Published by Barkley Press
ISBN-10: 1-937674-05-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-937674-05-2
Copyright © 2010 Jim Freeman
Cover design and typesetting: Michaela Freeman
Photography credits:
Front cover Moon: © Snizhanna
Front cover George Bush: © Oleksii Sergieiev
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author (contact at www.jim-freeman.com), except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Printed in the United States of America
DEDICATION
In 1999 I took the Czech girlfriend who was to become my wife on a three month, 31 state, 27,000 mile driving trip around America. We met the citizenry that has always kept the country on track; the mechanic in Key West who was sweating out a truck repair over Memorial Day weekend, yet took the time to help absolute strangers fix their air conditioning on a hundred-degree day. He works with troubled teen boys in his spare time and told us the story at no extra charge, then waved us on our way.
We met people like him in campgrounds, restaurants and businesses from Maine to Florida, Texas to California, across the mountain states and back to New York. There, a black used car dealer gave us a fair price for our car, peeling off the cash, no matter that our radiator had just blown at the curb in front of his lot. He listened to our story, then gave us a ride to the train into New York City and threw in a baseball cap with a grin and good-luck handshake.
We visited 17 National Parks, walked through Jefferson’s Monticello and admired his beloved University of Virginia, walked the streets of Charleston, San Francisco and Bozeman, Montana, cared-for and cared-about every step of the way. We stayed with friends and got a chance to see their lives close up, appreciating the time they made for us even while holding two jobs.
This is the America that doesn’t make the news, isn’t part of the Daily Show, working for wages and giving America buoyancy to keep this unique country from sinking.
I dedicate this series of books to these millions of Americans.
Novels
EVOKE
Letters from Ceilia
The Island
Non-Fiction
Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints
The Dark Side of the Moon
(a five-book series)
Poetry
The Smell of Tweed and Tobacco
Corner of My Mind
Broken Pieces
About the Series
The Dark Side of the Moon series is a chronological collection of observations on social, political and occasionally even personal subjects.
Jim Freeman’s views of the American scene are salted with irony and lightly peppered by humor, a relief from the unending rants of the far left or far right and reasonably balanced by common sense. They’re here as Freeman wrote and published them at the time, unedited and without the benefit of hindsight.
These books are food for thought and Freeman encourages readers to cut into them - use and abuse these books, dog-ear the pages, mark up with highlighter and write in the margins. Make them relevant, make them yours to refer to content that particularly pleased or infuriated you.
The Dark Side of the Moon is a time-machine that brings the blur of events into focus and context. Mark Twain said “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” Jim Freeman uncovers that dark side and strives to shine light on it.
About the 2006 Book
(Volume 3 of the 5 Volume Series)
2006 was possibly the most pivotal year of the decade, with the wheels apparently coming off American military and civil society on a dizzying daily basis. This third segment of The Dark Side of the Moon series begins with the Senate’s consideration of Sam Alito’s fitness to join the Supreme Court and winds up, some 460 pages later with the Exxon’s Valdez oil spill lawsuit limping to completion after a 12 year swordfight.
What else was going on, while America twisted in the wind of wars going badly and the fear-factor leading us away from common sense? Quite a lot, actually and The Dark Side of the Moon brings the year back into focus and sequence, (I hope) with an appropriate sense of humor and irony. Pivotal no doubt, but 2006 surely must also be counted among the most ironic years of the weird decade to which it belongs.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to take up the matter of Judge Samuel Alito as the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court. May all who have an interest draw near.
The Supreme Court and, by inference, nominees to that court have become single-issue objects of debate. It is all about Roe vs Wade and has been for some years now. An abortion issue litmus test obscures any deeper rational interrogation into a prospective judge’s more widely acquired qualifications.
And now, somehow we have added another foolishness; whether or not Judge Alito’s head may be satisfactorily Photoshopped onto the robed figure of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to satisfy … what? … or whom? The Senate is advising and consenting to a president’s nominee and it is in no way germain to that choice or that advice that the nominee be the ideological equivalent of Justice O’Connor.
I find some comfort in the fact that each extreme on these issues of Roe and separation of church and state finds fault with the nominee. There’s the further comfort that he doesn’t suit me entirely either. That’s the way it should be. The nation’s Supreme Court is not constitutionally defined in such a way that it should suit or espouse a particular ideology.
Having said that, I’ll come clean and list a few of my own particular hot buttons, all in the spirit of the New Year and a don’t-take-me-overly-seriously frame of reference. Personally, I think we get into foolish territory when we
Ban the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms, when a simple exchange of indivisible for under God would suffice. As a schoolboy, I had impressed upon my mind on a daily basis that this nation provided liberty and justice for all.
Burn, bomb, threaten and harass abortion clinics and their patients with all the wild-eyed hatred of the Ku Klux Klan, while merrily executing the poor and the black.
Get hysterical over the Ten Commandments when they show up on a plaque or engraving in this or that government building.
Likewise, lose all sense of perspective when the Christian depiction of the birth of Christ appears on the village green at Christmas time.
Polarize ethical thought. Polarization merely frustrates me learning about you and you knowing my thoughts on issues of interest to us both. If my god is not capitalized, it shouldn’t prevent conversation about what it means to be religious or to live in a substantially religious society.
So, I find Sam Alito entirely acceptable because as much as in spite of his differences with me. Above all else, I value a nominee of intellectual depth, one who is not an ideologue and whose values and judgments change over a lifetime. Alito meets all these personal criteria in my opinion.
Actually, given the extreme conservatism of this particular presidency, I think George Bush has done (with the exception of Harriet Miers) an excellent job in the advocacy of both Roberts and Alito. Each is a man of great judicial intellect and depth, with impeccable credentials. I shared a common fear that the choices available to this president might swing the court irrevocably to the right.
Neither of his nominees suited me entirely, nor did they seem unduly partisan and that’s reason enough for a standing ovation.
I and my wife have just spent two weeks in Italy without a newspaper in sight and, more importantly, no desire to see one and no burning thirst to know what’s happened in each and every twenty-four hours of our time away.
So, I’m home and scanning the Washington Post and the thing that seems most necessary, top priority in fact, is to find out what Doonesbury has been up to for the past sixteen days. And, because it’s the online edition, I can look. And I do.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange closed itself down, due to a landslide of sell orders it couldn’t electronically keep up with, the Senate has postponed a committee decision on Samuel Alito and the Congress is falling all over itself to sound like it’s serious about clipping the wings of lobbyists. But it’s Doonesbury I take the time to march through, day by day, all sixteen of them.
That either says something about Doonesbury or something about me, I’m not sure which.
But the congressional posturing on lobby money and rules, post Abramoff and pre mid-term elections, is such a Garry Trudeau moment that I’ll be disappointed if he doesn’t take a swing at it pretty quickly.
A plan outlined by the Speaker of the House, one Dennis Hastert (two heartbeats away from president), will boldly go where no legislator has gone before and specifically ban meals and privately paid-for travel by Congressmen and Senators.
It’s about time. That oughta fix ‘em.
Except. Except? Yes, except for when the lobbyist also hands out a campaign contribution to the legislator in question. Then only the best restaurants are good enough and the priciest foreign and domestic tours qualify without question or exemption.
So, let me get this straight. If a lobbyist wants to take Hastert to dinner, even a Big Mac is off limits unless he gives him a campaign contribution at the same time and then it’s legal to stuff the Speaker until he can’t speak on Kobe beef and champagne. Similarly, flying Dennis to Peoria on the company plane is a no-no, unless a campaign contribution is included and then a week in the south of France is business as usual, studying up on pate de foie gras for his Illinois goose farmer constituency.
Talk about being goosed.
Anyway, there are three basic rules about what lobbyists can and cannot do in their quest to bribe lawmakers. One has to do with what a ‘gift’ is and Senators and Congressmen are falling all over one another to get strict on that. The second has to do with how lobbyists report their bribery and the same above-mentioned suspects are working overtime to tighten up on that. The third leg of this sturdy stool upon which the lawmakers sidle up to the trough is campaign finance regulation and nothing is suggested to change in this area.
But nothing doing doesn’t mean nothing will be done.
The lunches, dinners, partying and good times will now ascribe to campaign contributions instead of lobbyist bribes and if a lawmaker can be booked into a week of shooting driven birds in the Scottish highlands, well … one must keep up with what’s going on in foreign lands.
Another nifty aspect of ‘contributions’ to election campaigns is that whatever is left over after the election legally belongs to the candidate. Congress, in it’s wisdom, made just such a law. Convenient, huh? You didn’t expect them to give it back? Makes your and my 401-K pale by comparison and it’s a lively incentive for any last-election candidate to do a little creative voting before he retires.
Hastert and his partners-in-crime will bellow and bray about closing ‘loopholes’ and tightening ‘restrictions’ until the furor caused by Jack Abramoff and the money he has spread has died down. The Speaker sincerely hopes that the national attention span is shorter than this fall’s mid-term elections. But if it’s not, blood will be let as the voters think necessary and the game will go on.
In the Congress and the Senate, blood has never been thicker than money.
Congressional Democrats are having a field-day with the Jack Abramoff-directed payoffs to (mostly) Republican office holders. It’s kind of a grin, because all that principled positioning shields the fact that they’ve been very much cut out of the spoils.
Tom DeLay, everyone’s favorite punching bag, now that he’s sidelined with legal problems that threaten to get far worse, heralded the restructuring of lobbyist access to Congress with his Republicans only strategy. It was incredibly and alarmingly successful.
Lobbyists are non-denominational in their bribery of legislators. They go where the access is and for ten years the access has been through DeLay.
It’s illuminating to listen to the silence in K-Street, where the halls of lobbyist power reside and the temperament is unruffled to the point of boredom. They know the appropriate loopholes will be looped.
Democrats, lunging at the ethics issue like junkyard dogs, are actually far more angered by their being denied access to the trough than they are by moral judgments. They’re also jumpy about whose name might be found next in Jack Abramoff’s appointment book. Washington has become a sort of governmental eBay, where everything has its price. This latest Democratic ethical Band-Aid outdoes the Republicans because, as one might expect, Dems have far less to lose.
Grandstanding from the Library of Congress, Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York held forth that “We are going to take the country back and we are throwing down the gauntlet today.” She added, “Mr. Abramoff and his associates will be held up as the beginning and end of our congressional crisis, but they are just the symptom of a larger problem. Now is the time to realize that the Republican members of Congress who put America up for sale have neither the ability nor the credibility to lead us in a new direction.”
Oh my, gauntlets and new directions again. When all else fails the speechwriters, they haul out the old and shopworn “Lead us in a new direction.”
The unavoidable fact is that Democrats have been relentlessly unsuccessful in leading us anywhere.
Unable to get along with the last Democratic president (remember Bill Clinton?) they lay on their sides while he was savaged and allowed their congressional majority to slip out the side door. Since Harry Truman, the Dems have lost the White House nine out of fourteen times and in all 65% of their losses fielded such dismal candidates as
Adlai Stevenson, the Illinois intellectual (twice)
Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s house cat
George McGovern, the dove from South Dakota
Walter Mondale, a vice president
Mike Dukakis, a man unknown before and after his defeat
Al Gore, the smartest and most qualified man ever to throw it all away
John Kerry, the best reason to question presidential primaries
Most of them were eerie in their ineptness for national debate, let alone leadership. But how Al Gore managed to so bungle a slam-dunk makes one wonder who Louise Slaughter has in mind to lead us in that acclaimed new direction. We are no doubt destined to watch Hillary Clinton add her name to the losers list.
Enough new direction rhetoric, you wild-eyed Dems. The United States Congress likes the old direction well enough. Like spoiled schoolchildren you may all point your pudgy little fingers and stamp your tiny little feet, but you’re all unindicted co-conspirators. The money’s pretty good for a three-day week, the campaign coffers are too fat to even consider putting them on a diet and, without all those fawning lobbyists, who would actually want to spend their time legislating?
Ms. Slaughter, there is no leadership in your party. To paraphrase General Douglas MacArthur, you are not leading, you are following in a different direction.
I’m not exactly sure what the title ‘executive editor’ entails at the Washington Post, but Jim Brady is it.
Jim lost his cool and shut down the reader comments feature on post.blog, a blog the paper says is ‘dedicated to sharing news by and about The Post and washingtonpost.com.’
Note to Jim: Panic is not dedication.
Admittedly, it’s an edgy world out there as various forms of media struggle to find their stride in the Internet environment. But Jim’s an AOL veteran, having left the Post for that supposedly Internet-savvy company, returning a couple years ago to the WP.
AOL has had its own problems, but we can assume that being stunned into submission over a weekend by 700 e-mails was not one of them.
The flap (and a small one it is) was caused by a posting on an item about Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell’s recent column concerning the Abramoff scandal: Getting the Story on Jack Abramoff. Her mention of the fact that Abramoff has spread his largesse among Democrats and Republicans alike (if not equally) touched off a deluge of ‘personal attacks, profanity and hate speech,’ according to Brady.
With the editorial equivalent of a trembly lip, Brady wrote about the comment closing as follows:
“Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it’s a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about. We’re not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more carefully about how we do it.”
Well, Jim, I don’t quite know how to tell you this without hurting your already offended sensitivities, but interactive web sites have been taking this in stride for years now. It’s usually called ‘rules for posting’ and is enforced by moderators. Bloggers who don’t accept such prescripts are warned, their posting not accepted and, if they persist, they’re blocked from the site.
Not a lot of ‘careful thinking’ required, just some WP intern staff to use their judgment and keep the ball somewhere inside the foul lines. They don’t cost much and, if a newspaper the size and prestige of the Washington Post decides to have an interactive blog (which is a great, if not very inventive, idea), then it ought to be able to hold the line against a few screamers.
The world is going digital, Jim. Seven hundred postings is what you want to have, it proves you’ve found a hot-button issue and newspapers kill for hot issues. The newspaper business is not in danger from ‘personal attacks, profanity and hate speech,’ but it is in great risk of irrelevancy, as news continues to be fed to us too quickly for print runs.
The Net is a weird-ball place, full of fun, information, thoughtful insight and deranged idiots. But it’s where the newspapering business is going and the kitchen hasn’t even begun to get hot.
Like the snowball that starts a landslide, small happenings in the stock markets of the world are capable of kicking off major panic.
The recent shutdown of the Tokyo Stock Exchange is an example. Investors panicked when a company named Livedoor, which is substantially and aggressively involved in various Internet businesses, got raided by investigators from the Tokyo District Prosecutors’ office and the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission.
Livedoor, a favorite of individual Japanese investors, was thought to be cooking its books and the raid caused an avalanche of sell-offs. The Exchange, unable to keep up with sell orders, closed 45 minutes ahead of schedule.
By the time the snow was at the bottom of the mountain, some $300 billion had been wiped off market valuations.
Individual investors in Japan make approximately 40 percent of all trades on Japanese exchanges and account for most of last year’s steep rise in the Nikkei, which recently hit a five-year closing high. But individuals aren’t very sophisticated investors, they panic easily and $300 billion is a lot of yen to watch run over a cliff.
Stockmarkets worldwide rise and fall periodically, which is what they’re supposed to do and most are regulated reasonably well to prevent another ‘29 crash. But there’s an exception and the exception is a relatively new investment vehicle and, at least outside the United States, it’s largely unregulated.
Hedge Funds have the potential to bring down the mountain, along with the snow.
So far, U. S. regulators have ‘seen no need’ for further regulation affecting hedge funds, because (they claim) hedge fund investors are high-income individuals or institutions that can fend for themselves. Which is an intriguing point of view, but dead wrong. Just because the entry fee is $2.5 million instead of $25 doesn’t preclude a rich sheep from running off the same cliff as a poor one.
Most hedge funds are operated offshore, outside America, and thus avoid what little U.S. supervision there is. There are tens of thousands of hedge funds, competing for trillions of investor dollars. Because their portfolios are so arcane, their specialties so esoteric, their main (and perhaps only) attraction to investors is return on investment (ROI).
The possibility of fraudulently managed ROI is what caused the cops to raid Livedoor.
Here in the U.S., once upon a time there was a hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management that got in short-term trouble. A lot of it. A mountain of it, suitable for a major financial avalanche.
LTCM required a $3.6 billion private rescue operation, put together under the eye of Alan Greenspan by a consortium of 14 major international financial institutions. Greenspan deemed this calling-out of the financial cavalry necessary to sustain confidence in the financial markets. In essence as well as fact, it was a bailout of the wealthy ‘individuals or institutions that can fend for themselves.’
That was 1998 and memories are short in the investment game. Last week’s Tokyo debacle is a warning that greed knows no dollar limitations and the rich as well as the middle-class are equally capable of running off the same cliff.
But the rich are far more likely to drag the world economy over with them.
Rep. Nancy Johnson, Chairman of the House subcommittee on Health, likely doesn’t know Steve Starnes, who has paranoid schizophrenia. Not the kind of guy she’d spend time with and who could blame her? It’s just as unlikely Sen. Mike Enzi knows him, although Mike chairs the Senate committee on health.
That’s understandable. Mike is from Wyoming, Nancy from Connecticut and both of them are a long way from Florida.
Nancy and Mike both have press secretaries. The voices Steve hears are mostly in his head.
On the 7th day of the new Medicare benefit, there were no seven-swans-a-swimming for Steve, but the voices were back. Ominous voices, according to Robert Pear’s piece in the NY Times, and Steve begged his pharmacy for the medication he had been taking for ten years.
No dice. Medicare no longer approved.
Steve was understandably scared. “Without them, I get aggravated at myself, have terrible pain in my gut, I feel as if I am freezing one moment and burning up the next moment. I go haywire, and I want to hurt myself.”
So, he was hospitalized, which is for-sure a more expensive treatment than continuing to provide controlling medication.
The Republican-controlled Congress continues to gut benefits to people like Steve Starnes for a variety of reasons, every single one of them fiscally irresponsible, including:
Continuing a tax giveaway to the rich
Avoiding a much needed increase in the gas tax
Funding a horrifically expensive and thus-far unfunded war
Trying to patch hurricane damage on the backs of the poor.
And if that makes you angry to hear, check out your own state legislature to find out if it is one of the two dozen that have legislated payment for prescription drugs if residents cannot obtain them by using the new Medicare drug benefit.
Increasingly, the mentally ill are being downloaded, like music on iPods, to the streets of our cities, where they make up a growing percentage of the homeless and ignored.
Steve is among the fortunate, cared for by Dayspring Village, a Florida assisted living center for the mentally ill. But whether they are properly cared-for, left to the vagaries of the street or shut away in forgotten isolation, it continues to cost more to treat the ambulatory mentally ill in emergency rooms and mental hospitals than it does to medicate them fairly and properly.
Richard Gilbert at uuworld.org writes,
“As the income and wealth disparity between classes has grown in recent years and American society has become increasingly fractured, I fear that our collective conscience has seriously eroded. “To have is to deserve” seems to be our moral motto.
Yet at the deepest levels of our being, we who take pleasure in our unparalleled prosperity are vaguely anxious that millions of others in our midst are living in poverty. So, are we the deserving and they the undeserving? Is the marketplace the measure of all things? How much inequality of any type can a democracy experience and survive? What is economic justice? How much is enough? How much do we deserve?”
It’s a fair question. Nancy Johnson and Michael Enzi are not evil and uncaring people, they are just too far removed from the subject upon which they legislate. Steven Starnes is not their brother.
And yet Steve is the brother to us all and he’s in trouble.
I don’t personally care a whit who goes to Scotland to play a few holes of golf on someone else’s tab or if a legislator is eating steak instead of rattling the pans in the kitchen in his Georgetown pied a terre, heating up the Kraft Dinner. But I do care that various interested groups are paying off our Senators and Representatives to the tune of a couple billion a year.
You think that’s high? I think it may be low by half.
Actually, you can’t get a total number. It’s all hidden, all smoke and mirrors. But the dollar amount is meaningless, it’s the paid special interests that get legislation harmful to your and my (merely tax paid) private interests that cause us to have
The highest cost prescription (and non-prescription) drug costs in the world
World’s most expensive, but 15th ranked, health care system
Health costs that threaten to swamp the nation’s financial boat
A lawyering system that drives doctors out of medicine
None of which contributes to your or my well-being and that’s where we miss the point on Abramoff.
Money doesn’t give us only bribed legislators (although that’s true enough), it gives us bad law, law skewed toward the contributor. Law distorted by bribery gives us bad health care and useless schools, but it also makes us cynical about what was once the world’s finest political system.
Rick Santorum in the most recent ‘election cycle’ bagged total ‘contributions’ of $11.5 mil, from which he spent about five and has a tidy six and a half million left over. The Senator’s cookie-jar against a rainy day, because (should Rick simply decide to pack-it-in and go home) he can legally pocket the six and a half mil.
A little something to cheer him up in his old age. Speaking of which, Santorum sits on the Special Committee on Aging and conveniently glommed onto $461K of that eleven and a half million from retired people. They probably expected something for their money, if they’re anything like my old daddy.
At the same time though, he pocketed a quarter million bucks from the insurance industry, 300+ thou from pharmaceutical and ‘health professionals,’ another hundred thou from hospitals/nursing homes and a tag-end $66,000 from health services/HMO’s.
We know they expect something and it’s not likely to be a lower consumer price for old daddy.
Essentially, we have a bidding war for Rick’s attention to committee business.
Either that or he’s a bad investment for someone. The shaky old fogies who coughed up over four hundred thousand can’t possibly have the same policy goals as the insurance, health and drug companies. Yet grandma and grandpa have been topped by a quarter million bucks in the bid for Rick’s heart and mind, not to mention his vote.
Rick won’t like that inference but, like Caesar’s wife, all he has to do is stop taking the dough.
Likewise, and to be bi-partisan about this (because it is absolutely a two-party shaming), it means not a thing to me who’s tucking Teddy Kennedy into a five-course meal. It’s his chins that have to assimilate the calories.
Teddy’s arithmetic is even stranger, grabbing $7.7 mil, spending $3.9 million and having $7.8 million left over. How does he do that? Reporting contributions that don’t add up. But Ted sits on the Judiciary Committee and raked in $745,000 from lawyers.
C'mon, guys, how does that make sense in any other than an emerging nation environment? And we have the hutzpah to criticize Vladimir Putin.
It took an Enron to shake up Congress enough to come up with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, that essentially requires corporate CEOs to sign off on accounting practices in their firms. But, of course, Congress wasn’t Enron at the time.
Now, through the spotlight on Jack Abramoff, it turns out that Congress has become Enron, wandering into an ethical swamp from which it may not find an agreeable way out.
But there is a way out and Congress, disgraced by Jack but greased with money, knows what it is. We’ll see if they have the stomach for it.
Perhaps a dozen photos of George Bush shaking hands with Jack Abramoff exist, maybe more. The Prez may even be shown with his arm around the guy, or in one of those back-slapping ‘tell me that one again’ moments.
Presidential photos are a major industry. They hang proudly on the walls of legislators, staff of legislators, wives of staff and even the occasional lobbyist. Like probably ten thousand of them. Among the ten thousand is Jack, the most famous of them all, at least for the moment.
Somehow or another, the photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein never became a controversial issue, possibly, because it was never withheld. It’s an American axiom that if you’re not going to show me, I’ve absolutely, positively got to see. Careers have been made on that … and broken.
And so it goes, the White House once again (tiresomely) making something out of nothing.
If they were anywhere near as good publicizing their agenda as they are bringing critical focus to their blunders, they wouldn’t even need Karl Rove. Dark-side Karl, the father of all this nonsense.
Mary Matalin, an informal White House adviser, said the photos should not be released and that, if they are, voters are savvy enough to realize the images are not evidence of a Bush role in the scandal. Matalin, Karl Rove think-alike and self-styled political consultant ought to know about keeping things out of the public eye, having whisked Dick Cheney off to various locations, all of them as undisclosed as the photos in question.
This is an administration that thrives on the cloak and the dagger, that perceives itself in terms of darkness and shadow. It no doubt revels in watching old James Bond movies, the real ones that featured the real man, Sean Connery. They are, each of them, legends in their own minds and real men. The bathroom mirrors of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush have in common the squint-eyed morning poses of men of action, guys in the know, makers of history.
Until it comes to a dozen worthless photos, that have now become the cause celebre of the opposition and front-page focus in the nation’s newspapers. Can you imagine Bond refusing the press? He’d toss the photos at their feet and turn to his martini, shaken, not stirred.
This president, who cannot be stirred, is clearly shaken.
What is the White House, some kind of national kindergarden? What silly games they continue to play. It’s been said (with considerable truth) that Nixon could have avoided resignation if he’d only admitted and shrugged off the Watergate break-in as an embarrassing incident of no importance. Clinton might have (with somewhat more personal difficulty) have acknowledged his weakness for babes and pointed in the general direction of John Kennedy.
But presidents seem never to learn and (more to the point) they’re handled and advised by staff that are scared to death of making wrong moves. So they never dare make the right ones, just diddle around pawing the earth in denial while their president swings in the wind.
Note to Karl Rove: Release the stupid pictures, Karl.
They’re coming out anyway. Do you guys really think, in this day and age, that a dozen photos that are already on various walls and desks can really be kept from the front pages?
“Yeah,” George squints at the photo and adjusts his glasses, “I guess that’s Abramoff, if you guys say so. Big money-man, if I remember. I back-slap a million of those guys. Shame he got in trouble, but that’s Washington.” Big grin.
The country would love it, but he’s gonna throw it away.
All that’s missing is Julie-Andrews, floating through fields of wildflowers, wearing a sash across her pretty bosom declaring Democratic purity.
Doing the Google Blog Search on ‘Jack Abramoff’ earlier in the week (before the Abramoff-Bush photos hit the news), I got the weirdest conglomeration of liberal-blogs-in-denial that the imagination could possibly create. Page one samples:
Native American tribes tend to support Democratic causes so it should not surprise anyone that they donated to Democrats. But these donations are not part of the scandal.
At a time when his party and some in the press are still trying to argue that the Jack Abramoff scandal is a bipartisan affair, Rep. John Doolittle -- a California Republican said to be under investigation in the case -- says he always …
Whenever anyone, whether it’s seedy, unethical Republicans or their various media bobbleheads, try to pass off the Abramoff Scandal as a “Bi-partisan scandal,” they are lying. This is a Republican scandal, and ONLY a Republican scandal. …
I really thought the Deborah Howell (Washington Post Ombudsman) critical firebombing of their web site was absurd, but it seems the Dems actually think their minority legislators in the Congress have clean hands.
They are merely un-equal-opportunity co-conspirators in this mess and their having been elbowed aside from the lobbyist money trough is in no way an indication of ethical superiority.
A case in point is Montana’s two Senators, one a Democrat, the other Republican. Conrad Burns (Rep) turned back $150,000 that came (directly or indirectly) from Abramoff. Max Baucus (Dem) gave back $18,892, that included $1,892 that he’d sorta forgotten to report for use of Jack’s skybox.
This tale of two senators says far more about access than it does integrity. Burns was in and Baucus out, when it came to access. One of the major aspects of the scandal is that Republicans had tied up access to money because they had control of both houses of congress and that allowed them to do it. They could deliver the vote. Democrats had a hard enough time even getting behind the closed doors, as Republicans divvied up the spoils and crafted the legislation accordingly.
But not being invited to the bank doesn’t mean you’re not a robber.
And so that portion of the blogosphere inhabited by the truly naïve, or that portion of the country that is so incensed by George Bush that they are blinded, has gone entirely nuts. In that context, the debacle that sent the Washington Post a-running from their ombudsman is entirely understandable, even if it’s not very courageous newspapering.
The country is flinchy. It has a great deal from which to flinch. But snap-judgment, based upon party politics and a certain amount of rage at the direction of the country, is hardly a firm place from which to declare the moral high ground.
“Jeez, the man offered me money, the crook. Wanted me to vote his way. So I took the money and I voted his way. What a crook the guy is, they oughta put him in the slammer.”
The Washington Post, in an editorial, says of Scott McClellan’s White House refusal to comment on Abramoff,
“Under these circumstances, asking about Mr. Abramoff’s White House meetings is no mere exercise in reportorial curiosity but a legitimate inquiry about what an admitted felon might have been seeking at the highest levels of government. Whatever White House officials did or didn’t do, there is every reason to believe that Mr. Abramoff was up to no good and therefore every reason the public ought to know with whom he was meeting.”
Every reason to believe Mr. Abramoff was up to no good? Are they serious?
Tens, and probably hundreds, of legislators, staff of legislators, appointed officials and staff of appointed officials—at the highest levels of government—possibly and quite probably including White House staff, have been paid-off by this guy. There is no other word for it—paid-off.
The absolute outrage is that the Washington Post (and other media) timorously talk of ‘asking’ about Abramoff’s White House meetings. They ought to be pounding on doors, pulling down the walls and giving no rest to an administration that made a business out of selling off the nation’s political integrity.
Tom DeLay reveled in his K-Street operations that, without a single whimper from the law, sold off lobbyist access like they were Virginia hams. Possibly they were. Legislators carved up, bagged and hung in that curing-shed they call the United States Congress, to be sold off to the highest bidder. Senator Rich Santorum was in charge of the twice-monthly, no Democrats invited (not that they wouldn’t have been happy to come) auction.
And the nation wonders, breathlessly, what will become of Jack Abramoff. Newspapers speculate on whether Tom DeLay will beat the rap in Texas.
Wake up, America! These are not side issues to American Idol and whether the stock market is up or down a few points. You’ve been sold-out.
The so-called conservatives among you, who delight in what has been done during the past six years of the Bush presidency and the ten years of DeLay domination of Congress, might wake up to the fact that government to the highest bidder wounds the right as deeply as the left.
A civil society depends upon a balance of interests.
If we lose the belief that the Congress of the United States works in our individual and collective interests, if we become convinced that our present and future is being auctioned off to the guys with the most dough, then civility in our society is at great risk.
And I don’t mean civility as in tipping our hats to one another or opening doors. I’m talking about cities burning and the have-nots deciding to have at the end of a fist.
Abraham Lincoln, remember him? He said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” Or let others do it for us without giving a damn, which is the same thing.
I suggest to the Washington Post and others, who mistake the indictment of one criminal for the curing of a national crime, that they stop staring at their shoes, lift their eyes and demand wide-ranging criminal prosecutions. Wherever they lead, down and through the halls of the White House and the corridors of Congress.
The scandals of Wall Street were merely momentary afflictions to our pocketbooks and yet we chose to send their CEOs off to serious prison sentences.
I want to hear no more of reconfiguring of the rules on limits for bribing our lawmakers. Don’t test my patience, you Democrats who would promise a new integrity in the government, if only you had your chance at the levers of power. You can’t promise integrity, you either have it or you don’t.
But you can promise prison and the selling of a congressional vote is a felony.
Once we’ve all agreed that keeping nuclear weapons in the box they came in is impossible, other options become agreeable, or at least open to discussion. Pakistan having the bomb rather abruptly cut off all serious talk about containment. And that’s probably a good thing.
So, having cashed-in at least some of our cold-war prejudices, we can get to work on demystifying the old nuclear power bugaboos, one of which has always been what to do about the reprocessing of spent fuel rods. Our Prez has an idea on that. He wants the U.S. to get in the reprocessing business, effectively becoming the world’s go-to (and only) source.
Might not be a bad idea. Whether or not the world will accept the parenthetical portion of that intention, we can only wait to see. One can imagine problems.
This idea has shaken some members of Congress who consider it ‘an expensive venture that relies on unproven concepts’ that could increase the danger of proliferation.
Yeah well, the spread of nuke technology is a given. It’s like trying to keep the secret of steelmaking to ourselves during the industrial revolution. What used to be complicated is now pretty straightforward and making bombs is more a question of money and access to raw materials than it is know-how.
The world certainly doesn’t need more killing-power, but it desperately needs more non-fossil-fuel energy.
Nuclear power is essentially steam-power to drive turbines. It’s been called a hell of a dangerous way to boil water, but it’s become less so with each generation of nuclear plants. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are no longer even close to the norm technologically and, if we can get over our jumpiness about fuel reprocessing producing weapons grade plutonium, everyone can get down to more useful business of fine-tuning reactor design.
The people who think this is a good idea, talk about a process that doesn’t separate plutonium, but whips up a mixed fuel too hot for terrorists to handle. Such a ‘hot mix’ can be used in special reactors that exist in France but not as yet in the United States.
Talk about French fries.
Bush is trying to get on the front-end of the global warming flak he’s been taking, saying “We ought to have more nuclear power in the United States of America. It’s clean, it’s renewable, it’s safer than it ever was in the past.” All of which is true and all of would lean us away from our vulnerability to each and every oil crisis.
A strong argument can be made for turning the world’s ink-blot reaction to the word ‘nuclear’ from bombs to energy. A remarkably effective way to do that would be to fund major research into reactor technology, share that research with other nations and lease reactors to economically emerging nations, where the dirtiest energy policies undermine new standards.
Lease them for a dollar a year, if that’s what it takes.
The key to that, at least in the short-term, is to control the disposition of nuclear fuel, from inception though the numerous re-processings to final disposal. The Bush plan (which he has not yet signed-off on and which is being shopped around to various allies) would solve that by making the United States the world’s source of re-processed fuel.
That will make for some very interesting international shipping problems, as well as land-based transport. But who knows, maybe we’ll do it all on a remote Pacific atoll and perhaps the fuel itself will become far less difficult to handle.
Possibly that’s a fair share of supposition, but if it is nothing else, this 21st century will be technologically advanced beyond all commonly held understanding.
What a huge and sudden leap it would be, from the controversy over spent nuclear fuel disposal in our western United States, to recycling for profit. Which doesn’t mean there is no controversy. There’s bound to be a huge national debate, as there should be.
Everyone may then come equally out of denial; the administration that there’s no global warming issue and the public that nuclear in any form is a no-no.
A few decades late, but better late than … whatever.
The rich and the various assorted enablers-of-the-rich were all there in Davos, Switzerland this week, while the previously-disenfranchised milled around various Palestinian polling places.
Both events were (and are) experiments in, or the results of, ventures in democracy that were unheard of a half century ago.
The casting out of dictators in Asia, along with China’s moderation into a wannabe consumer-based economy has brought immense capital wealth to the Far East. The lid is certainly off (or nearly off) that trembling, boiling pot that is the masses of Asia. Nearby, in the Middle East, the steam is rising—a pressure-cooker, whose clamped-down lid seeks out an early release of pressure in the Stans, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, in an effort to avoid explosion.
Far East and Middle East are works-in-progress and, while the short-term results may be subject to whims of capital or forces of rhetoric and bias , there is no denying their progress toward democracy in the long run. This is not a Bush-administration achievement, it’s been a long time in the making and its roots can be found in the Marshall Plan that followed WWII.
There wouldn’t be a World Economic Forum in Davos without Klaus Schwab, its originator. Born in 1938 in Ravensburg, Germany, his academic laurels, U.N. credentials and worldwide honors stun the ordinary imagination. Certainly nothing would have held such a man back, but European Marshall Plan recovery certainly helped thrust him forward.
The Asian attendees at Davos are progressions of the Japanese miracle and the Japanese miracle is the work of two war-makers, generals George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. Two victors-turned-philanthropists in the first such event ever recorded in the history of the world.
It doesn’t surprise me that the leading economy in the world today is American. We were the only industrial nation left standing at the end of WWII, profited from that happenstance and never looked back.
But I find it fascinating and of great historic interest that second in the world is Japan and third, Germany. The second greatest and third greatest economic powers on the planet are the losers of the greatest war in history. That’s using ‘greatest’ three times in one sentence, but it’s a mind-bending sentence.
Which brings us, inevitably, to Palestine and the recent election that has so shaken some free world pundits.
Palestine and most all of the Middle East for that matter, were the passed-by of American largesse after WWII. They simply weren’t important enough, nor were they badly enough damaged to be a focus of economic aid. Who knew the role oil would play? We had our own oil, Texas was full of it.
Left to stew in their own cultural juices, certainly without much American concern and subject to a constant selling off of their rights to suit our needs, they no longer fit into the neat little box of logical definition.
And so, as democratic elections come haltingly, to first one and then another angry and abused population, the results illuminate a self-interest we are not equipped to recognize.
How could we? We made a foreign policy of neglect, fostered oil-rich dictatorships in power ‘balances,’ armed the area to the teeth and made of it an socio-economic disaster. The Middle East was the Marshall Plan not offered and perhaps a mirror to what might have been in Europe and Asia, had they been similarly neglected. In fact, Eastern Europe proves that premise.
Davos is the cogent evidence that social and economic inclusion are more powerful than men and nations. The democracies that have thrived have come not at the point of a sword, but at the offer of a job. Those who are disgusted with the Palestinians voting-in Hamas would do well to realize that Hamas supported schools and charities that Yasser Arafat ignored. For forty years.
Some principles are the same in Palestine or Singapore, Davos or Detroit. Lids on freedoms eventually come off (or are blown off) and given an opportunity, men and women will vote in their own best self-interest.
And that, ultimately, saves us all.
John Kerry’s rush back from Davos to try and orchestrate a filibuster, that he knew had no chance, against Sam Alito, is a symptom. Hillary Clinton’s relentlessly middle-of-the-road and don’t-ruffle-any-feathers stance on almost any issue, is another.
The Democratic Party is rudderless and ineffective when the nation needs it most. The Dems have been persuaded into middle-ground and the Republicans already own that real estate.
They fear John McCain, but don’t in the least understand or learn from him. McCain is not uncomfortable with taking positions, sometimes quite bold and against the grain of his own party. Americans love that and McCain will probably be our next president because of it.
There hasn’t been a time of such clear need for ideological definition in decades, perhaps in my lifetime. The opposition is in disarray, churning in circles, unable to chart a direction. There’s not a Democratic candidate in sight who can win, with the exception of Barack Obama and this time around will not be his turn.
Famously, Casey Stengel said, “Two hundred million Americans, and there ain’t two good catchers among ‘em.” That lament fits politics as well as baseball. Another piece of Stengelese that works, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
In a time when
We have been misled into war and the people who got us in can’t seem to get us out
The ‘conservative’ deficit grows at $77 million an hour, 24 hours a day