After the Pledge of Allegiance

Jesus is out of step 

Whether or not you agree, we’re still all members of the same family, the American family. If this is so, would you deny places at the table to family members (your brothers and sisters) on Thanksgiving so that 20% of the family could claim 100% of the meal? Especially when the table is huge and the food abundant. Don’t we have a responsibility to share this abundance with all of our family members?

Ah, you say the 20% deserve their portion because they’ve earned it, and if those excluded had worked hard enough they would be sitting in their place as well? Certainly a good analogy if we were a pack of dogs. Is that what you believe we are, or should be?

By all estimates we’ve been and are the richest country the world has ever seen. Since this is the case, why do 45 million Americans lack health care, and why have we allowed our infant mortality to drift lower than that of… gasp! Cuba. Would you truly allow your own little sister or brother to die because your mother lacked sufficient access to health care? Or would you say she should have been more educated and more aware and more ruthlessly snapped and snarled her way to her portion of the bounty—even if she was disabled and unable to work?

Perhaps your America is different place than mine, where mistakes are punished and the less able are discarded like so much waste, where greed is moral and good, and where only the fittest and strong survive. Perhaps you should read your Bible, the text on which you apparently place such trust:

Matthew 9:10-12

And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold,
many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his
disciples.

And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why
eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?

But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, they that be whole need not a
physician, but they that are sick.

The more I read about the Gannon/Guckert pseudo-reporter-whore affair, the more certain I am there is some vital link to the White House that hasn’t yet surfaced.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he was Karl Rove’s boy toy. The only thing better would be if Guckert’s daily press pass was to the area directly beneath Dubya’s Oval Office desk. Remember that nonsense about Bubba choking on a pretzel?

After all, Gannon was a “real” journalist, wasn’t he? He did have two days of journalistic training—perhaps it was there he learned how to hold a microphone so firmly. Not that I give a damn about anyone else’s sex life. As far as I’m concerned, if Jeff, Karl, or George want to do it with a goat that’s their business, but when their party collectively bashes gays and uses them as an election issue, the ante needs be a little higher. In any event, things are developing and developing quickly.

In light of the rich-oriented tax cuts George Bush wants to make permanent, Will Durst, political satirist, has an interesting take on Bush’s new budget. Here are his bulleted points:

• Tighter restrictions on Food Stamp eligibility so rich people can have more money.

• Federal Drug Administration inspection teams sacked so rich people can have more money.

• Highway and infrastructure improvement budgets slashed so rich people can have more money.

• An 11% reduction in Homeland Security funds available to state and local coordination efforts so rich people can have more money.

• $250 million cut from programs to train child care doctors and other health care professionals so rich people can have more money.

• Small Business Administration cut from $3.3 billion to $.6 billion so rich people can have more money.

• Increase on charges for Veterans Health Care so rich people can have more money.

• Cutting Federal Foster Care Programs so rich people can have more money.

• Cutting Medicaid and Medicare benefits so rich people can have more money.

• Ending community services block grants, a $637 million program that helps pay for community action agencies founded more than 35 years ago as part of the fight against poverty so rich people can have more money.

• Proposed cuts in aid to farmers, seniors, children, students, cops, veterans, the homeless, the hungry, the environment, Amtrak, AND the Center for Disease Control and Prevention so rich people can have more money.

• Gutting the low income home energy assistance program which is mostly used by the elderly. That's right friends, he's cutting winter heating subsidies to the elderly so rich people can have more money.

He ends with the following:

Did the political comic Will Durst mention most of these cuts are necessary to insure that rich people can have more money? Because he meant to mention most of these cuts are necessary to insure that rich people can have more money. And the poor less.

For those of you with a philosophical bent, here’s an article (now a book) written by Harry Frankfurt, a philosophy professor at Princeton University. Have you ever wondered how George W. Bush can stand up in front of the world, tell lies with a straight face, and still believe in his own purity? I know it’s made me crazy. Incredulous when it happens, I want to reach out and shake some sense into him. “George, George, can’t you see what you’re saying is pure bullshit?” Well, there’s an answer to our quandary, and it comes by way of Frankfurt’s fine essay “On Bullshit.” I suggest you read the whole piece, but here’s a sample:

Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about “our great and blessed country, whose Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.” This is surely humbug. As Black’s account suggests, the orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is great, whether it is blessed, whether the Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our country’s history, or the like. At least, it is not an interest in what anyone thinks about these matters that motivates his speech. It is clear that what makes Fourth of July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements as false. Rather, just as Black’s account suggests, the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is what people think of him. He wants them to think of him as a patriot, as someone who has deep thoughts and feelings about the origins and the mission of our country, who appreciates the importance of religion, who is sensitive to the greatness of our history, whose pride in that history is combined with humility before God, and so on.

I think that just about sums it up.

I haven’t posted anything about the Jeff Gannon/White House affair yet, but from what I’ve been reading the noose is closing on whatever connection Gannon/Guckert had inside the White House. Anyone interested should visit Daily Kos where the whole affair is being investigated, archived, and revealed. Of course, many other blogs are on the case also, but all of them are referred to and linked.

Here's a little begging from the site owner: if you stop by leave me a little feedback, good or bad. And if you have a site you think I would like, leave your URL so I can visit you as well.

Thanks,
Charles

In the same way Americans get flu shots each year when the vaccine is available, the government (read that as the smirking chimp and his barrel of sycophant monkeys) makes sure the public also gets their annual (unquestionably available) injection of “fear.” All right all you FOX-fed sheep, drop the Vioxx, turn off American Idol, and line up! The Syrians are coming! The Syrians are coming! What horse hockey.

Here we go again. The bullshit machine is on full throttle. Today, Porter Goss (Bush’s boy), Robert Mueller (Bush’s boy), and Donald Rumsfeld (also Bush’s boy) raised the red flag on Iranian nuclear weapons, Syrian intransigence, and Al-Qaeda cells lurking in America. Add the recalling of our ambassador to Syria in response to the killing of Rafik al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, and you have a classic case of Republican hysteria mongering.

Crisis!, Crisis!, Americans be very afraid of our non-specific, non-substantiated, hearsay warnings.

My immediate reaction was “How can they even think about going to war with Iran without an army?” It just as quickly came to me that the answer was that Iraq would essentially have to take care of itself now that it has an elected government. Not tomorrow, but in the very near future. As long as we have permanent Iraqi military bases and protect the oil fields, then the rest of the country can to hell for all Bush cares. Another thing, now that Bush believes the Palestinian/Israeli issue is "settled," he can turn up the pressure elsewhere. Best of all, it takes the heat off Bush and his budget disaster.

Now it’s time to see just how gullible our oh-so-politically-aware population is going to be. I’ll give you 5 to 1 odds they suck it down faster than Jeff Gannon… well, I’ll leave that up to your imagination.

Well, what do you know… the election was stolen after all, something thinking voters have already surmised. Once more the Rove machine has rolled over the will of the of the American people—at least the thinking ones. No need to catalogue the abuses here; they’re apparent to most living, breathing human beings who can read. Remember those exit polls that showed Kerry with a solid lead:

Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.

(Snip)

On Jan. 19, on the eve of the inauguration, Edison and Mitofsky released their report, "Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004,"… that the discrepancy was "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters." But the body of the report offers no data to substantiate this position.

(Snip)

Notably, Mitofsky and Edison unsucessfully try to explain away the fact that, according to their data, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error.

(Snip)

The exit polls themselves are a strong indicator of a corrupted election. Moreover, the exit poll discrepancy must be interpreted in the context of more than 100,000 officially logged reports of irregularities during Election Day 2004. For many Americans, if not most, mass-scale fraud in a U.S. presidential election is an unthinkable possibility. But taken together, the allegations, the subsequently documented irregularities, systematic vulnerabilities, and implausible numbers suggest a coherent story of fraud and deceit.

(Snip)

The thesis of the Mitofsky/Edison exit poll report and the headlines that it generated are curiously detached from the numbers in the report itself. Statisticians who have studied the exit polls find substantial evidence to support the thesis that the vote counts—not the exit polls—were inaccurate.

Of course, nothing will change, but it’s all good material to store away until the truth (as a fact in the history books of 2050) comes out.

A very simple question: how can the government of United States condemn any nation for human rights abuses when the government of the United States increasingly uses the same tactics from the Patriot Act to Guantanamo to CIA “renderings” to political meetings that require loyalty oaths to enter, and so on? Doesn’t anyone see the logical problem here? So, what do they want? What conclusions can be drawn from such a comparison?

• Those currently running the United States are either liars, deluded, or both

If so, then their fundamental objective must be the retention and increase of power for its own sake by any means. What might these means be?

o Articulated sophistry of a high order
o Manipulation of public media
o Corruption of democratic social order
o Governmental secrecy as a primary value
o Fear as a political tool
o Expediency above morality


Our Dear Leader 


Not a pretty picture, is it?

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, has a lot of explaining to do. In his several years of “service” to the American and Iraqi people he lost 9 Billion dollars. Yes, lost (looted?)… as in “who knows where it went?”

U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, a former official with the U.S. occupation government says.

(Snip)

Describing the transfer of $2 million to one contractor's gunnysack, Willis (a senior adviser on aviation and communications matters for the CPA) said: "It was time for payment. We told them to come in and bring a bag." He said the money went to Custer Battles of Middletown, R.I., for providing airport security in Baghdad for civilian passengers.

Willis said a coalition driver would go around the Iraqi capital and disburse money from the a pickup truck formerly belonging to the grounded Iraqi Airways airline. The reason is because officials "wanted to meld into the environment," he said.

Willis' allegations follow by two weeks an inspector general's report that concluded the occupying authority transferred nearly $9 billion to Iraqi government ministries without any financial controls.

Just imagine, these are some of the same people (Republicans) who want you to trust them with your Social Security.

So, you have health insurance and a job and you’re doing all right… well, so did 50% of those who filed for bankruptcy in 2004. As if that wasn’t enough to scare you think about this:

• There are more bankruptcies each year than divorces
• Every 30 seconds someone files
• 4 million people filed last year
• 2 million of them had a decent job, were considered middle-class, owned a home, and had health insurance

To compound the issue there’s legislation in Congress which aims at making it harder to file. Thank God you have George Bush, the compassionate conservative, to watch your back. Just look at the great Medicare deal he gave seniors.

I feel like I’m losing my place in American society. We’ve always been a contentious people, but the shallow, crass, flagrant, power-grabbing greed of America’s religion spouting conservatives has reached new and unprecedented heights (or depths if you choose). Of course, power grabbing isn’t a new item on the agenda, we could hardly be human without it, but what seems most new is how stupidly this agenda is embraced by otherwise intelligent and moral people. How can anyone with a brain believe the lies the current administration keeps piling up? That’s the question I can’t resolve. In the face of proven lie after proven lie the current bunch in Washington still commands the allegiance of millions. What amazing rationalization it must take to deny such obvious reality. It brings to mind this quote: "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies." That’s from our favorite fascist, Adolf Hitler. Perhaps, in the long run, humanity deserves what it gets.

What can be more dangerous than a group of deluded, righteous idealists with political power? I wonder what all of those innocent dead Iraqi’s would have to say about it? The God-led manic in the White House and his crypto-fascist followers have brought America to the worst state the country has ever been in, and they’re poised to make a final strike against anyone who opposes them. People are being arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirts at Bush political rallies; photographers are being harassed and arrested for taking pictures of bridges; new electronic voting machines subject to undetectable manipulation and with no paper backup are being forced on voters; billions of dollars are being given back to those who already are rich and billions more are being wasted in Iraq; hundreds, if not thousands of people are being held in illegal detention and often tortured—and for what?

Is this the inevitable result of a system (manipulated capitalism) that rewards the greediest and least moral? Yes, when you add messages directly from God to a man who is never wrong.

Anyone who thinks genuine policy planning has a place in our current White House should read “Why Are These Men Laughing?” by Ron Suskind. Written for Esquire in 2003, it more than explains the bizarre difference between what George W. Bush says and reality—there’s no substance to his actions beyond pure politics. Of course, Karl Rove is at the center of the action.

One senior White House official told me that he’d be summarily fired if it were known we were talking. "But many of us feel it’s our duty—our obligation as Americans—to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations—mostly from Karl’s shop—to triumph by default. No one balances Karl.

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Now, it’s 2005 and nothing has changed.

Although the article quoted here is specifically addressed to progressives correctly framing our arguments and policies, it made me start thinking about how much America has changed in my lifetime. The changes are obvious: the hardening disregard for the less fortunate; the crass institutionalization of greed and how easily it’s expressed; an increasingly common belief that government is bad in and of itself; the appropriation and clinical manipulation of language to “spin” the truth; the effacement and disappearance of shame as a corrective in our culture; the failure of officials to take responsibility when their foibles are exposed; the list could go on and on.

Finally, we come to the highest level of framing accomplishment achieved by the right, and the most powerful. So successful have they been in their deep propaganda efforts, they have reframed the very categories employed in the discussion and consideration of political questions, as well as the labels and the meanings of those labels, used in such discourse. If, for example, they can cause negative images and sentiments to be associated with the very word 'liberal', they have won half the battle before it ever begins. And this, regrettably, is precisely what has transpired.

Consider the trajectory of the words and categories 'liberal' and 'conservative' over the past three decades. At the beginning of this period, liberal was far less the dirty word than it is today, and conservative far more so. Perhaps it was my age then, or the particular crowd with which I ran, but it seems to me that for many at that time, 'conservative' meant Nixon and lies and war and greed and uptight attitudes toward life's pleasures. Meanwhile, ideas like helping the poor, and the government functioning as a successful proprietor of solutions to societal problems, were broadly accepted as conventional wisdom.

To say that those latter notions are now ancient history for most Americans today is to be overly generous to the status of contemporary liberalism. The ultimate goal of skillful framing is to marginalize hostile concepts completely, optimally to the point of being forgotten and then actually inconceivable, and the right is now well down that path in the United States. Of course, this was precisely the core genius of Orwell in 1984, and why he was at such pains to portray in his totalitarian dystopia the government's efforts at reinventing language for the purpose of rendering certain ideas quite literally unthinkable.

Perhaps, then, the most profound - and subtle, and therefore little remarked upon - legacy of the Reagan years was to reverse those liberal notions embedded in 20th century conventional wisdom, turning Americans against their own government (notwithstanding the logical absurdity of such a notion in a democracy) and promoting the grandeur of what can only be described as greed. By the time we get to the era of Clinton and the Bushes, the poor and working class have fallen entirely out of sight, and politicians begin catering in their rhetoric only to the middle class. Meanwhile, being labeled 'liberal' becomes a political kiss of death, only slightly more attractive than 'pedophile' or 'terrorist' (just ask Mike Dukakis, who lost an election on almost entirely on the basis of this one-word albatross).

Honestly, is there really any chance of America recovering its moral and rational center? A part of me believes the damage is too great. What do you think?

Honest, this is from the transcript of Bush’s speech in Florida—from the White House web page no less. The reason he never gives details of his new plans ahead of time---is that he has no idea about the details. Imagine, the President of the United States, the man responsible for 265,000,000 people, and he doesn’t know what in the hell he is doing.

THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.

It’s not usually my style to quote David Brooks, but when he pointed out the fact that the Democratic Party under Howard Dean is drawing it’s power (and money) from readers of blogs like Daily Kos it needs to be noted.

The answer, as Mickey Kaus observes in Slate, is that the party is following the money. The energy and the dough are in the MoveOn.org wing, which is not even a wing of the party, but the head and the wallet. Only the most passionate and liberal voices can stir up this network of online donors from the educated class.

Of course he used it as a negative, but for those of us who believe the status quo of our current political system needs to be changed, it’s positive. In short, bloggers and their readers are changing the political landscape.

Now let's keep up the pressure.

In another convolution of language and specious logic, Robert J. Delahunty and John C. Yoo (one of the authors of the Justice Department’s torture memos) say, in a LA Times opinion piece, that The Geneva Conventions are not obsolete and are obsolete in the same breath.


The Geneva Convention is not obsolete— nor, despite his critics, did Gonzales say it was. It protects innocent civilians by restricting the use of violence to combatants, and in turn give soldiers protections for obeying the rules of war. Although enemy combatants may have killed soldiers or destroyed property, they are not treated as accused criminals. Instead, nations may detain POWs until the end of hostilities to prevent them from returning to combat.

(snip)

A treaty like the Geneva Convention makes perfect sense when it binds genuine nations that can reciprocate humane treatment of prisoners. Its existence and its benefits even argue for the kind of nation-building that uses U.S. troops and other kinds of pressures in places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq; more nation-states make all of us safer. But the Geneva Convention makes little sense when applied to a terrorist group or a pseudo-state. If we must fight these kinds of enemies, we must create a new set of rules.

In that important respect, the Geneva Convention will become increasingly obsolete. Rather than attempting — as Gonzales' shrill critics do — to deny that reality, we should be seeking to address it.

"...we must create a new set of rules?" "….we should be seeking to address it?"

How?-—with another anal light stick?