It has been plain all along that the only way to stop terror is to remove its causes. That we have done the exact opposite does not mean that Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush don't know know any better. But the terrorism is an outgrowth of their own larger game, which began long before 9/11.
That game is global domination, which they believe depends on military control of the world's oil reserves. The fool Osama only provided cover for the troop deployments already planned. Beneath all the fearmongering and the fluttering flags, this is what the nasty boys in Washington are up to.
Their true aims may be learned from scores of largely unread papers and speeches and budget messages, and from the dozens of largely unnoticed new garrisons all over the world. If we would listen and look, though, we might still stop the mindless march to a needless war.
Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has laid out the administration's imperial blueprint in a thoughtful, reasoned essay. Please take the time to read it. Please pass it along. Please.
I love saying I told you so, don't you? And I did tell you so, in the Famed Figurehead entry of October 25, below. It now develops that between his public sector gigs as a front man, William H. Webster had a fling in the private sector as well. By all means read the full story, which offers an unusually thorough demonstration of how the world actually works. Then proceed to the succeeding . . .
. . . topics, all of which should appear on the midterm exam to be held November 5.
¶ Explore similarities between Judge Webster's career and that of George Herbert Walker Bush, George Walker Bush's father. Both men specialized in taking over troubled bureaucracies and doing nothing once in office. Why were they picked? Repeatedly?
¶ Why was Judge Webster careful to inform Harvey Pitt in advance that there was a possible red flag in his résumé? (Bear in mind that Mr. Pitt himself has far bigger and far redder flags in his own résumé.) (Bear also in mind that Judge Webster's principal value in the job market is his reputation for clean hands. Would you trust a mechanic with "clean" hands to fix your car?)
¶ Why did Mr. Pitt seem so unconcerned that Judge Webster was the principal person responsible for ethics and accounting standards at U.S. Technologies, a fraud-riddled enterprise which contracts out the labor of convicts? Since the judge's service in such an enterprise was not a disqualification, was it a qualification?
¶ Judge Webster said of his appointment, "I'm sure they wouldn't have gone through with it if they didn't have confidence in me." Examine the probable nature of that confidence. Confidence that he will do or not do what? Who is/are "they?"
¶ If Judge Webster had no idea what was going on at U.S. Technologies, why did he resign from its board after learning that he would no longer be insured against investors claiming fraud?
¶ Are officers of the federal government liable for damages caused by their official action or inaction? For instance, could a defrauded investor successfully sue the chairman of an accounting oversight board who failed to oversee accounting?
¶ Is it possible to embarrass George W. Bush? Or is there a gene for shame which is recessive in his family?
Just finished watching the usual worthless twaddle on NBC nightly news and wondering my nightly wonder: Was that really the best Tom Brokaw and his fatigable news team could dig up, out of the whole, wide world?
How about this, for instance, this story from today's New York Times?
Remember all that fuss a couple of years back over Florida's Banana-republic voting procedures? And then the similar fuss but smaller fuss when it happened all over again in this year's Florida primaries? And all that pious concern from the White House and the Hill about voting scandals in dozens of other jurisdictions across the country?
Well, it turns out that Brazil has already figured the whole thing out. Unburdened by Katherine Harris and the political leadership of the United States, Brazil just ran two huge elections (some 90 million votes in each) with hardly a hitch.
"The heart of the Brazilian system," The Times writes, "is a plain $420 computer with a keyboard much like that of an automatic teller machine. Voters punch in the number of the candidate they want to vote for, wait for the candidate's picture and name to appear on the screen, confirm their choice or correct any error by pressing another button, and then move on to the next office on the list."
Think this might have caught Brokaw's eye, with an enormously significant election coming up next week? Of course you didn't think that.
Your attention, like his, is otherwise engaged. We're all rather think about who gets first dibs on killing the Serial Sniper and his Faithful Teen Sidekick.
No Threat to United States
Three Afghans are back home after eleven months in Guantanamo Bay. The New York Times reported today that they were released after it slowly became clear that they posed no threat to America's security.
"One of them, Faiz Muhammad, said he was 105. Babbling at times like a child, the partially deaf, shriveled old man was unable to answer simple questions. He struggled to complete sentences and strained to hear words that were shouted at him. His faded mind kept failing him.
"First he said that American soldiers took him away 12 months ago. Then he said he was 5 years old during the rule of the Afghan King Allmanullah, which would make him at least 78, and that he spent 8 months in an American prison.
"He was asked if he was angry at the American soldiers who arrested him. 'I don't mind,' he said, his face brightening. 'They took my old clothes and gave me new clothes.'"
The Poppies Blow . . .
"Opium production in Afghanistan soared to near-record levels in 2002, making the war-ravaged country again the world's leading producer of the drug, according to a United Nations estimate released on Saturday.
"United Nations officials blamed 'the total collapse of law and order' in the country during the American military campaign to oust the Taliban in the fall of 2001 for the increase, not the country's new government."
The complete story is in today's New York Times. Essentially our warlord allies are hurrying to profit from the run-up in prices caused by the Taliban's crackdown on poppy-growing.
This is a photograph of Johnny Knoxville. Mr. Knoxville is the star of Jackass: The Movie. It is a gross-out flick about young men doing disgusting things that make them vomit, such as eating snowballs soaked in piss. Last week Jackass was the number-one film in the nation, proof that we have not let the terrorists win. America, as we know it, lives.
Greatest of Three Evils
The New York Times today endorsed the worst of the three candidates for governor of New York. The editorial is an interesting piece of prose, the full flavor of which defies paraphrase. Check it out.
Its tortured logic is that George Pataki is the least unattractive of the three, the other two being self-financing billionaire candidate Tom Golisano and Democrat Carl McCall, the state comptroller.
The Times is well aware of Mr. Pataki's innumerable ethical outrages, ranging from selling paroles to locking harmless and helpless mental patients away in Dickensian nursing homes owned by large Pataki contributors. The paper has reported on all of these matters, and in many cases uncovered them.
But the Times backs the governor anyway, in the case of minor-party candidate Golisano because "this page has always believed that people should vote for the person they really want to see in office."
This page is an idiot, then. A good many people really wanted to see Ralph Nader in office but had enough sense not to vote for him. If they had, Al Gore wouldn't have won the election.
In the case of Mr. McCall, the editorial said, "While (he) has been a good comptroller, his campaign has offered some troubling insight into his ability to act decisively. When his enemies leaked letters he had written seeking jobs for relatives from companies in which the state owned stock, Mr. McCall did not deal with the matter swiftly -- acknowledging a wrong, taking his knocks and then moving forward. Even now, he seems to have trouble acknowledging that there was any problem other than getting caught."
Well, there wasn't any problem other than getting caught. Mr. McCall should have known better than to put anything on paper, since ethical standards in the government are so much higher than those in the private sector. But he wasn't doing anything that New York Times executives, to pick a nonrandom example, don't do on a regular basis.
Suppose a Times editor wants to find his nephew a job. He calls a colleague in Washington or Chicago, who takes the kid off his hands. Next time, vice versa. The news rooms of America are full of friends and relatives of executives at other papers.
To dismiss Mr. McCall on such trivial grounds, particularly when the alternative is a major-league boodler like Mr. Pataki, offers some troubling insight into this page's judgment.
So does the editorial's conclusion: "Mr. Pataki has disappointed us frequently in the past, but within the available field, he strikes us as the best bet. For Governor Pataki, the third term could be the one when he finally sets things right."
Upon reading this wise counsel, George Pataki will have no choice but to pop immediately into the nearest phone booth and emerge as Thomas Jefferson. And when that happens, Badattitudes will endorse him too.
Wellstone's Shoes?
Wellstone dies and Thurmond lives, further proof that if God exists, she doesn't really care.
In one of the stories on the tragedy, a colleague remembered Paul Wellstone saying, "I belong to the Democratic wing of the party." And a small wing it is. I hope Mr. Mondale wins Wellstone's seat, and I hope he rejoins that small wing himself.
I wrote speeches for the vice president during his doomed 1984 campaign against Reagan. My best effort was "In Reagan's America, a rising tide lifts all yachts." Mr. Mondale delivered the line in a speech before, if I remember, the machinists' union.
It scored what we called a "roadblock," which is to say a sound bite that makes the evening news on all networks. But Mr. Mondale never used the line again, although it resurfaced everywhere during the even more rampant economic inequity of the nineties.
The Mondale campaign strategy, however, was not to seem to attack Mr. Reagan except on his own turf, which meant it was okay to call him a budget-buster but not a shill for millionaires.
In the closing days of the campaign, when defeat was sure, Mr. Mondale began to make noises like a Democrat and his polling numbers crept upward. But it was too late.
If he makes it back to the Senate in the twilight of his career, my hope is that he'll want to recapture the good feeling of those final days before the landslide.
To End Terrorism
I have to confess that at first I saw John Ashcroft as a cornpone Mussolini, using the Osama stick to beat our civil liberties to death.
I take it all back. Finally I've figured out that the attorney general and the president are actually engaged in a subtle game to destroy terrorism at its source.
The clue lies in the president's conviction, repeated in speech after speech, that our enemies hate us for our freedoms. However unconvincing this may be to persons of experience and judgment, Mr. Bush seems actually to believe it. No doubt Mr. Ashcroft does, too. It is just about his speed.
Given their ingenuous beliefs, what would seem to them the only logical way to fight terror? Furious retaliation was politically necessary to try in the short run, but revenge has a poor track record over the long haul. Counter-terrorism does indeed produce an immediate warm feeling, like pissing your pants. But unpleasant after-effects inevitably follow. Ariel Sharon, who may not grasp this point, nevertheless demonstrates it.
The only intelligent remedy for terrorism, then, is to get rid of whatever causes the murderous envy which fuels the terrorists. Since the Bush-Ashcroft Axis of Good believes that cause to be freedom itself, then it is our freedoms which must be kicked over the side.
And so to save the Shining City on the Hill, they see no other course than to destroy it.
To Head Accounting Board
William H. Webster, former figurehead of both the FBI and the CIA, has been picked to clean up corporate accounting.
Mr. Webster is widely considered to be a man of unblemished integrity, which should give you an idea of how he is likely to perform in his new post. The places he's been, the only way to keep your integrity unblemished is to make no waves and sign whatever they put in front of you.
Consider the sad tale of Stansfield Turner, the first decent and honorable man ever to become director of the CIA. For doing his best to cleanse the agency, he was scorned as a traitor and a fool by Congressional conservatives and his own bureaucracy.
The only other man to make an effort to rein in the Agency was John M. Deutch, appointed by President Clinton. His reward was to be turned in as a security risk by snitches on his staff for the awful crime of having classified files on his home computer.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Aldrich Ames was opening the gates to the real rustlers.
As for the FBI, no man of courage and moral stature has ever served as director, not if we define morality in the real-world sense of making moral principles the basis for one's actions. While presiding over a moral cesspool, Webster never did this, although I make the charitable assumption that in the privacy of his own home he no doubt clung to moral sentiments of the very highest order.
Thus we can assume that the judge will continue his career of executive nonfeasance at the Securities and Exchange Commission. If he runs true to form, he will take a long nap, clueless and dreamless, while the Augean horses lift their tails and pretend to clean their own stables.
. . . of five-eighths of an inch at a range of 100 yards.
The last paragraph of an article on page A29 of today's New York Times:
"Bushmaster's principal owner and chairman, Richard Dyke, was the finance chairman of George W. Bush's campaign for the presidency in Maine in 1999. Mr. Dyke resigned as Mr. Bush's chief fund-raiser in Maine in July 1999 after a Los Angeles police officer sued Bushmaster as the maker of a gun that wounded him in a shootout with bank robbers."
Mr. Bush could hardly have foreseen that Mr. Dyke's guns would have wounded the Los Angeles policemen or killed so many others in the Washington-area serial murders.
But he could hardly not have foreseen that at least a few of them would not have been used to kill human beings, as this was the purpose for which their military originals were designed.
And Mr. Dyke certainly foresaw that a Bush presidency would be good for his particular business: the selling of M-16 knockoffs modified just enough to dodge the 1994 ban on infantry assault weapons.
For example the Bushmaster does not offer the bayonet-mounting feature standard in the military model, and it only holds ten rounds. But the Bushmaster is accurate enough so that one round usually does the trick, as we have all learned over these past weeks.
That Believes the Lie"
Paul D. Wolfowitz is one of George W. Bush's bits of rough trade over at the Pentagon, the other being Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Lately both of them have been sulking over the CIA's insubordinate refusal to believe that Saddam is about to drop an atom bomb on the Mall.
So now they want to set up a special Pentagon intelligence unit that will squeeze the CIA's facts in such a way as to produce the truth for a change.
Yesterday Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz explained to The New York Times just how those poor souls over at the CIA had managed to go so wrong.
Firstly, he said, "They are not making independent intelligence assessments." Readers of Orwell will understand this sentence at once. Independence is obedience.
And secondly, there exists "a phenomenon in intelligence work, that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will. The lens through which you're looking for facts affects what you look for."
Note Mr. Wolfowitz's use of the second person plural. He would find the first person singular to be, in this context, literally unimaginable.
A couple of days ago Daniel Gross had a piece in Slate about business executives who falsify their credentials. His point was that these guys often do their jobs as well as anybody else, so why should anybody care? And God knows why they do it in the first place, since they're probably going to get caught.
I agree with the first observation, but would go on to say (as in fact I did in an October 5th post called "When You Consider What the Real MBAs Do") that the underlying question raised in these cases is why we rely on credentials so much in the first place.
Mr. Gross's second point may or may not be true. My suspicion is that plenty of people get away with it. But neither of us can ever know, since nobody writes stories about the phonies who aren't caught.
I'm reminded of Beth Lumpkin, an Afro-American press aide who answered the phones in Jimmy Carter's Atlanta office during the 1976 campaign. She used to claim she could always tell when it was a brother or a sister calling, until one day a smartass colleague said, "How about the ones you can't tell?"
Fair's fair. In a posting last week ("One Family's Values") I disapproved of Jeb and Columba Bush for not being at their daughter's side when she got sentenced to ten days in jail on a drug charge. Now The Orlando Sentinel reports that both of them spent 15 minutes with their daughter yesterday in the Orange County Jail.
As Others See Us
George W. Bush can't stop telling us that our enemies abroad hate us because of our eerie, supernal goodness. How about our friends abroad, though? Bookseller Barbara Farnsworth just forwarded me this look at Mr. Bush's America through Norwegian eyes. As the election approaches, it's worth remembering that the three biggest fears facing most American families -- college tuition, medical expenses, and old age care -- simply do not exist for the citizens of most European countries.
On Friday The New York Times carried a story on George W. Bush's Marshall Plan for Florida, aimed at keeping the state from falling into unBush hands on November 5.
As part of this venture in good government, the president has agreed to turn over $120,000,000 in public money to family friends.
The agreement was tucked away on page 24 of The Times among a bunch other embezzlements from the Treasury for Bush family political gain. This far into this adminstration, it wasn't big news. Just the same-old, same-old.
But the affair struck me as remarkable both for its shamelessness and for the sheer size of the swindle. This is the background:
Although George W. Bush is in favor of drilling for oil practically everywhere else on the planet, he is opposed to it in Florida. There, his brother needs the support of environmentalists to get reelected next month. And the wealthy Collier family owns oil and gas drilling rights to large tracts of land in the Big Cypress National Preserve.
Furthermore, the Collier family gave upwards of $50,000 to the Florida Republican Committee this year. It was a niggardly sum, true, but the Bush boys are a cheap date.
So this spring the Bush administration agreed to pay $120,000,000 for the Colliers' mineral rights, which would certainly keep the oil rigs out of the preserve until after election day, and maybe forever.
The price seemed more than fair, since the National Park Service had completed a study only two years ago which estimated the value of those mineral rights at only $5,000,000 to $20,000,000. This meant that the Bush family was paying out to the Collier family a jackpot of between $115,000,000 and $100,000,000.
Naturally the Colliers are low-balling on their way to the bank, claiming that the Park Service is crazy and that their priceless swampland is just loaded with gas and oil, and the taxpayers ought to be happy that they were able to cheat the family so easily, and so forth. Mr. Bush's Interior Department finds all this to be convincing, offering as evidence that the deal has been reviewed by an "outside consultant."
But here comes the real beauty part. The Times says the Colliers "plan to argue to the Internal Revenue Service that the mineral rights are worth far more than what is being paid, allowing them to count the difference as a charitable deduction.'"
The whole reeking mess still requires Congressional approval, but if they were willing to let Bush invade Iraq, they'll probably rubberstamp this raid, too.
That Couldn't Shoot Straight
In an October 1 posting I raised the question of why it was that Iraqi antiaircraft batteries in the southern No-Fly Zone have never managed to hit a single U.S. plane -- not once, not in thousands of attempts over more than two years.
Ever since this news ran (unobtrusively) in The New York Times I have been expecting the papers to be all over this obvious absurdity like white on rice. Today it finally happened, no thanks to the indefatigable bulldogs of the Washington press corps. Thanks instead to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury and its bubbleheaded TV correspondent, Roland Hedley:
Maybe this time the real press corps, in the real White House, will pay attention. But I doubt it.
Congressman Dick Armey got all choked up the other day over the prospect of America's sons marching off to their death in Iraq.
Iraq is not to be confused with Iran, which despite the difference of only one letter in the names is not an Arab nation. Its national language is not Arabic, but Farsi. Few of the Americans due to die there are likely to know that.
Armey himself may or may not know. It is irrelevant, alongside the enormity of his general ignorance. But one thing he does know is that his own son will not be among those whose prospective deaths so sadden him. Neither will the sons, it is safe to say, of any of the other architects of Mr. Bush's mindless weenie-wagger of a war.
Columnist Mark Shields, himself a former Marine, makes that point with facts and figures in his column today. Read it. As a former draftee myself and the father of five sons, I welcomed the coming of the volunteer army. I was wrong. I wasn't smart enough see that it would be a tool for sending only the powerless poor to die in the wars of the powerful rich.
Made Perfectly Clear
Now and then we get a sad and disturbing peek at the real family values of our "family values" presidents. One came when we learned that President Reagan had never laid eyes on his 18-month-old grandchild. Another came this week in an Orlando courtroom.
From the invaluable Palm Beach Post:
ORLANDO -- As members of her family's political dynasty fanned across Florida Thursday, Noelle Bush was handcuffed and sent to jail for 10 days for hiding crack cocaine in her shoe at a drug rehab center.
The 25-year-old daughter of Gov. Jeb Bush and niece of President George W. Bush pressed a cheek with her only relative present -- her aunt, Dorothy Koch -- before deputies led her away. . .
The governor, up for reelection in three weeks, was taping an interview in Tampa when he heard of the sentence. An anchor interviewing Bush described the governor as "clearly shaken, distraught."
The governor's first words when he received the news of his daughter's sentence were "Call Columba," (his wife) according to station's Web site.
He said in St. Petersburg later Thursday that he did not attend the hearing because he did not want to bring more media attention to Noelle's case.
The lead headline in today's
Although the discovery of major oil reserves under Pyongyang might help us make up our mind. Moving right along, though, the story below the headline said:
"According to one theory, discussed widely in the Pentagon and the State Department, North Korea's leaders want to demonstrate that they cannot be bullied by the United States. 'Here they are declaring they have the stuff to make a nuke,' one official said. 'Whether they have one, or they are bluffing, we don't know for sure. But the message is, "Don't mess with us."'"
According to my theory, if Saddam were actually close to having a bomb, wouldn't he figure that this might be a particularly good time to brag on it? That thought certainly struck Kim Jong Il, and our own Dim Son hasn't even got permission from congress to invade his country.
The Times goes on to report: "'Imagine if Saddam had done this, that he had admitted -- or bluffed -- that he has the bomb or is about to have one,' one senior official said. 'But there's been a decision made that the system can take only so much at one time.'"
Unluckily for Saddam, Kim Jong Il got there first.
Gen. Zinni on the Iraq War
This morning I came across a speech by retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni which says all that needs to be said about our present careless and ignorant rush to war in the Middle East.
It is not an eloquent speech, but something better. It is an intelligent speech. It is a wise speech. It is a speech that grows out of a wide experience of both war and the Middle East.
This having been said, you will not be surprised to learn that his views are the diametrical opposite, in nearly all respects, of the policy being urged by the Messrs. Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Rove and Cheney onto their eager protégé, George W. Bush.
I spent the afternoon preparing a slightly abridged web version of General Zinni's speech before the Middle East Institute October 10. I hope you will read it, and then use the link at the bottom to pass it along wherever it will do the most good.
Becoming a Republican
In a move that stunned even seasoned Washington observers of political poltroonery, U.S. Representative Richard Gephardt yesterday became Bush's total bitch. Earlier the Missouri "Democrat" had signed onto the President's reelection campaign by jumping on the Iraq war bandwagon; now he called for a $75 billion tax cut. This effectively removed the last, faint hope that the Democrats would be able to use Bush's disastrous tax cuts against GOP candidates in the elections only three weeks away.
Asked why he didn't just change parties like Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Mr. Gephardt replied that he didn't want to lose the big office he occupies as house minority leader. Okay, okay, maybe he didn't really say that. But he thought it.
New York Times Prints
Today's New York Times ran a story on page A19 in which they had a little fun with the Washington TV stations for overcovering the sniper murders. The headline was "Lack of News Doesn't Deter Coverage." It ran on one of two inside pages that the Times filled with its own coverage of the murders. Twenty more column inches ran on the front page above the fold, along with two color photos. And a Maureen Dowd column ran on the op-ed page.
After Taking Out for Household Expenses
Divorce proceedings in Indiana have given us another look into the private lives of the rich and famous. Well, rich anyway.
Richard S. Bobrow is the boss of Ernst & Young, the multi-billion-dollar accounting firm. According to the story in The New York Times, Jan Bobrow said "her husband kept financial details from her, not allowing her to examine their tax returns and having her raise their four children on a budget of $5,000 a month . . . Mr. Bobrow earned $3,125,000 last year."
Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer is a conservative, but she's also covered many wars in her time and cowards apparently offend her. So she recently went around asking various Republican chickenhawks what business they had sending men to die in Iraq when they themselves had ducked military service. Here are a couple of excerpts from her full column.
Another huffed, almost with disdain: "All this talk about our young troops' going into Baghdad -- hey, these guys are in their 30s."
Richard Perle revealed his own deep concern for American soldiers when he was asked on a recent "Wide Angle" TV show about the threat of chemical and biological weapons to troops landing in Iraq. All he could do was announce, without any emotion, "These are not effective weapons in terms of the outcome of the engagement."
"Another" must have watched Saving Private Ryan one time too many. (Actually one time is too many for that despicable piece of war propaganda.) Spielberg and Another may find it comfortable to believe that our wars are fought by full-grown John Waynes, but they are not.
They are fought by kids with acne on their faces and comic books in their hip pockets. Lieutenants in their early twenties are "old men," and are referred to as such. This awful youngness of our troops in combat was the first thing to strike me in Vietnam.
As to Perle's lofty dismissal of mustard gas and sarin, it needs no comment. As to Perle himself, he is just another Kissinger wannabe and a man's ambition can reach no lower than that.
Ray Price, once the head of Nixon's speechwriting office, had an odd letter to the editor in the New York Times today. Mr. Price argued that Mr. Nixon's so-called "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war if elected president was actually a myth.
What he really said in his stump speech, Mr. Price explains, was that "a new administration will end the war and win the peace." Unfortunately this was misinterpreted by a green reporter to mean Mr. Nixon had a "plan" to do so.
What exactly did he have, then? A dream, like Martin Luther King? A desire? An intention? A vague hope? If he didn't have a plan, his campaign was based on a lie.
But of course he did. He had the same secret plan as Kennedy and Johnson: to hang on somehow for four years, trading hundreds of thousands of human lives for his own reelection. Once Mr. Nixon made it to a second term, he surrendered in a matter of weeks.
The Nobel War Prize
OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- Ex-U.S. President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize Friday for his work in promoting human rights and democracy, an award twinned with a swipe at Washington's drive to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Carter, a Democrat who was president from 1977 to 1981, won the $1 million prize from a record field of 156 candidates for his efforts to solve conflicts from the Middle East to North Korea, from Haiti to Eritrea...
But President Bush's drive to oust Saddam, with or without U.N. support, gave the award an anti-U.S. sting since Carter has said it would be a tragic and costly error for the United States to attack Iraq without U.N. backing...
The chairman of the secretive Norwegian Nobel Committee said bluntly that the award was meant to slam Bush's policy on Iraq. "With the position Carter has taken...(the award) can and must also be seen as criticism of the line the current U.S. administration has taken on Iraq," Committee head Gunnar Berge, a former labor minister, told reporters. Asked by a reporter if it was a "kick in the leg" at Washington, Berge said: "Yes, the answer is an unconditional 'yes."'
Catch a Thief
Earlier this month Securities and Exchange Commission chief Harvey L. Pitt offered John H. Biggs the chance to chair the new board that's supposed to swamp out the mess the big accounting firms made on Wall Street.
But what was a nice boy like John Biggs doing in a place like Harvey Pitt's office?
For years Mr. Biggs very capably ran TIAA-CREF, a gigantic pension fund for teachers and professors. I happen to have met him a time or two, and know him to be a man of high intelligence, wide practical experience, great energy, and unshakeable integrity.
Why would this administration want to hire such a man man to wake up the beloved old toothless watchdogs of corporate America? Turns out the administration didn't. Wall Street and the White House immediately leaned on Pitt, who assumed the supine position from which he has always confronted the accounting industry.
Leaving Mr. Biggs, who had already quit his old job, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
My own assumption was that this shabby treatment was intended to frighten off any other candidates who might be inclined actually to do the job they were being hired for. Then the White House would come up some close relative of a justice who voted right on Gore v. Bush, if any can be found who hasn't been given a job already.
But my son Mike, unlike me a compassionate liberal, has a kinder, gentler explanation.
"It's like when Roosevelt hired old Joe Kennedy to run the SEC." he claims. "You want to set a thief to catch a thief, and Bush probably figured an honest man would be in over his head."
Mike's theory is that Biggs was bumped to make room for Andrew Fastow, the former chief financial officer of Enron who is awaiting trial on charges of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy.
"It's a no-brainer," Mike says. "Sipowicz runs the guy into the wall and tells him, Listen good, scumbag, you're going to help us bring down the Wall Street Mob or they're going to be bending you over a bunk at Allenwood for the next 140 years. Your choice, asshole."
Showing off for the old gang back at the Midland Petroleum Club, President George W. Bush has gone to court to keep Californians from breathing cleaner air.
In a related development, White House chief of staff Andrew Card was once the chief lobbyist for General Motors, a prominent maker of vehicles which run on petroleum products with just a smidgen of ethanol thrown in to keep Archer Daniels Midland happy.
Anyway, the legislators of California, a state which voted for Gore in the 2000 election only to see him lose by a single vote in the Supreme Court, decided a while back that the thing to do was to require ten percent of the cars sold there to be of the electric, or "zero-emission" type.
Mr. Card's former masters, who have been dragging their feet on making fuel-efficient cars so as to give the faltering Japanese auto industry a chance to eat Detroit's lunch again, filed suit in federal court to keep California's air pollution at an economically viable level.
"The American people would be best served," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "if the leadership of special interest groups worked with us in our efforts to increase fuel efficiency, promote safety, and improve air quality."
Mr. Bush, a fervent defender of the right of states to function as "laboratories of democracy," was so furious at this string of baldfaced lies coming out of his White House that he told his chief of staff to clear out his desk by close of business. Then he called NBC and hired Leo McGarry.
Okay, he didn't. But the rest of the story is true. You could look it up.
Free Market
To Heathens
In his Onward, Christian Soldiers speech Monday, the Commander-in-Chief said that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people."
Now try this passage with various substitutions:
For Iraq, insert Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Great Britain, or the United States.
Here and there the fit is not exact. None of these nonthreatening nations, for example, is any longer "seeking" nuclear weapons.
And Great Britain has practiced terrorism mostly against the Irish rather than its own people, as Israel has confined itself mainly to Palestinians.
The United States, however, is a close fit with Iraq in the terrorism category. From the Middle Passage and the March of Tears to the Black Panther raid and Wounded Knee; from the Phillippines a century ago to Nicaragua and Chile and Kent State and the Ruby Ridge and Waco of just yesterday, we have used terror at home and abroad with equal readiness.
This is not to say that we are worse than anybody else. It is to say that we are the same as everybody else. If it sometimes seem that we are worse, that is only because we possess the power to act out our darkest dreams.
Now President Bush is urging us once again to follow our baser nature.
We would see in an instant how childish his war arguments are if we did not imagine that we, as Americans, were something finer than mere sinful humans. If America acts, it must be for the best. When Americans reluctantly punish, it is for their victims' own good.
In Mr. Bush's mind he is a decent and a simple man, forced to battle by evil men. Nor is Mr. Bush alone with his transparent rationalizations. Too many of us are similarly blinded by our own moral magnificence, or we would laugh the threat of Iraq -- Iraq! -- out of the house in a moment. As a casus belli, Saddam's hypothetical future bomb doesn't even come up to Tonkin Gulf or the sinking of the Maine.
Later on in his speech, though, the president accidentally laid out his real reasons for wanting to invade Iraq. It is doubtful that he even knows what they are himself. It is equally doubtful that he knows what projection is, and certain that he would not dilagnose it in himself.
But here is what he said:
"[The Iraqi regime] could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East."
There you have it. An Iraqi bomb would oppose Mr. Bush's aggression. Mr. Bush would no longer be in a position to dominate the Middle East.
And this is the awful irony that Osama was too stupid to see. Instead of getting our troops out of Saudi Arabia, his murderous folly has brought in whole armies. Osama has handed the failed oil man the ultimate merger and acquisition.
Once the president rams this little regime change through a gutless Congress, he means bring the joys of democracy to the whole damned Arab world if it kills them. As it certainly will.
Or Is It Vice Versa?
While the only president we have was trying to incite us to riot Monday evening with his Iraq speech, CBS ran an episode of Fear Factor.
Be very afraid.
Restores Integrity to WH
Since last month President Bush has been spreading a terrifying tale about how labor unions in the proposed Department of Homeland Security would endanger the war on terrorism. On Monday he told it twice at fundraisers in Manchester, New Hampshire. Here's one of those versions. If it sounds like a fish story to you, keep reading.
From the White House transcript of the President's remarks in the National Guard Armory, Manchester:
"I'll give you an example. The Customs Service thought it appropriate that our inspectors wear radiation detection devices on their belts. That makes sense. If you're worried about weapons of mass destruction coming into America, you want your inspectors to have the tools necessary to do their job. The union said that they needed to have a negotiating session, they needed to go to collective bargaining as to whether or not the inspectors ought to be told to wear this, whether or not it would be involuntary or voluntary. That would take a long time to settle.
"Nothing wrong with collective bargaining rights, I'm all for them. But what I'm not for is work rules that prohibit us from doing the job of protecting the American people." (Applause.)
I held my own applause, remembering Mr. Bush's rush to crush labor unions in the Justice Department early this year. That time, too, he argued that union membership posed a threat to our national security.
Was it possible that Mr. Bush was once again, and let me put this as delicately as possible, flat out lying?
It took no more than thirty seconds of Googling to find that this was indeed the case. The first link in the list was to the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, where I discovered that:
"The National Treasury Employees Union and its members never refused to implement this policy, nor would it have been legal to do so. NTEU has raised concerns about whether the program would work because of inadequate training, the availability of detectors, and more effective, alternate technology. NTEU originally proposed that the policy be implemented on a voluntary basis but said, after receiving training information from Customs, the union would have no problem with making the program mandatory.
"The union also alerted the administration that radiation detection devices were not provided to INS inspectors, even if they are the only inspectors at a port of entry, constituting a serious lapse in homeland security efforts. Thus, the union is serving not only to look out for employees’ interests, but also as a watchdog looking out for the public interest.
"Finally, existing law required Customs Service inspectors to wear the detectors immediately, which they did. The union cannot require bargaining either before or afterwards, if the Customs Service does not want to engage. The union originally asked to bargain; the administration refused; and that was the end of it.
"In declining to bargain, the Customs Service asserted its rights under collective bargaining law to 'determine the . . . internal security practices of the agency.' Any agency manager has that right under section 7106(a)(1) of title 5, United States Code. So this example demonstrates that the administration has ample authority –- under existing law –- to impose security policies unilaterally."
With Unilateral Disarmament
Lt. George W. Bush, Texas Air National Guard (ret.), gave a speech Monday in Manchester, New Hampshire. On the subject of his plans to invade Iraq he said:
"I was proud the other day when both Republicans and Democrats stood with me in the Rose Garden to announce their support for a clear statement of purpose: you disarm, or we will."
The other day in Manchester, New Hampshire, President George W. Bush, M.B.A., gave a speech in which he told the little people in appropriately little words why we should cut taxes on the rich:
"The job of government is to create an environment in which growth is possible. That's why I am such a strong believer and strong advocate of letting people keep more of your own money. (Applause.) You see, it is when times are slow that you let people have money in their pocket. When somebody has more money in their pocket, they're more likely to demand a good or a service. And in the marketplace, when somebody demands a good or a service, somebody is likely to produce the good or a service. And when somebody produces a good or a service, somebody is more likely able to find work."
In another election year, 1896, and another city, Chicago, William Jennings Bryan addressed the same problem in his famous Cross of Gold speech:
"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them."
Years later Hubert H. Humphrey explained Republican economic theory in even fewer words: "They think that if you feed the horses enough oats, later on the sparrows will find something to eat."
In 1894 the great populist governor of Kansas, Lorenzo Dow Lewelling, spoke as follows:
"I say to you my fellow citizens that no man in America ever had the genius or brain to earn a million dollars honestly. He can't do it while the sun shines!"
But even Governor Lewelling found himself tripped up by the deceptive language we use when the subject is money.
In what sense did Jay Gould or Cornelius Vanderbilt or John D. Rockefeller "earn" their billions, if they were dishonestly got? Earn is a word loaded with moral freight. It implies an equivalence, however rough, between the service performed and the amount "earned."
"Make," suggesting creation, is no better. Rockefeller, for instance, did not create wealth. He took it from others, who in their turn had taken it from their employees, from their customers, and ultimately from the earth.
My wife, who works seventy-hour weeks teaching calculus, earns her money. My doctor earns her money. My plumber earns his money. The dairy farmer from whom I buy my milk makes her money, out of grass and a few Jersey cows.
Kenneth Lay's money, however, was neither earned nor made. Neither, to pick a closely related example, was that of his protégé, George W. Bush.
We can only begin to think accurately about money when we stop dressing up the act of appropriation in words that carry undeserved moral significance. It is as if we habitually referred to the act of rape as "lovemaking."
Rape as a crime would disappear. We would come to honor the most successful and brutal rapists for their virility and selfless gift of pleasure to womankind. They would appear on the cover of magazines, be elected to high office, even receive honorary degrees from Yale.
Better to call things what they are, then, which is why I wrote in the preceding entry that Richard Scrushy "got hold" of the huge fortune he has wrung from his chain of rehabilitation hospitals. I could just as well have written obtained. Or took possession of. Appropriated. Gained control of. Received. Accumulated. Amassed.
But these are all morally neutral. We might do better to tip the scales all the way over to the pejorative side, if we ever hope to end up in the middle of the linguistic road.
How about grab? Pluck? Snatch? Seize? Lift? Pocket? Steal?
Or, for its cold precision, "subtract?"
Help me out here. Fill in the blanks below with the word or words of your choice. And never say earn again, unless you really mean it.
1. "In 2000, Kenneth Lay ___________ $123.4 million from the sale of his soon-to-be-worthless Enron stock options."
2. "In 1998, George W. Bush _____________ $15 million on his Texas Rangers investment of $606,000, most of it borrowed."
Asshole Like a Hummer!
Richard Scrushy, chairman of the HealthSouth Corporation, has gotten hold of hundreds of millions of dollars by squeezing a 25 per cent profit margin out of a chain of rehabilitation hospitals. From a New York Times story about Mr. Scrushy:
"To persuade skeptics that he is not, in fact, flashy, Mr. Scrushy points to his car. 'I don't even own a Ferrari,' he said. 'I don't even own a Bentley.' What he does own is a Hummer, a scaled-down, $55,000 civilian version of the oversized millitary vehicle."
The Real MBAs Are Doing...
Every so often the papers jump on someone who lost a job because his credentials were faked. Most recently in the news was the chief financial officer of Veritas Software. Kenneth E. Lonchar lost his job for claiming he had an M.B.A. from Stamford when all he had was a bachelor's degree from the University of Idaho.
Oh, the horror, the horror.
There is always a tut-tut tone to these stories which entirely misses their real point. Let's start with the 1997 case of Lon Grammer, a transfer student at Yale who was expelled just before his graduation for inventing his transcript.
In fact he had previously been scraping by in a community college with a C average. Yale, which has as much of a sense of humor as any other large business, claimed Mr. Grammer had tried to defraud it of something of value, namely a Yale diploma.
The university did not address the question of how he had managed a B average in their institution, although the academic career of George W. Bush provides a clue.
The nasty little secret of the Ivies is that they virtually never throw anybody out. (Dick Cheney at Yale was an exception, but he had to drink very, very hard to succeed.)
Think about it. If the value of what a university sells depends in large measure on how difficult people think it is to get in, flunking a student out exposes the fraud. How many other dummies got in? Why should we hire from that place?
And so, to protect the reputation of the admissions process, once you get into Yale or Harvard you nearly always graduate. (Ask anyone who went to either school. Ask me; I taught at Harvard for five years.)
It was not unusual that Mr. Grammer did well (and that Mr. Lonchar was presumably capable at his job). Most imposters seem to do as well as the others once they get inside the door.
Medical fakes almost never strike their colleagues as unqualified. Mr. Lonchar's abilities as a chief financial officer do not seem to have been in question. When one Paul C. Kurtz was exposed as a phony in 1998, a colleague said, "If all lawyers acted as well and as competently in proceedings as he did, we would have a great bar."
A successful bankruptcy attorney once told me that his firm's new hires from law school were of no more use in the actual practice of law than an English major would be. Much of medical school, my fourth-year son tells me, is the forced memorization of information which will be quickly forgotten and if ever need could easily be looked up.
Which brings us to the real point. Mr. Kurtz didn't defraud his clients, Mr. Lonchar didn't defraud his company and Mr. Grammer didn't defraud Yale. The fraud is that committed by our credentialing institutions, which at great cost teach nothing that couldn't be learned just as well on the job, through an apprenticeship program, or by self-study.
This is the logo for the proposed Office of Homeland Security. No doubt it will be hissed and booed to death shortly, which will be too bad. Unlike most logos, this one says it all.
(Come to think of it, though, the text loses something in translation. Heimat Sicherheit sounds more natural.)
Karefree Kollege Kapers
This week the University of Mississippi held various ceremonies to celebrate James Meredith's integration of the school forty years ago. But one famous alum, though invited, was prominently absent. This was Senate minority leader Trent Lott, who doesn't like to dwell on those particular carefree college days.
At least not in public.
Hundreds were injured and two killed during the student riots against Mr. Meredith's admission, which President Kennedy had to put down with 30,000 troops,
At the time the senator was a cheerleader, head of the interfraternity council and president of Sigma Nu. Among the things that the minority leader would like us to forget, I think we can assume, is a certain FBI and army raid on the Sigma Nu house.
The MPs rounded up 21 shotguns, a 22-caliber rifle, a 30-caliber rifle and a 22-caliber Colt pistol. Lott's fraternity brothers were certainly armed for something, and it wasn't bear.
You could look it up. The book was published last year by Doubleday & Co. It's called An American Insurrection, by William Doyle.
However, is Flesh-colored
Montana, Associated Press: "The Libertarian candidate for Senate has turned blue from drinking a silver solution that he believed would protect him from disease. The candidate, Stan Jones, 63, a business consultant, said he started taking colloidal silver in 1999 fearing millennial disruptions might lead to an antibiotics shortage. His skin began turning blue-gray a year ago. He does not take the solution any longer, but his skin condition, called argyria, is permanent, he said. Mr. Jones is running aginst the Democratic incumbent, Senator Max Baucus; Mike Taylor, a Republican state senator; and the Green Party candidate, Bob Kelleher."
Another Load on US
Until it became convenient, which was yesterday, the Pentagon flat out refused to release videotape of our planes bombing targets in the no-fly zone of Iraq. The risk to our pilots was simply too great.
Now that this has been judged to be no longer the case, on Monday the Defense Department showed reporters gun-camera tape that purported to show an Iraqi missile battery aiming and firing at one of our planes.
I say "purported" because I was once the spokesman for a secretive air war carried out in Laos by the U.S. Air Force.
A succession of junior State Department officers was assigned to ride herd on the air force's bombardments. Their impossible job was to monitor hundreds of sortie requests daily. Some years ago I wrote a novel called The Bombing Officer about the moral dilemma these State Department officers faced.
To a man they believed -- and could demonstrate -- that the Air Force consistently lied to them about target selection, intelligence reports, map coordinates of the targets themselves, and bomb damage assessments.
And so I read today's New York Times account of the Pentagon's newest reality show with a certain lack of gullibility.
Go and read the full story. Okay, now that you've now done so, let me point out a few things that caught my eye.
"At today's news conference, the Pentagon officials said Iraq fired at allied warplanes patrolling the northern and southern zones 642 times in 2000, 647 in 2001 and 416 times this year."
This comes to a total of 1,705. It averages out to 53.5 attacks per month in 2000, and 53.9 last year, and 46.2 so far this year.
The response of Lt. George W. Bush, Texas Air National Guard (ret.) to this slight downturn in alleged attacks on our planes has been to step up our retaliatory bombing in the last couple of weeks.
The Russians immediately suggested that these strikes were intended to "influence talks opening in Vienna over procedures for allowing United Nations inspectors back into Iraq."
But bluff, straight-talking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called it "'nonsensical' to blame the United States and Britain for responding to increasing attempts by Iraq to shoot down allied warplanes patrolling the no-flight zones."
Evidently none of the Pentagon reporters thought to ask the secretary how a decrease in Iraqi attempts on our airplanes had morphed into an increase.
Nonetheless, it only takes one missile to kill you. And so here is Secretary Rumsfeld again, expanding on the diminishing peril to which we had increased our response:
"Here you have U.S. and British planes flying daily to enforce the U.N. resolutions, putting their lives at risk, these pilots and air crews, day after day after day for years, and the U.N. not enforcing its own resolutions. With each missile launched at our air crews, Iraq expresses its contempt for the U.N. resolutions -- a fact that must be kept in mind as their latest inspection offers are evaluated."
But here's a curious fact that must be kept in mind as Mr. Rumsfeld's latest straight talk is evaluated: every one of those 1,705 attacks failed to hit every one of those allied planes. In nearly three full seasons, the Iraqi gunners are batting an impressive 0.000.
And yet we are told by the Defense Department:
"Iraq has successfully rebuilt its air defense to levels that existed before the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and the integrated system, connected by Chinese-made fiber optics, is formidable, the officials said. General Myers said Iraq has 'got a pretty good supply of long-range radars.'
Naturally such formidable defenses require an equally formidable response, and thus:
"The military has changed its tactics to attack their command-and-control and communications buildings to 'try and degrade this and we've had some success there.'"
But apparently not much, because:
"The Pentagon officials acknowledged that the retaliatory strikes had not deterred Iraq from firing on the allied planes. 'It's difficult for us to impose a level of damage that would make it in their interest to adhere to the U.N. resolutions,' Mr. Rumsfeld said."
As a veteran air war spokesman in an earlier imperial adventure, all this strikes me as being the exact same color as chocolate ice cream. But if I were you I wouldn't pick it up off the sidewalk and eat it.