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"a country that hides something is a country that is afraid of getting caught" - George W. Bush, so-called President of the United States, April 13, 2004.
For once, you just can't argue with the Shrub's logic. Well, you could argue that one can't hide what one doesn't have, but that's not my point today. What is my point?
Let's re-cap:
This week the Bush Administration argued before the Supreme Court that it doesn't have to reveal who Vice President Cheney met with or the nature of the deliberations that lead to the Veep's Energy Task Force recommendations.
In one of his last acts as Governor of Texas, George W. Bush attempted to transfer to his father's Presidential library, hence out of state control, his official papers. This was a blatant attempt to skirt Texas laws opening these papers up to public scrutiny.
Despite claiming otherwise, George W. Bush has still not released his complete Texas Air National Guard Service Record.
As one of his first acts upon pretending to assume the office of the President, George W. Bush issued an executive order extending the period during which Presidential papers could remain safe from public scrutiny. This would affect not only GW's papers, but those of his father (his earthly father), as well.
Bush resisted for weeks, until public pressure became too much to resist, having Condi the liar testify before the 9/11 commission.
Bush resisted for months, and lied about it, turning over Clinton Administration documents to the 9/11 commission.
Bush resisted for months, until public pressure became too much to bear, the creation of the 9/11 commission.
Bush resisted for months appearing before the commission, and only met with them today with his baby sitter and under the conditions that the session not be recorded, that there be no transcript, and that the commissioners not even be able to take notes.
I could go on, but you catch my drift.
With all of this hiding of the public's business going on, you have to wonder, what is Bush afraid of getting caught at?
Whatever you think of those who administer our current wars or the politics of those who support them, you have to admire somebody like this, who not only didn't have to do what he did but had more reasons than most of us to be comfortable in the life he had and not be willing to give it up.
The headline on my morning paper says "Vatican implies Kerry should be denied communion." I have problems with this on several levels. The basic one is that I don't think a man's relationship with his church is anybody's business but his and his church. I realize this is a minority opinion is this country because a politician is virtually unelectable for national office unless he finds a way to express his relationship with God (and it goddamn better be the judeo-christian God with whom he's having this relationship) in a manner that satisfies the unwashed masses.
My second problem is with the church. Some vatican mook, Cardinal Francis Arinze, is cited as saying that a politician who is pro-abortion is not fit to receive the eucharist. Now, I'm no expert in Vatican political/spirital pronouncements and it's not really my place to tell the Vatican how to run its church, but it seems to me that, in keeping with what I've heard of the church's teachings (If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means. - Catechism 2266-67), the church should perhaps apply the same standard to American Catholic politicians who support capital punishment as has been presented in the case of abortion.
Finally, there's my favorite whipping boy, the press. Sometimes, usually it seems, members of the press just react to a story and don't seem to give a lot of thought to its nuances or even whether it really is important. I think, if this story ends up with legs, it may fall into that category. We'll see a lot of gnashing of teeth and wailing from various factions of the media about what this means for Kerry. Personally I think Kerry isn't required to answer to anybody how he feels about what his church has just said, but if this is an issue worth covering, then it's an issue larger than Kerry, and the question of how politicians follow the teaching of their particular faith or their holy book is relevant across the board. I don't expect to see it happen.
Since November 2000 the powers in the Democratic party have been whining about how Nader cost them the election, and in so doing ignored the lesson and missed the opportunity that third party presidential runs traditionally have presented to the two major parties. When concerned about a threat to your political flank you can either co-opt the message and positions of that threat or, as the Democrats have been doing for four years, you can whine about the threat and wish he would go away. There is still time for Kerry to pursue the first option, in fact, Nader has all but invited him to do so. I'm not too hopeful that Kerry will do so. Much could have been accomplished by Kerry had he, upon locking up the nomination, approached Kucinich, who has primarily the same constituency as Nader, and invited him into the fold. Having failed to do so he faces the certain prospect of Kucinich continuing his campaign through the convention, to ensure that the progressive wing, no matter how marginalized by the Democratic party as a whole, be heard. And it is right that Kucinich should do so. If Kerry hasn't embraced that part of the party by the end of the convention, he will have exposed the party as a dedicated centrist party.
I have little doubt that despite that, the progressives will vote for Kerry anyway in November, because they (we), more than anybody, want Bush gone. It was we, after all, who opposed the war with our mouths, fingers, and feet in the winter of 02/03 while the mainstream, including Kerry, followed Bush merrily off to war. But once the imminent threat of Bush has been removed, these people will still find themselves cut off from the Democratic party. As long as they continue to feel that way, there will be the opportunity for Greens and other progressives to run candidates on the left margin.
Bush's presidency, and the lock-step support he has drawn from a Republican Congress, has established that there is a significant difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. The Democrats, who meekly bowed before Bush for three years and then nominated as nearly a centrist candidate as they had available in the fourth year, have not demonstrated that they offer a worthwhile alternative. The Greens, in particular, will be able to exploit that in the future, at the expense of the Democratic party.
One of the dangers that the Bush campaign, or its surrogates, is flirting with in making an issue of Kerry's service record, and his Purple Hearts in particular, is the perception that they are questioning the legitimacy of military honors bestowed on Vietnam era servicemen. If the mean to imply, as they surely do, that one or more of Kerry's Purple Hearts was awarded under dubious circumstances, they can't help but cast the same shadow of doubt over all Purple Hearts awarded during the war.
I could be wrong, but that doesn't seem like the most effective way to court the veteran vote.
As noted in TAP online many of the President's supporters hope for people to focus on the successes of his administration's counter-terrorism efforts, namely the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq. Although those are clearly successes, I have to question (again) whether they are counter-terrorism successes. The Taliban connection to 9/11 is once removed and as the administration has failed to prove otherwise, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. The perpetrators of 9/11, Osama and Al Qaeda, are still out there, still active, and still deadly. If that doesn't count as a failure, and one that outweighs those "successes," I'd be willing to have somebody explain to me why not.
With the press's new found enthusiasm for flaying the White House for its lies and ommissions as it beat the drums for war through the fall of 2002 and the winter of 2002/2003 come occasional hints that the press itself failed to do its job during that crucial period, as well. Just as Congress rather blindly and blandly accepted the word of the administration about the threat from Iraq to be true, a dereliction of responsibility which reached its apotheosis with the resolution authorizing the use of force, the press during this time all too often accepted unquestioningly the word of the Bush administration as gospel on this matter. This despite the failure of the administration to establish that it had any credibility and deserved such deference. Although I am grateful that the press has finally sniffed out the story about the missing WMD (now that it is lying stinking in the sun), I would like to see more acknowledgement from the press that they failed this country during a time when their service could have been invaluable, during the time when this country should have been debating in a meaningful way whether this country should be going to war.
Some in the press have acknowledged this failure. Richard Cohen spreads the blame pretty wide, but accepts his share. Bill O'Reilly almost does this, but leaves the impression that the problem wasn't an uncritical press or a devious President, but rather an incompetent CIA. It takes both, Bill. You were a fool to ever believe you should have believed the administration, any administration. That's the lesson you should have learned from this.
What's perhaps most shameful about this is the way much of the mainstream and virtually all of the right-wing press slimed those who did dare to question the administration. We who doubted the word from on high were castigated as America-haters, as wing-nuts, as traitors. There is precious little satisfaction from having been proved right. The only satisfaction I can see that could come fromm this is if the next time our country faces a crisis like this, our press and Congress stand up and do the job they are there to do, to dig for truth and make the administration, whichever administration it is, prove their case. What we got instead was a compliant press praising Colin Powell's "masterful" and "convincing" performance (what a fitting word) before the UN last February. Has a lesson been learned. I hope we never have to find out, but I doubt it.
One of the constant complaints from conservatives is that our schools, from our Universities on down to, I guess, kindergarten, are pervasively staffed by liberal teachers. So what the conservatives do is complain about this. And they complain. And they complain some more.
If this problem is such a threat to our way of life, don't you suppose the conservatives would do something about this? Like, maybe, recruit conservative minded people to teach school? Seems like kind of a no-brainer response, no? So why isn't that the response?
Anybody got any answers to that?
There's a young man, a student at a local high school, who has fostered a good deal of controversy lately by founding a conservative club on campus. I saw him on O'Reilly's show a couple of weeks ago and there was an extensive write-up about him in this morning's Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
Although I suspect (okay, I know) that I disagree with this young man's political views almost across the spectrum, the real problem I have with him is the way he expresses his views. It's not that he's a right-wing jerk; it's just that he's a jerk.
Speaking of his 25 year old sister, a school teacher in Boston, he said "She's a liberal. I go, 'Kate, you have a diseased mind. We'll get you help.'" Cute, eh?
According to this young man, his sister says he is stirring up all this controversy for himself, while he insists he is doing it for the conservative cause. If that is his intention, he needs to step back and rethink his approach. The things he says, and the way he says them, can only annoy and enrage those who don't already agree with him. Even O'Reilly told him that. By his own admission (he thinks the Republican party is too liberal), his cause is on the right wing fringe of the American political spectrum. You don't advance your cause my antagonizing those who don't already agree with you.
The young man's role model is Michael Savage. He even aspires to be a radio talk show host himself. Those two facts reinforce my belief that the young man is engendering all this turmoil for self-aggrandizement more than anything else. Two kinds of people listen to Michael Savage; those who agree with him and those who don't, but listen to him for amusement or because they like to become enraged while driving home (a whole weird pathology in itself). Those in the second group aren't going to cross over into first. Michael Savage is a lunatic on the right-wing fringe. I fear that the young man may be as well.
Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Vice President Cheney convenes an energy task force, which meets in private, primarily with representatives of the energy industries, and seals the records of these meetings. Fans of open government want to know how important policy questions such as this are decided, particularly seeing as how nobody outside of the industry had any input in developing this policy, so they sue in Federal Court to open up the records.
The vice-president's office, taking time out from the task of leaking the identities of covert operatives, resist this, right up to the Supreme Court, where the matter is now pending.
Among the justices on this court is one Antonin Scalia. Mr. Scalia thinks very highly of himself, particularly his sense of probity, and believes everybody else should, too, unquestioningly. Mr. Scalia is apparently non-plussed that there are people among us (shamefully, I must admit to being one of them) who would question his ability to judge this matter disinterestedly and ought therefore to recuse himself.
Oh. Why, you ask, would some of us think this (I heard a voice in the back of the room asking)? It seems that Mr. Scalia, in addition to other, perhaps more inoccuous social contacts with Mr. Cheney, went hunting with Mr. Cheney recently. For several days, they and other among their rich and powerful social set banged away at duckies in Louisiana. Mr. Scalia's way was paid for in part by Mr. Cheney. He was, in other words, at least in part, Mr. Cheney's guest. He is, to some degree, maybe a very small degree, beholden to Mr. Cheney.
If such a situation were to happen in our local courts, if I were to take out to dinner on the eve of trial the judge to preside over my shop-lifting trial (it was just a couple of items, small ones, and I really needed them), everybody else involved in, or even aware of, the matter would recognize that it was wrong and demand that the judge remove himself. At once.
Why is it so much harder to see that this is the right thing to do when the stakes are so much greater?
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