December 23, 2005
The Bridges are Back
Alaska's Congressional delegation celebrates the Season of Taking
David Boaz
Whether you’ve gotten a card or not, rest assured that Alaska thanks you for the $454 million Christmas present. Remember those “bridges to nowhere” that were finally taken out of the federal budget? Well, they’re back.
You may recall the highway bill that Congress passed in July. It was the biggest porkfest in history -- more than 13,000 individual projects awarded federal tax dollars in an orgy of logrolling and back-scratching. Among the most notorious projects were two bridges in Alaska, dubbed the “bridges to nowhere.” The bill included $223 million for a bridge linking Gravina Island to the town of Ketchikan in Alaska. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, federal taxpayers will eventually pay $315 million for this bridge. Here’s the deal: Ketchikan is a town of 8,000 people (13,000 in the whole county, and population is declining). Its airport is on the nearby Gravina Island. Right now you have to take a 7-minute ferry ride from the airport to the town. To save people that 7-minute ride, Alaska wants to build a $315 million bridge.
The highway bill also awarded Alaska $231 million for the Knik Arm Bridge, which was renamed “Don Young’s Way” in honor of Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and master porkbearer. According to the Alaska Wilderness League, “Construction of the Knik Arm Bridge would connect the city of Anchorage to hundreds of square miles of unpopulated wetlands to the north. Preliminary cost estimates for the bridge are upwards of $2 billion.”
But then Hurricane Katrina changed things. In the wake of the devastation of the Gulf Coast and demands for massive federal spending there, critics said Congress should revisit the highway bill and transfer some of the more outrageous spending to Katrina relief. The bridges to nowhere came in for special criticism, with fiscal conservatives and Katrina relief advocates joining forces to insist that the bridge funding be revoked.
It got so bad that Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, roared, “If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state . . . I will resign from this body." Taxpayer advocates could only pray that he would keep his word.
And sure enough, Congress acted. Headlines across the country echoed this one in the New York Times: “Two 'Bridges to Nowhere' Tumble Down in Congress.” The Times story began, “Congressional Republicans decided Wednesday to take a legislative wrecking ball to two Alaskan bridge projects that had demolished the party's reputation for fiscal austerity.”
Good news indeed. Except – Ted Stevens didn’t resign from Congress. Why not? Because it was all a show, just smoke and mirrors. Congress removed the requirement that Alaska use the money for the bridges to nowhere. But the state still got the money – a $454 million blank check.
And sure enough, Gov. Frank Murkowski has included money for both bridges in his new state budget. Murkowski, who used to be a senator himself, works closely with the state’s congressional delegation. Indeed, when he was elected governor, he searched the length and breadth of the great state of Alaska to find a qualified replacement and eventually found her across the breakfast table – his daughter, Lisa, who now works hand in hand with Stevens and Young to keep the funding pipeline flowing.
The federal money for the bridges was real gravy. Alaska has a $1 billion budget surplus, so Governor Murkowski could satisfy all sorts of special interests in his munificent budget proposal. Oil-rich Alaska also has $32 billion in its Permanent Fund.
And here’s a real kicker: The agency building Don Young’s Way is advertising for lobbying firms to represent it in Washington at a cost of up to $150,000. The firms would engage in "lobbying, educating, reporting, communicating and coordinating." So some of the $454 million that taxpayers in New York and California and Georgia and every other state are sending to Alaska will be used to hire lobbyists to milk the federal Treasury for even more money.
Merry Christmas, taxpayers.
David Boaz, is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer.
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Friday, December 23, 2005
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Excerpt: The Fog That Cloaks Hypocrisy
Excerpt: The Fog That Cloaks Hypocrisy
By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on December 13, 2005, Printed on December 13, 2005
Source Here
One often hears that someone represents a "real Horatio Alger Story." Horatio Alger was a master of the dime novel in the mid-19th century. He churned out dozens of almost identical storylines: a young, poverty-stricken churl is alone in the big, cold city. He works harder than the other shoe-shine or news boys and puts every cent away, while the other boys gamble and drink and waste their money on trivial goods. Along comes a wealthy businessman. He takes note of the young lad's ethic -- and the sparkle of intelligence in his crusty eye -- and takes him under his wing. Soon the boy is a wealthy man of responsibility and high station.
Embedded in Horatio Alger's work is the Protestant work ethic, the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps American creed. The mythology of upward mobility in America is central to modern conservative thinking, and much of it can be credited to Horatio Alger and his adoring fans. But who was he?
In this excerpt from "Fog Facts", author Larry Beinhart does some digging, and what he finds would come as a surprise to many a conservative Alger fan:
Horatio Alger (1834-1899) wrote about 130 short novels. Like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, which I read at the same age, they are all the same, yet all quite readable. Alger had a great gift for narrative. For some reason or other, I happened to pick one up as an adult. I was quite surprised at what I was reading. Then I read several more to see if that was an aberration. No, that part of my memory, at least, was correct; they are all exactly the same.
They feature a boy just at, or on the verge of, puberty, from the country or the slums. He comes to the center of the big city. He does work, but he doesn't work astonishingly hard, certainly not as compared to the majority of other working children in the days of legal child labor. He doesn't start his own business or invent a better mousetrap or find the Northwest Passage.
What really happens is he meets a rich older man who takes quite a fancy to him and sets him up with money and educates him and teaches him how to dress and conduct himself. There is, indeed, a "meet cute" in which the boy does something that draws that nice rich man's attention. It's usually something heroic, like stopping a team of galloping horses that's dragging a coach that is carrying the rich man's daughter.
This action is referred to in the books themselves and by people like those at the Horatio Alger Society as a sign of character. It is also a chance for the older man to notice how this boy stands out from the other boys. He has that forthright, noble-boy quality. Which is very, very attractive. Eager, earnest, shining. It's what draws priests to alter boys. In addition to the convenience, of course.
I do not understand how an adult can read Alger's stories and not realize that these were homosexual pedophile fantasies. Actually, it's a single fantasy repeated over and over again.
So I looked him up. And there it was. He had started out as a minister in Brewster, Massachusetts. He was having sex with boys in his congregation. Two of them told their parents. He admitted to a certain "practice." He resigned and moved to New York City. There he became a writer and began churning out these fantasies as dime novels.
We have two distinct ideas of what happened when he went to New York. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a critic, antiquarian bookseller, and gay activist, has written: "Alger continued his 'practice' although thereafter most often against types of boys nobody cared about, thus avoiding further trouble with authorities. The newsboys Alger glamorized in his fiction were in reality homeless child laborers who spent their nights in alleys or slum-squats .... Their plight included sexual exploitation ranging from outright rape to 'willing' prostitution."
Stefan Kanfer, writing in the City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a neoconservative propaganda mill, has a very different tale to tell: "The fugitive repaired to New York City in the spring of 1866. Though never to wear the cloth again, he resolved to live out the Christian ideal, expiating his sin by saving others." Upon seeing the slum children of New York, "an idea came to him .... He had sinned against youths; now he would rescue them and in the process save himself. He would do it as a novelist."
In this version, Alger never had sex with a young boy again (nor anyone, presumably, as there is no reference to marriages, mistresses, or an adult male companion). Kanfer describes also how Alger did many good works, works that kept him close to the youngsters he was trying to save, and how he helped many of them and found them places with his friends.
So, two distinct interpretations of Alger's reality.
On the one hand we have the gay activist saying, in essence, "Let's get real. Alger was a sexual predator, and sexual predators stay sexual predators. Going to the big cities was the sexual tourism of the day. There were plenty of young girls and boys with no means of support and you could buy what you can buy in Bangkok today."
Kanfer comes out fighting for hypocrisy.
Elsewhere, George Bush, in a series of private conversations that were taped by a friend, explained the reasoning for hypocrisy over honesty as a policy choice:
Mr. Bush said [to Mr. Wead]: "'I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried.'" He mocked Vice President Al Gore for acknowledging marijuana use. "Baby boomers have got to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do them," he said.
Joe Conason, in the New York Observer wrote, "For many American parents of a certain age, that self-serving yet poignant response must strike an empathetic chord. Concern that children will mimic parental misbehavior is universal, and so is the impulse to conceal embarrassing truths."
Hypocrisy of this type, though not labeled as such, is part of the Republican Party's program and has a great deal do with its appeal.
In the constellation of Republicanism, conservatism, and Christianity, the source of order is authority. A choice, a statement, or a rule is not made valid by logic or proof or evidence. It comes from the authority of the source. A godly man gets it from the ministers of God, who get it from the Bible, which is the word of God himself.
If there is no "authority," then there will be no order. To preserve order, therefore, we need to believe that each link in the chain is unbroken. To do so requires an effort not to know certain things.
In the matter of Horatio Alger's novels, this is probably trivial. But when it applies to abstinence-only sex education, it leads to unwanted teen pregnancies and increased transmission of STDs, and it brings misery and death. When it applies to not doing stem cell research, it perpetuates disease, pain, and early death.
Once we accept and sanction hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality, drinking, and doing drugs, the act of saying one thing and doing another becomes the norm in all things. The president wanted to take out Saddam Hussein because he was evil. It's good to oppose evil. In order to convince the world to go along, it was necessary to make a specific claim. So he said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he was linked to terrorism and that's linked to Al Qaeda. When those specific claims turn out to be false, that's alright, because the hypocritical form -- say what is necessary to do God's will and oppose evil, true or not -- is the accepted form.
Here was a fog. The myth of Horatio Alger.
To get to the facts, we did something relatively simple. We ignored the rhetoric and looked at the events. Which is sort of funny, since, in this case, they're both fiction. Still, if we stripped the rhetoric off the facts and they stood naked, we saw them for what they were.
Then we looked outside. In this case, to the author's life. There was a correspondence. He was, in real life, the character who appears in every book, under different names and in different guises, the outwardly reputable older man -- a pastor, no less -- who is very fond of young boys.
This is, intellectually, relatively easy to do.
It is socially and psychologically difficult. Our social and psychological methods of sorting out the world will generally trump our strictly intellectual ones. There are certain automatics that exist in almost any situation. We automatically give credence to what people tell us. We give additional respect to the words of people in authority. We tend to go with the group. We compartmentalize. We let our preachers preach, our leaders lead and Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, fix our cars. These things are neither good nor bad. They are efficient and they bring personal and social benefits.
Here, there were additional factors.
Alger's rhetoric creates fog. There are clean and noble boys and there are adult men, whose motives are good and pure, who help such boys. Teachers and coaches and librarians and Scout leaders and even priests do reach out to young people and enter into asexual mentor-protégé relationships without groping them, and help them find their way. That's good and it is necessary and it is a significant part of social life.
So there could be truth in it. Certainly there ought to be truth in it.
The preaching about being good and godly and all the rest in Alger's novels sounds sincere. So does his poem, Friar Anselmo's Sin, which is taken to be autobiographical, is full of regret and repentance and is about the promise of redemption through good deeds:
"Courage, Anselmo, though thy sin be great, God grants thee life that thou may'st expiate.
Thy guilty stains shall be washed white again, By noble service done thy fellow-men."
Alger reportedly did do good deeds and helped out many a young man.
This last is only marred by our suspicion that pedophiles who choose to work in positions that keep them in contact with youngsters, have ulterior motives, or, at the very least are placing themselves nearer to temptation than they ought to.
Alger's sincerity and his confiscation of the sort of truths that we are fond of confuse us. At the very least, if he is sincere, then he is not a liar. To be a liar requires intentionality. To accuse someone of being a liar means that we are saying that they are aware of the difference between reality and the things they say and that they are making a choice to deceive.
This mix -- predatory desires cloaked in the rhetoric of goodness, sincerity so sincere, we can't believe it's not genuine, statements that could be real, even should be real, but aren't, untruths that we are hard-pressed to call lies -- can exist in other, completely nonsexual contexts.
We don't have words for that. We don't have a label that describes the sort of people who speak such untruths with such sincerity from within such delusions.
The name of the New York chapter of NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, is the Horatio Alger Chapter.
By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on December 13, 2005, Printed on December 13, 2005
Source Here
One often hears that someone represents a "real Horatio Alger Story." Horatio Alger was a master of the dime novel in the mid-19th century. He churned out dozens of almost identical storylines: a young, poverty-stricken churl is alone in the big, cold city. He works harder than the other shoe-shine or news boys and puts every cent away, while the other boys gamble and drink and waste their money on trivial goods. Along comes a wealthy businessman. He takes note of the young lad's ethic -- and the sparkle of intelligence in his crusty eye -- and takes him under his wing. Soon the boy is a wealthy man of responsibility and high station.
Embedded in Horatio Alger's work is the Protestant work ethic, the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps American creed. The mythology of upward mobility in America is central to modern conservative thinking, and much of it can be credited to Horatio Alger and his adoring fans. But who was he?
In this excerpt from "Fog Facts", author Larry Beinhart does some digging, and what he finds would come as a surprise to many a conservative Alger fan:
Horatio Alger (1834-1899) wrote about 130 short novels. Like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, which I read at the same age, they are all the same, yet all quite readable. Alger had a great gift for narrative. For some reason or other, I happened to pick one up as an adult. I was quite surprised at what I was reading. Then I read several more to see if that was an aberration. No, that part of my memory, at least, was correct; they are all exactly the same.
They feature a boy just at, or on the verge of, puberty, from the country or the slums. He comes to the center of the big city. He does work, but he doesn't work astonishingly hard, certainly not as compared to the majority of other working children in the days of legal child labor. He doesn't start his own business or invent a better mousetrap or find the Northwest Passage.
What really happens is he meets a rich older man who takes quite a fancy to him and sets him up with money and educates him and teaches him how to dress and conduct himself. There is, indeed, a "meet cute" in which the boy does something that draws that nice rich man's attention. It's usually something heroic, like stopping a team of galloping horses that's dragging a coach that is carrying the rich man's daughter.
This action is referred to in the books themselves and by people like those at the Horatio Alger Society as a sign of character. It is also a chance for the older man to notice how this boy stands out from the other boys. He has that forthright, noble-boy quality. Which is very, very attractive. Eager, earnest, shining. It's what draws priests to alter boys. In addition to the convenience, of course.
I do not understand how an adult can read Alger's stories and not realize that these were homosexual pedophile fantasies. Actually, it's a single fantasy repeated over and over again.
So I looked him up. And there it was. He had started out as a minister in Brewster, Massachusetts. He was having sex with boys in his congregation. Two of them told their parents. He admitted to a certain "practice." He resigned and moved to New York City. There he became a writer and began churning out these fantasies as dime novels.
We have two distinct ideas of what happened when he went to New York. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, a critic, antiquarian bookseller, and gay activist, has written: "Alger continued his 'practice' although thereafter most often against types of boys nobody cared about, thus avoiding further trouble with authorities. The newsboys Alger glamorized in his fiction were in reality homeless child laborers who spent their nights in alleys or slum-squats .... Their plight included sexual exploitation ranging from outright rape to 'willing' prostitution."
Stefan Kanfer, writing in the City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, a neoconservative propaganda mill, has a very different tale to tell: "The fugitive repaired to New York City in the spring of 1866. Though never to wear the cloth again, he resolved to live out the Christian ideal, expiating his sin by saving others." Upon seeing the slum children of New York, "an idea came to him .... He had sinned against youths; now he would rescue them and in the process save himself. He would do it as a novelist."
In this version, Alger never had sex with a young boy again (nor anyone, presumably, as there is no reference to marriages, mistresses, or an adult male companion). Kanfer describes also how Alger did many good works, works that kept him close to the youngsters he was trying to save, and how he helped many of them and found them places with his friends.
So, two distinct interpretations of Alger's reality.
On the one hand we have the gay activist saying, in essence, "Let's get real. Alger was a sexual predator, and sexual predators stay sexual predators. Going to the big cities was the sexual tourism of the day. There were plenty of young girls and boys with no means of support and you could buy what you can buy in Bangkok today."
Kanfer comes out fighting for hypocrisy.
Elsewhere, George Bush, in a series of private conversations that were taped by a friend, explained the reasoning for hypocrisy over honesty as a policy choice:
Mr. Bush said [to Mr. Wead]: "'I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried.'" He mocked Vice President Al Gore for acknowledging marijuana use. "Baby boomers have got to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do them," he said.
Joe Conason, in the New York Observer wrote, "For many American parents of a certain age, that self-serving yet poignant response must strike an empathetic chord. Concern that children will mimic parental misbehavior is universal, and so is the impulse to conceal embarrassing truths."
Hypocrisy of this type, though not labeled as such, is part of the Republican Party's program and has a great deal do with its appeal.
In the constellation of Republicanism, conservatism, and Christianity, the source of order is authority. A choice, a statement, or a rule is not made valid by logic or proof or evidence. It comes from the authority of the source. A godly man gets it from the ministers of God, who get it from the Bible, which is the word of God himself.
If there is no "authority," then there will be no order. To preserve order, therefore, we need to believe that each link in the chain is unbroken. To do so requires an effort not to know certain things.
In the matter of Horatio Alger's novels, this is probably trivial. But when it applies to abstinence-only sex education, it leads to unwanted teen pregnancies and increased transmission of STDs, and it brings misery and death. When it applies to not doing stem cell research, it perpetuates disease, pain, and early death.
Once we accept and sanction hypocrisy in matters of sexual morality, drinking, and doing drugs, the act of saying one thing and doing another becomes the norm in all things. The president wanted to take out Saddam Hussein because he was evil. It's good to oppose evil. In order to convince the world to go along, it was necessary to make a specific claim. So he said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he was linked to terrorism and that's linked to Al Qaeda. When those specific claims turn out to be false, that's alright, because the hypocritical form -- say what is necessary to do God's will and oppose evil, true or not -- is the accepted form.
Here was a fog. The myth of Horatio Alger.
To get to the facts, we did something relatively simple. We ignored the rhetoric and looked at the events. Which is sort of funny, since, in this case, they're both fiction. Still, if we stripped the rhetoric off the facts and they stood naked, we saw them for what they were.
Then we looked outside. In this case, to the author's life. There was a correspondence. He was, in real life, the character who appears in every book, under different names and in different guises, the outwardly reputable older man -- a pastor, no less -- who is very fond of young boys.
This is, intellectually, relatively easy to do.
It is socially and psychologically difficult. Our social and psychological methods of sorting out the world will generally trump our strictly intellectual ones. There are certain automatics that exist in almost any situation. We automatically give credence to what people tell us. We give additional respect to the words of people in authority. We tend to go with the group. We compartmentalize. We let our preachers preach, our leaders lead and Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, fix our cars. These things are neither good nor bad. They are efficient and they bring personal and social benefits.
Here, there were additional factors.
Alger's rhetoric creates fog. There are clean and noble boys and there are adult men, whose motives are good and pure, who help such boys. Teachers and coaches and librarians and Scout leaders and even priests do reach out to young people and enter into asexual mentor-protégé relationships without groping them, and help them find their way. That's good and it is necessary and it is a significant part of social life.
So there could be truth in it. Certainly there ought to be truth in it.
The preaching about being good and godly and all the rest in Alger's novels sounds sincere. So does his poem, Friar Anselmo's Sin, which is taken to be autobiographical, is full of regret and repentance and is about the promise of redemption through good deeds:
"Courage, Anselmo, though thy sin be great, God grants thee life that thou may'st expiate.
Thy guilty stains shall be washed white again, By noble service done thy fellow-men."
Alger reportedly did do good deeds and helped out many a young man.
This last is only marred by our suspicion that pedophiles who choose to work in positions that keep them in contact with youngsters, have ulterior motives, or, at the very least are placing themselves nearer to temptation than they ought to.
Alger's sincerity and his confiscation of the sort of truths that we are fond of confuse us. At the very least, if he is sincere, then he is not a liar. To be a liar requires intentionality. To accuse someone of being a liar means that we are saying that they are aware of the difference between reality and the things they say and that they are making a choice to deceive.
This mix -- predatory desires cloaked in the rhetoric of goodness, sincerity so sincere, we can't believe it's not genuine, statements that could be real, even should be real, but aren't, untruths that we are hard-pressed to call lies -- can exist in other, completely nonsexual contexts.
We don't have words for that. We don't have a label that describes the sort of people who speak such untruths with such sincerity from within such delusions.
The name of the New York chapter of NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, is the Horatio Alger Chapter.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Iraq occupation as a boon to terrorists... thank you, Norman Soloman
Terrorism vs. Insurgency - By Norman Solomon, AlterNet Posted on December 12, 2005, Printed on December 12, 2005 Source Here - With public support for the Iraq war at low ebb, the White House is more eager than ever to conflate Iraq's insurgency with terrorism. But last week, just after President Bush gave yet another speech repeatedly depicting the U.S. war effort in Iraq as a battle against terrorists, Rep. John Murtha debunked the claim. His refutation deserved much more news coverage than it got. "You heard the president talk today about terrorism," Murtha told reporters at a Dec. 7 news conference. "Every other word was 'terrorism.'" Speaking as a lawmaker in close touch with the Pentagon's top military leaders, he went on to confront the core of the administration's current argument for keeping American soldiers in Iraq. "Let's talk about terrorism versus insurgency in Iraq itself," Murtha said. "We think that foreign fighters are about 7 percent -- might be a little bit more, a little bit less. Very small proportion of the people that are involved in the insurgency are terrorists, or how I would interpret them as terrorists." Murtha threw cold water on the storyline that presents U.S. troops as defenders of Iraqis. He cited a recent poll, commissioned by Britain's Ministry of Defense, indicating that four-fifths of Iraqis now want the American and British forces out of their country. "When I said we can't win a military victory, it's because the Iraqis have turned against us," Murtha said. Contrary to what countless pundits still contend, Murtha sees the U.S. presence in Iraq as a boon, not an impediment, to terrorism. "I am convinced, and everything that I've read, the conclusion I've reached is there will be less terrorism, there will be less danger to the United States and it'll be less insurgency once we're out," he said. "I think the Iraqis themselves will turn against this very small group of Al Qaeda. They keep saying the terrorists are going to control Iraq. No way." The relatively small number of Al Qaeda forces in Iraq will become isolated when the deeply resented occupiers leave Iraq, he predicted, and actual terrorists will no longer find a haven among most Iraqis. During his presentation about the importance of distinguishing between terrorism and insurgency, Murtha was directly admonishing the White House. But what he said could also serve as a reality check for news media. All too often -- without attribution to any source -- reporters have asserted that the U.S. military actions in Iraq are part of a "war on terror." And journalists have routinely failed to include any perspectives that challenge the view, avidly promoted by the Bush administration, that the fighters doing battle with American forces in Iraq are, by definition, terrorists. In a typical news report from Baghdad, airing on "All Things Considered" early this month, NPR correspondent Anne Garrels presented the U.S. government line as the only one worth mentioning. During the Dec. 2 broadcast, she described recent American offensives and then told listeners: "The military says its actions have resulted in numerous terrorists killed or detained, as well as the discovery of a large number of weapons caches." The Bush administration is glad to define a "terrorist" as anyone who uses violence against occupation troops. And many U.S. news outlets parrot the claim. But that is flagrant manipulation of language. Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, available at War Made Easy - War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." © 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Saturday, December 03, 2005
Statement of position on the occupation of Iraq
My dad wrote this up for the El Dorado contingent of active Democratic party folks... I edited and added a little of my own. I kind of like the combination. I urge everyone to read the administrations recently published "NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR VICTORY IN IRAQ" - decide for yourselves if you think this team serves our national interests or could achieve any victory that would be recognizable.
This post is dedicated to the men and women of the Armed forces of the United States:
Why we should get out of Iraq now.
The US led Iraq occupation has become a disaster that more time, money and allied lives cannot save. Early support for the war was based on what has been demonstrated to be faulty and intentionally deceptive intelligence. The rank and file membership of the Democratic Party can no longer support the misguided policy that the continued occupation of Iraq represents. The administration led the people and representatives of the United States into a war under false pretenses that serves only to undermine our national security, waste the lives and limbs of our brave soldiers and kill or maim the innocent Iraqi men, women and children it states whose liberty we sought to protect. It is time to come home.
The leadership of the Democratic Party must offer a policy that does justice to our most basic democratic principals, rebuilds the trust this occupation has cost the United States among our most respected allies, and respects the rights of the Iraqi people to self-determination.
We, the Democrats of El Dorado and Lane Counties, urge our national leaders to immediately call on the administration an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq for the following compelling reasons:
1. The occupation of Iraq does not, and never has, represented our national security and does nothing to reduce the threat of terrorist acts against the United States.
2. As an occupying and foreign force in the region, the United States acts as a focal point for the insurgency, swelling the ranks and helping the recruitment of radical elements in the entire region. It also provides the insurgency with a unique training opportunity against the best trained military force in the world.
3. The "War against Terrorism" has compromised the long established principals of United States military justice. The abuses of prisoners and mistreatment of innocent Iraqis is just one example of the failure of our leadership to lead by our most sacred values. The administrations refusal to sign a bill prohibiting the abuse and torture of prisoners is testament to our inability to lead with our principals.
4. We are engaged in a war that has no meaningful international support because we have openly declared, as a bully in a schoolyard, that you are either "with us, or against us." The very idea of patriotism has been corrupted by those in the administration and their supporters who claim that dissent for the war equates to treason and cowardliness.
5. America will build democracy in the middle east and elsewhere by being true to our democratic values at home and not by seeking to impose those values on others.
6. Let us use our resources wisely, to rebuild the primacy of American economic and educational power rather than continuing to throw lives and money at the administrations misguided and incompetent attempt to build an American empire and "New World Order."
This post is dedicated to the men and women of the Armed forces of the United States:
Why we should get out of Iraq now.
The US led Iraq occupation has become a disaster that more time, money and allied lives cannot save. Early support for the war was based on what has been demonstrated to be faulty and intentionally deceptive intelligence. The rank and file membership of the Democratic Party can no longer support the misguided policy that the continued occupation of Iraq represents. The administration led the people and representatives of the United States into a war under false pretenses that serves only to undermine our national security, waste the lives and limbs of our brave soldiers and kill or maim the innocent Iraqi men, women and children it states whose liberty we sought to protect. It is time to come home.
The leadership of the Democratic Party must offer a policy that does justice to our most basic democratic principals, rebuilds the trust this occupation has cost the United States among our most respected allies, and respects the rights of the Iraqi people to self-determination.
We, the Democrats of El Dorado and Lane Counties, urge our national leaders to immediately call on the administration an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq for the following compelling reasons:
1. The occupation of Iraq does not, and never has, represented our national security and does nothing to reduce the threat of terrorist acts against the United States.
2. As an occupying and foreign force in the region, the United States acts as a focal point for the insurgency, swelling the ranks and helping the recruitment of radical elements in the entire region. It also provides the insurgency with a unique training opportunity against the best trained military force in the world.
3. The "War against Terrorism" has compromised the long established principals of United States military justice. The abuses of prisoners and mistreatment of innocent Iraqis is just one example of the failure of our leadership to lead by our most sacred values. The administrations refusal to sign a bill prohibiting the abuse and torture of prisoners is testament to our inability to lead with our principals.
4. We are engaged in a war that has no meaningful international support because we have openly declared, as a bully in a schoolyard, that you are either "with us, or against us." The very idea of patriotism has been corrupted by those in the administration and their supporters who claim that dissent for the war equates to treason and cowardliness.
5. America will build democracy in the middle east and elsewhere by being true to our democratic values at home and not by seeking to impose those values on others.
6. Let us use our resources wisely, to rebuild the primacy of American economic and educational power rather than continuing to throw lives and money at the administrations misguided and incompetent attempt to build an American empire and "New World Order."
Thursday, December 01, 2005
The party of Teddy and Abraham gone terribly, terribly bad...
We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?
By Garrison Keillor August 26, 2004
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.
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