the rix mix

Labels: George W. Bush, holidays, love, Mahalo, postcard

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces formally ended their nine-year war in Iraq on Thursday with a low key flag ceremony in Baghdad, while to the north flickering violence highlighted ethnic and sectarian strains threatening the country in years ahead.

"After a lot of blood spilled by Iraqis and Americans, the mission of an Iraq that could govern and secure itself has become real," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at the ceremony at Baghdad's still heavily-fortified airport.

Almost 4,500 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives in the war that began with a "Shock and Awe" campaign of missiles pounding Baghdad and descended into sectarian strife and a surge in U.S. troop numbers.

U.S. soldiers lowered the flag of American forces in Iraq and slipped it into a camouflage-colored sleeve in a brief outdoor ceremony, symbolically ending the most unpopular U.S. military venture since the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 70s.

So "ends" a war to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction it never had, toppling a brutal dictator who, in a perverse irony, was suppressing both Iranian-backed radical Shiites & the Saudi-backed Sunni terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. A FB friend reminded us today of a quote from Ernest Hemingway:

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector."

What does your shit detector tell you about the "end" of the Iraq War? Is it over for us? Ya think?

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq

Can't help but think the vast majority of the people chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" last night have been no closer to a real battlefield than what they've seen on TV.  The average age in front of the White House looked around 20.  Party. What are you supposed to do, just recall  the horror ten years ago, know the world is better off without him on it, & go to bed? That's what most Americans did. Also, every triumphant chant generates an echo with exactly the opposite sentiment. But it was a natural reaction. The workers toiling in the pit of Ground Zero, grim, hopeless work, literally inhaling bodies, personally earned their moment when President Bush visited with a bullhorn. But even there I felt something important was lost - the sense of a global tragedy.

Revenge tastes best served cold, the saying  attributed to Sicilians. This would have had the taste of revenge served medium-hot, on Sept 11, 2002.

The war goes on. Osama was a symbol, not a commander, his organization fractured into independent cults. It's an ideology, not a nation. or a person.

Very mixed reactions all around.The usual partisan name-calling. in comments on Facebook last night President Obama was called a "jerkoff" & an "asshole."  You have to grant the office some dignity even if you believe the person occupying it is a complete fool. Someone else will have the job & shouldn't have to wipe the shit people threw  off the desk.   Barack Obama is not a fool. An oligarch, yes. But so was George W. Bush. That's the kind of national government we now have. It may be the government we've always had. I don't enjoy thinking about it.

I despised George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.  We didn't catch Osama because we didn't know how to find  Osama until we redirected our efforts to Afghanistan & Pakistan. But killing Osama sooner wouldn't have been like killing Hitler in, say, 1943.

Googling "Paterson NJ Muslim 9/11" returns not a single  eyewitness account, police report, news story, or photographic evidence that anyone from the large Islamic community there celebrated in the streets after the attacks. Yet, like any urban legend, many accept it as fact. Apparently, no brave patriot from the 'burbs, some of whom regularly visit Paterson to obtain their stashes, ventured there on  9/11 to check out the rumors.

Labels: George W. Bush, in the news, Iraq

Al Gore, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama all, to one degree or another, supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Gore said he would've done it.

Besides harboring bin Laden, the Taliban were a continous source of horror stories, from treatment of women to blowing up the great Buddha cliff statues of Banyan.

Were we ever sure what we were going there to do? Yeah, kill bin Laden & destroy al-Qaeda camps. But what else? Was "nation-building" part of the plan? The Russians tried that. How would we know when we had finished the job? Where was the exit?

The Bush adminstration was planning to oust the Taliban before 9/11. The plans were so well advanced that the Taliban government abandoned Kabul within days after our campaign began on 11/7 & before an American life had been lost. We had them on the run for an entire year.

I don't see how President Obama can avoid increasing our ground forces, with the resulting expenditures of American lives & treasure.

President Obama will have to remind us why we went to Afghanistan in the first place. He will have to explain what it was we wanted to accomplish there after the Taliban were driven from power, that we did not accomplish. Then, he has to convince us that this goal can still be reached , or offer some other rationale & goal.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, George W. Bush, in the news

The best thing was that New York City went ahead & elected a mayor of moderate political & nonalarmist temperament who, from his own business experience, took a long economic view & understood it wouldn't do to turn Manhattan into a fortress island. He believed the city had a hopeful future & gambled on it.

Many of us were wondering at the time if we should put more distance between ourselves & the Port of New York.

We're still here.

The worst thing was a president who couldn't build on the good will of a shocked world, who couldn't finish the dangerous & difficult task we had generally agreed upon in Afghanistan & instead lied & manipulated America into a war-for-profit that his backers had intended to wage before he had taken office.

There's the contrast. A nation bogged down in two wars; a revived Taliban; a national economy in tatters; an irrational, paranoid, extremist right more obsessed with the new president's birth certificate than with bin Laden & Al-Qaeda or our own economic recovery. & in New York, a vibrant international city toughing out a recession, & a mayor - like him or not - about to accomplish what "America's Mayor" couldn't pull off from a smoking pit using the bullhorn of fear in the anxiety following 9/11: a third term.

I don't care for midtown Broadway as a pedestrian mall. But it could have become a desolate, scary place patroled by National Guard in Humvees. It might have been unimaginable for thousands of people to pack the streets outside Ed Sullivan Theater as Paul McCartney performed from the marquee, as they did last month. Downtown may have been largely abandoned by major businesses.

The shame of it is so much of America didn't learn from New York City. The place is too diverse, too broad-minded, too unconcerned with matters that future Americans will regard as petty, reactionary, bigoted, & foolish. That's how great cities are; New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago. Tough, resilient, & hopeful.

The President advises children to study hard, & some seriously unbalanced Americans go nuts. New York, having constructed two new baseball stadiums, begins digging a new trans-Hudson rail tunnel & debates the long-term revitalization of Coney Island.

9/11 Day is different around here. Everyone lost someone or has friends who lost someone. We've met people who were downtown that morning. It's personal.

We're still here.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, George W. Bush, in the news

Which reality do you inhabit, Obama World or Cheney World?
Eugene Robinson, "Worldviews Collide"

Some of the deeper philosophical discussions I had with friends as a 10-year old were about Bizarro, the imperfect Superman clone/nemesis. Bizarro had to act according to his nature, so there was some question as to whether or not he was truly "evil" like, say, Lex Luthor. Place Bizarro in a Bizarro World (Superman carved a square planet for him) & he made Bizarro sense & posed no threat to humans or Superman.

It hadn't occurred to me that Dick Cheney was the Bizarro president. In Bizarro logic, the Vice President would be the Chief Executive of the Disunited States of America, elected unfairly by a minority of the people. Indeed, Cheney was that. In Bizarro logic, the Vice President would hide from the public while in office & give speeches when he no longer held it, & campaign when he wasn't running for anything. The problem is that Cheney thinks he's in Bizarro World. Since we can't create one for him, a federal penitentiary would be an adequate approximation.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, culture, George W. Bush

In the run up to the Iraq invasion Donald Rumsfeld thought George W. Bush had to be given some spine with a Sunday School pictorial adorning a presidential memo, using stock Dept. of Defense photos & Bible quotes out of context. A Christian Crusade against the Infidels. Us bloggers have good reason to tag some of our posts "Blogging against theocracy."

Yes, Bible literalists fumble with metaphor. Open the door to one & a hundred more walk through [metaphor], & soon you can't tell the difference between a miracle & a meteorological event. But only the most simple-minded of believers could fall for this above the silhouetted image of a tank:
Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Ephesians 6:13

Rumsfeld's quote. Next unquoted sentence: Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.

Ain't gonna study war no more.

Only fitting [pun alert] that this disturbing exposé was in GQ, where men go for our weekly Ten Fashion Essentials.

• tan or beige sports coat
  
• hand-painted tie
  
• WFMU tee shirt
  
• baseball type cap better than a common geezer would wear
  
• winter jacket that actually keeps you warm
• bead necklace made by & given as a gift from a woman
• spare shoelaces in sock drawer
• guayabera shirt
• clean unsmelly sneakers
• Breastplate of Righteousness

Labels: blogging against theocracy, George W. Bush, home furnishings, Iraq, religion

When President Obama took office, I was ambivalent about what attitudes or measures he should take toward the criminals & incompetents his administration was replacing. He had his hands full, & I just wanted Bush to go away. If Americans preferred reform without retribution, that might not be a bad thing. But Cheney would not go away, & the miserable bastard kept showing up on TV, lying & trying to undermine the new president - who had the kind of broad electoral mandate Cheney & Bush never had. Cheney's statements during the Somali pirate crisis were infuriating. Despite warnings from within the party by conservatives like Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Repugs will not tone down their extremist, apocalyptic language. They turned to two professional entertainers, Rush Limbaugh & Glenn Beck, for leadership. (As if those jerks' followers were capable of delivering 280 electoral votes.) Torture memos were surfacing, Condi Rice was implicated. There's no way the Prez can keep the lid on the scandal now. As long as the Repugs are in complete self-destruct mode, at the edge of a precipice & shouting, "Push me," they might as well receive the shove they desire.

Americans wanted to believe that the extreme methods of interrogation not considered torture were necessary, infrequently applied, successful in extracting verifiable information, & not a daily obsession of people at the very highest levels of the Executive Branch. We're learning (as if we didn't know already) that none of these are true. Justice wants its hour. I was wrong to think a reckoning for the crimes could be avoided. Hurricane Katrina proved the indifference & incompetence of the Bush adminstration, but torture is the darkness at its heart. They would have - had they believed it necessary - waterboarded you or me.

Republicans are a minority party, & now they are a regionalist party, too. Democrats unseated a sitting president in 1992 with an unexpectedly great candidate, nearly did so again in 2004, before Hurricane Katrina, with a mediocre one, & decisively won the popular vote in 2000, all without Howard Dean's visionary & practical "50 state strategy." To win outside their remaining pockets of strength, Repugs need a lot more votes than they receive from a core of white bread homo bigots, young Earth creationists, & unreconstructed secessionists. America is becoming less bigoted & more secular, & provincial divisions are breaking down (every day we're now in direct contact online with people from all over America).

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, George W. Bush, in the news

Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.

We will meet that threat now with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory.

My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace.

George W. Bush, March 19, 2003

& war is what we got.

The Battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001, and still goes on.
***
In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused, and deliberate, and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th — the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.

George W. Bush, May 1. 2003

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq

A president leaving office after 8 years no wiser than when he entered it. That must be a "first" in American history. One only has to recall President Eisenhower's Farewell Address, a speech concerned with balances, & a fair statement of the Republican suspicion of large government. It is a troubling speech still, for the prophetic warning of a "military-industrial complex" that controls our national defense more than ever; & because Eisenhower had known this for years without speaking out, in large part because the temper of the era prevented such criticism within the political mainstream. John Kennedy ran for president & won charging falsely that America had a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. But Ike had wisdom. George has wiseass.

The single legitimate-sounding claim made for the "success" of the Bush administration is that America has suffered no further terrorist attacks on our homeland (from the outside. American suffers much homegrown domestic terrorism). There is no proof that the excessive measures used by the Bush administration - including the invasion of Iraq - were necessary to prevent attacks, of if they even did. Push a burning house over Niagara Falls & of course the fire will be extinguished, but it won't explain why there aren't more fires. The world is no safer, & the global economic malaise & diminished American leadership & example makes it all the more dangerous. Most of the world welcomes Barack Obama not because he'll present a weaker America, but because he promises a better America. He has to deliver on the promise, but the fact that we elected him so decisively - no vote count shenanigans changing the outcome this time - was our message to the world that we want to return to our ideals, & the election of the first black president itself demonstrates & advances those ideals, our "Yes, we can" in the most significant way we could.

We have risked much, placing our hopes in Obama & the responsibility on his shoulders. But look at where we are as Bush leaves office? Obama's unwillingness to steer as far left as I would like, his reliance on "establishment" politicians for advisers & cabinet, his friendly overtures to people I consider ideological enemies, is a candid admission of his need for cooperation & experienced counsel, & of his unwillingness to enter office on a tone of partisanship (although I think he will be forced to go there to get what wants). His confidence resides in proven capacity to lead, learn, make his own decisions, & meet challenges - in those he has few if any doubts. Unlike the outgoing president, he is not a facade for a closet junta presidency. There is no Cheney, no Rove, no Rumsfeld, no stink of a coup d’état ruling from "undisclosed" locations. Obama has in his administration several of the biggest egos in American politics, people who believe they can do his job in a perilous time, & even campaigned for it.

George W. Bush is convinced history will vindicate him on Iraq, & maybe it will. But that's all he has. He has been a disaster in the present. He leaves office with a worse reputation than Richard Nixon upon resigning. He doesn't even get a good will farewell bump from the American people in the polls. Democrats, Republicans, & independents have joined together in saying, "Good riddance."

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, George W. Bush

Barack's more than raised my eyebrows over the past 2 1/2 months. He really angered me only once, over a minor matter with major reverberations. But I haven't dogged him. I believe we ought to let ourselves enjoy this change, an awful president & administration going away at last; the wonderful spectacle of a young, intelligent, compassionate man taking office, a black man (& a Hawaiian, to my mind). I wish he didn't have such a terrible burden at the outset. His first task is comparable to cleaning the Augean stables, the fifth labor of Hercules. Joe Biden mentioned this during the campaign. Hercules had to do it in a single day. Barack has to show some real progress in a hundred. (Joe's own task was to slay the Wasillaean Hydra.)

America has been through hell the past 8 years. About 20% think we haven't been, or won't put the blame where it belongs. Some crazy people still think Al Gore would've been worse. Even James Buchanan wouldn't have been worse. Buchanan only gave away federal arms & property to traitors. So Bush didn't cheat on his wife while he & his pals raped America. That's an achievement future historians will praise?

We were in a recession in 2001. Most intelligent people saw the dot com bust as an unavoidable correction, investment running too far ahead of the consumer market. Home prices were inflated - that did bite us. But the nation was in pretty good shape to absorb the emotional & economic traumas of 9/11 & then Hurricane Katrina. It's reasonable to ask why America didn't recover from the recession or the terrorist attack. It's reasonable to ask how America got to our current sorry condition. It's certainly reasonable to investigate this & punish some of those responsible, in & out of government.

Repugs & "conservatives" are angrier & more embittered than they have ever been. They had all three branches of national government. They were in control. For them, what's happened to America during their rule is unbelievable, impossible. Surely everything must be different than it is, liberal media is just reporting it all wrong. Their last hope was that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could not possibly be elected President.

The Bush years have been hell for me personally. It wasn't his doing, but he hardly gave cause for any greater hopes; he was all about war, deceit, stupidity, ignorance, avarice.

At the start of the Clinton presidency I was falling for a woman who loved music, art, & boardwalks. During the Bush years I was briefly with a local gal who had voted for him (if she had actually voted, maybe she just listened to AM talk radio). How messed up was that? Me, a guy who had banned all registered Republicans from his home social events during the Reagan years.

So I'm going to enjoy the next few days. I'll laugh at Rick Warren. He's an updated character from a Sinclair Lewis novel; secure, self-righteous, falsely humble, a bit corpulent beneath his suit, preaching Gospel as middle class boosterism. In Lewis' world he'd have been pastoring the biggest mainline protestant church on Main Street.

We're getting change one way or another. In countless ways President Obama will be better than Bush because he is Barack Obama, not a Bush. As for the Augean Stables, we'll see. I have my tests, & they are changes in tone & emphasis on the various federal websites I frequent for information. Those will tell me how well he's getting rid of the bull shit. But the irony is not lost on me that as Barack takes office, that office has become a job no one in their right mind ought to want, & is not what he expected when he announced his candidacy two years ago, or even when he accepted the nomination in August.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, George W. Bush, THE election

If Bush put every neuron of his reptillian brain to work at once he would not be able explain what off shore oil drilling has to do with $4 per gallon gasoline.

I'm not saying that we won't have to do that drilling in the future. My gut sense is that it'll be difficult to avoid even if we adopted a sane, comprehensive long term energy policy. But it's another thing, & won't rescue SUV dinosaurs or bring down the price. High gasoline prices & an end to the truck as family car are two absolutely necessary components of that policy. The oil billionaires & their lackeys (George has a foot in both groups) would like us to believe there's undiscovered gushers aplenty in the United States that if tapped will painlessly loosen our chains to despotic oil producing regimes abroad (we have our own despotic oil producing regime here). But we & they know these reserves would supply but a fraction of our current oil requirements. We have to curb our oil use drastically for the additional sources to matter much.

I'm a NAMBY* kind of person. But if America had a farsighted energy policy that dealt with global warming & was designed to free us from the House of Saud - a dependence that warps our foreign policy & threatens national security, if we planned for the future the way Europeans are forced to do, there's a lot I think we could accept in New Jersey that isn't now so attractive.

* Not in my backyard.

Labels: George W. Bush, in the news, Iraq

I read somewhere the suggestion that Memorial Day has been trivialized by making it a Monday holiday. I don't think that's exactly true. I think we've trivialized all our holidays. Monday holidays are convenient for just about everyone, including business. A holiday on a Tuesday or Thursday invites a four day weekend. Memorial Day is much more of a start of summer celebration now. The 4th of July used to serve the purpose, believe or not. Beyond that, Memorial Day cannot be turned into anything other than another retail shopping occasion. Shopping is the #1 hobby. It feeds on every other hobby.

Memorial Day comes to us from the Civil War. My grandparents' generation, born around the turn of the 20th Century, were the last to directly feel that connection. But through them, I felt it, helped by the Civil War Centennial while I was a teenager. About the time Memorial Day would have begun fading in significance, we had another great war that touched everyone in America, & so it became an important day in the 1950's & 60's, with parades concluding in solemn & touching ceremonies at town monuments to war dead. Those monuments had many additional names from World War Two.

Now we have trivialized war. The burdens are shared by relatively few Americans, all "volunteers" & their families - if three & four deployments of the same Guard & Reserve units could be considered volunteering. Soldier graves are dug one at a time, here & there, at widely separate places. it's easy to avoid seeing them. Where profit was once the great opportunity of war, now it provides the reason itself. Iraq is about profit, & all the other reasons are ruses. We know them to be ruses. We have the proof, for God's sake! The ruses are possible only as long as most Americans can be distracted & not asked to sacrifice anything. Our president sacrificed his golf game because he felt families of dead American soldiers would be offended by photos of him swinging a club on exclusive links with oil billionaires & other war profiteers. Instead, he takes long, invisible vacations at a remote location in Texas. His emotional response to the war he started is mere sentiment, & that enrages me. It is about patriotic display without substance. It is about crocodile tears. It is about not fearing for the lives of his children, that they might be swept up in a sense of duty or by economic necessity & themselves "volunteer" for a year in Iraq or Afghanistan, or staring at arrays of screens & switches deep inside a ship, or even sitting at a desk in the middle of a hot, boring military installation in America. In a way, George W. Bush is perfect for an America that fights two wars at once as we complain bitterly about the sacrifices we are forced to make because of the price of a gallon of gasoline.

Drive to the cemetery, look at the little flags on the graves, & think on that, & think on how this day once helped to heal the deepest divisions of this nation, & how it still tells us that there are worthier sacrifices, ultimate sacrifices even.

Labels: George W. Bush, holidays, Iraq

One of many reasons I support Democrats in New Jersey is their support of health care for children, & the steps they have taken to provide it. There's consensus in the party on this matter & the debate is over. That's why our governor moved so quickly to bring suit against the feds for rule changes that could leave thousands of New Jersey's kids without health care. But there must be a national solution. It shouldn't depend where a child lives or on parental choice or ability to pay. Health care for children must be like education for children. Every child must have access to health care, period. The Children's Health Insurance Program, created during a Democratic adminstration, is the current avenue toward that goal of full coverage. We're spending trillions of dollars on war & weapons, pissing it away. But our dimwit, semi-literate, silver foot in his mouth president, our "pro-life" president, is more haunted by some terrible spectre of socialized medicine than he is by all the very real sickness & death his policies have caused.

We know our Yalie prez doesn't understand irony, although he handed America a great example of it in his Child Health Day proclamation, issued on Monday. Well, not entirely, since he believes the biggest health challenges facing, say, a toddler child of working poor parents are drugs & not making the right choices.

Labels: George W. Bush

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a religious fundamentalist. Religious fundamentalists must deny historical & scientific facts to make "reality" correspond with literally inerrant scripture, so it's a small step to denying other stuff they consider unpleasant or inconvenient. We have plenty of them, too. Three are running for the Repug presidential nomination. Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, & the existance of homosexuals in a theocracy called the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was elected president by a landslide & the people of Iran are stuck with him until the next election. Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, & Tom Tancredo deny evolution. I suspect the latter two believe the Earth is about 6000 years old. This makes no sense to me. If one wants to believe in a Zap! Pow! God, the Big Bang is much more impressive & awe-inspiring than a combination of Zeus & Paul Bunyan deviously stashing marine fossils on mountaintops & pressing faked hominid footprints in ancient African mud.

Iran has no homosexuals because the law does not recognize their existence. Therefore Ahmadinejad states a legal fact. But homosexual acts carry the death penalty. Except perhaps for the extreme punishment, American fundamentalists want to reinstate those kinds of laws here: Refuse to legally acknowledge sexual orientation, strictly prohibit certain sexual activities (applying also to heterosexuals). The justifications for these laws are entirely religious.

Ahmadinejad is but one extreme example of a worldwide reactionary drift. If you haven't noticed, we have a reactionary president. George W. was put in office with the support of fundamentalist mullahs & their militarist allies. He's an expert denier, too. Watching these two demagogues face off is frightening, they are both so wrong-headed, so ignorant, so poorly prepared for their powerful positions. The Iranians made a terrible mistake electing Ahmadinejad, & Americans made a terrible mistake giving Bush constitutional legitimacy in 2004.

Labels: blogging against theocracy, George W. Bush, religion

Cindy Sheehan was never so effective, or nonpartisan, as when she was standing alone by a road outside Bush's ranch in Crawford Texas. The heat was brutal. She represented every grieving parent & spouse who had doubts about the cause for which a loved one had died or been maimed. Her request was simple: She wanted to talk to the President who had claimed time & again that he was grieving, too. This was only weeks before Katrina. Those events, Cindy's simple protest & the terrible storm, & Bush's sociopath responses to both, were punches from which he has never recovered, & from which unfortunately he has learned nothing.

Now "Cindy Sheehan is resigning." I wish she had remained "nonpartisan" The left was already in her corner; she was a galvanizing person who could touch the rest of the country. She needed to surround herself with other Gold Star Mothers, widows, & war veterans. She was not a very good writer, & she had an undeniable emotional frailty. She did what she believed was the right thing by adopting forums such as Move On & Kos. It was not the right thing. The left encouraged her to be The Inconsolable Wailing Irish Woman, & Casey Sheehan made into an iconic "every mother's son," which of course he was not. No one is. One only has to peruse the hundreds of sycophantic comments that attached themselves to every one of her diaries, & look at the shit thrown at her from the right, to realize how trapped & exposed she must have felt. So I'm glad she's going to the sidelines as a "leader," & doing so with angry words for those Democrats who recently betrayed our troops. Including Democrats Kos heartily supported, & two I've voted for. Because the only way to really "help the troops" now is by rescuing them, bringing them home, & thanking them as generously as we can by providing for their needs. & taking control of our armed forces back from the ruinous corporate profiteers & evangelical zealots. & thanking Cindy for going to Texas in 2005 & doing so much to expose the fool & fraud we have for a president.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq

Priests to purify site after Bush visit
GUATEMALA CITY --Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official [Juan Tinney] with close ties to the group said Thursday.
***
Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.

Tiney said the "spirit guides of the Mayan community" decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of "bad spirits" after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. He also said the rites -- which entail chanting and burning incense, herbs and candles -- would prepare the site for the third summit of Latin American Indians March 26-30.

Might help to do something like that in New Orleans whenever George visits to check up on his urban minority population dispersal project.

Labels: George W. Bush, religion

Norman T. Holtaway was the first teacher who ever explained to me that "the word is not the thing" & discussed the dangers of using abstract language. Mr. Holtaway taught Senior English at Roselle Park High School & was the only first rate English teacher I encountered from K through 12. I thought of Mr. Holtaway last night as I turned off the President's speech about halfway through when I became sick of hearing the word "freedom" used again & again as if everyone including George W. Bush knew what-the-hell he meant by it. A person who doesn't read books is less likely to care what's being kept off the shelves of the public library than a person who does read books. I don't remember who said, "You don't understand what liberty is until you've tried taking a few." What is the difference between freedom & liberty?

On the first day of class, Mr.Holtaway held up an ordinary yellow #2 pencil & announced, "This is a cow!" The class laughed. So did I. But unlike most of them, I was intrigued. Mr. Holtaway decided to call this common thing a "cow." We called it a pencil. Why? For no reason other than he was tired of calling it a pencil & today he was saying it was a cow. But it's still a pencil. No, it's a writing instrument & it's a cow. A thing with a name. OK, let's take a vote. "Pencil" wins. so it's a pencil, not a lapiz, a crayon, a matita, or a cow. But "freedom" isn't even a thing. What does it signify?

The President also said we are in "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation." That may well come to be. But what was the decisive struggle of the 20th Century in 1906?

Labels: about writing, George W. Bush, growing up

George W. Bush quoted Bin Laden as saying,"Al-Qaida can cause the U.S. economy to collapse by implementing a 'bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.'" If that's so, getting the United States out of Iraq is surely one of the last things Bin Laden wants to occur. & Bin Laden is most definitely not like Hitler & Lenin. Bin Laden is a sickly old man without a country; If he had one, it would be Saudi Arabia. Whatever Bin Laden's fantasies are of a fundamentalist Islamic Empire, they break down at exactly that point where the Sunni & Shi'ite divide, & then they shatter into tribe & sect. He has no equivilant of a pure Aryan race, & he has no unifying political theory that can be imposed on disparate national groups. Unlike Hitler, he doesn't operate in the open as a leader & within an existing constitutional framework, which is how Der Fuhrer intially gained power. There's no equal of the "Red Army" either.

It's fitting that Bush should deliver his "Terrorism Strategy Update" to the Military Officers Association of America. Because in both his administration & the current military establishment, you can count on the buck always being passed down. The administration designs the strategy, starts the war, creates & encourages attitudes of fear, paranoia, the cheapness of human life, which it signals to the Pentagon & national security apparati. This is turned into the tactics of gulags, camps, torture, executions, & an acceptance by many in the officer ranks of lawless warfare. When the enlisted soldiers pick up on this & act upon it, perhaps by direct order, the buck stops with them. No one else need take the responsibility; not Bush, not Rumsfeld, not the Army brass in Washington, & not even the colonels & generals on the ground in Iraq.

Labels: George W. Bush

Yes, we do have a foreign policv, so let Duh Prez sum it up in his own words.

"It’s an interesting period because, instead of having foreign policies based upon trying to create a sense of stability, we have a foreign policy that addresses the root causes of violence and instability.

"For a while, American foreign policy was just, Let’s hope everything is calm — manage calm. But beneath the surface brewed a lot of resentment and anger that was manifested on September the 11th.

"And so we’ve taken a foreign policy that says: On the one hand, we will protect ourselves from further attack in the short run by being aggressive in chasing down the killers and bringing them to justice.

"And make no mistake: They’re still out there, and they would like to harm our respective peoples because of what we stand for. In the long term, to defeat this ideology — and they’re bound by an ideology — you defeat it with a more hopeful ideology called freedom."

He never does say what's in the other hand. Wouldn't help to point out that "freedom" isn't an ideology. The stupid argument is always "We're fighting [insert enemy] there so we don't have to fight them here." Always implicit in Bush's rhetoric, often explicit from his supporters, most recently Sen. Elizabeth Dole, a mentally-challenged politician who's lost at least 75 IQ points since she quit working for the Red Cross. Rather, it's been instructive watching the weather disasters & power failures that have afflicted us over the past year: it took a week for Con Ed to restore power to a section of Queens, & then much of that through temporary generators. New Orleans remains a ruined city. I don't know why we haven't had terrorist attacks after 9/11, but I'm not going to credit the Iraq War as a magnet for lunatics who would otherwise be blowing up power transmission towers in California, subway trains in New York, or the Old McDonald Petting Zoo in Alabama. Clearly, we're still sitting ducks.

Labels: George W. Bush, Iraq