Now I don't mean to gush, but I miss hearing Clinton talk. I miss the fact that he could talk and that he enjoyed talking and asking and answering questions. Have a standards fallen so quickly?

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

Dammit! Now I have to buy the book!

I was going to anyway, even though I have so many unfinished books and other projects I'm ashamed of myself. In fact, I wasn't sure I even I really wanted to read it. I just want to see it on the Top 10 list over on Amazon.com. But I just finished the intro and fell for that wonderfully cranky prose all over again.

In recent times, the right has ginned up its “liberal media” propaganda machine.
Books by both Ann Coulter, a blond bombshell pundette, and Bernard Goldberg,
former CBS News producer, have topped the best-seller lists, stringing together such
a series of charges that, well, it’s amazing neither one thought to accuse “liberals” of
using the blood of conservative children for extra flavor in their soy-milk decaf lattes.
While extremely popular with the media they attack, both books are so shoddily writ-ten
and “researched” that they pretty much refute themselves. Their danger derives
less from the authors’ respective allegations than the “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”
impression they inspire. In fact, barely any of the major allegations in either book
stands up to more than a moment’s scrutiny. The entire case is a lie, and, yes, in many
instances, a slander. Although I abhor the methods of both authors, I do not feel they
can go unanswered. Ideas, particularly bad ones, have consequences. The myth of the
“liberal media” empowers conservatives to control debate in the United States to the
point where liberals cannot even hope for a fair shake anymore. However immodest
my goal, I aim to change that.

You gotta love Eric's sense of humor. The title--What Liberal Media?--sums up the bewilderment we all felt when we liberals rolled off of our futons, and opened our copies of the New York Times over our bowls of organic granola, to discover we had the power to control the hearts and minds of American public. You also gotta love his salute to Tapped, Atrios, and company for their work at debunking the myth.

In my more compassionate moments, I entertain the idea that perhaps people on the hard right aren't nearly as nutty or scary or evil as we might believe. Then reports like this jerk that fairytale right out of my head.

Bush is revered so intensely among CPACers that all successes seem to issue from him, while failures are the fault of others unworthy of the great man. Jason Crawford, a 23-year-old who works in business development in New York, formed his group Patriots for the Defense of America right after Sept. 11 to promote "moral clarity" in the war on terror. Now, convinced that moral clarity requires attacking North Korea and fomenting revolution in Iran, he's disappointed in the administration. Yet speaking along with Oliver North (who ranted against the "brie-eating, foie gras-sucking French") at the "What Are We Fighting For?" panel, he put the blame not on Bush, but on some amorphous "us" who failed to rise to Bush's challenge. "Today we can see from our actions that we lack moral clarity," he told the crowd. "We are betraying the principles of the Bush doctrine!"

Dear, sweet, pale, trembling Lord!

I don't know what's funnier; the idea the Tom Daschle is a communist, or the outraged victimization of these people. If they weren't so completely beneath contempt I'd pity them. The fact is they're fighting a losing battle and they know it.

People who know me will laugh when I say this, but I really don't believe in laying everything that's gone wrong in the last two years at the feet of the Bush administration. Yesterday's shuttle catastophe is one of those horrible things that I'd like to chalk up to misshap. But this is hard to ignore. What gets at me the most is the way that Bush's constant slashing of funds is having real and unimaginable consequences.

New look! Got bored!

This morning my uncle forwarded me a message urging to me to pray for our good Christian President George W. Bush. The general gist of the message that because he has such high regard for both God and the military, we should give him our spiritual support.

What a blessing to have a professing Christian as President.

Please take a moment after you read this to "pray for him." He truly
does have the weight of the world on his shoulders. Pray that God will
sustain him and give him wisdom and discernment in his decisions.

Pray for his protection and that of his family.

And after you have prayed, send this to everyone on your e-mail list.
Our President needs Christians, Democrats and Republicans alike, to be
praying for him. As this makes the e-mail rounds, eventually there could
literally be millions of people praying for him, and for our Great
Country....

This wasn’t exactly surprising. My uncle is an army reservist, with two children who’ve recently entered the service, and a devout Christian. And of course like many of us he’s trying to reconcile himself to what’s going on in the world. But of course it bugged me. As a lapsed Catholic and a liberal my feelings on prayer and politics are inconclusive to say the least. I have never been comfortable with the idea of public prayer. I can come up with reasons and ideology to back me up but I don’t think they would quite go the distance to describing my squeamishness. It’s like kissing someone passionately in a crowded room or shouting in a library. The idea of a large church wedding terrifies me because if I’m going to declare my love before God I’m not sure I want everyone watching. These feelings have only been exacerbated in the last several months, so when I read that email, I immediately began searching the Web for any text about Christianity and the antiwar movement.

I hit upon a Jesus Was a Leftist Web site and sent the link to my mother. She emailed me back pointing out the questionability of this citation:

Was Pro-Choice (proven by what Moses wrote)

Exodus 21:22-23
(Word of God from Moses)

22 "If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [1] but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows.
23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life,

I’m not sure what it means but I’m definitely sure it doesn’t endorse choice. Then it hit me what I was trying to do.

If there’s anything that forever damns the Republican Party in my eyes it’s the way they’ve hijacked Christianity to their own narrow and vicious ends. And it’s dismally remarkable how easily the language of the Bible lends itself to racism, warmongering, hate crimes, and violent crusades against perceived sinners. More shameful that that is the Get Out Of Jail Free nature that calling someone a Christian affords. We forgive so much when given a glimpse of a public display of piety or hear tell of a leader’s revelatory Christian transformation. It is this sort of distortion that has never failed to infuriate secular, agnostic, and atheist liberals, who see the hypocrisy but, having removed themselves from religious argument are powerless to combat it.

Now in the wake of George W. Bush’s regressive two years in office, a new breed of Christian has found it’s voice in liberal politics, particularly in in environmentalism and the antiwar movement where the language of Christianity can be most directly applied. Initially I was thrilled. When confronted with their liberal counterparts, conservatives were often left tongue tied. This was comically evident when Jerry Falwell clashed with the What What Jesus Drive organization for conservation. ( "I urge everyone to go out and buy an SUV today.") Outbursts like that only prove my point: those on the right who espouse Christianity the loudest were the worst kind of hypocrites. How else would you describe a person who can’t see the religious significance of preserving the Earth? And why shouldn’t liberals take back Christianity? After all, its philosophies of forgiveness, compassion, philanthropy, and humility are more in line with liberal ideology.

But as Jesus Was a Leftist Web site illustrates, in the end it’s still a game of citation twisting. Biblical language is ambiguous at best and both sides can quote forever and justify pretty much anything. And once again I turned to the question of Christianity, prayer and politics. Is there ever a good way to mix them? Looking back over my uncle’s email I can’t quite dismiss it altogether. Underneath the rhetoric is something that I can ponder on; an admonishment not to hate Bush even if I disagree with him. This is something I can think about on a purely practical level. I don’t enjoy hating Bush. It hasn’t enriched my life in any way. It gives me insomnia and ruins my appetite. But that message is a far cry from asking me to pray for Bush and that I cannot do. When I pray it will be for the armed forces over seas, those they may potentially kill, the families here at home, and for myself and finding a sense of balance in a world of extremes. But I won’t pray for Bush.

The next time some Green nut insists on the general sameness of Democrats and Republicans, point out this rather significant difference. Yes, both sides tend to come from affluence, or come into it once their careers take off. The difference is that there is genuine dedication to social responsibility on the part of the Democratic rich which isn't nearly as obsessed with amassing more and more wealth. Can you picture Cheney saying this?


...he outlined steps to try to halt the growth of the uninsured, such as pruning Bush's proposed $674 billion tax cut and sending money instead to help states shore up health programs for poor people and uninsured children, programs that are being pared by the states' worsening budget crises.



Clinton noted his own post-presidential affluence as he echoed the Democratic attack on Bush's tax cuts as a boon for millionaires. Instead of spending the money on Medicare and Social Security (news - web sites), Clinton said, Bush wants "to give it to me!"



'TAKE MY MONEY AND MAKE AMERICA WELL'



"It's bad ethics and terrible economics," he told an enthusiastic audience at the Families USA health advocacy conference. "Take my money and make America well."



He also said he couldn't figure out why the Republicans wanted tax cuts that would deepen the deficit.

This is so obvious it's pathetic. Repubs have sex on the brain.

I feel a complicated mixture of horror and glee at this.

President George Bush is determined to go to war with Saddam Hussein in the next few weeks, without UN backing if necessary, according to authoritative sources in Washington and London.
The US president is "to turn up the heat" in his state of the union address on Tuesday.

"The pressure comes from President Bush and it is felt all the way down," a European official said. "They're talking about weeks, not months. Months is a banned word now."

Mostly horror. This war will be bad on so many levels. It will also be the nail in Bush's re-election coffin. What worries me is that the more reluctant the American public gets at going to war, the louder the drumbeats get. He must be either so oil-hungry he doesn't care, or just totally in denial. The only good thing to come out of war with Iraq would be that Bush's numbers might get so bad he has to resign. And I would far rather see Bush serve out his term than drop out early because he's blown it to the tune of thousands of lives.

“The United States should never go to war because it wants to. We should go to war because we have to...”

"Maybe this will inspire America's poor to not be so poor all the time."

Watched The Murder of Emmett Till last night on PBS. I almost didn't but I had it on pretty good authority that it was worth watching. I tend to initially balk at watching these programs because I always end up feeling so angry and depressed after, but after the whole dismal weekend of affirmative action debate I really needed to see something relevant.


It was worth seeing, although somewhat lacking. I don't think an hour is enough time to get into everything that the case embodied. For one, the antipathy that African Americans have towards the south continues today and has it's roots in the ideology of Mississippi. And the sexual politics of race is worth a documentary in itself. They also didn't get into the question of the whistle which surprised me. One story has it that Till would whistle to counteract his stutter. They mentioned the stutter briefly but not the whistle. My feeling is that whether the whistle was intentional or not isn't important. The point is that he was killed for it. Still that they didn't at least mention it was odd.


One of things that struck me was how large a part the northern press played in bringing the story out. How depressing is it the press in an era of segregation was in some ways more progressive than our press now?

Why We Need More Than An Antiwar Movement.
Kenneth W. Warren
Department of English
University of Chicago
January 16, 2003


Last August while visiting family in New Mexico, my wife, our children, and I viewed a video sent to my brother-in-law by the U.S. Air Force. Something of a group letter home, the video included footage of new recruits—my nephew included—getting haircuts, going through drills, and saying their hellos to parents, siblings, girlfriends, and boyfriends. Each recruit was given a chance to speak directly to the camera, and on occasion some gave their reasons for enlisting-- getting college tuition paid for, making money to help out the family, and proving themselves. No one I saw (and this was less than a year after 9/11) mentioned fighting terror or a desire to participate in the ousting of Saddam Hussein as a significant motivating factor for having joined up. And of all the reasons given, free college tuition was cited most often.
The Air Force appeared to have gotten the message because the successful completion of six weeks of basic training was treated with the pomp and solemnity of a college commencement. With parents and family in attendance, the newly minted airmen were showered with gifts, while video and still cameras recorded the moment for posterity—the celebratory atmosphere a far cry from what my father experienced in the late 1940s when as a 17 year old (he had lied about his age to the recruiter) he had enlisted in the Air Force, not to fight the Cold War but rather to escape the unattractive alternative of plowing and planting the several acres my grandfather farmed in northeastern Arkansas as a sharecropper. Yet whatever their differences, my father and my nephew were aware that for them the most readily available path to the good life many Americans expect was a term of enlistment in the U.S. military.
Perhaps the video I saw was not representative of the attitudes and situations of most new recruits into our military, but at the very least it tracked with a significant fact too little remarked about the first War for Oil prosecuted by George Part I and its all-too-likely sequel courtesy of George Part II, namely that both Chief Executives could deploy fighting forces of approximately 500,000 and 250,000 soldiers, respectively, without conscripting a single U.S. citizen. There’s nothing accidental about any of this. The relentless campaign to reduce the size of government and destroy the nation’s social welfare system, a campaign that began with Ronald Reagan and was slowed only marginally during the Clinton years, has been coincident with the nation’s move to an “all-volunteer” military--so has the disappearance of Pell Grants, the precipitous rise in college tuitions, the attachment of origination fees to student loans, and the increasing proportion of undergraduate financial aid provided by loans rather than scholarships or grants. It is simply harder for many lower and middle-income families to shoulder the expenses necessary to send their sons and daughters to college. But if these young men and women will agree to shoulder a rifle for a few years then Uncle Sam will help with the bill. Add to this the significant number of men and women serving as reservists merely as a way of bolstering family income and the picture becomes clearer: We’ve created the 21st-century version of the Hessian fighters whom the British employed over two centuries ago to defend their empire. Our new Hessian, though has been dragooned from the ranks of our poorer citizens—citizens who have been cut out of significant portions of the social contract by two decades of regressive social and economic policies.
What this has meant for the foreign policy of Bush I and II is that they have always assumed (and indeed have had) the capacity to wage a major war absent the consent of the public and Congress. Both administrations have sought consent only for reasons of political calculation and most decidedly not because they needed it in order to go forward with their plans. (The much ballyhooed Congressional debate before the first War for Oil occurred only after a half million troops had already been sent to the Persian Gulf. If anyone truly believes that there was a chance of calling those troops back without their having fired a shot, I’ve got a lake just east of Chicago that I can get you a good deal on.) Those of us who oppose this new war need to take this factor into account.
The antiwar movement of the 1960s was fueled largely by the draft, whose very existence meant that even to have the capacity to wage war the administration needed to go directly to its citizens in a fundamental way. Rep. Charles Rangel’s recent calls for reinstating the draft stems from a similar observation as well as from the astute recognition that if carrying out this proposed War for Oil required wealthy and middle-class Americans to send their sons and daughters to Iraq rather than to the Ivy League, then this whole business would be a non-starter.
We do need vigorously to oppose this war. But we also need to recognize that the best way to wean rogue administrations like the one currently occupying the White House from an addiction to warmongering is to invest our public resources heavily into improving the social welfare of our citizens who would then choose military service because they wanted to and not because they had to. Unable to assume a ready supply of bribed GIs that he could fling willy-nilly across the globe, our court-installed Chief Executive would be constrained to pursue a more legitimate foreign policy that the nation’s citizens might genuinely support.

Good piece on former Govenor Ryan in The Nation. Congress Republicans could take a lesson in "compassionate conservatism" from him.

The significance of this moment rests not just with the commutations but in Ryan's journey. This conservative Republican pharmacist-turned-pol has recounted how the exoneration of mentally retarded death-row inmate Anthony Porter--falsely accused of a double murder and saved only by the investigative efforts of college students--began the nagging doubt in his mind. Less obvious, perhaps, is the role prosecutors and pro-capital punishment legislators played in his decision. After the Porter case, Ryan named a blue-ribbon commission, which proposed reforms in Illinois capital laws, and Ryan went to his legislature three times asking for a narrowing of the death penalty. But the legislators were unwilling to modify a system under which seventeen death-row defendants were falsely convicted and more than thirty were represented by disbarred or suspended lawyers.

Just how much of this is tied up in Ryan's own legal and political troubles is a matter for conjecture. Though Ryan is surrounded by a corrupt administration and faces possible indictment himself in a license-peddling scandal, anyone who speaks with him finds little evidence that his stand on the death penalty is anything but sincere. In October, a wrenching series of individual commutation hearings brought forth the details of death-row defendants' crimes and new facts about their convictions, and Ryan--long a supporter of victims' rights--publicly wavered. It's hard to think of a more conscientious use of a governor's power to pardon and commute as a court of last resort, when the customary checks and balances have utterly failed.

Thoughts after watching The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Leiberman or Mr. Magoo? You decide.

Greetings from the Democratic stronghold of Illinois! Good inauguration speech by Blagojevich, though I have doubts that he can get us out of this deficit without raising taxes. Still he seems to have a realistic sense of what job creation actually means as opposed to our fearless leader.

Speaking of which...

According to Hertzberg Bush has a rather odd way of interpreting the Bible.

The current Administration likes its initiatives faith-based, and there has never been much secret about which faith constitutes the base. "Christ," Governor George W. Bush replied during a 1999 primary debate, when asked to name his favorite political philosopher. In the ambit of Bush the President, piety is next to godliness. According to a former Bush staffer, Evangelical Christianity is the "predominant creed" at the White House, and a tardy arrival is apt to be greeted with the reproach "Missed you at Bible study."

After the unveiling last Tuesday of Bush's "economic stimulus package," though, one has to wonder, and not for the first time, just which Bible these good people have been studying. It must be some sort of Heavily Revised Nonstandard Version, whose verses are familiar yet subtly different:

He that hath pity upon the rich lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will pay him again. (Proverbs 19:17)
Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the rich, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven. (Matthew 19:21)
For the love of money is the root of all good. (I Timothy 6:10)

Glory Hallelujah!

Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, in a surprise announcement, declared on Tuesday he has decided not to run for president next year.

Now if only Gephart and Leiberman could take the same reality-check vitamin.

What the f***??!!

President Bush will propose eliminating taxes on corporate dividends paid to shareholders, a measure that could cost the government $300 billion over 10 years and would be far bolder than some of his advisers had been suggesting, administration officials said today...
...The move will be the centerpiece of what is now a $600 billion package that is aimed at spurring economic growth, but it would also create much bigger budget deficits for the future.

I wish that this BS would just fade into the background, so I can finally get rid of this migraine I've had for the last two years. But than crap like this happens and I can't believe that this is the world I'm about to inherit.

I miss Bill!

Happy New Year y'all (sorta)

Why isn't this all over the airwaves?