Tannishblog

The 2008 Presidential campaign is heating up. Newspapers, desperate for diversions from the horrors of reality, are queuing up the contenders for and early slaughter. The few contenders there are, that is. MSM is salivation with anticipation of the as-yet-realized pit fights and slander mongering that all good American elections cycles require.

There is one candidate that probably will get little air time, however. Entrenched good-old-boy, hand-in-pocket journalism will pass her by. You shouldn’t, though. Susie Flynn is running for president on a single-board platform. She wants to help the (over) nine million children in the US without health insurance. there is no party affiliation mentioned, but I would guess she’s a liberal. Please visit her site, maybe email her your encouragement, and sign her petition. Her goal is lofty: nine million signatures. She’s collected over 14,000 so far!

Another chance to show the scarecrows in congress how quickly the grass roots grow! Support Susie, send a message, let anyone who cares to look know what is REALLY on the minds of Americans. Our children are our future. The future is NOW!

Apologies to the makers of the famous powdered H2O additive:

That must be good stuff they pass around the sauna stones at Republican National-whatever gatherings. To say it’s Electric Kool-aid doesn’t cover it; the Merry Pranksters gang got some compassion from their experiments. People like John McCain and Mike Pence (R-IN) are drinking Crack Cocaine Kool-aid to think that a staged, one-hour "tour" of the Shorja market in Baghdad was anything like a normal shopping trip.

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

I regularly don body armor, hire sharpshooters and a full company of soldiers with Humvees when I go to the market. Apparently so does Mike Pence:

At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, and his three Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.

I’m glad I don’t live in Indianapolis. Meanwhile, in Realityopolis, the Iraqi merchants view yesterday’s pageant differently:

“They paralyzed the market when they came,” Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.”

He added, “This will not change anything.”

I’m sure the impact of such high-and-mighty Americans will make no difference to the beleaguered Iraqis, but this silliness may have profound impact on John McCain’s electability quotient. Pass the juice, son!

The Democrats have already screwed up. Their seats aren’t even warmed yet and they stuff $21 billion of pork barrel spending into the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill for FY2007.  So much for integrity. The NY Times provides a PDF partial list of all "the other white meat" that Democratic congresspersons chose as payment for their votes. Porkbusters.org and Council for Citizens Against Public Waste are almost apoplectic. Who can blame them?

I would remind all the new Congressionals that much of the whining that got them their new chairs was about indiscriminate spending by congress. D’OH!

Our government hasn’t come to grip with the Internet yet. They haven’t understood the new era of transparency we’re heading into. Clinging to old-school methodology, our leaders still live in a world where the inner workings of the Hallowed Halls are mystical, where secrets are commonplace. Similarly, the quid pro quo chumminess governments have with major media outlets are circumvented. Instant access to information by the unwashed masses destroys these dynamics. This is, to my way of thinking, A Good Thing.

Tyranny breeds of secrecy, as does oppression, theft, warfare, and corruption. These common diseases of governments can be treated, if not cured, through unhindered sharing information. It is through the formation of a world in which no one can hide that may save humanity from itself.

Yet large beasts such as the American Political Animal are difficult to turn once the stampeding begins, and so in the fervor of power wresting, our Democratic majority has shown their anachronistic thinking, and their old bad habits. Akin to a pot  smoker in remission, this vote selling is a tough habit to mask, and the Internet is a glass wall the addict is crouching behind ineffectively.

So clean up your act, servants of the public, your actions are plainly visible, your tracks impossible to cover. Welcome to a new world order of accountability and transparency, a world, I note, that you have paid for. Selling votes for unimportant pet projects in this time of war and astronomical deficits - after a bitter campaign of demanding accountability -  is, well, to quote a certain American cultural icon: "it’s DesthPICable!"

It annoys me how Republican "pundits" are attacking every idea with which they disagree. Most especially the whole Stay The Course / Get them Out debate. Yes, its a tough decision.

What everyone seems to agree upon is that Iraq is a mess. In four years, the greatest military machine in the world cannot re-stabilize what it has destroyed - namely the sovereignty and economic stability of Iraq. We broke it. We should fix it. But how long do we continue to try?

The same opinions that rile me scoff at the Democratic congress’ recent attempts to pin down a plan from the president: timetables, measurable progress by the Iraqi government, and conditions met to bring our soldiers home. In order to show they’re serious, the tackle the issue when money is on the table. Money is what all Americans understand: when money is involved, people pay attention. Surely, congress did get the president’s attention - along with its attendant anger - and a threat to veto. The Righty opiners think this proves (yet again) how the left is unsupportive of our military. The Lefty pundits say that a veto of the appropriations bill without stipulations of progress would endanger the troops just as surely as the alternative.

This argument should have taken place two years ago, but a Republican majority refused to oversee expenditures. Since the start of Armageddon until today, the richest nation on Earth blindly wrote blank checks to fund a questionable military pursuit. Most of the money wasn’t real, but borrowed from future Gross National Product and from taxes our children have yet to pay. The Righties seem okay with that.

If our World’s Greatest Military(tm) cannot manage a regime change in more time that it took to end WWII, then it’s high time to rethink things. If a thirteen-digit expense account cannot fund this endeavor - or any, for that matter - how is the delaying tactic currently being played on the beltway going to change anything one way or the other? In a war of trillions of dollars, what’s a few billion between rivals?

Four years. Eight TRILLION dollars carte blanch. How much is too much? How long is too long? How many thousands more dead and injured? How many more survivors psychologically damaged?

We blew it in Iraq. We’ve broken something that we cannot fix. Conventional warfare does not account for amorphous combatants and suicide troops. We cannot win by doing "What we’ve always done." We’ve already spent too much money and time. Staying the course and expecting different results is a textbook definition of insanity. The whole Iraq situation is insane.

Let’s be sane, now. It just might help.

Imagine the following scenario: After a pent up morning in the classroom, children burst from the school for recess. Several of the older kids group to play a game. But the same old games are becoming boring, so one child begins a new game by pretending to be president. Another pipes up to vie for VP, and soon the prominent roles are filled in this schoolyard administration.

Over the course of a few weeks, this game plays out. Policies are discussed. A war is planned and executed, causes invented, and the children recruit underclassmen to act out a battle.War is, after all, what governments do. Follow through limited, as the kids quickly loose interest.

At one point, a younger group of kids attempt to join the game, and are snubbed. Talk begins on building an imaginary fence to keep out the undesirables.

An election begins when two more vocal members disagree on policy. Sides are drawn and after a week of recess one-upmanship, a vote is taken. this leads to a protracted argument on cheating, but the child with the bully on his side eventually wins reelection, and losers sulk and start scheming together.

The newly reinstated president again plays at general while younger kids fight for him, but the battles are confusing and it’s hard to see who is winning. Talk begins about passing laws, but every initiative by the losing group is ignored by the winners. Meanwhile, the empowered few start cutting imaginary taxes because someone once heard parents complain about taxes. As the children lower taxes, they cut money for the things they don’t like: education, hospitals, improved roads and bridges, helping poor people.

One child heard on the news about a big storm somewhere, and this is folded into the play. The president quickly dismisses the story: "Who cares?" he said.

Another pipes up about his grandma getting help from the government for medicine, and the vice president speaks out against giving things away for free to old, sick people. Better they just die.

Talk eventually comes to teachers they don’t like. There are many of them. One child, in a desperate attempt at being noticed by the president, suggests firing them, and a list is soon made of the teachers that should go. Some of the other kids disagree and task the president about the idea. He just points to the small boy who thought the idea up, and the group starts picking on him.

Eventually, the game becomes stale, and the children look for other amusements. Their mock government dissolves. Unknown to them some younger kids, having overheard the game, start their own governments, and in time, the game becomes a permanent fixture in the arsenal of recess amusements. As some kids relocate to new schools, the idea of playground politics spreads, evolves, and becomes more sophisticated and treacherous as the kids constantly try to one-up the previous motions.

Meanwhile the first group grows up, attend college and seek careers - some in politics. Styles and aspirations developed on a gravel lot come back to influence their methods and motivations. Some things never change.

The NY Times today features a nicely staged photo-op of our president standing at a podium in the oval office. I note that the camera angle rises from the floor as if the whole world looks up to the man. Beneath, the caption reads:

“We will not go along with a partisan fishing expedition aimed at honorable public servants,” President Bush said in a news conference.

Interesting phrase; carefully crafted. My first reaction, though, was "Wait. What ‘honerable public servants’?" If the people feeling pressure from the senates investigation regarding the firings of US Attorneys were indeed honorable, then why would they feel pressured. And why would the president feel the need to pre-empt regularly scheduled TV programming to say this to the people. I mean, besides the fact that he likes to pre-empt things.

He then offered a ridiculous concession to congressional Democrats: You can interview Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, but not under oath and if you do you cannot later subpoena them. The Democrats refused. Now the Republicans can spear them with the "partisan fishing expedition" line, because - on the surface - the White House made a reasonable offer. That’s what they are thinking, anyway. I question how reasonable it is to cripple a congressional investigation by demanding special dispensation for "honorable public servants." How honorable are they that they have to hide behind bogus provisions?

(That reminds me of a short conversation I had yesterday with a friend from Canada about how the Internet is creating a transparent society: My comment was "If you have done nothing wrong, why worry about privacy?" She didn’t agree, though.)

Also in the Times is an Op-ed piece by ousted US Attorney David C. Iglesias entitled "Why I Was Fired." A must-read.

Meanwhile, Tom Delay (remember him?) - another paradigm of honor - has this to say regarding last weekend’s anti-war protesting, as reported by Impeachbush.org:

Disgraced Tom Delay went on television Sunday morning and complained on Meet the Press that "we shouldn’t have had what we had yesterday…in Washington, D.C." with people calling for "impeaching the commander in chief."

But, Tom… That’s not what you said during the Clinton Impeachment hearings. Talk about a partisan fishing trip! Mr. Delay’s message these days is to do as I say, not as I do. Hmm, my Dad tried that. I didn’t work for him either.

So: we have "honorable public servants" crouching behind special conditions, presidential posturing - again - and a disgraced former congressional leader reprimanding the public for exercising free speech. As my Canadian friend noticed; American Politics are Never Boring.

So true.

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!