Tannishblog

Like an ace up the proverbial sleeve, the warmongers trot out a troika of sweeping confessions yesterday by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others, from which we are to infer that all the president’s men are making progress against the terrorists. Make no mistake, it’s juicy reading.

"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan,"

And the media is responding with expected Pavlovian zeal.

I can’t help wondering about the timing. That this would come forth from prisoners held and tortured for years by our compassionate nation is suspect. Exactly what the White House needs after weeks of hearing about Michael Reese Hospital and US Attorneys. Can we say "manipulating the news cycle?"

Am I getting (even more) jaded or are things really that obvious? Don’t answer that; it’s rhetorical.

This from TPMmuckraker: A White House insider, speaking anonymously (and who wouldn’t these days?) said the following:

“I think (Karl) Rove and (Joshua B.) Bolten (Chief of Staff) believe there is the potential for erosion of the president’s credibility on this issue.”

The context is the wanton, blatant political firings of US prosecutors last year. This story is getting traction everywhere news might be hiding.

What’s the big deal? this is just the latest scandal of… How many? Has anyone kept score? Isn’t it amazing how much hubris is exhibited by the brigands ostensibly running this government? Running this nation into the ground, is what they’re doing.

But "erosion of the President’s credibility?" Doesn’t that imply he has some left? That can’t be right! This is the guy (with a little help from his friends) who will forever be known as "The Man Who Started Armageddon." I can’t begin to list all he has done to erode credibility - of the office of President, of the institution of Congress, of the United States of America - let alone list his numerous character flaws that chip away at the President’s credibility in a personal, human level. Strip away the titles and privileges; as a person this man is literally incredible!

Here’s a name we might be hearing about in the future: David J. Lesar. He’s the chairman and chief executive of Halliburton. Yesterday, the NY Times reports congressional Democrats creating controversy by questioning his relocation to Dubai.

Like Mr, Lesar, the names Halliburton and Dubai have only surfaced since the war began. The American public never heard of these before the media hounds sniffed around. And where the news leads, trouble soon follows. It reminds me of Enron, where we only found out about them after their implosion. A curious phenomenon. I’m expecting to hear more of David J. Lesar, Hallibutron and Dubai, UAE, and the news, as usual, will be troubling.

Some seemingly small events seem unrelated to large ones. That is not true; everything connects. Halliburton is as intrinsically tied to Iraq as is it’s former CEO, Dick Cheney. And wasn’t least year’s hubbub over US ports connected to a company from Dubai? That was the first time I had heard of the place.

The first time I heard of Halliburton was in connection with a unprecedented no-bid contract worth billions for services in Iraq during wartime. They bill themselves as an Oil Services Company. Vague, that. One would ask what kinds of oil services do the troops need? Then came the allegations of mismanagement of of vague services rendered - or not - and billions of dollars spent for AWOL service. People are getting suspicious. Now, the Chief Exec who oversaw the company’s most lucrative contracts, netting the firm unprecedented growth (there’s that word again,) suddenly relocates to a little noticed corner of the world. (I suspect Cheney’s stock portfolio has "done well" these past few years.)

The NY Times news story quoted a company spokesperson’s remarks that the move, while unprecedented, was purely a business move: they’re in the oil services business; Dubai is in the Persian Gulf region; therefore, on the surface, one could reasonably presume that’s true.

Except Dubai has the distinction of gaining the least of its wealth through oil profits of all the Arab Emirates. And its not in geographical position to provide a pipeline path to anywhere. Likewise, it’s not the largest port in the UAE. It’s a tourist destination.

Something’s rotten in the state of Texas. I reiterate: We’ll be hearing more about Mr. Lesar. I wonder if, as a US citizen and head of a US corporation, he can be subpoenaed while over there. I suspect we’ll find out.

Okay - not really; I quit that stuff years ago. But I did space out on this blog’s two-year anniversary. It was Wednesday. On May 7th, 2005, I began an experiment in writing, hosted on Blogger, which is surprisingly still ongoing.

I don’t have many readers, but I would like to thank you all for your silent encouragement, your occasional commentary and especially your patience. Having a hundred or so visits a week is enough to fool myself into believing I’m not wasting energy here. Blogging is often akin to screaming into a vacuum, but any kind of writing is like that. Thanks to the miracle of web site tracking, I can rest assured some few visit every day. That’s good enough for me. Besides, I have no vision of being the next Kos…

Thanks, all.

A once-in-a-lifetime event is taking place on May 6th in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama is visiting to give a teaching in mind training in the morning at the Harris Theater, and a public talk entitled: Finding Inner Peace in a World Full of Turmoil, at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in the evening. Tickets are available for either event or for an all-day pass which includes a catered luncheon. The full-day package is very limited.

Tickets go on sale today a noon. Proceeds will benefit the establishment of Tibetan-American Center for Cross-Cultural Understanding, Chicago. Go to the web site dalailamachicago.com for more information, or go to the Harris Theater online box office.

Maybe I’ll see you there!

I’ve blogged about this before. Time progresses, congress digresses, fiscal responsibility regresses.

$8,822,470,731,125.59

‘Nuff said.

The right is bad-mouthing special prosecutors in the wake of the Scooter Libby ruling. As example, they drag out the corpse of Bill Clinton’s saga to compare unfavorably against Scooter.

We obviously cannot know whether the feckless Clinton would have acted more vigorously abroad had he not gone to sleep every night that year thinking about how to escape from the legal consequences of his own tawdry conduct and lies, and been thinking instead about how to protect the country from its enemies.

The assumption is that outing a covert operator who went on record against administration policy is in protection of our fragile, beleaguered nation.

But that’s the warm-up. Then they invoke the fear response.

Now, unlike in the 1990’s, we are at war.

A war of our own making. Funny how that detail is overlooked. The meat of the article is how rogue prosecutors should be under the authority of the executive branch.

To begin with, both cases featured the familiar phenomenon of runaway special counsels. Although the independent-counsel statute under which Clinton was endlessly investigated and ended in his impeachment has expired, it was a recipe for mischief. By vesting executive authority in a prosecutor not subject to the control of the executive branch, Congress had created a constitutional anomaly, one with unintended and destructive effects that plagued Democratic and Republican administrations alike. True, Fitzgerald’s appointment was the result of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s self-recusal, and he was endowed with a different set of powers from those granted to Kenneth Starr, but he operated every bit like a one-case prosecutor, effectively unchecked by line-authority in the executive branch.

It amazes me how some Americans believe that Authoritarianism is an appropriate modality for a modern Democratic Republic. Give it another quarter-century and the children of these people would vote for totalitarianism. The irony is how that would be the last free choice they would ever make. Three words apply: Checks and Balances.

Here’s another slice of steak:

In retrospect, it is clear that the Clinton case, despite the President’s obviously perjured statements, should not have been permitted to move forward. Indeed, as Posner has also argued, the Supreme Court erred grievously when it ruled in 1997, unanimously, to allow a sitting President to be caught up in civil litigation involving sex.

20-20 hindsight. To say "We shouldn’t have" cannot excuse the fact that you did. Ask any parent of a hung-over teenager the morning after prom. The Clinton "scandal" was a political firing squad whose only purpose was to hijack the American government. It worked. But while the Republican congress feasted on the sanctity of presidential impeachment proceedings, devaluing the institution in the process, Americans like you and me were losing health care, education funding, social security benefits and jobs. But that wasn’t important at the time, nor has it been important since.

Back to Poor Scooter:

We do not yet know what the price tag will be for the Libby distraction, just as we do not know if his conviction will be tossed out on appeal or result in a presidential pardon.

So, one man’s justice is another man’s distraction - interesting. Bill Clinton’s sexual discretion was a crime of magnitude wherein he put the nation at greater risk of terrorists and killed thousands of soldiers and half a million foreign nationalists all the while bankrupting the nation through deceit, mismanagement, graft, and profiteering. Scooter Libby, by contrast, just lied to protect a vice president that had trouble keeping his Johnson zipped up.

Wait - did I get that backward?

The right wing blogophiles have been having fun dissing Al Gore and his supposed energy-gluttony. One goes as far as to compare Gore’s Tennessee mansion with George Bush’s four bedroom Texas ranch, as if apples and cucumbers have anything in common. The talk is about double standards and how Al’s a hypocrite. Try as I might, I cannot find a reference to the hypocrisy of a whole administration for four years of beating dissenters over the head with "Support the Troops" while ignoring the needs of wounded soldiers in VA hospitals. Can you?

The denizens of Right Blogistan are slamming the man, Hollywood’s latest fling, because he’s the darling of the Left Coast. They cannot slam his massage. Even the head-in-sand diehards are grudgingly and grumpily conceding that the weather has been uppity. So, the only thing left is to discredit the dude who has the gumption of forcing them to look where they don’t want to.

Cruising the web lanes half asleep at the mouse last night, I cam upon a shiny new site: DraftGore.tv. Similar to algore.org and algore-08.com, the idea is to get the man elected. First, though, you have to get him to campaign. That may be the tough part.

There’s a momentum building behind this idea.  The Internet is buzzing with the prospect. It seems more people would welcome a Gore campaign in 2008 than would cringe. He’s a rock star, a visionary and a golden man-of-the-hour.Andy Ostroy of ABCNews ventured a slogan for the man: "Imagine How it Would Have Been." Indeed.

I don’t think he’ll run. Here’s why. By being the victim of a hostile takeover of the popular vote, Al Gore saw into the rotted soul of American politics. For years he’s tried to bring this issue home to the lard-assed chair warmers in congress. He’s heard a thousand excuses why "this issue requires careful thought," so the vote should de delayed "until a study has been done." Kudos for him for trying.

After the 2000 disaster, as he struggled with the injustice, I surmise he came to the realization that the fight for ecological responsibility is bigger than one nation. Not America nor China nor the European Union can unilaterally minimize the coming storms. It takes everyone. So he turned his back on the national stage and took his show on the road.

Al Gore stopped begging governments to take action. He took his message to humanity. Climate change is not a political issue, it’s a human issue; therefore, he realized, entrenched governments are insufficient to the task. Instead, he would ask humanity for help.

So doing, Mr. Gore has transcended national politics and championed the first global political issue. He has become Ambassador to Earth on behalf of the human species. He has inadvertently given humanity a reason to likewise transcend local governments, to push inevitable globalization to the next level by immobilizing a global grass roots on a subject everyone is concerned about. Why would he return to the restrictions inherent in a myopic nationalism?

This is, of course, my personal opinion. Others disagree. I’m okay with that, because clearly - one way of another - Al Gore’s time is here. The world may become a better place either way.

Support The Troops!

Hasn’t that been the rallying cry of warmongers? For years they have tossed these words against someone of opposing position who dares speak out. It was the mantra of the 2004 presidential election and a glue to both cement a solidarity of support for the Iraqi debacle and adhesive to gum the lips of Moonbat Peaceniks.

Support the Troops!

We recruit young impressionable people with limited prospects, offer them promises of schooling, housing and all the benefits of self-discipline. We seduce them with signing bonuses. Then we ship them off to war - still in ignorance - without necessary equipment or well-defined goals. We extend duties beyond recruitment promises, shorten well-earned leave, change the rules of engagement. So doing, we disrespect the families who believe in America so much they offer one of their own to such mistreatment.

Perhaps their loved one gets killed. The family’s grief is carefully orchestrated, muted for the media; hidden from sight. Most Americans will not see. Some might argue the dead ones are luckiest.

More likely the young soldier is damaged. Unfit for duty, the military reluctantly ships her home stealthily, lest hounding reporters catch a scent, and closeted in dilapidated hotel-cum-hospitals resembling the war-torn buildings they left half a world away. Most Americans will not know. It is within these crumbling walls that our bravest molder in neglect, disinterest and bureaucracy while their loved ones and their country remain ignorant.

Support the Troops!

Yet some know. The people who bandage the soldiers, provide meals, encouragement: they know. They work in the same conditions. The supervisors know, too, as does the next level of management. However removed the bureaucratic strata may become, the squalor is known to someone. All the way up to the Department of Defense, to the White House someone must have known.

Government employees are used to keeping secrets. That is how they keep their jobs. Through the necessity of self interest the bureaucracy keeps mum. Until one soldier remembers his courage, his humanity and his dignity and musters the strength to speak out. Soon everyone knows. Soon we learn the problem is systemic. Now we watch the resulting circus to see who is in support of whom.

Reflexive back pedaling, political posturing and feigned regrets are the response. This situation might need two scapegoats hung out to dry.

sup·port       /səˈpɔrt, -ˈpoʊrt/
–verb (used with object)
1.    to bear or hold up (a load, mass, structure, part, etc.); serve as a foundation for.

Structures cannot remain without mutually tenable support. This goes for bridges as well as social constructs. Soldiers uphold our nation, the government supplies the troops, and the people support the government. The structure has broken.

2.    to sustain or withstand (weight, pressure, strain, etc.) without giving way; serve as a prop for.

Support must be able to bear great pressure.

3.    to undergo or endure, esp. with patience or submission; tolerate.

The military cannot tolerate criticism from within. It will not listen to criticism from without. This makes the system unsupportive of the people, the soldiers and ultimately of itself.

4.    to sustain (a person, the mind, spirits, courage, etc.) under trial or affliction: They supported him throughout his ordeal.

5.    to maintain (a person, family, establishment, institution, etc.) by supplying with things necessary to existence; provide for: to support a family.

Likewise, modern militarism is run much like a machine. Machines are inconsiderate of families, insensitive to human dignity, blind to its own shortcomings. Militaristic machines are incapable of supporting the human condition.

6.    to uphold (a person, cause, policy, etc.) by aid, countenance, one’s vote, etc.; back; second.

Americans have begun to awaken to the forced ignorance their government has enforced through media blackouts. They’ve begun to show support for the troops by voting in a coalition determined to bring this catastrophic war to a close. The media is awakening and remembering its duty to humanity by uncovering what has lain hidden.

–noun
10.    the act or an instance of supporting.
11.    the state of being supported.

What better supportive action can we take but to keep our soldiers alive? To keep their families informed? To aggressively pursue rehabilitation for the wounded?

What a concept!