his country? When his voice was needed in the national debate, he chose to remain silent. He didn’t support the war, he thought that it was wrong from its premise to its execution; but he said nothing. Now, we have his hollow ghostly voice speaking up too softly, and too late. When he could have made a difference, he chose silence. (more…)