As the first military commission trial at Guantanamo began this past July, after years of simmering intramural feuds and administration stonewalling, I was privileged to speak with one of the attorneys for Abu Zubaydah, allegedly al Qaeda’s “number three” official. I wanted to know how the case was going, who Zubaydah is, and about the military tribunals that the responsible men and women in Washington have set up before the world. The attorney, a gruff-sounding but amicable fellow named George Brent Mickum, spoke with me by telephone.

“The security classification is top secret,” Mickum said. “Anything that I’ve learned through my client I can’t tell you.” Apparently, I had asked about some of the specifics of the case, specifically what Mickum knew about the CIA’s involvement. Late last year, a controversy erupted over an incident in late 2003, when staffers at our Central Intelligence Agency destroyed several incriminating videotaped interrogations of Zubaydah. But if it were really true that our G-men were waterboarding him, it wouldn’t have been the first time Zubaydah knew brute force at the hands of mysterious captors. Much is also mysterious about him. In his testimony before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) in March 2007, of which I obtained an unclassified transcript, Zubaydah drew a distinction between military and civilian targets and claimed to oppose Bin Laden’s tactics, which he viewed as reactionary.

Abu Zubaydah, an alias for Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn Tariq among 35 others, “was severely injured in 1992 when he was fighting Afghan communists,” Mickum said, “hit with a mortar shell.” This is confirmed by several other sources, including the transcript of the CSRT hearing; in various accounts, he was greviously wounded by gunfire and shelling in Faisalabad, Pakistan. It is also alleged that Zubaydah is mentally ill. It almost approaches the absurd to extract actionable intelligence from a physically and mentally compromised figure such as Zubaydah, but the Kafkaesque nature of Gitmo and the entire extralegal superstructure of the “war on terror” defies empirical minds. “None of this makes any sense,” Mickum said with some exasperation. “The government does what it does and justifies it after the fact.”

A lot of information is already on the public record. Much of the supporting material in Mickum’s petition to get his client the writ of habeas corpus overlaps with mine, including Katherine Eban’s illuminating report in Vanity Fair. In it, Eban describes how, like the subjects in Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments, interrogators thought they had the imprimatur of respected scientific authority on their side.

Eban tells the story of how the CIA took over from the FBI’s successful “rapport-building” and substituted terror and domination for actual intelligence. This was done by using a program called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) that trains soldiers to withstand torture at the enemy’s hands, and “reverse-engineering” these torture techniques—lifted wholesale from the Communist Chinese—to be used on detainees captured by the US military. Referring to the Chinese torture tactics manual, Mickum explained: “We have adopted it lock, stock and barrel. All we did was translate it into English and change the title.”

Zubaydah was the first Qaeda suspect to be captured and became the test case for an international system of CIA-run “black site” dungeons and the attendant methodology of medieval cruelty masked by 21st-century rhetoric of a “new kind” of war against barbarians plotting against us from caves. “Torture was the modus operandi,” said Mickum. “There were no limits.” Indeed, throughout the copious literature spelling out in macabre detail all of the legalistic wrangling, it is apparent that — scared witness of an impending terror attack — interrogators around the world in the archipelago of CIA detention camps (“black sites”) were intent on getting whoever they could capture to say anything. According to Mickum, “They were desperately afraid that there would be another attack, [and] desperately felt they needed to get intel.” The operative rule was to “extract pieces of information from the lowliest guy and then fill in the picture of who our enemy is.” Geneva protections were obstacles to the approach, therefore ignored.

In Jane Mayer’s much-acclaimed book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals” (2008), the reader is treated with the sheer scale of depravity and lawlessness that has characterized every major aspect of this administration’s approach to fighting terrorism. Zubaydah “would set the precedent for the abuse of U.S.-held prisoners, transforming U.S. practices starting with the CIA, but eventually spreading through the U.S. military, too” (p. 140). Abu Zubaydah himself “had left fingerprints all over Al Qaeda operations for years.” According to the 9/11 Commission report and other sources, Zubaydah ran two training camps for his “defensive jihad” and had conflicts with Bin Laden, whose agenda was more fanatical.

What is most noteworthy about all of the escapades is the role of the medical profession, chiefly psychologists, in helping legitimate torture and other coercion — even methods known to produce nothing but bullshit — to extract valuable and actionable intelligence, ostensibly to save lives. As Eban records, “Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.,” adding that the “central role” belonged to James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Both had been versed in the SERE methods. “We are proud of the work we have done for our country,” Eban quotes them as saying in a joint press release. Eban quotes Steve Kleinman, described as “an Air Force Reserve colonel and [an] expert in human-intelligence operations,” as declaring somberly that Mitchell-Jessen “have caused more harm to American national security than they’ll ever understand.”

In a serious attempt to find out the identity of Zubaydah and his actual role, I spent long hours amassing information and putting together the pieces. The end-result seems to be a study in contradictory claims, but more or less a clear picture emerges. According to a BBC News profile, Abu Zubaydah “had used at least 37 aliases” — another one of which was Abd Al-Hadi Al-Wahab — “and was considered a master of disguise.” His shape-shifting repute is repeated elsewhere. The top source for Zubaydah’s notoriety as a world-class terrorist is Ahmed Ressam, “an Algerian witness,” who alleged that Zubaydah was the “chief recruiter” for al Qa’ida, and that he was behind “a thwarted plot to bomb hotels [in Jordan] during millennium celebrations” (hereafter “the millennium plot”).

An Associated Press dispatch also relied upon Ressam’s testimony, which again alluded to Zubaydah’s role as a recruiter and middle-management operative. We also read of Zubaydah’s “combat skills and organizational talent that pushed him to the top ranks” of Osama bin Laden’s global criminal enterprise. Born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on March 12, 1971, he “developed a unique talent in mortars and other heavy weaponry” and “was apparently named bin Laden’s second deputy in 1995, responsible for screening recruits and devising terrorist plans” on a logistical basis. He was not a policy-maker; he was simply tasked to carry out the wishes of Bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri. Yet, for some reason, Zubaydah “doesn’t appear on the FBI’s list of top wanted terrorists.” “Jordanian military documents” also allege that Zubaydah “recruited Raed Hijazi,” who was himself “named as a recruiter of suspects in plots to bomb U.S. Embasses in Paris and Sarajevo.”

Also, the AP reported that Zubaydah “is believed to have been a field commander for the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 U.S. sailors were killed”; his co-operative was a man named Khader Abu-Hosher, another Palestinian. Along with Jordanian tourist hotels, other targets of the foiled millennium plot were Israeli draws like the “site on the Jordan River where Jesus Christ was believed to have been baptized.” “In September 2000,” Zubaydah “was found guilty of conspiracy to carry out terror attacks in Jordan” and “sentenced in absentia to 15 years of hard labor.”

A lengthy report in Time magazine put forward a rap sheet connecting Zubaydah with someone named Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti who, after “three months of psychological interrogation tactics … finally broke down” and, “according to a secret CIA summary of the interview, al-Faruq confessed that he was, in fact, al-Qaeda’s senior representative in Southeast Asia.” The Time report breathlessly continues, “Then came an even more shocking confession: according to the CIA document, al-Faruq said two senior al-Qaeda officials, Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, had ordered him to ‘plan large-scale attacks against U.S. interests in Indonesia, Malaysia, (the) Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam and Cambodia.’ … Fearing an attack could come at any moment, al-Faruq’s interrogators relayed his revelations to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center [hereafter “CTC”] in Langley, Va. … Al-Faruq’s threatened attacks never occurred.”

Abu Zubaydah was captured almost by accident, with the crucial aid of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency — for a price. “On the outskirts of Pakistan’s militant tribal area” in a city called Faisalabad, Mayer wrote that ISI “officers had noticed had noticed a caravan carrying several exceptionally tall burka-clad women who turned out to be male Islamic extremists in disguise. … For a bribe, their driver gave away their destination. This enabled the U.S. government to mount a major surveillance operation on their neighborhood. In the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, translators and analysts among the agency’s 38,000 employees pored over every fragment of electronic information vacuumed by enormously powerful eavesdropping equipment trained on the spot, until they could pinpoint what they believed was a nest of top Al Qaeda suspects” (p. 140).

“In the predawn hours [around 4 AM] of March 28,” Mayer continued, “dozens of armed CIA, FBI, and Pakistani law-enforcement and intelligence officers raided a shambling compound on the suburban outskirts of Faisalabad, taking Zubayda by surprise along with some twenty-five other suspected Al Qaeda followers, including one with a valid Arizona driver’s license. In an attempt to escape, Zubayda leapt from the roof to that of a neighboring house, where a gun battle ensued before he dropped twenty-five feet to the ground. By the time it was over, Zubayda had been shot in the thigh, stomach, and groin. A Pakistani doctor told [novice CIA officer John] Kiriakou that he’d never seen anyone with such egregious injuries survive. In truth, Zubayda had nearly slipped into sepsis in the back of a pickup truck where, unrecognized, he had been piled with several other wounded suspects after the gunfight. An agent with a flashlight identified him just in time to rush him to the hospital for resuscitation” (pp. 140-41).

“Zubayda left behind computers, cell phones, computer disks, phone books, and two Western-style bank cards for accounts in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He also left behind a voluminous personal diary—in all, there were nearly 10,000 pages of potentially invaluable intelligence. Adding urgency, according to Kiriakou, were the remnants of a bomb that he and two other men had been building on a table, along with plans for what appeared to be an attack on a British school in Lahore. … What put Zubayda in CIA custody was not toughness, it was money. The Pakistani intelligence service bought the original tip leading to his whereabouts with a small bribe to the taxi driver. Afterward, the CIA bought Pakistan’s help for a much larger sum. A CIA source involved at the time disclosed, ‘We paid $10 million for Abu Zubayda.’ [$25 million, according to Mickum] He said the money went to the ISI” (p. 141).

“The FBI took him first to Faisalabad’s Allied Hospital and then to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, 170 miles to the north,” wrote al Qaeda expert Jason Burke, in the Observer. From there “he was whisked by the CIA to Thailand where he was housed in a small, disused warehouse on an active airbase,” according to ABC News investigators Brian Ross and Richard Esposito.

After a few days of FBI interrogations in which “phenomenal” information was divulged (Mayer, p. 156), CIA-contracted military psychologists John Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen arrived with their SERE program, angered and frightened the FBI agents and completely destroyed any chance of getting at valuable information. Zubaydah was stripped naked, put in a cage, waterboarded repeatedly. “Once healthy,” Ross-Esposito wrote, Zubaydah “was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board under after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.” His insanity worsened; he remains in prison without charge. On the bright side, he ID’d Jose Padilla, the suspected “dirty bomber,” gangbanger and U.S. citizen (ibid, p. 155).

Burke described Zubaydah as Bin Laden’s “most influential henchman,” “an apparently mild-mannered … bespectacled, slim-shouldered Arab” who “is trained in every weapon from kalashnikovs to heavy mortars to truck bombs” and possessed “a reputation for efficiency and ruthlessness.” In Burke’s account, Zubaydah was indeed a dangerous terrorist, “linked to British Islamists accused of being al-Qaeda operatives” and, from 1996, “was appointed ‘chief of operations’ … [of] the camps where thousands of volunteers flocking to bin Laden’s [jihadi] banner from across the Islamic world were to be trained.” Burke also cited Ressam, the captured Algerian terrorist. The 9/11 Commission report also leans heavily on Ressam’s testimony, perhaps coerced.

“The government has tried to suggest that all Islamic militants are al Qaeda,” Mickum said. “That’s ludicrous. Most of the camps were for defensive jihad, defense of Afghanistan and Kashmir.” In his testimony, Zubaydah concurred: “…if an aggressor or invader invades Muslim lands, no matter where, then it is every Muslim’s duty to defend the land against the invader.” He referred to Russia and Serbia as examples of aggressors against Muslims (Verbatim Transcript of CSRT Hearing for ISN 10016, Oral Statement, p. 9).

The story of Abu Zubaydah, a thirty-something schizoid who acted as a go-to intermediary and middle-man for logistics but not proven to have done operational planning on a terrorist attack, is in reality a story about ourselves and how we have acted around the world in the name of fighting barbarism. “I think we oversold [Zubaydah’s] value — the administration did — to the American public,” commented Ron Suskind, the author of “The One-Percent Doctrine” and “The Way of the World,” his latest. Abu Zubaydah is “psychologically imbalanced, he has multiple personalities. And he was not involved in various events that we thought he was involved in. During various bombings in the late ‘90s, he was not where we thought he would be.”

“Ultimately, we tortured an insane man and ran screaming at every word he uttered,” Suskind said.

The past is prologue. (Gustav nears landfall.)

Mayor Nagin has ordered a total evacuation, saying Gustav is much more powerful than Katrina. If FEMA once again fails, may God protect the people of New Orleans. (Above: the French quarter, courtesy Matthew Hinton/Agence France-Presse)

A moment of silence.

(Above, the Lower Ninth ward in 2008; courtesy In the Loop)

Sure to be buried underneath the ensuing avalanche of post-Speech commentary from the chattering heads of CNN and other outlets will be a tempered but iconic note of support from a seemingly unlikely source: GOP defector Susan Eisenhower. Here’s what her grandfather, a Republican president who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, said 47 years ago, about the time Obama was born:

“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Why can’t Obama say this? Was Eisenhower really a man of the so-called radical left, as our political culture would have it today?

“John was a wild man. He was funny, with a quick wit and he was intelligent. But he was intent on breaking every USNA regulation in our 4 inch thick USNA Regulations book. And I believe he must have come as close to his goal as any midshipman who ever attended the Academy. John had me ‘coming around’ to his room frequently during my plebe year. And on one occasion he took me with him to escape ‘over the wall’ in the dead of night. He had a taxi cab waiting for us that took us to a bar some 7 miles away. John had a few beers, but forbid me to drink (watching out for me I guess) and made me drink cokes. I could tell many other midshipman stories about John that year and he unbelievably managed to graduate though he spent the majority of his first class year on restriction for the stuff he did get caught doing. In fact he barely managed to graduate, standing 5th from the bottom of his 800 man graduating class.

“… I can verify that John has an infamous reputation for being a hot head. He has a quick and explosive temper that many have experienced first hand. Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to that red button. … He is not a moderate Republican. On some issues he is a maverick. But his voting record is far to the right. I fear for his nominations to our Supreme Court, and the consequent continuing loss of individual freedoms, especially regarding moral and religious issues. John is not a religious person, but he has taken every opportunity to ally himself with some really obnoxious and crazy fundamentalist ministers lately. I was also disappointed to see him cozy up to Bush because I know he hates that man.”

—Phillip Butler on John McCain, a fellow classman at the U.S. Naval Academy and a fellow P.O.W., explaining why he will not vote for him this November

End this war.

Search your feelings.

It’s a shame that the New York Times didn’t publish Sen. McCain’s editorial response to Sen. Obama’s OP-ed last week. You can read the reprint on CNN here. If the Times actually put it to press, maybe a good number of people—especially these so-called moderates and independents who, supposedly, gravitate toward the phony “maverick”—could see just how extreme McCain’s prescriptions really are, and how shallow his understanding of the situation actually is.

“Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy,” McCain declares. The progress in question is the certifiable decline in rampant insane violence. Yes, that is partly due to the troop “surge” begun in 2007. To his credit, McCain also mentions—without naming it—the “Awakening Councils” of Sunni Iraqis, another US-led initiative. Going unmentioned is the crucial factor of the Mahdi army’s Iraq-Iran brokering of ceasefires that happened around the same time. And, needless to say, enough ethnic cleansing was going on in Baghdad and elsewhere that by necessity there is less violence. But, because this is about political expediency, it’s all you, Mac, and your courageous stand for the Surge.

“No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges.” Okay, then why no mention of the gargantuan embassy we are constructing in Baghdad, or the Status of Forces Agreement? “The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback” if we withdraw, warns McCain. I don’t think this even merits much comment aside from repeating the fact that Qaeda fighters were not in Saddam’s Iraq until we launched the invasion five years ago. Iran “stag[ing] a comeback” in Iraq? Sorry, but that’s retarded. Iraq and Iran fought a bloody war for a decade. If Sadr is the radical, he’s also fiercely nationalist and his forces—Badr brigades and others—would repulse any Persian attempt to “conquer” once the vacuum appears following our departure.

I’m no expert, and Obama’s nakedly opportunistic efforts to put a progressive cloak on moves toward the “center” (e.g. right wing, the “responsible” imperial manager role) like his predecessor frighten and dismay me (see cartoon above), but it’s a very dangerous prospect to put into office yet another figure who doesn’t seem to know shit about something with such high stakes. Hopefully I’m wrong.

Baruch Obama.

Going to see a midnight screening of The Dark Knight. Hopefully it will live up to and exceed expectations. Very psyched. But also it might be a bummer, considering.

When asked if he felt that it was more difficult to run against Mr. Obama because of the sensitivities of race, Mr. McCain responded wryly: “I’d like to make a joke, but I can’t.”

C’mon, Mac, let’s hear it!

The president of our United States is a Communist. Happy Fourth!

I like to study memes and conventions and assumptions in our social reality, and I often take the radical critique. It borders on condemnation at times. I see nothing wrong with this and think, instead, that there’s a lot of value to it. But that’s because there is something deeply wrong with me. I don’t think everything is okay. I’m not going to pretend it’s all good, and I’m not going to live not caring what other people think. It’s because I’m not sane. I’m not a mainstream American. But I am a patriot. The people who call and style themselves as patriots are among the most unthinking, callous people on the planet, of any nation. People of the personality type that cares for nothing more than power and domination are a threat to any country’s welfare and future.

As for my patriotism, love of country is not fear of foreign lands and peoples. Fear of the irrational kind projected onto a concern for national domination is the cancer of our times. It is, to use the proper lexicon, jingoism. A barbarian wearing the clothes of a patriot is not a patriot; it only adds insult to injury when the hated decent people who work for patriotic values and ideals are thrown a traitor’s rags and a tyrant’s crown. There are nationalists in our midst, totalitarian to the core, who despise the Enlightenment and everything it represents, our civil liberties and the constitutional pillars of our democratic republic included.

To the decent, humane, enlightened people of my country, I ask this: are you willing to defend your homeland? We revere veterans of military service in far-off lands, at the half-chained service of interests that see their human needs as little more than the logistical matters of ordnance and ammunition. We hate today’s official satan. America “has no permanent enemies,” to quote the current secretary of state. Indeed our enemy is always changing; yesterday it was Sunni dead-enders, today it is Shiite triumphalists. Yesterday it was Khomeini, today Saddam; yesterday, Qaddafi, today Noriega. And on and on all the way back. What is truth when you cannot find your friends? Or what is justice when you find a new enemy at every corner? We need to take a good hard look in the mirror. I already dread what we’ll see, if we care to open our eyes. Happy July Fourth. Let the bombs burst in air.

“I’m an outsider by choice, but not truly. It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.”

“Scratch any cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

1937-2008
R.I.P.

R.I.P. Tim Russert.

“The right questions were asked. I think there’s a lot of critics—and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one—who think that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, ‘This is bogus,’ and ‘You’re a liar,’ and ‘Why are you doing this?’ that we didn’t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.”

—David Gregory, NBC News correspondent, 9 June 2008 (as quoted by Scott Ritter, here)

The “right questions” are those, as Gregory implies, that do not question the basic assumptions behind the enterprise; that would be irresponsible. Journalists are not supposed to “debate the policy” or, God forbid, debate the Commander in Chief. Forgive me if I cannot help but picture Pharaoh’s scribes.

“We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq.”

— New York Times, 6 June 2008 (June 2008!)

What an irresponsible, ultra-liberal newspaper. (The report from the Senate selective-intelligence committee here.)

From the “minority opinion” — written by Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss and Chris Bond, a fine trio of dissenters: “Ultimately, these [Senate] reports reveal a dubious agenda of vainly trying to prove the often quoted, but false, absolutely partisan, slogan, ‘Bush lied and people died’” (p. 166). They’re right: over 4,000 Americans are still alive, safe with their families, in one piece — and not one dishonest word ever escaped the President’s mouth.

They’re very right. Far-right, one could say.

“Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

— President Bush, as quoted by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez (ret.) in his new tell-all memoir Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, shortly after insurgents in Falluja murdered, hacked and strung up four contractors in April 2004 (Sanchez cited by Michael Abramowitz, in the Washington Post, 2 June 2008, A11); Falluja was extensively bombarded and invaded that November (including the use of white phosphorous), an assault that wiped out hundreds of civilians and ended any hope of pacifying Iraq

“At the risk of repeating myself, this is the crucial difference between patriotism and nationalism: patriotism is love of one’s country and defensive, while nationalism is expressed typically through contempt and fear of other nations and a will to power over other nations. The Iraq war was made possible by a propaganda campaign by the government, the exploitation of public fear and anger, the warmongering of nationalists and the twisting of patriotic sentiment into support for a war of aggression by casting the war dishonestly as one of self-defense.”

— Daniel Larson

If such real-early polling can be relied upon, given that the general election is only, oh, about half a year away, it appears that 11 states are in play and that, if held today, Obama would quite likely beat McCain very, very narrowly. Remember, Obama is that radical Black nationalist Islamic fundamentalist far-leftist right? (More like super-centrist corporate-friendly pacifier... oh now I sound like Paul Street!)

Every so often you encounter some real gems. Keep these in mind for Memorial Day:

“Americans know in their gut that, as pathological and silly as Americanism can be, it’s knit into the fabric of all our lives, so much so that even staunch critics of America have absolutely no desire to jump out of America’s skin. No American really wants to replace America. They just want a better America, a more truly American America.”

— James Poulos

“What kind of culture defines ‘maturity’ as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and ‘realism’? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses.”

— Mark Slouka

“Although there has been a great deal of discussion of the problems that await Obama among white men should he win the Democratic nomination, this analysis suggests that while McCain certainly has a strength among this group, it is no more of a strength against Obama than it would be against Clinton. Clinton’s slight advantage among blue-collar white men is offset by Obama’s advantage among white-collar white men.

The bigger issue appears to be Obama’s problems among white women, when compared to how Clinton would perform among this group. Obama loses to McCain by nine points among white women, while Clinton wins by three points. Clinton does better than Obama among both blue-collar and white-collar white women.

All in all, although both Democrats are to a degree handicapped against McCain among white voters, Clinton would perform better than Obama in a general-election matchup among non-Hispanic whites. Combining white voters of both genders, the current analysis shows that McCain wins over Obama among whites, 53% to 38%, and beats Clinton by a considerably smaller 51% to 42% margin.

It is important to note that Obama runs about as well vs. McCain as Clinton does, and both Democrats currently maintain a slight advantage over McCain in general-election trial heats. So any weaker relative performance for Obama vs. McCain among a demographic group (such as white women or lower-educated voters) is made up for by a stronger relative performance among another group (such as blacks or higher-educated voters).”

— Gallup, today

QUOTATION OF THE WEEK:

“I wonder if Obama’s and [Ron] Paul’s amazing web success is a harbinger of a more libertarian and self-empowered political culture — because the web does not reward obedience, submission, or authoritarianism. It saddens me a great deal to see conservatism in America increasingly lean toward top-down, authoritarian, fear-based politics. In its best incarnation, conservatism is about self-government, individual freedom and hope-based politics. It’s about trusting people, not corralling them. In this, the web is the right’s natural ally, and it’s a very telling sign of American conservatism’s decadence that it doesn’t get the Internet as effectively as others.”

— Andrew Sullivan, 9 May 2008

Sullivan is my favorite conservative commentator and thinker, pretty much by far; these days it seems “conservative” has become practically synonymous with belligerence and douchery. So it’s good to see such a decent and intelligent voice.

C’mon, you ungrateful Araboushim! Dance and celebrate!

Amid the flurry of news about the North Carolina/Indiana primaries, there is a whole world out there: over 20,000 are dead in Burma from a cyclone. Maybe you missed it.

“Every Palestinian is a militant because everyone (sooner or later) wants Israel off their land, out of their lives, and forgotten like a horrible dream. It is for this reason that they are all equal targets: none of them is intelligent enough to understand that their land isn’t their land, their lives are not their lives, and their horrible dream is their present and future. Have no pity on those who don’t get it.”

— Jennifer Loewenstein (clearly a self-hating Jew!)

MoveOn can be disrespectful at times. I personally think that, for some reason, a carrot just might be totally useless as leader of the free world.

“…nothing in the region would be so difficult to solve except for the underlying cause of the unrest and dissension that exists there—that is, the Arab-Israel quarrel. This quarrel seems to have no limit in either intensity or in scope. Everybody in the Moslem and Jewish worlds is affected by it. It is so intense that the second any action is taken against one Arab state, by an outsider, all the other Arab and Moslem states seem to regard it as a Jewish plot and react violently. All this complicates the situation enormously.

As we began to uncover evidence that something was building up in Israel, we demanded pledges from Ben-Gurion that he would keep the peace. We realized that he might think he could take advantage of this country because of the approaching election and because of the importance that so many politicians in the past have attached to our Jewish vote. I gave strict orders to the State Department that they should inform Israel that we would handle our affairs exactly as though we didn’t have a Jew in America. The welfare and best interests of our own country were to be the sole criteria on which we operated.”

— President Eisenhower (November 2, 1956)

What an anti-Israel extremist. [Sighing sarcasm.]

I don’t trust you.

Remember our suffering. Not theirs, at our hands. Sorry if I am bitter.

“Palestinians will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” (Matan Vilnai, Israeli Deputy Minister of Defense, 29 February 2008)

Due to cutoffs in fuel, the UN refugee relief agency cannot deliver food to one million Gazans. There are about 1.5 million people living there. (I feel so ashamed.)

A few uncomfortable facts from the Land of the Free™: we have the highest incarceration rate on the planet. We imprison more of our population than any other country. Over half of inmates in federal prisons in 2006 are there for drug offenses. These data come from a report in today’s New York Times, mirroring the earlier work in February of the Pew Center for the States which found that for the first time in US history over one in 100 American adults are in prison or jail. Proud to be an American...

Happy Pesach!

Finally, some recognition of a global disaster. (Yet once again the focus is on the threat of political volatility and not the more basic humanitarian problem of millions facing starvation.)

“Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. … The Palestinians are not as nice as the Tibetans in the eyes of the world. But the Palestinian people deserve exactly the same rights as the occupied Tibetan people … there is no difference between a Tibetan and a Palestinian — they both deserve the exact same freedom. … There is also no point in asking which occupation is crueler, the Chinese or the Israeli. The competition is harsh and bitter. The Chinese killed and imprisoned more Tibetans, in Lhasa there is less freedom of expression than in Nablus, but in general, the extent of Israeli repression in the territories is much greater today than Chinese repression in Tibet. Nowhere in the world today is there a region more besieged and confined than Gaza. And what is the result? The world calls to boycott the occupier in the case of China, while absurdly, with regard to the Palestinians, the world is boycotting the occupied entity, or at least its elected leadership, and not the occupier. This, it seems, has no parallel in history. … Is there any other way to describe this, except a double standard?”

— Gideon Levy (in Ha’aretz, 13 April 2008)

Why is the worldwide crisis in food prices considered a nonevent by every major US news outlet? According to the Google news aggregator, only the BBC, Voice of America, AP and the Sydney Morning Herald gave it any coverage. Checking the CNN homepage; it’s another horse race story about Clinton and Obama, this time on their “faith.”

Maybe this is premature; I’m going to check the New York Times. The top story in their world news page reads that the National Security adviser of the United States “said foreign leaders would be more effective influencing China with… ‘quiet diplomacy’”—let Beijing immolate a few dozen more Tibetans, we don’t want to spoil the celebration. Okay, here’s a bulletin closer to the mark; it addresses the riots in Haiti over “rising food prices”. But no big picture. Maybe when millions of Americans are in danger of starvation our media will take note that there is a problem.

NOTE: So apparently I missed this but the main page still has Hillary-Barack at the faith forum as their top story.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut (from “Requiem,” in his final book A Man Without a Country, p. 137 [2005 hardcover edition, Seven Stories Press]):

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

And this wonderful bit of prose earlier on that only grows more haunting and, well, painfully honest and eloquent (from chapter 9, pp. 98-101):

“It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the U.S. Constitution.

“But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.

“I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: ‘C-Students from Yale.’

“George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

“To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, and published in 1941. Read it!

“Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

“PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

“And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.

“So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

“They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!”

An American patriot left us one year ago today. You will always be remembered; God help us if we don’t.

p.s. Last month, an ABC reporter asked about two-thirds of the population opposing the war and whether that should matter; the Vice President of the United States answered, “So?” The reporter, Martha Raddatz, followed: “So, you don’t care what the American people think?” Arrived this contemptuous remark in reply: “No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls” (editorial in the Battleboro Reformer of Vermont, “They don’t care”)

This is funny to me because sometime last year I tried to compile a list of the towns the area codes encompass but then I just found that someone -- a feminist no less -- actually took the trouble to map it. (Just for fun.)

Today marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. These are extended passages from his April 4, 1967, speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (see the entire address here)

…In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.… Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

…[W]e increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy — and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us — not their fellow Vietnamese — the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs….

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one “Vietcong”-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them — mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

…What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

…Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.”

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

…The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy—and laymen—concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

…I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

…War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of Red China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

…This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept — so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force — has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

…If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

[Rest in peace.]

So I saw a very interesting bumper sticker today, which is the fifth anniversary of the ground invasion of Iraq, that speaks volumes about the silence in the mainstream discussion about the impeachment option (it may not be too late). But it attacked the burning issue of our constitutional order from a different angle, reading: “Support the Troops – Impeach Bush Now.” And, if you think about it, don’t our fighting men and women deserve a more competent and able commander-in-chief? Everyone talks about the “antiwar” case for removing Bush from office, but what about the “pro-war” case? Where’s Anthony Cordesman, our respected military affairs think-tanker, talking about the insult to our soldiers that they be victim to a chief policy-maker (and commander, needless to say) of such ineptitude? Why should our troops continue to sacrifice their lives for a man who was never fit for the job, and for a strategy that will ensure they die in vain? Does anyone really care about them?

SIDEBAR NOTE: Five years, half a decade of war. 4,000 Americans dead. (Nearly one million Iraqis dead.) $3 trillion down the hole. Iraqi society devastated, basic services still unavailable to many. Internal displacement and refugees in the millions. Terrorism a bigger threat to the United States than ever. Al Qaeda and Taliban resurgent, the Hydra that endures our fire, enriched by the conflagration we initiated by invading Iraq. It’s time to leave Mesopotamia like the British have before us so long ago. The question now is how to exit without ensuring imminent genocide and a deepening of the ethnic cleansing and humanitarian crisis that already exists. It’s also time to put out to pasture the war criminals in our capital seat who have killed thousands of our sons, daughters, mothers and fathers, and maimed, scarred and crippled many thousands more.

I believe it was John Kenneth Galbraith, the respected economist, who once said that “the only respectable form of socialism in America is socialism for the rich.” And it is obvious that that’s happening right before our eyes, shattering whatever illusion left about the “free market” in the United States. We do not have one. Instead, we have, as E.J. Dionne was good to note in today’s Washington Post, a system of corporate welfare that—instead of enduring the rigors and sacrifices of real risk and self-discipline that the “market” instills in everyday people, like the people who have really suffered but, really, to hell with them because they’re not rugged individuals like us right?—expects a government hand-out when they start to feel the pain.

Condemning the Hamas rocketing against Sderot and Ashkelon is a no-brainer, let’s make that clear. But the Israeli retaliatory responses are, in my judgment, excessively heavy-handed and counter-productive. Taking my cue from news reports from several sources, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead on this front is about 100 to one (over the past several months of fighting since the Hamas victory in January 2006). It is now almost beyond dispute that Israeli policy is, in effect, a collective punishment of the Gazan population, and that’s despicable as a general principle.

Although I have no military background, I think it’s fair to observe that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) strategy seems to be that by exercising intermittent displays of force instead of a full-out invasion, terrible enough in terms of the human impact but more cost-effective, Hamas will be incrementally weakened but not destroyed. In other words, destroying Hamas — and to be real, I’d like to see the organization eradicated — would probably totally destroy Gaza and its 1.5 million people. Not a pretty public relations picture. So now we also have this lovely statement by Matan Vilnai, the Deputy Minister of Defense:

“Palestinians will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”*

Anyone who honestly cares about the future of Israeli society and its wonderful people would surely see at once the obscenity of those words, and join me in calling for his immediate shit-canning and dismissal. (Hamas “spokesmen” predictably dubbed their foe “new Nazis,” according to a report in Yediot Aharonot.) So what to do, when uncontested sovereign territory undergoes near-constant attack? I wish I had an easy answer because I do not; but I hope it’s not naïve or unreasonable of me to declare that threatening annihilation is not the best choice — nor is it anything other than an insult to the Jewish people and a defamation of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Period.

*Min. Vilnai used the word ‘shoah,’ connotative of disaster or calamity — but unmistakably a direct reference to, and unconscionable exploitation of, the Nazi Holocaust.

Creatures from the Gaza Zoo spotted escaping their pen (above), venturing out for a totally unnecessary shopping spree. Get back to your cages, wild beasts!

Dept. of Homeland Security: Preggers are to be shot on sight.

Full report here.

In December, the State of New Jersey put a heralded moratorium on the death penalty. Just yesterday, Nebraska ended the use of the electric chair, giving this reason (courtesy Andrew Sullivan, a sharp conservative writer, who cited the decision):

We recognize the temptation to make the prisoner suffer, just as the prisoner made an innocent victim suffer. But it is the hallmark of a civilized society that we punish cruelty without practicing it. Condemend [sic] prisoners must not be tortured to death, regardless of their crimes. And the evidence clearly proves that unconsciousness and death are not instantaneous for many condemned prisoners. These prisoners will, when electrocuted, consciously suffer the torture that high voltage electric current inflicts on the human body. The evidence shows that electrocution inflicts intense pain and agonizing suffering. Therefore, electrocution as a method of execution is cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Nebraska Constitution.”

There’s a lot to remain proud of in these United States. We are a humane people, and nearly a decade of arch-reactionary, authoritarian (mis)rule cannot, could not, and will not change that. I would also add that it is a hallmark of a civilized society that we punish terrorism without practicing terror.

Call for the abolition of the “superdelegate” system, which is hideously antidemocratic; in the next several months, also call for the abolition of the electoral college. As it stands now, the popular voice may become subverted by entrenched systems of power and privilege that many of us do not entirely understand—all of which are woefully underreported if not ignored by our media. That said, my earnest wish is that Obama can pull through and defeat Clinton, the California returns notwithstanding.

“It was painful. It’s painful now. … There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. That devastated me.”

— Colin Powell, 8 September 2005

And so it was: a used, duped man helped sell a war that is now facing its sixth year.

Democracy in America Revisited

We face the radicalization of the obvious. The zeitgeist demands that we deny what is right before us and give reality all manner of euphemistic descriptions and evasions. And so we want simple answers for everything. But, on the other hand, the social reality is not so complicated that we cannot speak of it. We stand on the self-destroyed scaffolds of the New Right and the ashes of the New Left, generations removed from the promises of social democracy and looking toward an uncertain, chaotic future, mindful of the need to rise above the tired categories of “left” and “right” and demonizations of the Other. My generation has enslaved itself to trendy, escapist and cynical patterns of thought, as we, to borrow the language of Port Huron, look uncomfortably to the world we inherit from our vantage in college dormitories.

We have so many opportunities ahead of us and are so privileged. Social change on an institutional, systemic level is a moral imperative that rests on our shoulders. This should not be of academic interest, or the province of “change agent” elites, but the work of ordinary citizens. We are a republic only if we can keep it, to borrow Benjamin Franklin’s words. I have no doubt that my words will be given some or other ideological sign or tag. We can ask what were the tags appended to the proponents of the American Enlightenment and revolutionaries who resisted colonialism? It is surely recognizable.

So we must proceed from elementary facts. One of these is that we have betrayed the Founders in word and spirit, for which we ought to be deeply ashamed and embarrassed. The second is that even acknowledging that fact is illegitimately tarred radical. Orwell, at one point in his life an anarcho-syndicalist fighting fascism in Spain, wrote that to “see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” What faces us is a bald-faced betrayal, a usurpation of American liberty and the Constitutional order that has thrown us, atomized, confused and self-deluded, into a denial of the reality before us. To speak honestly, the litany of high crimes perpetrated by our government need not be reviewed here. Have we been awake?

It should suffice to say that we cannot afford to approach the world as liberals or conservatives, terms now more worthless than international peacekeeping missions. “Liberal,” for example, when not a pejorative term of abuse and derision, means in an operative sense accommodating of neocolonial foreign policy and “centrist” management of the domestic polity in an arch-regressive, statist direction for the sake of political expediency (Clinton). It can at times take on a charismatic form (Obama) or fashion itself as populist (Edwards), but all are a far cry from traditional Enlightenment notions of freedom and equality. “Conservative” has been deformed beyond recognition.

Tocqueville wrote admiringly of the impressive “equality of conditions” that gave meaning to freedom in the United States. No big government enforced such conditions of life; the society was structured along the contours of small townships and direct participatory democracy was realizable. Much has obviously changed, like industrialization—not altogether a bad thing—but some things, thank God, do not. The preamble to our Constitution still speaks of a strange concept called the “general welfare.” What of it now? Does it even remain coherent or sensible to talk of American society, when the dominant culture encourages us all to think only of ourselves so we can “get ahead” by climbing over everyone else’s backs as we all ascend the same pyramid?

I believe in the power of individuals, and think of myself as an individual with the rights of an individual and, hopefully, a free mind. So, for example, my attraction to democratic socialist theory, a school of thought obvious enough at several points (i.e., the insane idea that people, as human beings, ought to own themselves and not submit to state or corporate power), is tempered by several caveats. Yet politics has discredited itself. But we avoid any and all things “political” at our own expense, and at the peril of generations unborn, in these times.

Charlie Wilson’s War?

Your application was intriguing … What you didn’t have was the strong news reporting background of many of the other candidates. [I actually submitted a dozen or so pieces from my college paper] … You clearly have many of the instincts that a very good journalist should have. In particular, we applaud your curiosity and your commitment to search out your own truths, rather than to swallow a party line.”

Excerpted from my rejection letter from the Washington, D.C. bureau of The New York Times for this summer’s Rosenbaum editorial internship. If it’s a good thing to not be a partisan...?

Here’s my problem with much of the post-N.H. commentary with regard to the Clinton “victory.” Particularly, with third-wave “feminists” like Gloria Steinem, who wrote in the New York Times the day before the primary a gushing, grotesque article about HRC that made me briefly consider the wisdom of throwing up. (I did not.) Lemme pull it out of the trash bin, just a sec… here we go. January 8: “Women Are Never Front-Runners.”

Right out of the gate Steinem is playing the ‘gender card’ at full tempo, without any shame at all. The biggest illogic of the whole thing is the insinuation that opposing Hillary Clinton means I am opposing the advancement of women in politics. And that’s flat-out absurd. Yes, there is no question that women have it tougher, that they have a higher hurdle in the political arena, and that there are popular stereotypes they have to overcome. But that’s not the point: HRC is not as polarizing, unpopular and shrill and power-mad and self-congratulatory as she is because she’s a woman, but because she’s Hillary Clinton. It is actually, in a way, sexist of Steinem to suggest, ever so implicitly, that Clinton represents all women. No, not all women, but a subset of career-oriented women who are not really that interested in equality but more intent on shaming men into thinking they are automatically “sexist” or “misogynistic” because they oppose individuals like Hillary Clinton. In other words, it is sexist to argue that opposing her candidacy is perforce sexist.

Here’s Steinem: “I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate [not if you count Obama’s service as a state senator], an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training…” Wait, stop, stop right there. On-the-job training? Are you kidding me? She is not getting hired; this is an election, not a job selection process. Steinem concludes that “[w]e”—i.e. women—“have to be able to say: ‘I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.’” (her emphasis) The first part is dubious at best, and the second is completely patronizing. It’s like saying that I support Joe Lieberman—and I certainly do not, for several reasons—because he’s Jewish. Just ridiculous.

NOTE: It is interesting to take a look at the letters published in Thursday’s Times. The best came from two men and two women writers (because, unlike the Steinem-type feminists I am interested in equality; there was a feminazi forum at my college some time ago, whose breakdown was three women speakers and the token guy).

Daniel Grossman of Clifton, NJ writes, “It is unfortunate that the Clintons continue to resort to this type of manipulation [Hillary had gotten a tad choked up the day before NH]. … Victimhood is not a sufficient criterion for being president.”

Karin Kimbrough adds: “As a black woman and a feminist, I find it depressing to see Gloria Steinem set up this tired, false debate as to whether a black man or a white woman is more disadvantaged in national politics. … My parents (who are Ms. Steinem’s age) vividly recall racism in the Deep South, including barriers to voting as well as the barriers to many other supposedly granted rights like eating in restaurants, staying in hotels and using public facilities. These were all rights white women actively enjoyed.” I’m reminded of the Carlin rant about how feminists like Steinem “don’t give a shit about black women’s problems, they don’t give a shit about Latino women, all they care about is their own reproductive freedom and their pocketbooks.” Then he goes on to agree about their characterization of men as moral monsters and how it’s terrible that women “put on a man-tailored suit with shoulder pads” and “imitate the worst habits of men”—like, tada! Hillary Clinton!

But I digress. Phillip Ruland from Laguna Beach (CA) chips in with the fair-minded sentiment that “such a self-regarding emotional display”—I believe a good paraphrase can be something like “oh, look I’m about to cry, can’t you see how you should agree that I’m entitled to be your leader?”—“is hardly the type of character trait one desires to see in a presidential candidate—man or woman.” And Marilyn Kiss of Staten Island writes that she has been “firmly in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp” until she cast a vote in favor of authorization of use of force against Iraq in 2002. “For me,” Ms. Kiss—couldn’t help it, sorry—“international peace trumps national feminism, since it also takes into consideration the lives of women and girls in Baghdad and beyond.” Need I repeat what Carlin said?

Alas, we cannot expect everyone to be levelheaded, male or female. This is Carolyn Kirkland of Fort Worth, Texas, who makes this asinine statement: “Gloria Steinem ... may have ... helped turn an election. I am amazed at how many of my women friends e-mailed her Op-Ed article to their friends because she put into words what so many of us feel in our bones.” Oh, how long, oh Lord, how long?

[Addendum, Jan. 11: in her 1983 book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions Gloria Steinem made the ominous foreshadowing, “One day, an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the earth” (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p. 218), er, the Democratic nomination.]

(Photo credit Zombie/AP)

...and CNN calls it for Hillary. Damn.

The goddamned Associated Press and NBC just called New Hampshire for Clinton; CNN still thinks it is too close to call. Which it is. Looks like a dead-heat. Have the college-town votes been counted yet? They cannot just ignore 30% of the precincts can they?

STOP HILLARY NOW. Come on, college kids!

Our voting machines still do not have paper; and there are -- still -- questions about their reliability. This is some ridiculous shit.

“I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there’s at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world. But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven’t known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war. Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I’m facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn’t have a sense of humor?

“But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision. Because it is pretty clear that the average American would not have supported the Iraq War had they known the costs going in. I am far too cynical to believe that any future debate over war will be any less vitriolic or emotional, but perhaps a few more people will realize just what those costs can be the next time.”

— Andrew Olmsted, a soldier and a blogger, who was killed on-duty in Iraq on January 3 (courtesy Obsidian Wings)

God rest him in peace.

It’s time to seriously consider doing this, as a sensible and prudent measure to end the Iraq war. If our Congress can’t de-fund it, the American people can. I’m not sure how this can be legally, or if it will be successful in crippling the war machine and its efforts to suck more and more of our sons and daughters to their assured slaughter for no intelligible reason or end in sight, but it may be worth a try to check it out. I’m not a pacifist, but this is not a just war and our soldiers need to come home. Make it a New Years’ resolution.

These are heavy times, and it’s easy (and understandable) to want to just tune out and wait it out, hoping for the “opposition” to roll in and fix everything. But we need to make sure that future generations know that we didn’t all just sit around and wait; that we cared about our country; and that we knew that the times were too serious for frivolous campaign games and electoral chicanery to not stand up and defend our Constitution, and indeed our way of life. Privacy International just released a massive study that troublingly points to the conclusion that the United States has joined the ranks of the “endemic surveillance societies” of the world; our status over the past year has been “deteriorating.” Russia and China are also listed as endemic surveillance societies, obviously.

It ought to inspire shame that we’ve managed to join them — and they’re totalitarian societies, no less. We did it in a democracy. But there is still much to celebrate, and I hope everyone had a wonderful New Years’ Day. I will never be afraid to say I love my country.

Happy New Year.

So I’ve been home for the second full day since my ten-day trip to Israel ended, a wonderful, amazing, incredible time. I hope to return someday, and make aliyah. And I also hope to see the people I met once again somewhere across these United States. I got bused with mostly Univ. of Florida people, great people, very cool people. And I hope to meet the wonderful Israelis we met once again, someday, somehow. Thank God for Facebook; I’ve been able to get my pictures developed (woot, Motofoto!) and posted. I usually don’t do personal stuff on this blog but I feel it is appropriate, more than appropriate here. We did, and saw, and experienced so much. Unfortunately I have to spend the next few days I am home until I return to college to draft my undergrad paper, something about media critiques and propaganda.

So I’m sababa (cool) and wondering about haMatzav (the situation) and everything, hoping I can stay connected with my new hevre (friends). The biblical Hebrew I’ve taken, one semester’s worth, has not prepared me. Nor should it have. I’ll continue with it, and throw in the new conversationals I’ve picked up. And here’s to the children we spent time with at the daycare center, a government-financed home for them to go to as respite from their “at-risk” or otherwise dysfunctional family lives. Atsuv (sad), I know, but at least they’re happy there, and here’s hoping they turn out as great as they are now.

Israeli music and food and sights and sounds, it’s still unfolding. I observed some interesting parallels between the culture and what I saw in Spain some three years ago. On one point they’re both Mediterranean countries. So now I’ve seen both ends of it. Balkan Beat Box; these guys are incredible. Bought a copy of their record, “Nu Med,” on the way home at the Ben-Gurion airport. Ben Gurion, son of a lion cub. My Hebrew name is Ari, simply meaning lion; well the Kabbalists won’t settle for simple meanings. Ari. I knew someone named Ari once. He was the brother of a girl I once knew, Yelena, a very rambunctious kid. I’m rambling, and digressing.

Probably going to sleep soon, been quite sick all day. Estoy enferma. It’s a winter thing.

Thank God for conservative writers like Andrew Sullivan. I’ve been a long-time reader of his, and it appears that the impeachment option is not only common-sensical but, by now, practically mandatory if we are to remain a constitutional republic, and a free society. I’ve taken the liberty to post (above) a delightful memo he clipped on his blog, simply because it’s so fucking chilling. The writing is on the wall, I fear.

Some words on the Ron Paul phenomenon: how has it come to pass that anti-war, anti-empire and pro-Constitution positions are nearly universally labeled radical and fringe?

(Disclosure: Some weeks ago I contributed $25 to the campaign, my first and hopefully last political donation. Therefore supporters of his candidacy are hopelessly biased.)

“You see, my mom, she saw Kristallnacht; and my dad, he saw worse/the land called Lithuania was the country of his birth/and before the Auschwitz ovens fired, the Nazis went there first/

“So I heard their stories and, well, I guess I keep ‘em someplace in my mind/Though I go about my business pretty carefree most of the time, when I see the mark of Nuremberg I have to speak my mind/

“Excess nationalism; religious intolerance; corporate worship; unchecked military growth, with a global reach/Sounds like fascism to me.

“… I remember a boat full of dreams carryin’ my mom and my dad/And I can’t be silent about the only country I’ve ever had.”

— Dan Bern, October 2004
Nelsonville, Ohio

There is democracy in Venezuela. Take that, Chavistas.

THE GOOD WORD
“If only holiness were measured by the volume of our incessant chatter, we would be universally praised as the most holy nation on earth. But in our fretful, theatrical piety, we have come to mistake noisiness for holiness, and we have presumed to know, with a clarity and certitude that not even the angels dared claim, the divine will for the world. We have organized our needs with the confidence that God is on our side, now and always, whether we feed the poor or corral them into ghettos.”

— Charles Marsh, “God and Country,” The Boston Globe, July 8, 2007

Marsh prefaces his article by quoting a line from the old Dylan song: “If God is on our side, He’ll stop the next war…” Studs Terkel interviewed Dylan (Zimmerman) in 1963. He was asked about another song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and in response he explained that he wasn’t “talking about that hard rain meaning atomic rain,” but instead that “it seems to me like the bomb is a god in some sort of way,… and people will worship it actually. You have to be nice to it, you know. You have to be careful what you say about it. People work on it, they go six days a week and work on it, you have people designing it, you know, it’s a whole new show. … I don’t believe they’re bad people.

“…What’s gonna happen, there’s got to be an explosion of some kind. The hard rain that’s gonna fall. In the last verse when I say, ‘When the pellets of poison are flooding the waters,’ that means all the lies, you know, all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers. All you have to do is think for a minute. They’re trying to take people’s brains away. Which maybe has been done already. I have to think it’s been done. All the lies I consider poison.” (Quoted in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott [New York: Wenner, 2006], pp. 7, 8)

Poisonous pieties and self-righteous platitudes, to boot.

Sir, I beg your pardon,” said the sandy-haired young man. “There is nothing here. You don’t seem to understand. The Middle East, all of this, this is nothing.” He gestured around the new living room and toward the window, where we could see a half-finished house, obscured in the fading winter light by a haze of blowing sand.

“The Middle East,” he said, firmly taking another crescent, “is just a corridor, a pass-through for great powers. Always has been. Throughout history. Even more now.”

“But the Golden Age,” I protested. “The Arabian Nights.”

“That was centuries ago.” The young man laughed disdainfully. “Do you see any magnificent palaces in Baghdad today?” …

Mr. Kirtikar set down his biscuit-filled plate. “Ah, Sami,” he said to the sandy-haired young man. “You’re not being fair to our guests. We are all here, my dear Sami, most probably, is that you do not see a long-range future for yourself here in Baghdad.”

“Why?” asked Bob. “Is it politics? Religious discrimination against Christians? East-West tensions? The Arab-Israeli conflict?” Bob came out with it. The company looked slightly embarrassed. Mrs. Kirtikar offered more tea. There were more cardamom crescents and also large round thick cookies with whole almonds pressed into their centers.

Sami nodded. He had apparently decided to take this strange American seriously. “All of those things,” he replied. “Yes. I would like to go to America. Maybe you could give me a list of places where there are scholarships available? Because,” he rushed on, “well, in addition to all of those things you mentioned you must remember that this is a poor area, a poor country. Without resources such as you are accustomed to taking for granted.” He laughed, bitterly, I thought. “Nomads. The desert. Living off of goats’ milk. You have surely heard of all that, even in rich America.”

“But what about oil?” Bob asked. “You have plenty of that.”

Mr. Kirtikar sniffed. “The British take most of it. Iraq gets only a small share. But you see the British made a great investment and they are the ones who brought the technology that made it possible for Iraq to exploit their oil. So they deserve the largest share.”

Was he serious? I stared at him. He was, and he was not finished talking. “And the Arab-Israeli conflict, that is not such a problem. It will pass with time.”

— Elizabeth and Robert Fernea, The Arab World: Personal Encounters, ch. 14, “Baghdad and Al-Nahra, Iraq” (1956) [New York: Anchor Books, 1985], pp. 334, 335