John L. Hess: Dissents

John Hess (1917-2005)

2005-01-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

John L. Hess died this morning at the age of 87. He passed away peacefully in his sleep.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are ---
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

--Tennyson, Ulysses

Let Them Eat Sushi

2004-12-31T13:38:00.000-08:00

Being called a skinflint got George Bush into a swivet. He said we’re the most generous country in the world. Then New York must be the most generous city in the most generous country. Evidence of that appears in the Dining section of the Times. Its critic took a guest -- at least twice -- to a new sushi joint in midtown where the tab comes to $500 apiece, minimum, counting tax, tip and a glass of sake. The critic went out of his mind at the first bite of raw fish, and his bliss only deepened as he went course after course to the end. Four stars. He’d evidently have given more if the Times had any more stars to give. One might say that the stars are based on price more than on the quality of the food -- for in the el cheapo column down below no stars are given, though the critic raved about the raw fish in a whole block of restaurants costing $25 or less.

Considering the rents in midtown, what can they be paying the help? I think of dishwashers earning less for 40 hours of hard work than the $500 the Times is enchanted to pay for its four-star tasters. And their workers have shlep home to wherever they can find shelter -- with rent controls going up and the MTA panting to raise fares and cut service. For the workers the choice is often whether to buy medicine .or groceries. But here in Wall Street, generosity is in the air. It’s year-end bonus time, and the big firms are dishing out packets of up to 20 million and more. So bring on your $500 sushi -- and don’t you dare call us skinflints.

Uncle Scrooge

2004-12-28T18:37:00.000-08:00

I can’t get over it. We tell the wealthier countries of the world to chip in billions for the victims of this catastrophe, and then we toss three million into the kitty. No doubt we’ll shell out a bit more, but don’t hold your breath. It’s not high on our national agenda. Leaders of both parties are visible on our TV screens with their hands our - but it’s relief from taxes that they’re asking - or more federal spending in their own districts..
Call us Uncle Skinflint. We’re not even on the list of the 10 most generous providers of aid -- we’ve not even come close to the pittance called for by a treaty that we have signed. Norway is at the top of the list. One of our diplomats suggested that it ought to put up more.

Or call us Uncle Scrooge. Scrooge has been all over our screens as the old meanie in "A Christmas Carol." A fable for the kiddies. Actually Dickens created him as a reply to the meanies of his day, who were campaigning for the repeal of England’s poor laws. They were arguing that home relief was was bad for the poor -- undermined their character and caused them to multiply until they ate us out of house and home. Scrooge refuses to give a donation, saying "Are their no prisons? Are their no workhouses?"

In the end, Scrooge repents, and provides a turkey the Cratchits and medical care for Tiny Tim. In real life, alas, the meanies won. The poor laws were repealed, the common grazing lands were sealed off and peasants were driven to seek work in mines and mills.

Tsunami

2004-12-28T07:35:00.000-08:00

It can escape nobody that most of the victims of natural disasters are poor folk. Correction: It did escape the Times, which blames geology for the tidal waves that devastated the shores of South Asia. In other words, blame God. Well, he's done it before.

But it's poor folks who settle in where disaster has a way of striking, and they keep going back. In fact, survivors are already scavenging in the wreckage for shelter and for gravesites. Where would they go? Safer areas are out of their reach.

Our local media took pride in the $40 million that some zillionaire we never heard of paid for a penthouse in midtown. Not of course for safety from tidal waves, though we do often have watermain breaks. The price does, I guess, reflect the vitality of our town, which sparkles despite its atrocious mismanagement. Check the cultural listings.

Just now I will not dwell on New York housing and wages. Those millions in South Asia get far less, and very few public services. Lord, they didn't have sirens to warn them about the earthquake. They fled the first wave, came back and were hit by the second. We've had much better warnings of all the bad things that are happening to the environment. What are we doing about it?

Suicides to Come

2004-12-23T18:25:00.000-08:00

Sy Hersh says our brass is afraid to tell their civilian bosses what they don’t want to hear. Remarkable evidence of that came at yesterday’s joint news conference by Donald Rumsfeld and General Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Rummy said the bombing of that mess tent in Mosul reflected the desperation of our enemies in the war on terror. He babbled that THEY could lose an occasional battle and survive, whereas we could not afford to lose one. I defy you to make sense out of that. General Myers then slipped in a revelation -- that was a suicide bomb. Never mind what that tells about our security arrangements -- he said they were first rate --but it blew a large hole in the argument that our foes are just fighting for oil and power. They are mad and evil -- true enough -- but they could hardly have expected to strike oil where they were headed. Nor were they cowardly, like the Bush gang of draft dodgers. As for winning battles, we just drove them out of Fallujah. And three more U.S. marines were killed there yesterday.
These have been uncomfortable days for those who sent them there. Tom Friedman of the Times agonizes over the picture of the murder of three election workers in Baghdad - in broad daylight, in the middle of a main street. The killers did not even bother to wear masks. Freedman somehow found that to be the fault of Rummy and his gang -- for not sending enough troops, and for turning the world against us. But he sounds like them. He’d stay the course -- and send as many more troops for as many more years as it takes -- on a suicide mission.

We Told Them So

2004-12-22T10:34:00.000-08:00

We on the left are in a bind. How can we say “we told you so” without sounding smug. The first count of our impeachment of George Bush has been his attack on Iraq. We warned that he was lying and that this would be a war we could not win. Every day it becomes more painfully clear that we were right -- that we're losing the war and the only sane thing to do is bring our troops home. But those who said we had to stay the course find it hard to say THEY were wrong. So they don't, quite.

The Times had to lead with the catastrophe in Mosul, but it felt obliged to balance that with quotes from people who said that was sad, but. William Safire claims we're winning the war, and he's still hoping to find those weapons of mass destruction, somewhere, by widening the search to other countries. Tony Blair flew in to say that our prediction of an election proves we're right even if it doesn't don't look very plausible. Bill O'Reilly invited a peace advocate to explain our side, and cut him off with a long rant charging that we are traitors, rooting for the enemy -- that we want our troops to lose so we can say, “I told you so.” Well, sorry, Bill -- as long as this war goes on, we'll have to say it, and keep on saying it: We told you so.

The Flat-Earth Crusade

2004-12-16T18:15:00.000-08:00

When they decided to make war on Iraq, the Bush gang at first called it a Crusade. They hastily renamed it but the notion survives.

On a panel show last week, a guy called in to say he’d read every word in the Koran, and couldn’t find a single bit of mercy in it. That proved to him that we had to fight till we converted all of Islam to our faith. He should have spent part of this time hunting for mercy in the Old Testament.

Islam adopted the Old, and the New Testament as well, as holy writ. It was far more tolerant than Europe to non-believers. In what we now call the dark and middle ages, Christians slaughtered one another, and Jews, en masse, and burned heretics at the stake, while scholars of the Caliphate were translating much of what now survives of the science, medicine and art of the golden age of Greece.

There is plenty of proof in our language: Arabic numbers and words like algebra and alcohol - though liquor is supposedly forbidden in Islam. Great minds have never taken literally the mumbo-jumbo of folk religion. Greeks put the planets in orbit and worked out the circumference of the earth thousands of years ago. And then the church cracked down.

Now, we’re turning backward. Our president applauds those who teach that every word in the Bible is literally true -- that the earth and all in it were made in six days -- and that textbooks have to say that evolution is only a theory. I don’t know how much of that, if any, he actually believes -- but clearly, we’re in for a lot of superstitious blather these next four years.

Footnote: That noble investigative reporter Gary Webb has taken his own life, a victim of savage persecution by the CIA and the major media for his exposure of links between crack cocaine and the CIA and the contras. Please do check out the splended eulogy by Alex Cockburn in the Nation. In passing, I remark that the Nation not long ago disavowed a Cockburn column, whereas it keeps its door open for Christopher Hitchens, a convert to Maggie Thatcher and Yankee imperialism. It is no surprise that the Times Book Review engaged Hitchens, and not Cockburn, to report on Leftwing writings, but how does one explain the Nation? (Its editors say they can’t explain the exclusion of my MY TIMES: A Memoir of Dissent from its roundup of writings about the Times. As Rumsfeld says, stuff happens.) See also my comments in my book and in EXTRA! and Counterpunch and WBAI and blog etc. To be continued ...

Bernie’s Hideaway

2004-12-15T18:07:00.000-08:00

It would have made a great final chapter to Bernard Kerik’s autobiography, just out. President Bush was about to swear him in as chief defender of homeland security. Instead, Bernie presented his excuses at a state dinner in the White House.

The president had been facing the need to fill that job for over a month, but he seems to have overlooked it in his daily chats with the Lord Jesus. It turned out that there some problems with Bernie’s resume.

Now, we bleeding hearts feel obliged to pass over his misbehavior as a youngster, because he had a dreadful childhood. But that happens to be just the kind of mitigating factor that Kerik and Giuliani would not tolerate in their pre-emptive war against crime in our Latino and African-American communities. Kerik got his first crack at them as a corrections officer -- if you’ll excuse the expression. The news clippings show him using inmates freely as personal help. There’s something about a valuable painting taken from Rikers Island. Then Giuliani named him police commissioner, chauffeur and bodyguard.

Eyebrows were raised when Kerik assigned half a dozen homicide detectives to search for some keys that his publisher had mislaid. It turned out that she had changed handbags and just forgot about it. She’s a rich widow who owns a big rightwing publishng house. She enjoyed working on Kerik’s book, with occasional foreplay in a hideaway the city maintained for the commissioner in Battery Park City -- until she came upon a note left behind by another woman, and there went the ballgame. Pity: We do need to learn more about that stun-gun that Kerik manufactures, in partnership with Giuliani. A few people died of heart attacks after being stunned, but they say there was no connection. As Rumsfeld said, things happen.

We’ve got four more years of this coming up. They won’t be dull.

Hess: The Poisoned Chalice

2004-12-13T18:51:00.000-08:00

The poisoned chalice. It reads like a page from the thousand and one nights of Scheherazade -- Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. And boy, have they been making fabulous news, right here at home. But who can resist the tale of the poisoned cup that was handed to the handsome prince who claimed the throne of Ukrainia? And what was in it? Dioxin -- Agent Orange -- the stuff we rained on Vietnam. We thought it had been banned, after Love Canal and all, but last week we learned we’re still using it. That came to light only because a couple of helicopters crashed while spreading it over a field of opium poppies, in Afghanistan. That was news to the Pentagon, which said it’s investigating.

The big time cultivation of opium was developed in China by our British soulmates, who waged war on the natives when they tried to suppress it. Another form of chemical warfare was used in the Middle East by none other than Winston Churchill. As a war minister, he dropped mustard gas on natives of what was then called Mesopotamia. Lawrence of Arabia described it as a betrayal of promises he had made to sheiks of Araby to serve the British cause against Turkey. The upshot was a deal that put the French in control of Syria and Lebanon, the British in control of Iraq and Palestine, and Royal Dutch-Shell in control of the oil.

Now Americans have taken charge. And still, you know, it reads like Scheherezade. Ali Baba -- do we have thieves right here at home. Here’s a new page about Marc Rich and his secret pardon and his deals with Saddam Hussein. Here’s our Bernie Kerik and his secret harem downtown. He was at table last night with Bush, can you imagine? Anyway, these next four years are not starting out dull.

Uneasy in Bed

2004-12-11T19:27:00.000-08:00

The Times and the Washington Post both thought it was front-page news today that a deeply embedded reporter put a National Guardsman up to asking Rummy that embarrassing question. So once again, the blame for a bad gaffe by the Bush adminstration is p assed along to the so-called liberal media.

Alex Jones, the biographer of the Times family who is now a Harvard mentor on ethical standards of journalism, said it made him uneasy. Elizabeth Bumiller of the Times, who is notorious for her gushing about Bush, explained that it was intimidating to stand up at a news conference and ask pointed questions. After all, she said, he was the president of the United States, and this was going to be on the evening news. Others have noted that if one did, one might have a hard time being called on next time -- or even having one’s phone calls answered promptly at deadline time.

The Kissinger tapes have exposed how poohbahs of the media groveled before him -- and it doesn’t seem to have shamed them, or damaged their careers at all.

As for Rummy’s contemptuous response to the Guardsman -- Bush was asked about it at his next appearance. In his dyslectic way, he muttered something about Rummy’s winning ways. Nobody asked him to explain. But there’s been an increasing note of desperation among his defenders in the media. How’d you like to be on THEIR side these days?

Grunts Talk Back

2004-12-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

That was a dramatic turning point in our war on Iraq. Our embedded media stood agape, while troops on their way to combat stood up to the Secretary of Defense. The news conference was held in Kuwait, because the next stretch of road to Baghdad was too dangerous. Why, then, they asked, did they have to scrounge for scrap iron and shattered bullet-proof glass to beef up their vehicles? Why did their folks back home have to scrounge for money to buy them the latest body armor? Why was their pay late and why, above all, were they being held over beyond the periods they thought they had signed up for?

Rummy sneered at them as if they were his regular press gang. He said the best stuff had to go to the regular army, and the reserves and Guardsmen just had to wait. As to serving out their time -- read the small print. There is no limit -- they’re in for life and beyond.

Actually, there’s a very good reason for those limits. Research into the history of war has found that a unit under direct fire soon begins to lose its effectiveness, and should be relieved within about 30 days. One name for it is shell shock - men diving into shell holes rather than fighting on. It might be argued that the Bolshevik revolution was a result of shell shock -- the troops couldn’t bear their government’s order to continue the war.

This one is of course endless. There never has been an exit strategy. Our government will continue to pretend that there is one, that things are getting better when evidently they are getting worse. But the troops are talking back. That is something new.

A Tragic Generation

2004-12-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

Tom Brokaw made a packet of money with a book calling us the Greatest Generation. Well, I volunteered for its great adventure, World War Two -- and, all things considered, I still think it was the right thing to do, but I’m not as confident as I was then.

I am deeply moved by the tale of that athlete who left a rich and brilliant career in baseball to heed what he thought was the call to defend his country. It was a lie, of course, but he believed. In no time at all he was rushed to Iraq, and brought back in a coffin. The military said he died in heroic combat. Today we learn that that was a lie, too. He was a victim of friendly fire.

So are we all -- but most Americans are not quite that believing. Their national religion is hypocrisy. Time and Newsweek today both publish studies showing that large majorities claim to believe every word in the Bible -- contradictions -- misprints, flat earth and all. They believe "Thou shalt not kill" but they’re enthusiastic about capital punishment. They re shelling out big bucks at the movies to watch it being inflicted on Jesus, slowly. They believe he’s come back and chats with our president every morning - no doubt telling him how a rich men can keep his money and still make his way through the gates of heaven. They believe we zapped Saddam Hussein for knocking down the World Trade Center but we need 12,000 more troops to speed up what Bush just called our scheduled departure from Iraq -- which our military say may take another decade or more.

People being polled say all those things. I don’t think many of them really mean it. The tragedy is that a majority plays along -- and people die.

SS: A Social Compact

2004-12-04T15:25:00.000-08:00

Note: The following was held up by a fundraiser at WBAI yesterday. My archives are of course full of defenses of Social Security…. By the way, I commend Friday’s Daily Howler.org for a staaggering example of the stupidity that infects our airwaves.

Here we go again. For 25 years, the enemies of Social Security have been wailing that it would bankrupt the country, and even telling us when that would happen. Time after time, they would stave off the awful day by cutting benefits and raising the withholding tax. I wonder now whether I didn’t play into their hands by showing time and again how they were juggling the numbers. The thing is -- it was just a game. Social Security is not an insurance plan -- it’s a social compact. We agreed, as members of the human family. to care for all who needed it. The trust funds were a fiction -- IOU’s that we owed to ourselves. The armed forces don’t have a trust fund, but nobody has ever talked about THEIR going broke, even under the bloody chicken hawks who are now in control. They’re moving 12,000 more troops into Iraq to enforce democracy, and they say they’ll need them there for at least a decade more. Money’s no object -- even laws and treaties are no object. This is a matter of national security, and that’s held to be sacred. Well, so is the principle of Social Security.

Hess: Torture ‘Technically Illegal’

2004-12-01T18:42:00.000-08:00

A front-page story in the Washington Post says our generals in Iraq were warned [in a memo] that torture was illegal. Heck, they ORDERED the torture. What’s more, torture is as American as apple pie. It goes back to the early settlers and their witch hunts. One common tag for it is the third degree, and our cop shows routinely feature it with approval. One of the first reactions of our pundits to 9-11 was to recommend the torture of suspects.

We’re about to get a new attorney general who maintained that anybody suspected by the president has no rights at all. The Red Cross does not agree. It told our government so emphatically after visiting
Ironically, the New York Times refers today to the abuse of prisoners in Fidel Castro’s jails. Dissidents who were just released told of solitary confinement in cells six steps across -- light left on all night -- crude plumbing - reading matter and television censored. Outrageous -- but no comparison was drawn with the squirrel cages at Guantanamo.

It needs to be said that Castro has no right to lock up dissenters, even if they were encouraged by a government in Washington that has been trying to kill Castro off and on for 45 years. Yet it must also be noted that he was the only Latin American leader to have challenged Yankee imperialism. And survived. Today, even though Venezuela is a big supplier of oil, Washington’s campaign to overthrow Hugo Chavez has continued -- with strikes, hit squads and all the rest -- with the staunch support of the New York Times.
This said, Castro is wrong to limit democracy. There has got to be a better way.

Born Again and Again

2004-11-30T18:58:00.000-08:00

Is this a marvelous country, or isn’t it? There were the two biggest mouths on radio, yakking away -- Bill O’Reilly, as if he had not just paid off the colleague who sued him for sexual abuse, and Rush Limbaugh, as if he weren’t facing time for sundry crimes involving drugs. And there was Dick Cheney confirming that nobody from the New York Times could fly on his plane -- not even Tom Friedman, who has backed the war on Iraq as much as he has.

If we have a national religion -- and we do seem to be heading that way -- it may be hypocrisy. The champion winner on "Jeopardy" turns out to have ve had a team of experts feeding him the answers with a gadget like the one Dubya Bush is supposed to have worn. The religion is born-again Christianity -- a literal belief in every word in the Bible, no matter how absurd or contradictory. David Brooks of the Times nominates a pope for it today -- a Southern Baptist named John Stott. Brooks doesn’t really believe in anything,-- he contradicts himeslf in two phrases halfway down the column. What is troubling is how progressives have bought the complaint tbat we’ve been mean to believers. In truth, we’ve been happy to fight alongside movements like Witness for Peace -- and shared jail cells with them. It is a grave mistake to believe that we should imitate the Brookses and pretend we sympathize with churchgoers who hold, like Stott and Dubya, that to abort a pregnancy is an act of murder. That is not the way we’re going to win elections, and not the way we want to win. That is -- hypocrisy -- not our party at all.

To End the MADness

2004-11-29T07:34:00.000-08:00

All right, grownups, back to the real world. The WBAI evening news invited you to spend the weekend with the kiddies and “fageddabahdit” -- the news would not be really new. And it wasn’t. Even the headlines didn’t change…

The main one said Iran maybe would, or maybe wouldn’t. agree to rule out research on dangerous nuclear materials. The talks are being conducted by Europeans, along with the UN atomic agency that kept trying to tell us that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear capacity. Well, even the small amount that Iran might turn up with would be something to worry about, but it’s ridiculous for the US to make noises about it -- since we have more nukes than the rest of the world put together and are actually building new ones and fixing to scatter some around in space. We’re the only country that ever used the bomb, and has threatened flat-out to use it again.

The official policy used to be called MAD, for Mutual Assured Destruction. There was a moment when Ronald Reagan, in the early stages of Ahlzheimer's Disease, agreed in principle with Mikhael Gorbachev to begin getting rid of nukes entirely, but Reagan’s advisers said he didn’t mean it, and Gorbachev’s generals replaced him with a drunk we called a hero because he shot up the Soviet parliament.

Anyway, there’s a huge step that we can now take to improve world security. That is to buy -- for money -- the surplus warheads that are kicking around in the former Soviet empire. At the same time, we can do the same ourselves, and save money. We have enough bombs to destroy all life on earth ten times over. Wouldn’t one time be enough?

Fageddaboudit

2004-11-25T17:46:00.000-08:00

I’ve checked out the day’s news for you, and I’m here to say, Fageddaboudit.

It’s as bad as it was yesterday and it isn’t really new. So if there is one evening in this godawful year for us to turn the news off and dine with people we love, this is it. If we can pitch in at a soup kitchen so much the better, but I’m not going to press you.

There’s a brilliant cover by R. Crumb , on the New Yorker , depicting a diverse crowd in midtown with, in the center, a little Indian representing those who fed the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. He’s wearing a sandwich sign advertising a Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixin’s; for 29.99. But that is getting perilously lose to the real world that I’m trying to put out of mind for a moment. Turn inside and enjoy the comics and a visit with Lucy and Charlie Brown. Lucy notices that Charley never smiles. She warns him, then throws the ball, and bonk! Men never listen. Well, here at WBAI’s evening news, sufficient unto this day are the evils thereof. I’m off for the weekend. Enjoy the holiday -- I’ll be back Monday, to the real world.

Safire the Shameless

2004-11-24T09:15:00.000-08:00

William Safire has called for amending the constitution so that Arnold Schwarzenneger can run for president. Yes, Schwarzenegger the Nazi groper. Safire has announced his retirement as a commentator for the Times -- and I’ve been waiting for him to shut up already, so I can record another of his sins, but he keeps frothing away, so here goes.

The Times hired Safire just after Watergate, in time for him to escape the criminal prosecutions that followed. But he remained loyal -- kept sharing Nixon’s wisdom with readers, bragging about his long hours at the great man’s knee. How he wept at the funeral! Well, not long ago the tapes of a good-old-boys’ session between Nixon and Billy Graham were made public. They reeked with anti-semitism, with hostility toward Jews in Government and contempt for their toadies at the Times. I’ve been waiting ever since for Safire to eat his words. Not a sound.

Another war criminal who taped his own phone calls was Henry Kissinger. A couple of weeks ago a packet of them came to light -- full of groveling, nauseating pandering by eminent members of the mediocracy, notably Ted Koppel and Marvin Kalb. He told them what to write, edited their copy on the phone. They couldn’t deny it -- they just brazened it out. Did it hurt their careers? Not so you can notice it. Well, since they won’t say they’re sorry, I’m just mean enough to tell their listeners that they ought to be -- again and again.

Embedded to the Grave

2004-11-22T18:35:00.000-08:00

It was a nice bit of timing. Our troops were getting bad publicity around the world again, over the killing of unaarmed Iraqis -- so a Times man embedded with those marines, got off a dithyramb about their courage and dedication. They’d occupied this famous mosque and shot it full of holes. Then a marine began to climb the minaret and was fatally wounded. Did they leave him there? Not our heroes. A buddy came from behind and carried him out of there. Now, up in that minaret was a man without a helmet, without body armor, with only an AK-47 . Call him what you like -- an insurgent, a terrorist, a suicidal -maniac -- he’s surely dead by now, but his fate got no mention at all.

We live in denial. According to the polls, a majority of Americans believe that our draft-dodging president is a brave combat leader and his challenger -- with all his medals -- doesn’t have the guts to finish this war and carry on the wars to come. Many of the same citizens defend moral values in the voting booth, and tune in on pornography at home. They call us liberals bleeding hearts -- real moral values and intelligence make them nervous. That explains the survival of such mad hatters as Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and William Bennett.
But who’s sane? Check out today’s editorial in the liberal Times, which salutes our "swift and stunning" victory last week and adds that "about 20,000 to 40,000 more soldiers are needed right away." Lord have mercy and the creek don’t rise.

On Changing the Rules

2004-11-19T17:29:00.000-08:00

I hope I shook up a few sleepy heads last evening, when I agreed with Tom DeLay that if a simple majority can adopt a rule in Congress, then a simple majority can change it. Now, the rules we’re talking about have to do with filibusters. Good folk now think of filibusters as a way a minority can prevent the majority from doing bad things. They say this even as this majority IS doing bad things, and planning worse. They forget that filibusters used to be a favorite took of white racists -- who were then Democrats but have since changed their label. They forget that one rule, which Newt Gingrich whipped up in cahoots with Bill Clinton, requires cutting social programs across the board, right now, this week, in order to hold down the federal deficit.

The electoral college, Lord help us, is a rule that pretends to protect the little states against the big ones. We can do better, and we must -- other countries do. But let me find a note of hope in this grim picture. Since the beginning of time, a majority of people have favored the death penalty and the oppression of women. Yet in Europe, the death penalty has been outlawed, and women have made great strides, because cooler heads have come to prevail. Even Turkey has foresworn executions in order to be accepted among more civilized countries. And all this has happened in a few decades. Here, we’ve had a setback, harkening like Islamic extremists, to the barbarity of fundamentalism, but that cannot last. It’s too cruel, too mean, too stupid.

Lame All Over

2004-11-18T19:04:00.000-08:00

I was composing a sermonette last evening when Con Ed blew a manhole cover and took WBAI off the air. They call it "stray voltage" or good old American knowhow, Meanwhile, surfing the networks, I didn’t hear a single mention of the great scandal of last weekend, about the murder of unarmed Iraqi civilians in that mosque. Only foreigners seem to care. Anyway, what I intended to say seems just as valid tonight.

What I wrote was that they were calling it a lame-duck session of Congress, but that was pure flattery. Those ducks don’t have a leg to stand on. They’re about to meekly raise the national debt limit by 800 billion dollars. They went past the limit weeks ago but pretended not to, in order not to embarrass the Republicans before the elections.

I was going to note that they don’t embarrass easily. I was also going to predict that the Senate Democrats would sheepishly ratify Condaleezza Rice as secretary of state -- -- Joe Lieberman called her "an excellent choice." Then I would quote Tom DeLay’s threat to "go nucular" if the Democrats use the rules to suspend him when he gets indicted, or to block really awful court appointments. That’s a great point. [To be discussed further: If Congress can adopt rules by a simple majority, it can repeal them by a simple majority. Why not? We’ll still have to fight the Bush counterrevolution out in the streets.]

And finally, I might quote the humor weekly The Onion as reporting that the Republicans plan to privatize elections. Which in fact they already have.

Courage.

Interrupted Sermon

2004-11-17T18:20:00.000-08:00

FYI -- Good friends I was composing a sermonette for this evening when Con Ed blew a manhole cover ("stray voltage") and put WBAI’s phone out of action for a day or two. Another triumph for good old American knowhow. I tought I might, with your forbearance, share today’s thoughts before events overtake them. You are welcome to pass them along.

They’re calling it a lame-duck session, but that is pure flattery. Those ducks don’t have a leg to stand on. They’re about to quietly raise the national debt limit to 800 billion dollars. They went past it weeks ago but pretended not to, in order not to embarrass the Republicans before the elections.

That’s when I was told the phones were down. I was going to note that they don’t embarrass easily -- already they’re blaming for slandering our brave marines with that videotape in the Iraqi mosque. I was going to predict that the Senate Democrats would meekly ratify Condi as Secretary of State -- Joe Lieberman called her "an excellent choice."

Then I would note Tom DeLay’s threat to "go nucular" if the Democrats use the Senate rules to block judicial appointments. A great point I’ve seen nobody make before: If Congress can make rules by a simple vote, it can repeal them by a simple vote. Why not? We’ll still have to fight the Bush counterrevolution out in the streets. And finally, I might quote the Onion as reporting that the Republicans are calling for privatizing elections. Whcich in fact they already have. Courage.

She’d Take All But Utah

2004-11-17T18:16:00.000-08:00

A message from the Queen to the former American colonies reads that in light of their failure to elect a suitable president and thereby govern themselves, Her Majesty has decided to take them back -- "except Utah, which she does not fancy."

A copy was E-mailed to me by an English friend who is registered as a Liberal. which in Britain puts him on the center-right. Everywhere in the world except for the USA - the word "liberal" MEANS conservative -- as in laissez-faire -- keeping the government’s nose out of people’s affairs. The Brits HAVE a Conservative party, so named, but it has been discredited by its support for the Bush war -- so the Liberals have been coming back.

Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Europeans are against the war, but a majority of American voters think they’re for it. One reason is that we are incredibly badly informed. Take a front-page story in the Washington Post today. A pool reporter from NBC News taped marines shooting unarmed civilians at an Iraqi mosque. "This one’s still alive -- bang, bang." The reporter was there, saw it with his own eyes, got it on tape. So what was the headline? "Marines Investigate Shooting."

How’s that for fair-and-balanced, objective reporting? It‘s a way of life inside the Beltway -- and outside, too -- including Utah.

Mission Re-Accomplished

2004-11-15T18:53:00.000-08:00

Mission accomplished -- again. All of Falluja is democratic now, whether it wants to be or not. Those fireworks we’re seeing on TV are not as pretty as those on the Fourth of July, but they carry the same message -- independence. Fallujans who survive will damned well vote.

One of their liberators may not be there, though. Colin Powell has put in his resignation -- too soon to celebrate this victory, too late to save his honor.

He was the only combat veteran in Dubya’s coop of chicken hawks, and they often seemed to hold it against him -- hinted that he didn’t have the guts they required. What he did not have, surely, was the guts to stand up to them. Time and again, he lied to our country and to the United Nations about why we had to tackle Saddam Hussein -- quickly, even before we nailed Osama bin Laden. Caught in his lies, he never really apologized, never expressed remorse.

There’s talk now of his being replaced by Condoleesa Rice -- who evidently despised Powell and would never dream of apologizing or expressing remorse. She says she never gave the secretary’s job a thought.

Well, there’s no telling how this will come out. We’re still mopping up in Fallujah.

Safer Every Day

2004-11-12T16:24:00.000-08:00

They told us New York was safer now because they’ve got Saddam Hussein locked up. Now Clyde Haberman of the Times tells us we’re safer because Yasir Arafat has been laid in the cold, cold ground. He’s only half joking.

He quite seriously accepts all the fantasies in the obituary of Arafat by Judith Miller. Neither Arafat nor Hussein had anything to do with any acts of terrorism that we know of here. In fact Homeland Security has quietly lowered the level of alert it raised during the Republican convention. That’s a relief for the city, which kept an army of policemen on overtime for the duration. Mayor Bloomburg noted that Bush had promised to pick up the tab, but hadn’t produced. His Times flak at City Hall, Jennifer Steinhauer, tells how he boldly wrote his complaint into his speech of welcome to the convention. The Bushwackers said no sirree, so Bloomburg threatened not to speak at all. Then he agreed to cut it down to a paragraph, to a sentence, to a few words. In the end, if you followed the story over to the next page, you learn that he took out the few words as well.

Steinhauer tells it as if it was a tale of heroism: This is the billionaire who was going to get so much for our town by turning Republican and snuggling up to Pataki and Bush. It has not been money in the bank.

Saving Falluja

2004-11-11T16:23:00.000-08:00

The reporter said Arafat was "very much alive, though perhaps just barely." Then the scene shifted to Falluja, which was clearly shaping up as an American victory, though perhaps only barely.

Nobody who remembers Vietnam can forget that officer who said we had to destroy the village in order to save it. Now they have to destroy a whole city in order to save it. And then what will we have? A smoking minefield of rubble stained by the blood of -- what shall we call them - heroes? Martyrs? Terrorists? Crusaders? Losers, anyway.

In this war, our spin doctors don’t let us see our dead, even in coffins draped with flags. But our triumphant president chose this day to visit injured servicemen, right after his daily chat with Jesus. He told them he feels their pain.

On the other hand, Iraq veterans and students are speaking out for peace. Our WBAI colleague Christ Hogan will be serving tonight in a panel with Mike Hoffman of Iraq veterans against the war, and Jacob Levich and other organizers, at Hunter College Student Lounge, 68th Street and Lexingon Avenue. Begins 7:30 -- do check it out. There is a battle that has to win, in the end.

Burying Arafat

2004-11-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

Yasir Arafat had a lot to answer for, but he did not deserve to be buried by the Times in an obituary by Judith Miller. It is as loaded with lies and distortions as her revelations about weapons of mass destruction. For a more balanced picture, check out Shimon Peres, the hawkish leader of Israel’s Labor party, in the Washington Post, or my own reporting, for the Times during the summer of 1970, which ended in what Palestinians call Black September.

In New York, by the way, the word Palestinian was not quite kosher. It implied that another ethnic group might claim a share of the land that Jehovah had awarded in perpetuity to William Safire. If you had to mention them, the preferred term was Arab -- pronounced Ay-rab in the red states. I shocked readers one day by calling Arafat a moderate in the Palestinian resistance. A blowhard, bossy, a terrible manager -- Texans might find the type familiar -- except that he was no draft dodger. As I relate, when he dithered his way into disaster in Amman, he grabbed a rocket launcher, tipped a car over and faced down a Jordanian tank. But contrary to Judith Miller, he did not target civilians, or take hostages, or hijack airliners. In fact, he expelled from the PLO the factions that committed those deeds. But he was an icon -- with that kaffiya over that Semitic cartoon of a face - so they blamed him for everything.

A myth repeated so often that it couldn’t be beaten to death with a stick is the legend that Arafat turned down an offer of nearly everything the Palestinians were asking for. He was offered nothing. Bill Clinton invited him to agree in advance to a plan that included a map that looked like fly-paper, with hundreds of settlements crisscrossed by highways and checkpoints reserved for settlers. Arafat wanted to negotiate -- like buying a rug. But all the pressure was put on his side.

So now many world leaders are in Cairo, attending the funeral of the president of a state that we and Israel have never recognized. Millions of Moslems around the world are in mourning. And tomorrow, he will be laid to rest -- for now -- in the courtyard at Ramallah ringed by Israeli armor. Ariel Sharon has chuckled at this arrangement. It is nothing to laugh at.

Do We Live Too Long?

2004-11-09T16:15:00.000-08:00

Not to worry. Our leaders have all pledged to keep those Social security checks coming, to those who get them now. They have a different plan in mind for workers now under 50 or so. They’ll take two percent from each paycheck and turn it over to Wall Street to invest it in a choice of mutual funds. When their time comes, they will retire on their profits, like good capitalists.

One problem is that this would divert literally trillions of dollars of withholding tax revenue that has been financing the government. We had balanced the budget and were on our way to wiping out the national debt when the Bush gang took over. It also slashed taxes on the rich and went on a military spending binge. So how can they plug this new hole?

One serious answer, loudly repeated this weekend, is to raise the retirement age, to 70. Not for us lucky survivors but for our kids, and their kids. It was pointed out as a tribute to Senator Pat Moynihan that he helped lift the regular age from 65 to 67. It was pointed out that we’re living longer, so why not work three more years? Which raises the question -- who’s hiring? Corporate management, and many public services, are laying people off at age 50 - and when they do find jobs they pay less.

One of Moynihan’s accomplices made a splash by calling on the elderly ill to die and make room for the young folks. That was early in a bipartisan campaign to whittle away at social security that has been going on for 35 years. Bill Clinton gave it a slogan worthy of George Bush, when he said "Save Social Security first." Now, nobody mentions Social Security without promising to save it, by taking another nibble at it. So that is at the top of the agenda in Washington, with no serious opposition from either side of the aisle. That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless at all. The very fact that they talk of saving Social Security reflects how precious it is. People will march to save it -- I promise.

Rove as Nerd

2004-11-08T18:16:00.000-08:00

The talking heads were marveling at the disaster they helped bring about, and tried to soothe their consciences. Now that Dubya has won by a clear majority, they said, he surely won’t go for the jugular, the way he did last time. They remind me of the old punchline: "Boy, have you got the wrong vampire!"

His ace blood-sucker, Karl Rove, offered a cheerful anecdote to prove it. He was the class nerd -- the boy who knows all the answers, and gets picked on by the jocks in the back of the room. They didn’t pick on Karl Rove. He got his dad, who happened to be the principal, to tell them that if they did, he’d yank them off the team, forthwith. Karl the Nerd didn’t care for games where he might get hurt; instead he led the band oom-pahing for the guys who did get hurt -- which made Karl right at home in the gang that now rules us.

It may perhaps be a comfort to know how big a role ignorance played in the disaster. Bob Herbert of the Times points out that a majority of Bush voters think Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center and was caught with a stock of weapons of mass destruction. A lot also believe that our attack on Iraq has been a catastrophic success, as Dubya put it, and that the world was rooting for Bush to win. I say it may be a comfort because it has to discomfort our punditry.

You may enjoy reading DailyHowler.com, and checking out his forthcoming piece in FAIR - that’s Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting - and other progressive websites. But let’s face it: we are in for a rough ride. Hang in there.

Now the Fight for the Count

2004-11-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

Hang in there -- it’s going to be a long night. The counting can’t begin till the polls close - and everybody in line at that moment is still entitled to vote. So there’s still time to nag the neighbors and make them do their duty.

The poohbahs all said it was too close to call. That’s a disgrace to the republic. It’s also a disgrace to our so-called liberal media for keeping so many people so ignorant and confused. They conducted the debates, and Kerry won them, so now they say that might have been bad for Kerry. They said if we caught Osama Bin Laden, Bush would win by a landslide. Osama spitds iun our eye, so they say that means more votes for Bush. Record slaughter overseas, record loss of jobs at home, record deficits -- all prove this is no time to change horses in midstream. Though Bush can’t even ride a horse.

Meanwhile, the fight to count those ballots is at a fever height. Republicans have mobilized all over the country to cut down voting by people of color -- and they’re experts at it. Experience shows that literally millions of actual votes will not be counted. It’s up to us to holler -- ten times as loud as the Bushes, because the media gives them ten times as much more play.

One final reminder: There are no safe states. In New York, Kerry and Edwards -- who can be pushed -- are on the top line at left, and the saintly pacifist David McReynolds -- who can’t be pushed -- is on the second line at right. Let’s keep hope alive.

A Vote for Peace

2004-10-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve been advising like-minded citizens everywhere that there are no "safe states" and hence they should vote for Kerry for president, as the far lesser evil. But in New York I urge them also to the saintly pacifist David McReynoilds, for Senate. They can’t be called spoilers because there is no contest; the Republicans have named only a token candidate against Chuck Schumer, and indeed Mayor Bloomberg has publicly endorsed him for re-election.

Sadly, so has the so-called Working Families Party. So-called, because it is just a line on the ballot, controlled by a few nominally progressive trade-union officials who have worked for years to stave off efforts to build an effective labor party. Their interest is obvious: it is to continue to control their huge pension and welfare funds, which would shrink or vanish if we enacted universal single-payer health care and other reforms.

What is harder to figure is the stance of our leading left-liberal weekly, the Nation. By and large it agrees with McReynolds on the issues, but it has shown an inexplicable allergy toward the Greens, especially in New York. Under the influence, perhaps, of the "pragmatic liberal" Mark Green, it blackballed a Nation colleague running for governor. As a result, the Green party lost its line on the ballot by a few hundred votes, while the so-called Working Families Party squeaked by. Now it is too late for the Nation to endorse McReynolds -- assuming that it might like to. It is not too late, though, for it to re-examine its positions.

However the election turns out, the Nation will have achieved one obsessive goal; its final issue gets in one more poke at Ralph Nader. He wasted resources fighting to get on the ballot, and he never did face up to how much damage a Bush victory would bring. But he did keep his agenda alive. In states that are safe for Kerry, I’d recommend a vote for Nader -- but from where I sit, there are no safe states.

Countdown

2004-10-29T05:06:00.000-07:00

Mayor Bloomberg mailed $400 checks to a lot of residents to warm their hearts on the way to the polls. Actually, he raised their taxes by $1700, so this was only a partial refund, but he figures they should be grateful for small favors. On a Blumberg market program, an adviser was asked what stocks to buy if Bush is elected. He said military stocks, naturally, but pharmaceuticals, for sure. He wouldn’t sell either one if Kerry was elected -- just hold on to them -- which is a pretty good picture of what’s at stake on Tuesday.

The election is already under way -- and also, the anti-election. Who would believe that a truckload of absentee votes would vanish again in Florida-- that butterfly ballots, with arrows pointing the wrong way and punch cards with hanging chads would be handed out -- this time in Cincinnati? Who would imagine that thousands of touch-screen machines with no paper trail would be installed -- virtually all of them in minority districts. The Bush gang has gone all out to keep millions of citizens from having their votes counted.

Which brings up the question, what can we do about it? Time is running out. It’s all very well to call the big media and talk programs -- if they don’t charge for it - though one can get more mileage with blogs on the Internet. But the biggest influence each of us can have is to nag everyone we can in the neighborhood, on the job - in subways and buses. It’s a matter of overcoming apathy and despair. Let our enemies be desperate -- they know they could not win a fair election. We can stop them - this time.

(P.S. Note how after all the breast-beating and confessionals about slanting coverage, the Times reports that Columbia University is investigating a charge of anti-semitism by pro-Arab professors, only to conclude, on careful reading, that there isn’t a word of truth in it.)

Hobgoblins

2004-10-28T19:21:00.000-07:00

Double, double, toil and trouble. The hobgoblins are riding this Halloween. Bombs missing in Iraq -- ballots missing in Florida -- must we go through all that again?

The big news tonight is that Yasir Arafat has been carried off the stage. He will be missed. He was one of the scariest of the hobgoblins. Now it will gradually dawn on even simpletons that for all his faults -- and they were enormous -- he was never a master terrorist. So they’ll keep having to find new scarecrows.

One of the scariest has just popped up backstage: James Baker. He’s the former secretary of state -- a sort of foster father-figure to George Dubya. Baker moved into Florida to hijack the last election, but his net goes a lot wider than that. Naomi Klein of the Nation has just done some bang-up reporting on Baker’s long ties with the rulers of Saudi Arabia. He stands to pick up as much as a billion dollars in fees for one upcoming deal. His role helps explain why Pappy Bush held back from taking Baghdad in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War, becauuse they figured they still needed Saddam.

It’s been thrown up to John Kerry that he voted against that war. It was in fact one of the better things that he did during his career. Not winning those medals -- he shouldn’t have - but leading Vietnam veterans against the war. As a Senator, he had an outstanding record investigating the dirty wars in Central America and the contras’ role in drug trafficking. A while ago, Ruth Conniff of the Progressive did a nifty analysis showing that Kerry’s voting record in the Senate was generally liberal for a term and a half, and then went bad -- like so many Democratic politicians led by Bill Clinton.

Well it does confirm my view that Kery can be pushed. It’s up to us to get those votes out and get them counted. Don’t let them steal it again.

The Denby Syndrome

2004-10-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

There’s a new book called "American Sucker," by a guy who lost nearly all his savings in the stock market. Normally, I’d feel only sympathy for him. But I can’t think of David Denby without remembering how he trashed that great movie The China Syndrome.

The nuclear industry had put out a packet of propaganda saying that a meltdown was impossible and the filmmakers were trying to scare us, out of pure greed. And that’s exactly what Denby wrote in New York Magazine, and George Will in his column -- during the week of Three Mile Island.

I don’t believe either of them ever apologized or changed his ways.

Denby became movie critic at the New Yorker and according to his book went hog wild -- drinking, sleeping around, and playing the market all day long, following the advice of such ugly characters as George Gilder. Then the bubble burst. You'd think Denby would have learned his lesson, calling himself a sucker and mentioning the scandals in the market -- but no, he’s still gambling with what’s left, on some other system he’s glad to share with us. He also spices up his book with stuff about his former wife that I’d rather not know.

Ever since his assault on The China Syndrome, Denby has been symbolic of the moral standards of the gang that’s been dragging the world toward armageddon. But the movie was proved to be true, the brokers were proved to be crooks, the warmakers were proved to be liars and today -- their own polls have begun to find Bush running second to a Democrat. Of course he did that last time. Now we must make the verdict stick.

There Are No Safe States

2004-10-25T18:29:00.000-07:00

Four years ago, many supporters of Ralph Nader recommended a switch to Al Gore -- the lesser evil -- in states where it might change the outcome. Elsewhere, they could vote their conscience. Well, that escape hatch has been closed.

There are no "safe states." If there were, how do you explain New York -- where Democrats far outnumber Republicans -- having a Republican governor and a Republican mayor? For this and other good reasons, many now feel obliged to vote for the lesser evil -- Kerry, with all his faults -- against Bush, the greatest evil ever to have occupied the White House.

New Yorkers are lucky, though. They will be able to vote for an old hero of the struggle for peace and justice, in the person of David McReynolds. He managed to scrape up enough petitions to get on the ballot as the Green candidate for Senate. He can’t be called a spoiler -- no way -- because the Republicans put up only a token candidate against Chuck Schumer, one of their very favorite Senators. So, Schumer can’t lose. That makes it a barf to hear him waffling like Kerry for the duration of this campaign. But it does confirm my point that these guys can be pushed around -- pushed either way. Right now, the crucial job is to get voters to the polls, and get their votes counted. Keep in mind -- there are no safe states.

On Pulling the Trigger

2004-10-22T18:47:00.000-07:00

Tom Friedman of the Times says he has a nightmare -- that John Kerry would not pull the trigger against the next target for pre-emptive war. The editorial page worries that he wouldn’t pull the trigger against Social Security. It clings to the line of Peter Peterson and his Concord Coalition that Social Security and the welfare state are on their way to bankrupting the nation.

Well, let’s compare the two major candidates on these issues. Actually, neither one has a plan to get out of Iraq, and both of them both fudge about showdowns with Iran and North Korea. As for Social Security and Medicare, Bush is committed to begin privatizing them in January, coaxing workers to invest in the stock market instead. Kerry did not follow my advice and call for single-payer, universal health care. But he did come out for some decent measures: a patients’ bill of rights, coverage for more children, the right to negotiate prices with the drug industry, and so on. Trouble is, he’d have to get his program through Congress.

I cling to the point that Kerry is a man who can be pushed around. He shows that every day. Up to now, the push has come from the wrong side. Representatives of the public interest have given him a blank check. Now, we have to fight just to get our votes counted. Then, however that turns out, we must fight to keep them from pulling those triggers.

A Hurrah for Boston

2004-10-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

Well hurrah for the visiting team! There have always been a lot of New Yorkers who root for Boston to beat the Yankee imperialists, and it’s great to think of Rudolph Giuliani there in Steinbrenner's box -- Rudy, the Brooklyn boy who betrayed his own Dodgers in order to snuggle up to the powerhouse in the Bronx. This year it was particularly gratifying because the Bush gang has kept spewing about Taxachusetts -- that liberal state.
I remember when cars from there carried bumper stickers saying "Don’t blame me -- I’m from Massachusetts. That was a couple of years after the Nixon landslide of 1972-- after the Watergate cover-up came apart and Nixon was headed for impeachment. Now, there’s a word we may need to freshen up if the Bushwackers heist the White Houze again next month.

Every day, good people tell me that if that happens, they’ll move to Canada. I grant that four more years of the worst president in American history is a grim prospect -- but there is no reason why we should run away, or take it lying down. Besides, where would we get our flu shots?

I’m reminded of the years of Reagan and the elder Bush. They were loaded with impeachable crimes -- pre-emptive wars -- trading with the enemy -- perjury -- assaults on Social Security and Medicare -- a transfer of the tax burden from the rich to working people. The Democrats lost Congress and quite a few state houses and city halls. But we survived. Trouble is, many people weren’t paying attention, or forgot, and we went on to blow our next chances in the Clinton years. But there was a chance - there always is one. Look at the Red Sox. Go for it, Boston.

Flu Shots in the Capitol

2004-10-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

It’s a relief to learn that flu shots are being given, free, to members of Congress and their staffs, as they go off on recess. For common citizens, the supply is limited to infants and old folks. The rest of us might be safer staying home and watching the playoffs.

That may be what many are doing, anyway. That may help explain the cockeyed election polls -- they’re not paying attention. The humor weekly Onion says Kerry is hoping that stem-cell research may find a cure for what’s bugging his campaign. And it says our generals have settled for a strong second place in their war against Iraq.

Listen -- if enough of us had a sense of humor, we wouldn’t be there. Or, if they paid attention. Listen to Bush, indignantly denying that he would privatize or cut Social Security -- as he promises to begin doing just that in January. Just give it another name -- like Clear Skies for more smoke in our lungs and Clean Water for more lead and mercury in our faucets.

Anyway, there’s Bill O’Reilly to cheer us up. The Daily News says his accuser turned down his offer of $2 million to settle her complaint of sexual harassment - so that affair may brighten the gossip columns for a while longer.

That’s OUR flu shot. Not to be sneezed at.

Bent Straws

2004-10-19T19:25:00.000-07:00

According to the polls, a majority of Americans have pegged Dubya Bush as bad news at home and abroad --stupid and greedy, mean as home-made sin. Yet he holds an edge among those likely to vote. A reminder of H. L. Mencken’s dictum that noibody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence and taste of the American people. I’ve put it down to bad information, a bad shaping of people’s minds -- and I’ve often cited the influence of the Times. Now I must note that it had a very well written editorial endorsing Kerry -- or rather, opposing Bush -- and there’s a front-page analysis today that highlights what Dubya has called his "catastrophic success" in Iraq.

The trouble is that the Times and Kerry do not squarely challenge the morality of the war, or call for bringing the troops home. And they waffle on what should be a winning point -- Bush’s plan to privatize Social Ssecurity and Medicare. Both of them play along with the notion that some more cuts are needed. Kerry even brags about breaking with his party to support a couple of them.

I’ll get back to that -- try and stop me. But I must close on a bit of pleasant news. Bill O’Reilly has called off readings to kiddies, to promote his children’s books -- because he’s in a swivet about his telephone sex habit. Not long ago, he was entertaining talk about his running for president which of course brings up Bill Clinton’s sideplay in the Oval Office. Tell me, is this a great country, or isn’t it?

‘Into the Valley of Death’

2004-10-18T18:39:00.000-07:00

The mutiny of a platoon in Iraq throws a burning light on our feelings about war. They did not question the morality or wisdom of it; they just objected to the lack of body armor and protection. They called it a suicide mission. The army doesn’t deny their complaints, but sticks to the motto -- theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die.

Actually, if soldiers didn’t run away there’d be none left to tell the tale. Over the week-end, I saw a rerun of "The Red Badge of Courage," about a young soldier who runs away from his first encounter with enemy fire. For a change, this one’s about the brave Union army -- usually, it’s the rebels who are the good guys. And the picture has a happy ending. The hero comes back to rejoin his comrades on the line. Ready, aim, fire -- fix bayonets, charge -- beat the drums, seize the flag from fallen comrades, charge again. The red badge of courage is a bullet wound in the heart.

So in the end this tragic film glorifies war. It was written about the time that Kipling was calling upon America to pick up the white man’s burden and rule the world. The thin red line -- into the valley of death rode the 600 -- theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die. History tells us that that charge in the Crimea was a total defeat for the empire. It was an act of lunacy, as Bob Herbert writes of the war in Iraq.

That is plain to see in the news every day, but the perpetrators can’t take the blame. There will be a court martial and heavy sentences, to set an example. It does not seem to have occurred to the platoon sergeant to apply his intelligence to the wisdom or morality of the war, but he evidently has a sense of humor. What can they do to us, he asked -- send us back to Iraq?

Fair and Unbalanced

2004-10-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

If you can’t stand Bush, and you can’t stand Bill O’Reilly, it was a great night. By now, we know that viewers scored the debate overwhelmingly as a win for Kerry -- he has cleaned Bush’s clock in three out of three rounds. At the close, it was fun watching the mediocracy pedaling desperately to avoid calling it -- with even some of the right-wingers covering their backsides -- and the center-liberals picking out faults by Kerry as well as Bush to show how fair and balanced they are.

Fair and balanced. Which brings us to Bill O’Reilly, who ranted that he was being blackmailed by a former colleague. She’s suing him for making her talk dirty to him on the phone while he masturbated. He didn’t deny that it was true -- she taped some of the calls -- he just denied it was illegal, and objected to the amount of damages she was demanding.

This recalls Rush Limbaugh -- who faces prosecution for stocking up on speed with fake prescriptions and allegedly resold some of it. And there’s Bill Bennett -- the moral watchdog with the gambling habit. And there’s Dubya Bush, with the lying habit of lying. Yet all of them still function -- still command a considerable number of followers -- like the Bushie in the focus group who said on camera that Kerry’s being better in debate was one more reason to vote for Dubya.

So the same polls that gave the debate to Kerry, big time, called the election outlook a dead heat. But the climate has definitely changed. That was worth staying up for.

Rupert and Chuck

2004-10-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

The New York Post today endorsed Chuck Schumer for re-election as Senator. It acknowledged that this was weird: one of the most extreme rightwing rags in the country, backing a Democrat. But the publisher Rupert Murdoch is not putting aside his prejudices. Schumer is a pet of Wall Street, a full-fledged war hawk and a sponsor of the USA Patriot Act -- which has been called the most sweeping attack on civil rights in more than a hundred years.

Basically, these issues have been taken off the table in the contest for president and vice president, since all four major-party candidates agree on them. They differ on the tax cuts -- but they all voted for them when they went down. They differ on exporting jobs but favor it, too. Weird is the word. So their debates can be depressing. Let us instead consider a few cheering notes.

There’s the satirical weekly Onion, picking up on Dick Cheney’s warning that the election of Kerry would incite new attacks like 9-11, says Cheney has pledged to attack the U.S. -- pre-emptively, I presume -- if Kerry is elected. Daily Howler dot com carries more about the buddy-buddy ties between Bush and tonight’s moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS. In passing the Howler proves that Wolf Blitzer of CNN is a jerk -- but you knew that.

Maybe the most encouraging item is an AP dispatch from Durham North Carolina. A summer class of high school seniors on assignment managed to get 17 letters published by the New York Times in a single month. Mailed from their home towns, or friends’ towns, on various issues. Hats off! Since way back I’ve been urging listeners to write short punchy letters to smaller papers, to out-of-town papers, from out-of town addresses if they have them, but warning them that trying to get into the Times was probably a waste of time.
Seventeen kids -- high school seniors -- did it. There is hope.

An Unnoticed Veto

2004-10-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution last week that criticized Israel. It was a big story in Europe and a very big story indeed in Islam, but it has not yet appeared in print in the newspaper of record. The veto came just as Bush and Kerry both were promising Americans that they would get Moslem countries to train Iraqi forces. Arab governments that were meeting just then had to take the proposal off the agenda for fear of worsening their troubles at home.

It’s not new for our embedded media to miss a significant story under their noses. Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan tossed off a line at a news conference about laying a carpet of little nukes across Europe, which the American reporters ignored until headlines in Europe brought it to their attention. A while back the whole capital press corps was embarrassed to have to pick up from the alternate media a booboo they had all heard over the canapes at a reception but never thought to share with their public.

This happens every day of the week. Thank goodness for the Internet. DailyHowler dot com alerts us to the fact that the moderator for the final debate, Bob Schieffer of CBS, is a bosom buddy of Dubya Bush who frankly despises the Eastern liberal elite epitomized by John Kerry. The new issue of Extra!, published by Fair, has some terrific material, and Counterpunch is always indispensable. Then there’s Jim Hightower’s Lowdown and our own WBAI and a lot of links, including JohnLHess dot blogspot dot com.
Courage, friends. We are not alone.

Oedipus Wrecks

2004-10-08T18:33:00.000-07:00

On the day that Dubya moved into the Oval Office, he was already obsessed with Saddam Hussein. People who have studied the matter say the reason is simple -- that Dubya’s father had been widely criticized for not taking Baghdad over during the first Gulf war, when he had a real alliance with half a million troops and no opposition. Pappy has explained that if he knocked off the dictator in place, he’d have a hopeless mess of a country to occupy just the mess we now have. And that, I think may explain why George W. H. Bush was not invited to address the Republican convention that nominated his son.

People who go in for psychoanalysis have been talking Oedipus complex -- meaning the son took us to war to show up his father. Certainly, young Dubya was no credit to the family -- always in trouble drinking, a flop in the oil business, using Pappy’s pull to stay out of Vietnam, and forever stumbling over words. The elder Bush is also dyslexic -- and no great intellect, but not nearly as bad.

Dubya has been called the very worst president in the history of the United States. If that is true -- and I think it is -- then Dick Cheney must be the very worst vice president. He has been a surrogate father to Dubya -- there has long been doubt as to which of them is really in charge. Tonight, Dubya will be back out there alone- -- well, largely alone, with a raft of selected questioners and a spinroom full of buzz. And once again, he’ll go up against an opponent who doesn’t have real answers but sure has today’s news on his side. A round not to be missed.

Liberal?

2004-10-07T19:02:00.000-07:00

I was talking the other day about the Times trying to live down the myth that it’s a liberal paper. Well, I just came upon this editorial from 1980, the year of misery for President Jimmy Carter. Inflation was running in the double digits and people were calling for price controls. These -- I quote -- "soon turn into a nightmare. But wages are different. They can be held down by a minimum of bureaucracy." Unquote.

Carter and the Times had been bit by the rabies of deregulation. A "minimum of bureaucracy" left us helpless against the raid on corporations based on junk-bonds, the breakdown of rail and air service and the savings-and-loan swindle that bled every county in the country. Poor Carter had fallen under the influence of David Rockefeller and his crowd. He named James Schlesinger to manage the fuel supply -- and the pumps ran dry. He named Paul Volcker to run the Federal Reserve. Volcker went in for tough love -- high interest rates to cool the economy down. Tight money and tight budgets are for Democrats. For Republicans, easy money and big deficits are just fine.

If that weren’t enough to do Carter in -- he let David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger talk him into inviting the exiled Shah of Iran to come here for medical treatment, even though our embassy in Iran had begged him not to. Iran exploded, the embassy was taken hostage, and Carter went down in disgrace.

There are more failing marks on his page, but Carter lately has shown signs that he has learned. He’s a decent man, eager to make the world a better habitat for all. As we enter the climax of this campaign, it would be well if Kerry and Edwards followed his guidance, rather than that of Democratic politicians stuck on the wrong side.

A Mixed Round

2004-10-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

John Edwards did not quite follow my advice last night. He did get in some sharp jabs -- about the loss of jobs and benefits, about the lies that got us into war, about the crimes of Halliburton, and, notably, about Dick Cheney voting way back against the liberation of Nelson Mandela, against Head Start, against Meals on Wheels and against Martin Luther King Day.

But Cheney got in some jabs too -- notably, about flip-flopping. He noted that Kerry and Edwards voted for Bush’s tax cuts, for his war budgets and for letting him take us to war -- and then changed their tone when Howard Dean threatened to capture the nomination with his pitch for peace and old-line Democratic values. Once Dean was overcome, they went back to Bush lite.

I had thought that as a crackerjack courtroom lawyer Edwards would punch away until Cheney lost his notorious temper. Instead, Edwards chose to play the shill for Kerry. He was at times deferential to Cheney -- embarrassingly so -- and as belligerent about the war as Bush, if not more so. And he never did come out for universal health care.

The polls and the pundits are mixed about who won the round. But there is this hopeful thought: If the right can push Kerry and Edwards around that easily -- so can the left. And there’s a lot of exciting action going on, on our side.

Cheney’s Turn

2004-10-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

John Edwards is said to be a topflight trial lawyer. Well, he couldn’t ask for a better hostile witness than Dick Cheney -- mean, foul -mouthed and hot-tempered. Bush loyalists may defend Dubya as being sort of detached, to put it mildly, but Cheney took command even before Dubya took the oath of office. He called in the chiefs of big oil, big coal, of Enron. He still refuses to identify the plotters or release their decisions but we’ve been living with their results on the environment and the economy.

They nearly bankrupted California and impoverished the rest of the country. Edwards will no doubt be pointing out that Ohioans lost a lot of good jobs, and those who found new ones had to work for lower pay, and fewer benefits. This gang has actually made it illegal to cross the border to buy cheaper medicine. There’s a great peg for Edwards to call for universal health care -- single payer. That’s the slogan that elected Bill Clinton president 12 years ago.

And I haven’t mentioned Halliburton -- its no-bid contracts, its rip-off prices, its secret partners. Nor just what Cheney was doing on the morning of 9-11, when our jet fighters were awaiting orders, and Dubya was being hustled off to Nebraska. Nor how much of the barefaced lying about the menace posed by Saddam Hussein can be traced directly to Cheney. Or -- oh, I can hardly wait. Go get him, Edwards.

Fudging the Point

2004-10-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Four days gone by and still the Times couldn’t bring itself to say Bush lost the first round. They cut down whole forests to cover the story, but it was with a blanket of gray ink.

The Times Bushman David Brooks spent a whole column blowing up smoke. Every paragraph contradicted the one before it and the one after it -- if they meant anything (it’s not always clear). He ended by suggesting that our moral nation may embrace a candidate who may not dominate every argument, but who can show a shared cast of mind.

The Times actually scored as a point in favor of Bush that Kerry had called Iraq the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was emphasized with the return of its chief foreign columnist Thomas Friedman. He said Bush had made a mess of their war but he hoped that Kerry might salvage something out of the wreckage. First off, he would fire Rumsfeld.

Now, while Friedman was away, the Times ombudsman made things worse by calling the Times a liberal newspaper. It’s been trying to live that reputation down for a hundred years. It depends on how you define liberal. Take its editorial Saturday, which said “Kerry is not helping things any when he pledges never to cut [Social Security benefits].”

On Paying Ransom

2004-09-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

The rule is plain and simple: We do not pay ransom. It would only encourage more kidnappings. That’s very persuasive -- unless the hostage is someone you care about.

All Italy has been celebrating the release of the two Silonas -- angels of mercy -- although it was admitted, and then denied with a wink, that the Italian government itself paid a million dollars to the kidnappers. Nearly all of Britain seems to be praying that Tony Blair will hearken to the appeal of another victim. On the record, Blair is committed to the line of Bush and Ariel Sharon -- we don’t negotiate with terrorists -- although with all three, you never know. There HAVE been exceptions.

That’s the sort of thing we should keep in mind during tonight’s debate. Life is complicated. That’s a great handicap for liberals or radicals or progressives - call us what you will. Your core voters for Bush have swallowed his simple solutions -- except when the victims are members of their own families.

I repeat, we are all hostages, and as such, we have a huge stake in the showdown tonight . The debate will be on three levels - one on stage, one in the spin room that will tell us what to think of it, and, finally, the deciding one, in our own minds. Your contributions, by the way, will be welcome.

They’ve Already Called It

2004-09-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

I plan to tune in on the debate Thursday night, but not to learn who won. They’ve already told us.

The moderator, Jim Lehrer, had Tim Russert on last night and they reminded each other how Bush whomped Al Gore in their debate four years ago. At noon today, PBS said merrily that Bush had cleaned Gore’s clock.

But Bush did not win that debate. As Paul Krugman reminds us, a poll of viewers in their living rooms gave it to Gore. But in the back room where the media were hanging out, Bush’s spin doctors were cleaning their clocks. They said, did you spot that body language - that sneer, that fuzzy math, that tie he was wearing, those tweeds -- whatever. There’s a fresh news angle, just for you. By morning the headlines were calling Bush the winner.

Actually, Gore got more votes in the election, but that’s another story. As far as the pundits are concerned, Bush won the debate, and they’re all but calling him the winner this time, barring some horrendous misstep. -- like admitting that he lied us into a terrible war and we should get out now. Well, his handlers have him better trained than that. Trouble is, Kerry’s handlers won’t let him say it, either. Listen to them, peddling Bush light whenever the newsmakers put them on..

So we have to bring our own intelligence to the debates, to make a real contest,of them, over real issues. And who knows? There are really a lot of minds out there. They just need to be wakened up.

On Camera, Ralph!

2004-09-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

Alexander Cockburn has a keen bit of advice for Ralph Nader: Stop wasting time and money fighting to get on a few more state ballots. Instead, get out where the action is. Like Jesse Jackson, who flew into crisis zones, and won the release of American hostages, and gave us a more accurate picture of what was going on in the Mideast, Africa, Grenada and Panama. Or Al Sharpton, who went to jail in New York and in Puerto Rico to force attention to crimes that were being ignored. Or Jimmy Carter, lately, pushing for elections to be as fair in Florida as in Venezuela. All three have had their shortcomings -- but our pundits hated them for showing up theirs. They hate Jackson and Sharpton particularly for being conspicuously smarter than anybody else on stage.

Now, Nader can be recognized anywhere in the world as the man who fought the big corporations and saved tens of thousands of lives, perhaps hundreds of thousands, on car safety alone. Cockburn suggests that he fly to the Middle East and call for an end to killing and torture and hostage taking on all sides. And in this country, he should continue to show up wherever jobs are being outsourced under treaties that Nader long opposed. That way, Nader can take part in the presidential debates, even if he must do it from the sidewalk outside. Where he should be joined by many other Americans whose interests are not represented by the men on stage. Which is to say the mass of America’s working people.

First Amendment, Anyone?

2004-09-24T18:48:00.000-07:00

A clipping turned up in my files, about a poll taken in 1988. One question asked: Should the Constitution be amended to say there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech and press? 41 percent said yes…30 percent said no…7 percent had no opinion…and only 22 percent said it was already in the Constitution -- the First Amendment.

Now, polls are of course wildly misleading. But it’s got to mean something that a random survey by telephone would reveal such a level of ignorance, or that fully 30 percent would say they didn’t even want our freedom to be guaranteed.

There is the core base of the Bush vote. They never were a majority, and there is no reason to assume that many of them couldn’t be brought to see the light -- but clearly, our press has not been doing its job.
Look at how it responded to Bush’s performance yesterday, with an Iraqi warlord in tow: Bush’s usual disjointed string of untruths -- unresponsive to the questions asked, in language that doesn’t parse. Sadly, Kerry’s reply did not disagree in any material way. And as for civil rights, Democrats helped to draft and pass the rollback now taking place.

Well, we’ve lived through worse, and survived -- even, now and then, come out ahead. Newcomers keep joining the ranks of the freedom riders. Welcome, and have a brave weekend.

A Bipartisan ‘Rescue’

2004-09-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

Last evening, I welcomed the start of what the Times called the serious and useful debate the American people deserve. I pointed out that both sides agreed, basically, about Iraq. As I spoke, Jim Lehrer of PBS was holding another phase of the debate -- on Social Security.

In this round, the two parties -- and the moderator -- agreed that Social Security was headed for broke. The official spokesman for Bush called for privatizing Social Security for young workers and trimming benefits for those already in line. The official spokesman for Kerry was more emphatic. If he had his way, he said, he’d end all welfare entirely. He’s an old accomplice of Peter Peterson, the Wall Street zillionaire who’s been flim-flamming the media for decades. One typical result is today’s editorial in The Times, which says Bush’s plan is wrong but young workers can’t expect to receive as much as us old geezers do. For one thing, it says, we’re living too long.

You can find my replies to this monstrous propaganda in MY TIMES and in the archives of the Nation, Counterpunch, Extra! and WBAI. Meanwhile, take note that there is no difference on Iraq or on Social Security between the two parties in the "serious and useful" debate now under way. We’ll get to other issues as we go along. Stay tuned.

A Serious Debate?

2004-09-21T17:30:00.000-07:00

The Times says hurrah! -- we’ve now had "the start of the kind of serious and useful debate the American people deserve." Well, goody, but how did the two opponents differ?

We’ve been here before, in another war that everybody now admits to have been -- to put it kindly -- a mistake. In 1968 the contender, Richard Nixon, implied that he had a plan to get out. Four years later, he said he WAS getting out, by degrees. Today, neither guy has any plan but to stay the course.

Dubya Bush should be in bad trouble, but he’s so cocky that he went to the United Nations -- that house so hated by the far right -- to tell the whole world off. Kerry’s backers are in a panic -- for good reason. Paul Krugman prays that he won’t let himself be trapped into neo-con fantasies -- which of course he has done when he talks of enlisting foreign and Iraqi support. He says that winding down our occupation and letting others work it is probably the best we can hope for. Nixon call that Vietnamization. He didn’t mean it, and it didn’t work.

David Brooks takes on the neocon side. Typically, he begins by praising Kerry for finally taking a stand. He asks a keen question about drawing down our forces -- what do you say to the last man who dies before you finish pulling out. His column is typical of Brooks -- pretending to look at it sympathetically from our side, while slipping in a dart now and then. Only a year ago, Brooks was caught faking a political portrait of a redneck county in Pennsylvania. That didn’t keep him from getting a fat job at the Times. Poor Dan Rather bit on a forged memo that was essentially true, and he’s being made the villain of the day.

When does the serious debate begin?

Happy New Year

2004-09-17T18:41:00.000-07:00

Is it too late to wish listeners a happy new year? For those concerned, of course. I just heard a great Jewish joke: Why did he have to pick us as the chosen people?

A joke like that is often called black humor -- which ought to remind us that other people have been chosen for victims over the millennia. Or, rather, allowed themselves to be victimized.

An old friend e-mails a scandal from San Diego. It seems the California State University hired Michael Moore to give a talk, but called it off because it couldn’t find a speaker of equal stature to take the other side. It asked Moore to refund the deposit. He said no, you pay, in full. So the San Diego Union calls Moore a greedy rich man -- as if being rich and greedy were not what the Bush crowd is all about.

Just so, the media is stomping all over Dan Rather for a crime committed by Dubya Bush. Somebody seems to have slipped. Rather a doctored copy of a memo that seems actually to have existed. The secretary of the Texas National Guard says its commander actually did write memos like that to cover his backside. They said Bush jumped the line to get into the Guard and avoid serving in Vietnam, and then took off for Alabama where he never showed up for drill or the required medical exam. So he was playing hookey from playing hookey, and never did earn an honorable discharge. But it’s poor Dan Rather who’ll be taking the heat from the media this weekend -- while news from Dubya’s war front continues to be catastrophic.

My word to Dan Rather: Take courage. At least, you cared.

Blog It!

2004-09-16T19:05:00.000-07:00

Good people keep telling us that things have never looked so bad. I don’t know how much comfort it is, but I’ve seen worse, and we got over it -- well, most of us did.

It’s true that we have never, in the history of the republic, had a government as evil as this one. Or as stupid. It’s done an incredible amount of damage and plans more. Yet it doesn’t get its own way all the time, even though it has had no effective opposition in Congress or the Supreme Court. And even though the big media have never been concentrated in so few hands.

But sanity, and even laughter, can be heard out here. Two new books hit the best-seller list this week, hooting at the Bushes - one from the Daily show - blam, blam - and one by Kitty Kelley - who’s a catty gossip but has collected plenty of dirt. Then there’s independent radio, like this one, and a growing world internet of information.

For example, my comments are in the archives of Extra!, Counterpunch and WBAI, and you can now pick them up on my blog, at johnlhess.blogspot.com. Welcome.

Holding Us Hostage

2004-09-16T11:17:00.001-07:00

The settlers vowed to kill any politician who would let a non-Jew own one inch of the Holy Land. They meant business -- they are armed, and have used their weapons freely. They cherish the memory of one of them, who murdered more than 30 Arabs at prayer. Another fanatic killed Itzhak Shamir for agreeing to leave some enclaves for Palestinians.

Ariel Sharon joked about the threat last weekend. He said he wouldn’t change his plan to clear the Gaza Strip and demolish new wildcat settlements. But before nightfall his troops killed 15 unarmed Palestinians who were allegedly trying to sneak into Israel to look for jobs. His hit squads and his bulldozers coninued their work, in vain retaliation for suicide bombings by Palestinian women. After all, Sharon has been engaged in that ethnic warfare for all his life.

Note that ten times as many Israelis had just demonstrated for peace -- but they get very little encouragement here. Ai-pac, the American lobby for Israel, has always been close to the far right there, and to the right of most Jews in this country. The conflict in Palestine is obviously damaging to U.S. foreign relations, but especially with elections coming up, the Bush administration has no intention of putting any real pressure on Sharon. This can only stir the embers of anti-Semitism -- you could hear that issue raised in discussions of Pat Buchanan’s new book. In the end, we are all playing hostage to fanatic minorities. We are the majority, let’s not be a silent.one.

What Dilemma?

2004-09-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

A Republican leader called upon his party, out loud, to discourage people from voting in Detroit and other districts that are largely black. When Democrats complained, Sean Hannity of Fox News charged that the Democrats were playing the race card. The Democrats!

Okay, that’s Rupert Murdoch’s stable -- which aims at people who are out of the habit of thinking. There’s quite a few of them around, unfortunately. But the more serious media are not as much help as they ought to be. Here’s a front-page analysis in the Times that says that by raising the military pressure in Iraq, the U.S. is risking losing popular support.

What popular support? Like the rest of the world, the people of Iraq generally admire our wealth, our standard of living, our consumer goods, our style as they see it on television. They send their kids to work and study here, if they can. What they don’t like is being occupied by us.

Their latest glimpse of us, showed an Arabian TV reporter pointing to a crowd celebrating the wreckage of an American armored car. As he spoke, one of our gunships opened fire, destroying the humvee and a lot of unarmed bystanders. The reporter looked at the camera with dismay and said, "I’m dying." Then he fell, dying.

That scene played all over the Muslim world yesterday. And we wonder why they don’t love us.

Our pundits keep talking about our dilemma, but a dilemma implies two choices. We don’t have two choices. There is no way that an occupied country can be turned into an obedient colony or a happy democracy. Those who lied us into this war know that. They just can’t figure out a way to get out. Besides, they’re making money out of it. So they hang on for the next election, the next four years; some have talked of staying the course for the next 20 years.

They are mad -- madder than Hannity, if they believe what they have been saying. And we would be fools to let them get away with it.

Double Talk

2004-09-13T13:02:00.000-07:00

That was a terrible week of news for the Bushies. Dragging us deeper into quagmire abroad and stagnation at home. So what do they have to say for themselves? The memo was forged.

The Bushies, who have a lot of experience with fakery, claim this one was done on a typewriter that did not exist. Experts consulted by Dan Rather found that the army did so have lots of machines that used that type face. In any case, what the memo said was obviously true -- Dubya played hooky from playing hooky -- that is, not only did he wangle his way into the Texas National Guard to dodge serving in Vietnam but he also dodged months of flight training and a required physical. So his alleged honorable discharge is a phony. And what were the media chattering about? Whether John Kerry’s war medals were phony.

There’s worse. Dick Cheney warned us that to elect John Kerry would invite even worse atrocities in this country than 9-11. And that came in for serious discussion, too.

It must be said that the Kerry dancers played right into his hands. They couldn’t have been more helpful if Karl Rove had been pulling their strings. Their handlers told them they mustn’t be mean to the meanies -- play nice. Kerry’s worst move, no doubt, was his statement that he’d have voted for war even if he knew Bush was lying. And he might send in more troops and stay the course for four more years. He’s also sounding Republican on Social Security and Medicare, and unbelievably chintzy on welfare, child care and housing. So, where does that leave the forces of peace and justice? Where they have been all along. We’ve seen them marching by the hundreds of thousands, going to jail by the thousands, and marching on again -- getting the message out. The fight goes on.

3d Anniversary Blues

2004-09-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

Offering up a bit of laughing gas to relieve the pain, a listener proposes that everybody’s who’s for peace drive with headlights on all day, and everybody who’s for the war drive with their lights off all night.

A cartoon in the New Yorker shows a beggar with a sign that says "Pay me or I’ll vote for Nader." That’s a pretty good dig at those Democrats who are more worked up about the three percent who might vote Green than they are about the much larger numbers who may vote for Bush because he talks with Jesus, wants to ban gay marriage and is giving us back our assault rifles. Not to mention the half of the population that doesn’t bother to vote at all.

Another caller offers a reason why. John Staso has joined the panicky Kerry camp as its main adviser on Social Security and Medicare. Staso has been a fulltime propagandist for the Cato Institute, peddling the notion that those programs are gonna bankrupt the nation. It’s not clear why they need Staso,. The New Democrats led by Clinton have been pushing that line for 25 years. So now, voters are invited to choose between two cockamamie plans to privatize pensions and health care - plans that nobody can tell apart. Meanwhile, they face another homongous increase in the cost of Medicare, and a million more workers drop out of health coverage entirely.

So here we are, on the third anniversary of 9-11, with the outlook no at all clear. I can only suggest that we keep our headlights on.

1,000, and Rising

2004-09-08T19:18:00.000-07:00

The big black headline in the New York Daily News is just the number 1000. No need to explain -- Bush’s war in Iraq has rolled up a toll that the media could not ignore.

The Pentagon claims to keep no count of the number of Iraqis killed. During the current "truces," what it calls "incidents" have risen to 260 a week, and the odds typically run 25 or more Iraqis killed for each American, but for us, what counts is the death of our own. That’s normal, and has been the case during all our wars It was true for Vietnam - which has been revived as a hot topic during our election campaign. Quick,now - 58,000 Americans died -- how many Indochinese?

For those of us who were around then, the current debate is like a replay fast-forward. Great demonstrations, thousands finding imaginative ways to dramatize their cause, despite police repression. Already, some veterans home from Iraq are reaching out to one another to form a peace movement like the one John Kerry led on his return from Vietnam.

It was his golden moment. He has tried to live it down - play the war hero over again. That’s been a disaster for him, and a disappointment for us -- but we’ve lived through that, too -- two national elections before the Vietnam war came to an end. This one should require only one.

Four More Years?

2004-09-07T18:14:00.000-07:00

Someone asked John Kerry when he would bring the troops home. He said he thought he could do it by the end of his first term.

Four more years? That was the chant we heard from inside the Garden last week. It was not what we heard on the streets, where half a million people marched for peace.

Now Kerry has taken a dive in the polls. Paul Krugman explains that deep down, people love war. I dunno. I can think of a few occasions in history when masses of people cheered going off to war -- as in 1914. But they all thought they would be home by Christmas. The cheering never lasted four years.

Alas, fear and hatred stay around longer. David Brooks rakes the embers by dwelling on the madness of suicide bombers as if they were a race apart -- as if war itself was not suicide bombing.

The word is that the dreadful events in Russia have strengthened the poll ratings of Vladimir Putin - just as 9-11 strengthened Dubya Bush. If so, it’s a case of rallying around the flag, but it cannot last. Russians have paid a terrible price for the imperial ambition of their rulers. It brought down the Czar and it brought down the Soviet Union.

I guess an American can say that without being accused of being unpatriotic. Or can he?

A 'Catastrophic Victory’

2004-08-31T13:00:00.000-07:00

I doubt Dubya will ever stumble closer to the truth than his phrase "catastrophic victory." He’s been bragging about the victory since he declared "Mission Accomplished’ a year ago last May. But his handlers promised that the Iraqis would greet us with rose petals. One recalls the old line, "I can understand your need to dissemble your love, dear, but why did you have to kick me down the stairs?"

Last weekend, Dubya blurted another truth in an interview in which he said "I don’t think you can win the war on terror." It flatly contradicted what he‘d been reciting on the campaign trail all along. The interview was held for release over the weekend, but there was not a peep from the White House until Sunday night, when it babbled that he was misquoted or quoted out of context. By now, they’re saying he doesn’t mean that at all. Talk about your flip-flops.

They remind me of another old line, about the fellow who complains to his shopmates that he caught his wife and a stranger in a compromising situation. So then what happened? "Aw, she lied out of it." With our media, they can lie their way out of anything.

Take that scoop of Dan Rather’s on "60 Minutes" last Thursday: a mole in Donald Rumsfeld’s entourage passing a Top Secret memo to Israel, by way of AIPAC, the superhawkish lobby in Washington. Now imagine we were back in the cold war, and secrets were being passed to a satellite of Moscow. But the damper went down on this story immediately. The Times, which has gone wild about moles over the past 60 years, played this one down, and now suggests that Rather’s scoop spoiled an investigation into an incident that may not have been serious at all. The sound you hear is of dirt being swept under a rug. In the distance, you can hear the louder sounds of a catastrophic victory.

A Midtown Hiroshima?

2004-08-27T13:02:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Kristoff of the Times dropped in on a conference of experts and came away worried about a new Hiroshima. Former Defense Secretary William Perry figured it was even money that it would happen in this country during the next six years. Another bigtime player posted a standing bet at the same odds that it would happen somewhere in the world in the next ten years. Kristoff put himself down for five bucks that it would not. He explained that if a bomb with the force of Hiroshima went off in midtown Manhattan, it would vaporize half a million people -- including him -- so he couldn’t lose.

Well, it’s anyone’s guess, but the odds seem to be getting worse. The Bush Administration used that as a reason to go to war. That is ironic because we have more nukes than the rest of the world put together and are building more and planning to station them in outer space. Ours is the only state that claims the right to use the bomb, the only one that has done it and the only one that has threatened, convincingly, to do it again.

The great physicists who invented the bomb came to regret it. They sponsored the project only because they were afraid Hitler would get his hands on it. They begged Truman not to let the genie out of the bottle. He said he never lost any sleep over it. Many people did, but in this country, those who opposed the arms race were called traitors. One by one, other countries got into the atomic club. So the odds on a rogue hit keep getting worse.

It would not be hard to make them better.

We could, for one, stop making bombs and begin cutting our stock down toward zero. With the money we save, we could buy out Russia, the Ukraine and North Korea -- all of which have shown signs that they’re willing. We could revive our support for the world ban on nuclear weapons. Countries that rejected UN inspections would face sanctions. There -- that might not solve every problem but it would certainly improve the odds. First, though, we’d have to disarm the Bushies.

Let the Games Begin

2004-08-26T18:45:00.000-07:00

Some of the kindest folk in America arrived in town tonight after walking all the way from Boston, picking up recruits along the way. Others keep arriving from all points, many backpacking it, chipping in for gas, sharing shelter and rations, getting here every which way, to protest the orgy of meanness that will open in the Garden Sunday night.

Inspiring. It is heartening also that their protest includes many of the most talented and popular figures in music and the arts. They’re putting on a great show. Now those of us who live here have a special obligation to guide our visitors -- not to the "in" restaurants or the hit shows but to the sites where their message can reach the public.

They should be calling home-town media, by phone, by e-mail, with short, punchy letters or Op-Eds or whatever. And they should emulate the politicians and get in front of the cameras, wherever they are, with handmade and punchy placards. No profanity, please, we don’t need it -- the truth is bad enough. No flagburning, please; we are the ones who mean well for our country. Nothing that can be interpreted as insulting to our troops -- WE want them home. The war lovers don’t.

And I repeat, watch out for provocateurs. There is nothing the Bushies would like better than a pretext to accuse us of mob violence. We must make it clear to all that it’s just not true.
And now, let the games begin.

A Faith-Based Protest

2004-08-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

John Kerry is still trying to live down his condemnation of our war in Vietnam. At Cooper Union last night, where Abe Lincoln once condemned our aggression against Mexico, Kerry said “I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president.” But he did not defend this country in Vietnam. After all, we lost that war. The Communists won, and they haven’t given us a bit of trouble since. So what was he defending?

That’s a point being made by pacifists, who are coming to town in large numbers. They oppose violence even in self-defense. Their movement began as a faith-based doctrine - “turn the other cheek.” Now our home security forces have been mobilized in record numbers to keep this germ from infecting the celebration of war at the Garden.

The Times, in its inimitable way, gently scolds both sides - the mayor, for not letting peace-lovers march past the Garden or assemble on the Great Lawn , and the peace lovers for refusing to let him pin them up over by the Hudson. It said they should “accept whatever disappointments come their way with dignity.”

Well no, I think they will respond with indignation, determination and imagination. Think about Ghandi, and Martin Luther King, and the Selma bus boycott, and the sitdowns at lunch counters. A word of warning, though. Any large crowd will draw some trouble-makers. This one is likely to be penetrated by provocateurs. We know from long experience that the dirty tricksters will stop at nothing. Peace demonstrators must do all they can to isolate them, get in their way if need be, and try to persuade the media ihat we are not there to break windows or hurt anybody. On the contrary, peace is what we’re about..

Grave Robbers

2004-08-23T17:34:00.000-07:00

I raise my glass to celebrate the liberation of a noble reporter, Micah Gaven. He was in Iraq finishing a documentary on the worldwide plague of grave robbing, when the war intervened. He was kidnapped and threatened with execution, but was let go, in part at least because he had interrupted his work to do a bit of freelance reporting, in which he exposed the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Italian soldiers. Our congratulations to his family, good progressive peaceloving people.

I look forward to seeing his film this fall. I began writing about tomb robbers 30 years ago in the Times and then in other publications and in my books, The Grand Acquisitors and My Times. As with the nursing-home scandals, the plague never ended. Around the world, poor men dig up sites where our history was born, in order to peddle artifacts to merchants who smuggle them to rich men, who display them as souvenirs till they get bored with them, then give them to museums and are honored for it, and take tax deductions that often exceed their original cost. It drives archeologists wild, because it fouls up their effort to explore the ancient history of mankind. But greed knows no conscience.

Nonetheless, a salute to the Gaven family. It’s rare that we get news from Iraq that makes us feel good.

Backward Reels the Mind

2004-08-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

A headline in the comic weekly The Onion reads, "Homosexual Admits to Being Governor of New Jersey." And you know, all the news sounds as if it‘s being played backward. Here’s Bush proposing to bring some troops home -- and Kerry saying that’s reckless. Here’s a key Republican in the House saying he wouldn’t have voted for the war if he knew what he knows now, and here’s Kerry saying HE would have -- and what’s more, if he’s elected, he may send MORE troops to Iraq.

You’d think the Republicans would want to forget about Vietnam, but they’re making an uproar over Kerry’s record there. They say five medals are too many. Somebody asked Dick Cheney about his five draft deferments. He said he had other priorities. And guess who got the bigger hand from the Veterans of Foreign Wars?

Play the reel backward. We’re on high alert for a terrorist attack here, so the FBI and the police are going around taking names of pacifists. They say Ted Kennedy turned up on a no-fly list. He got aboard but a lot of grandmas have run into trouble at airports.

Our mayor is terribly concerned about the damage they might do to the grass, especially when the Republicans come to town. He offers us a discount on admission to the zoo if we behave.
And talk about reeling backward, the Times replaced the great Barbara Eherenreich from her guest spot on the Op-Ed page and turned it over to one Dahlia Lithwick -- who claims to be a Democrat and says we lose votes by making fun of George Dubya. DailyHowler.com takes her column apart today in a most entertaining way. Yes, we can laugh at the news, if we reel it backward.

Yes, Do Recount

2004-08-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

The Times has appealed to its friends in Venezuela to stop pretending that the election was rigged. It only caused the oversight commission run by Jimmy Carter and the Organization of American States to run another careful recheck -- confirming before witnesses that the first count had been highly accurate. Hugo Chavez had once again defeated an effort backed by Washington, and the Times, to overthrow him.

A detail with special meaning for us is that the touch-screen voting machines used in Venezuela kept a paper trail that made a reliable recount possible. Not so for thousands of new machines sold to Florida and other jurisdictions in the U.S. Experts have been shocked at how easy it is to rig the code to report any count that is desired. And that is only one of the problems we face in trying to get fair elections.

Here as in Venezuela, difference in wealth and politics tends to be linked to difference in complexion. Conservatives in this country have always tried to deny the vote to people of color. The Bushes are again at work on that in a dozen dreary ways, trying to frighten the poor away from the polls. Already, they’ve brought in the police and the FBI. So the common folk won’t get a full count -- they never have. Their job will be to turn out, and fight for every vote. Venezuela proves they can win.

A ‘Yes’ to Democracy

2004-08-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

There was no way for the average Yankee to realize what a triumph for democracy the vote in Venezuela has been. Our embedded media has been blowing spitballs at Hugo Chavez since he came to power. In one if the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the New York Times, it hailed the announcement of a coup that locked him up and kicked out the constitution, the national assembly and the supreme court. Its joy lasted less than two days, when an outpouring of the mostly poor majoriiy turned things around.

Ever since, Washington and its henchmen have been trying to dump Chavez by other means: boycotts, long strikes, sabotage of oil production and propaganda (they own most of the media). They figured that misery would wear out the resistance. And finally, a recall referendum looked appealng -- a chance for everybody to vote No. They threw all they had into it, but finally began to realize they would lose. Juan Forero of the Times blamed the rise in oil prices, which allowed Chavez to spend more on schools and health and land reform -- dirty pool. It was a signal defeat for a policy that says we will not tolerate any regime in the third world that talks back -- that does not recognize the right of international capital to exploit their resources. That’s a fact well understood everywhere but in this country. So I urge you to spread the word from Counterpunch.org and Fair.org and Noam Chomsky’s new book. We have a few referendums of our own coming up.

Out to Lunch

2004-08-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

The lead headline in the Times says "U.S. Holds Back." The fourth paragraph says in brackets that according to Reuters, our offensive has resumed. Maybe the editor in charge was out to lunch.

You could say the Washington Post scooped the Times by getting that headline right. But it was weeks behind the Times in confessing that it played up the propaganda that got us into the war, and played down evidence that it was a pack of lies.

Does this mean that they’re both going straight? Don’t hold your breath. Here’s a Times editorial that scolds protesters for refusing to be penned up like cattle behind barbed wire during the Republican convention. It says, heck, the Mayor even offered to water them. You can look it up.

The Times also reports that Rudy Giuliani is taking a big role in the campaign. He’s there to downplay the loopy conduct of George Bush and company on September 11th. We’re supposed to think instead of an heroic Republican mayor -- America’s mayor -- taking charge at Ground Zero. In all of its soul-searching, the Times has never seriously examined how Giuliani’s conduct really affected what happened on that awful day. So now he’s playing hero again.

Will somebody pass the water bottle? And please, Officer, a warm meatloaf for Mike Wallace.

Chuck Chuck

2004-08-11T18:15:00.000-07:00

Who’s writing John Kerry’s lines? Karl Rove?

Actually, it’s the Clinton gang, but Dubya can count on them to bail him out.

By now, just about everyone knows he deceived us about his reasons for going to war. So Kerry says he would still vote to go, only, he would wage a more "sensitive" war.

A majority of Americans would surely vote no. But on the issue of war and peace, we have effectively been disenfranchised.

True, Ralph Nader will be on the ballot in many states, and David Cobb as well, but we come down to the line in a turmoil over whether a vote for peace would count as a vote for Bush.

For one set of answers, check Counterpunch.org and its new book of essays called A Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils. It cuts the difference down to a zinc penny that can flip either way, but there IS a real difference in what people have in mind when they vote Republican or Democratic.

Meanwhile, here is one reason to register Democrat. There’s a primary coming up - with chances to vote for a number of progressives like Frank Barbaro and, especially, to vote against Senator Chuck Schumer. I can hardly wait.

Digging Deeper

2004-08-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

Did it hurt Dubya when he said "Our enemies…never stop thinking of ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we"? I dunno -- his audience cheered. To be sure, they were handpicked -- Dubya had to read off from a card the question one of them forgot to ask him, and the answer.
You can’t say the opposition was being mean to him. There’s an old saying that if you dig yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is, stop digging. Well last week, our forces dug in by killing more Iraqis than in any week since the war began. They said they did it at the request of our new president, Ahmed Allawi. He replaced our former president, Ahmed Chalabi, who used to be our favorite Iraqi in the whole world, then suddenly became a suspect and is now hiding in Iran from a US and Iraqi warrant for his arrest for murder and sundry other crimes. Hiding with him is his nephew, whom we saw the other day prosecuting Saddam Hussein.

The current president, Allawi, demonstrated our progress toward democracy by closing down a TV news bureau and by listing 80 or 90 grounds for capital punishment, including dangerous talk. Allawi’s an old henchman of Saddam Hussein who has kept up the practice of executions with his own hand. And by the way, recent pictures of torture of prisoners by our Iraqis appeared yesterday in the Portland Oregonian.

All this and then some, in a week of terrible news for Dubya. And the best line Kerry could come up with was a promise to wage "a more sensitive war."

Lord help us.

Tainted Inspection

2004-08-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

Back in the days of Jimmy Carter, when deregulation came into fashion, I invited advocates to go eat uninspected hamburgers. By golly, they did. Worse yet, they served uninspected meat in schools and nursing homes. Lately we’ve had several outbreaks of illness and some deaths as a result.

That’s one of many results of the popular conclusion that, as Ronald Reagan liked to put it, Government is the problem, not the solution. The government did have inspectors in packing plants, because the public had demanded them after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle a hundred years ago. But they were only there to check the plumbing. If they noticed, say, a smudge of manure on a carcass, they could tell a foreman about it. But to actually slow the line down and check it out was a big deal that required appeals and approval from on high.

After many cases of food poisoning and many local scandals and the usual punishment of whistle-blowers, a regulation was drafted to give FDA plant inspectors the right and duty to act on the spot. President Clinton signed it as he was leaving office. But he timed it to go into effect three weeks later. So it was one of the measures that Bush killed when he took power.

Note that Clinton had been in the White House for eight years. Why did it take so long to approve such a simple and obvious reform. Note also that he came from Arkansas, and so does Tyson Foods, the great chicken packer -- which used to love Clinton and now loves Bush even more. Subsidiaries of Tyson figure in some of our sickest food scandals. Their chickens live so tight they can’t spread their wings, and need dangerous amounts of antibiotics to survive. A recent video tape shows men stomping on chickens just for fun -- like our MP’s in Iraq. The moral is, I guess, buy organic, and vote organic.

The Clinton-Gingrich Cap

2004-08-05T05:43:00.000-07:00

Twenty-odd years ago, radical conservatives told themselves that the national debt could be useful as a club to pound the so-called welfare state. So they cut taxes on the rich and raised military spending, by scaring hell out of people with wars and rumors of war. They used the resulting deficit to whack hell out of Social Security -- a game they’re still playing.

Then along came the New Democrats, led by Bill Clinton. They also aimed to repeal the New Deal but with a twist. They were going to bring back the virtues of Hoover Republicanism. In eight years they balanced the budget, and seemed on the way to paying off the national debt. Earlier on, though, the new Democrats managed to lose control of Congress and much more. Clinton made a deal with Newt Gingrich to put us into a straitjacket. It was a rule that any increase in spending must be accompanied by money to pay for it. So the budget has remained balanced, except for the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. Liberals say meeting our most urgent needs is simple, just shave a few points off the schedule of future tax cuts. Bush replies that he’d veto any bill that did that , and the liberals don’t have the votes to override him or even close debate and bring an issue to the floor. That brings the issue to the streets. Americans overwhelmingly favor all that the New Deal has done for them, and can still do for them. What they need to learn is that the Clinton wing now in control of the Democratic party is no friend of theirs.

Plucked Again

2004-08-04T05:34:00.000-07:00

The spin word for today is pluck. The Times said it was a “Day of Pluck and Patience.” The News thumped its chest and roared, “After All, WE’RE NEW YORKERS!" It called the Mayor “Cool Hand Mike” for coming to City Hall as if nothing had happened. Whereas something evidently did happen.

The Democrats were making a big deal about John Kerry’s pluck in Vietnam, while Dubya Bush was playing hookie back home. So somebody dug up an old laptop that belonged to one of Osama bin Laden’s pack. Four years ago, he put these five buildings down as possible targets. No further mention has been found, but the White House turned it into a delayed action bomb -- serving Osama well because it cost us millions in police measures, and serving Dubya well because it transferred voters’attention from Kerry’s pluck to ours. David Brooks makes a further point: He writes in the Times that being plucky in the field doesn’t make a man a good commander -- that after all, nearly all the men who led us into war with Iraq were chicken hawks, like Brooks himself. Case closed.

Orange Alert

2004-08-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

Who’d believe they could change the subject so fast? Last week, Topic A was how to switch presidents. Today it’s how to duck a bomb down the street. Are they crying wolf? Well, sure. Trouble is, there are real wolves out there.

Leaving aside the home-grown variety -- like the Oklahoma City bombers, the anthrax killer and that crazy cop in the subway the other night -- there’s a growing number of wolves of the breed that attacked the World Trade Center twice, and brought it down the second time.

The Bushes, who should know them well from their family ties with the oil sheiks, keep saying the terrorists do it because they hate democracy -- so we have to suspend democracy, to save it. Well, they didn’t do a very good job on security after the first attack, did they? Mayor Giuliani turned City Hall into a fortress and built a bunker in the sky, which brought down the house.

Now obviously, we’re glad to have cops up on Wall Street checking cars, and they’re welcome to peek into our lunch bags. But making life hard for peace demonstrators is playing into Al Queda’s hands. In the Moslem world, we are hated, not because we are democratic but because we are there, as occupiers and exploiters, as armored gunmen, jail keepers and torturers. So let them see us on television as peace-loving democrats, not targets for their revenge. That is a sensible approach to homeland security.

Meanwhile, Back Home…

2004-07-30T16:39:00.000-07:00

Now that the Democrats have finished celebrating the Vietnam war, they may want to catch up with what’s been going on at home. For example, New York’s Governor Pataki just vetoed a minimum wage of $7.15. That is the same as the pittance promised by Kerry and Edwards. But New York is supposed to be a blue-blue state, with a margin for the Democrats in the double digits. If they can’t deliver even those pennies, how would they deliver on the goodies that Kerry tagged onto his acceptance speech?

Indeed, how come we have a Republican governor, a Republican state senate and a Republican mayor? Why can’t a Democratic assembly and a Democratic city council override them, on life and death issues? And if they can’t, how will they turn out the majorities they will need in November?

Yes, Kerry cleared up one problem. He proved he could deliver a rousing speech -- that he could “look presidential,” also likable, brave, clean and reverent, like his boy scout den-mother -- just as belligerent as Bush but honest and intelligent as well. The pundits were carried away -- even David Brooks called it a good Republican speech. The Bushes will be fighting back -- and they fight dirty. Two weeks ago, it was reported that they had tracked down a big terrorist in Pakistan -- and sure enough, they timed the announcement for Kerry’s day yesterday. There will be more -- there are scary times ahead. And work to be done.

Roll Call

2004-07-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

When the roll was called, a score of delegates refused to make it unanimous. They voted for Kucinich, though Kucinich himself pleaded with them to give in. They reminded him that they were all pledged to end this illegal war. That notion was erased from the platform and forbidden on stage, but whenever the ban was broken, the applause meter showed that it was the real view of the majority.

Kerry himself arrived with two boatloads of warriors to relive the glory of combat in Vietnam. Nominating him, Edwards said “John and I have this messge for Al Queda and the terrorists: You cannot run, you cannot hide, we will destroy you. Guess who that sounds like -- is meant to sound like. In an Op-Ed in the Times today, Barbara Ehrenreich calls for a feminist machismo -- for the U.S. to challenge discrimination against women all over the world.

Which reminds us that we are far from having achieved gender equality here. The pundits went gushy over the line in the keynote address about there being only one America. Edwards repeated that there are two: the rich and the rest of us. Jesse Jackson reminded us that there are many Americas, in that rhyming patter that once rallied millions to the polls. Then Al Sharpton turned loose. To the argument that blacks need to offer some votes to the other side, he said their votes had been dipped in the blood of martyrs, and were not to be traded. Speaking of the five-to-four division on the Supreme Court, he said, if this crowd had controlled the court 50 years ago, Clarence Thomas would never have got to college. And after emancipation, slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule. They didn’t get that 40 acres, they didn’t get the mule, so he reckoned they’d have to ride this Democratic donkey for as far it would go.

Infomercial

2004-07-28T19:02:00.000-07:00

Dan Rather explained why the ratings were low -- the convention was a four-day infomercial. Every minute was scripted - every line vetted to peddle the product. So there would be no division, no contest. The only surprise was how disciplined the performance would turn out. There was Howard Dean, declaring that the whole party was now one Democratic wing -- a strange bird indeed. There was the party platform, calling for guns and SUV’s and war without end. There was the keynote speaker -- no, the real keynote speaker was Bill Clinton, who directed the show. There was the designated keynoter, denying that he was an African-American, saying there were no Afro or Latino or Asian Americans any more - only Americans. That of course is an argument against affirmative action. Barack Obama came close to making that argument -- calling on poor mothers to bring their kids up right. He’s an attractive figure, already being talked of as a rising star, which reminds me of Colin Powell -- no overriding passion for peace and justice.

The infomercial was heavily infused with tributes to our brave warriors, beginning with Kerry himself. Again and again we were reminded of their heroism -- never about the crimes of even a few bad apples. The word torture was never heard -- nor did anybody count the Iraqi dead. But the real war continued to make the evening news, if not the convention.

It should be said that there was one departure from the Clinton script. That was by Ted Kennedy, reminding us that the New Deal gave us minimum wage, overtime pay, Social Security, the right to organize, public housing and much more -- all things now under fire -- all things that people will continue to fight for.

Whose Party?

2004-07-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

It was such a winning day for the Democrats that the Bush squad on Fox TV practically conceded the election. So did David Brooks on NPR. But the media saluted, not the next president but the last one. The Post sums it up with Bill Clinton shouting ”IT’S MY PARTY.” There’s enough truth there for me to play party pooper.

Look, the seizure of power by Bush has brought so much grief that we simply have to defeat him. But let’s not glorify what went before. Clinton and Gore came to New York 12 years ago as New Democrats, pledged to end welfare as we knew it and cut out that taxing and spending, and to be tough on crime. On the way, the governor stopped in Little Rock to execute a man with half a brain, who asked a keeper to save his pie for breakfast. Clinton also found a pretext to insult Jesse Jackson on his home turf. The myth says he won by pitching to the Reagan Democrats, but in truth he ran quite badly -- worse in fact than Michael Dukakis. He squeaked through only because late in the campaign he picked up the cause of universal health care. Then he turned it over to Hillary, and it was goodbye care, hello HMO’s. The Democrats promptly lost Congress, and state houses and city halls across the land.

New Yorkers have special reason to remember the Clinton years: We are still breathing illegal fumes from that coal plant in Ohio that he swore would never open. Jobs? He exported jobs, through Nafta. He achieved the repeal of Aid to Families With Dependent Childreni, and at the end he was toying with privatizing Social Security. There is more -- much more - but enough. It had to be said, to clear up our undersstanding of the hard road ahead. But let it not spoil our enjoyment at the prospect of getting rid of George Dubya.

Global Warming

2004-07-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

Now for the good news -- great news. A year ago, we detected signs of a climate shift. The likes of Ann Coulter were fading off the best-seller list, and being replaced by the likes of Michael Moore. Today, we’ve reached a new level -- people are saying out loud, hey, this Bush gang can be beat -- WILL be beat, in November. And the media pack have begun to believe it -- you can tell. USA Today just scrapped a column sent them by Coulter from Boston -- said it wasn’t funny, just too stupid to print. She said they must not have been reading her stuff before.

The first wire dispatch from the convention led off with a complaint that there were not enough toilets for all the media there. They’ll have to flush it somewhere -- and we’ll be getting all of it. This is the home of the New York Times. It has assured us that nothing significant would happen at the convention, but no paper will tell us so at greater length. In an editorial Sunday, it expressed pleasure that the peace avocates had, as it says, thrown in the towel. The party platform will say, "People of goodwill disagree about whether America should have gone to war." Even the Times winced at this: "We support the American people’s freedom to choose whatever cars, SUV’s, minivans and trucks they choose." Talk about Bush Lite -- this is Bush heavy.

It is also a triumph for the Clinton crowd. They came in 12 years ago as Reagan Lite and did more harm than Reagan in a number of ways . But the second Bush turned out to be worse than any of us could imagine. Now the Democrats have chosen, in Kerry and Edwards, a pair of candidates far better looking than Bush and Cheney -- how could they not be? -- and offering hardly any target at all for the Bushwackers. It’s not the choice we ought to have -- but the likelihood that Bush is headed for defeat should brighten our day.

Scanning the Vans

2004-07-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

I promise you that we won’t let terrorists scare us out of covering the Democratic convention. The FBI, ever on the alert, warns us that they are talking about blowing up our vans in the parking lot. And these are not Moslem terrorists, who are easy to recognize, but true-blue American Bush-loving terrorists, who talk like Ann Coulter.

Anyhow, we don’t have a van, and we don’t expect to pay much mind the floor shows inside either convention. All the fun will be outside. Already, the cops in Boston have won themselves a raise by threatening to picket the hall. Inside, delegates will be chanting for a candidate who promises to raise the minimum wage to seven dollars and change by the year two thousand and seven. Even our billionaire Republican mayor has put himself down for ten -- and that doesn’t even catch up.

The mayor has a thing, though, about peace marchers. He won’t allow crowds to trample the grass in Central Park -- except for big concerts -- or to choke up Times Square, except for New Year’s Eve. Fifth Avenue -- nothing doing. It was the West Side Highway -- take it or leave it. But we will be marching there PAST the Garden -- and I promise you they’ll know we were there. The efforts to repress our protest, only incite the imagination of our protesters. The watchword is to avoid violence, which only plays into the hands of the enemy. There is always the danger that some wackos -- possibly provocateurs - will try to make trouble. Our own security teams will try to foil them. For the rest, let the fun begin.

3 Pluses for the Times

2004-07-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

There’s an old line that expresses the attitude of the meanies among us -- “I’m all right, Jack - Eff you!” The great Barbara Ehrenrreich reminds us today that there are also women meanies, whose motto might be “I’m all right, Jane, Eff you!” She cites a well-off woman who got an abortion because something showed up wrong with her fetus -- but objected to waiting in a clinic with working mothers who just could not face having another baby.

A great column in the Times today -- do read it. In fact, it was a good hair day for the Op-Ed page: a piece about how poor the job figures really are -- and Maureen Dowd making fun of Sandy Burglar, as they now call Clinton’s former security adviser. She reminds us that Fawn Hall once smuggled papers out of the White House under her sweater -- to cover up Ollie North’s role in the Iran-contra scandal. Dowd also plays up the way the Bush pack is sniffing out nukes and al Queda terrorists in Iran, instead of Iraq. Much of its base surely wouldn’t know the diference.

One more merit badge for the Times today. It apologizes for saying that Venezuela’s leftwing president, Hugo Chavez, faced a recall because he was accused of electoral fraud. It admits that a commission headed by Jimmy Carter cleared his election. Chavez won by an overwhelming majority, but the Bush administration, which did not, has never let up on its effort to overthrow him. Neither has the Times. The story is one of the darker chapters in its history. Today’s confession offers at least a glimmer of light.

Wrong Rx - Again

2004-07-21T19:25:00.000-07:00

The Times half apologized the other day for having endorsed the Bush bill on Medicare last fall. It said it figured Congress would mend some of its shortcomings by now -- and it looks like that ain’t gonna happen. That’s a mistake the Times has made often before -- pushing dangerous legislation with predictions that it would be fixed. You’d think it would have learned by now - but no, this editorial repeated one of the crudest sins in my book -- My Times: A Memoir of Dissent.

It has to do with the catastrophic Medicare bill, which Congress passed by an overwhelming vote during in the Reagan administration. A catastrophe indeed, it zapped the elderly alone to pay for catastrophic illness, and included a stiff surtax on people over 65. The newspaper of record got it all bass ackwards, and the rest of the media followed. But when the new program took its first bite into social security, millions of people learned that they’d be worse off than before. There was a grass roots rebellion, and the law was repealed.

But history as misreported by the Times is often stronger than the truth. This new editorial repeats a myth from that disgraceful year A bunch of rich ladies were supposed to have tried to tip over the car of Rusty Rostenkowski, the Democratic boss of the House. Rusty was the only witness, but the story sure had legs. The editorial did not mention that Rusty later went to jail as a crook. He was a hero to the Times in those days, and in this tale he still is.

I remember calling for corrections at the time, and at least once I got one. I now repeat that. But I’m not holding my breath.

Police Blotter

2004-07-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t get worked up about Martha Stewart -- not even when she likened herself to Nelson Mandela, as a victim of persecution. He fought to liberate his country -- she hustled housewares. She was on the way to making a billion at it, when she absent-mindedly picked up a bit of petty cash doing what insiders have always done on Wall Street -- buying stock on a tip, and unloading it on a tip. True , some outsiders got taken for, what, 50 grand? But five months in the slammer doesn’t look like cruel and unusual punishment -- if she ever serves it.

The fuss the media made over it was unusual. The day she was sentenccd, the courts were fiddling with half a dozen swindles on the order of billions of dollars, involving our food, gas, electricity, pharmaceuticals -- don’t get me started on that, I’m just back from the drug store. General Electric just added another conviction to what may be the longest rap sheet on record, and don’t thnk it’s over.

Today’s new crime sensation may look like small potatoes -- Samuel Berger, accused of taking home records of his doings as adviser to Bill Clinton. A neo-con, he seems to have been involved in operations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Latin America and Africa. If the archives were opened, things that have been swept under the rug would be brought back to light. I just mentioned Nelson Mandela. It was probably before Berger’s time that our intelligence service put the finger on him for the apartheid government of South Africa, but that sort of cooperation never ended. Now, Berger is a chief adviser to John Kerry. So yes, by all means, let’s get a look at his files.

Worse Than We Knew

2004-07-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

I was planning to chat about Martha Stewart, but she’ll keep. The Internet carries some news we simply can’t ignore. Parental guidance is advised -- I mean that.

A highly regarded Australian correspondent reports that Ahmed Allawi -- our handpicked prime minister -- drew his pistol and killed seven prisoners. This in front of American witnesses. An earlier report says he once called for a hatchet and chopped a prisoner’s hand off. But there is worse.

Sy Hersh told the ACLU about letters written by women prisoners begging their menfolk to kill them to end their shame. They had been forced to watch their young sons being sodomized before their eyes. Hersh says photographs of those crimes were withheld from the package released by the Pentagon.

When the torture story broke, George Dubya was shocked. But Gary Trudeau dug up a cartoon he’d drawn for the Yale News many years ago. Dubya was the fun-loving head of an elite fraternity, where the initiation included branding with a hot iron. Dubya said it was only a clothes hanger, and no worse than a cigarette burn. He’s presided over a lot worse since then.

Which confirms Barbara Ehrenreich’s observation that torture is as American as apple pie. True, but so is a belief in common decency. We’ve simply got to get rid of these sadistic brutes.

Behind the Safety Doors

2004-07-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

Our Police Commissioner is so uptight about security that he won’t let peace marchers anywhere near the Garden. He also ordered up four safety doors for his own headquarters, at $50,000 apiece. He paid cash down, which is something the city almost never does -- and they’ve disappeared - - not a scrap of paper to show they ever existed. One guess is that they never did.

I’ve often said that if we close our eyes and stick a pin into a map, it will hit a spot of corruption. Nassau County would break out in measles. It just ordered an audit to find some missing money -- and learned that one of the accounting firms it hired was one of those that had certified the cooked books..

The pin could have landed in Suffoilk County -- either end -- or in Westchester. Yonkers? White Plains? Or Rockland, or Orange County. Jersey is always rich pickings -- especially now that they’ve brought in a call girl used as a bribe. But if the pin lands near Wall Street, it’s liable to explode like a rocket grenade. The financial pages these days read like the Police Gazette -- and they of course mention only the rare individuals who have to take the perp walk for all the others. Like Martha Stewart, who will face the music tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we get this show of democracy, paid for out of their petty cash. We’re all invited to watch it, at a safe distance, behind security doors that are a sham.

In the War Room

2004-07-14T18:55:00.000-07:00

The Republican spin-meisters are so proud of their work that they let a Times reporter into their war room. They studiesd a long, routine campaign talk by John Kerry -- same old same old -- until one of them pounced. Kerry said he was proud that he’d voted against a spending bill for the Iraq war. It was not against spending the money -- it was against a couple of riders in that bill. Later, he voted FOR an amended version, and he has said he favored spending even more. This was not news to anybody -- yet the signals went out from the war room, and the big media dutifully carried that spin for today.

The campaign also did its damnedest to spin the gay marriage. issue. Bush called for a Constitutional ban, to please his born-again base -- but he didn’t twist arms, or offer payoffs, the way he has done on things that were really important to him. So the amendment fell short of a simple majority -- much less the required 60 votes for cloture. That took it off the table till well after November. That should be a relief to a lot of Americans, including many Republicans, who don’t want the Federal government meddling with our sleeping arrangements.

Those margins in Congress can be shifted. It is paralyzed now on a lot of vital matters -- minimum wage, health care, the environment, jobs and justice, war and peace. They will be decided, not by this Congress but by how we the people respond right now. Let’s put the right spin on it.

Postpone Elections?

2004-07-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

George the Second flew to a nuclear bomb factory at Oak Ridge to show us what he saved us from. It was an update on the message he delivered on that aircraft carrier -- mission accomplished. He reminded us that he speaks only gospel truth.

Because Amrerica led the way, he said, "the forces of terror and tyranny have suffered defeat after defeat, and America and the world are safer." Meanwhile, his department of Homeland Security was alerting us against major attacks -- maybe even bigger than 9-11 -- and suggesting that we might have to postpone the November elections.

Funny -- that has also been proposed in Afghanistan and Iraq. We were supposed to be building those nations on the American model. Now it looks as if we’re building ours on their model.

It’s worrisome. A group of House members has appealed to Kofi Annan to name a commission to oversee our elections. If the world depends so on a free America, there is certainly plenty of cause -- the explosion of election spending, the efforts to block some people from voting, the barriers to third parties and independents getting on the ballot or being heard, the insane gerrymandering, the undercounting of votes, and so on.

Yes, we could use oversight by the UN. Unfortunately, it will not happen. Democracy is, finally, up to us -- each of us - to keep informed, to educate our kinfolk, our neighbors, our fellow workers -- and make our voices be heard. There are signs that this is happening -- that like last time, only more so, a majority of voters want George Dubya out. Don’t let them dare postpone that happy day.

Kucinich Falters

2004-07-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

Going through an old file I came upon a column I once wrote about Dennis Kucinich, the boy mayor of Cleveland. He’d just squeaked though a recall referendum, and the media were calling that a sock in the eye. I said heck no, it was a blazing triumph: Normally, people don’t vote FOR a candidate but against all the others. That time there was only one on the ballot, and a majority voted for him. They were right, too. He saved the municipal power plant, and that turned out to be a blessing for Cleveland .

Kucinich eventually moved on to the national battleground. Among the nine candidates for president in the Democratic primaries, he was the first to denounce the party’s betrayal of the New Deal, the first to challenge the war on Iraq. He won a few electoral votes, and promised to carry his fight to the convention. Well, I’m sorry to report that Kucinich seems to have let us down. According to the Times, John Kerry’s people -- that is, Bill Clinton’s people - talked Kucinich into withdrawing his plank calling for a prompt withdrawal from Iraq. Instead, the draft calls for withdrawal “when appropriate” -- in weasel words that even the Bush gang could endorse.

Now, the platform that Ralph Nader proposed to Kerry was, I believe, a winning platform, right on all the major issues. But many good folk who agree with it are terrified that Nader would take enough votes away from Kerry to elect Bush. Republicans think so too, and are trying to help Nader get on the ballot, while Democrats try to keep him off. It’s not a pretty picture. In any case, progressives should be fighting right now, every day, to salvage the Democratic platform, to elect decent candidates to Congress and local office and, above all, to bring the troops home. That advice goes for Dennis Kucinich, who, I hope, will quickly coime to his senses.

Gitmo Law

2004-07-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

If they were innocent, they wouldn’t be suspects, would they?

That was Reagan’s attorney general, Ed Meese. The Supreme Court didn’t agree with him, and gave us the Miranda warning, so familiar to every TV viewer. Cops and prosecutors found they could live with it very well, but the Meese crowd never did buy it. Well, last week the Supreme Court- the most reactionary one in a century, admitted that even a foreign suspect held on foreign soil had some rights. So now the Pentagon says okay, we’ll provide him with counsel -- not a lawyer, perish forbid --but a military officer, who won’t tell him the charges against him but will let him guess what they are and deny them. Or whatever.

Meanwhile, we’re taking more prisoners, and casualties, every day. The man Bush handed Iraq’s sovereignty over to last week with the words, "Let freedom reign," has declared a state of emergency. He said he’d impose curfews, to keep folks off the streets, while he rounded up suspects. Also he may have to delay elections and would in any case ban parties hostile to his regime. In other words, martial law. But he doesn’t have an army able to enforce it, yet, so guess who will have to stay the course? To all this, more and more Americans are asking, Why?

Winning Ticket?

2004-07-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

The news is not only absurd -- sometimes it’s downright funny. Like the front page of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, the New York Post, showing Kerry shaking hands with his running mate, Gephardt. If you snagged a copy, you should be able to peddle it at a profit on e-Bay. The editor borrowed an explanation from Dick Cheney -- he said it was none of our business.

The newspaper of record got the ticket right, of course. But Daily Howler.com points out that what he calls The Phantom struck again. The headline said "KERRY CHOOSES EDWARDS, CITING FORMER RIVAL’S POLITICAL SKILL." Which implies that skill was something Kerry knew he badly needed. Actually, Kerry opened with a paean of praise for Edwards’ as "a champion of the values of middle-class Americans and those struggling to reach the middle class." Then he mentioned Edwards’ "guts and determination -- and political skill." The Phantom had to reach down to this phrase to put a down beat to what was after all a big day for the Democrats, and a bad, bad day for the Bushes.

The Bushes know that very well. Hear them whining about Edwards’ lack of foreign experience -- as if George Dubya ran last time as a statesman -- and about Edwards making all that money, whereas George never earned an honest dollar in his life. We can brush aside all those phony polls. Many Americans will only now begin to seriously consider the choice that will be offered them in November. True, they are four multi-millionaires, and they’re all reading from Ronald Reagan’s cue cards. But there are differences. Most importantly, people think they are different, and they send different messages when they vote -- or, when they stay home.

So let the games begin. And let’s try, now and then, to smile.

Too Nice?

2004-07-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

No sooner did Kerry name his pick for a running mate than the media spun into its Bush defense mode. Its main complaint was one that one of my children once invented. Unable to decide whether the bath water was too hot or too cold, he said it was too nice. Yep -- they suggested this morning that Americans did not want a vice president -- or a president -- who was too nice.

But they might not mind a presidential adviser being nice. Last week a network aired a profile of Condoleezza Rice that said she was nicer than one might think. It said she began life as a musical prodigy, learned to read music before she read English, and won a national competition at age 15, playing this piano concerto by Mozart. They gave us all of the final movement. Wonderful. Then the spinmeister said they couldn’t find a tape of the competition -- that was Artur Rubenstein with the Philadelphia Orchestra, but after this message we’ll discuss what her choice of this piece tells us about her.

I tuned out, but how about, bait and switch? Actually, Condy Rice has explained why she gave up music as a career. She thought she might not make it as a worldwide star, and didn’t want to spend her life teaching 9-year-olds to murder Beethoven.

Evidently, she was not cut out to coach children. Instead, she went on to coach George Bush on how to murder who? We are filling in the blanks, every day.

Saddam in Court

2004-07-01T11:43:00.000-07:00

Whether one favored our war in Iraq, or not, the appearance of Saddam in court should have been a red-letter day. Instead it was one more foulup by the Bushes. They refused to hand him over to the international tribunal on crimes against humanity -- because they fear with good reason .that one day it might pass judgment on Americans.

So they hired a nephew of the swindler Ahmed Chalabi to read to Saddam a list of his atrocious deeds. All of them were no doubt true Nearly all dated from the years when he had the full support of the U.S. including the elder Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and Rumsfeld. In court today, Saddam declined to accept them, holding the court to be illegal and pointing out that he still had not been allowed to see a lawyer. He was particularly angry about Kuwait, which he still thought was taking oil that belonged to Iraq. He did not mention that he’d gotten a green light from the elder Bush - or thought he had.

According to CNN, early reaction from news outlets in the Moslem world were generally sympathetic to Saddam. That is appalling. What is also appalling is that anybody who criticizes the Bushes is immediately accused of treason, of blaming America first, and even of liberalism. Lord have mercy on us.