THE PICTURE ON THE RADIO

I have 3 daughters. All 3 are now successful, amazing adults. The oldest was almost 7 when the youngest was born. My middle daughter was almost 6 then. I listen to the radio for my news because I find myself getting too emotional when I watch most news on television. Sometimes, however, the reporter on the radio paints so vivid and disturbing a picture with mere, momentarily unambiguous words that those words conjure up is more vivid than any photograph or film from the greatest of masters. No masterpiece by Diane Arbus, Robert Caps or W. Eugene Smith could be any clearer.

Where I live the day was sunny, a harbinger of early spring. Perhaps it was also like that where the father the reporter described sat. This father sat wailing on the littered ground near a hospital. He cradled in his arms 2 children, a boy of 7 years and a girl of 2. He kept trying to open his daughter's eyes in vain insistence that she remain alive. This toddler was as dead as her older brother. 

According to the war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his genocidal government, this father and his dead babies are Hamas. According to the murderous scum who currently govern the nation of Israel this father trying to reanimate his dead daughter with some impossible magic from his tears is a terrorist.

No such horror ever befell me or my daughters but once my youngest nearly died because she'd caught a flu. I woke one Saturday morning late when she was just 9 months old  because she hadn't cried for a diaper change and feeding. For a week she hadn't been able to keep anything down, not Jello water, not Coke syrup, not even Emetrol. Now she was a listless ragdoll, eyes open in a motionless body. I got her to, first, a pediatrician and then to a hospital where an IV line ending in syringe larger than her delicate arm pushed fluid and life back into her. 

I was too enfolded in frantic efforts to save my daughter to fall to falling tears. I don't remember whether I spent that night in the hospital with her or just many of the other nights during her stay but I did stay by her crib about half the nights of her stay. She is now a nurse practitioner who works in hospital Emergency Rooms. She has 3 daughters of her own. My experience is in no way commensurate with that of the father in Gaza wailing over his 2 dead children after Netanyahu's resumption of his genocide in Gaza. Still the fear and distress I felt 45 years ago came streaming back to me as I heard of this poor father on March 18th. 

I can also honestly state that we're I cradling my children murdered by a war criminal more concerned with retaining his political power than in pretending to understand the least mote of human decency, I would be a terrorist from that moment on. I would find no space in my heart for any Israeli father or mother and his or her children. The next time a terrorist act by some Palestinian parent unconscionably murders some Israeli children don't place the blame on the Palestinians but rather lay those  children's bodies on Benjamin Netanyahu's doorstep. 

For each grieving parent of Palestine should there not be a matching, grieving parent in Israel? Should there not be a tear-filled Israeli eye for each tear-blinded Palestinian eye until, as Mahatma Ghandi observed, the whole world is blind?

It should be obvious to anyone with even a small amount of human decency and commitment to logic that to stop the murders the murders must stop. People on both sides of the Gaza border must have sufficient food and water and medical care and supplies. People on both sides of the Gaza border must have the right and ability to govern themselves in a way that is responsible to themselves and to their neighbors. People on neither side of the Gaza border should be subjected to some lunatic's pipedream of a casino infested beachfront resort unless it is their own will to do so. People on neither side of the Gaza border should be required to bow down before the statue of some golden calf, especially if the statue is of a golden bullshitter.

The Netanyahu government and Bibi himself are terrorists just as surely as were those Palestinians who attacked on October 7, 2023. Eliminating the murderers of Hamas is a useful goal as long as the murders of the current Israeli government are eliminated too by shipping them to the International Criminal Court and letting them rot in prison cells. Maybe Netanyahu and his equally criminal right-wing cronies could be forced to share cells with murderous Hamas criminals so they could express their blind hatred against one another while decent Israeli and Palestinians work out how to peacefully share the land of their father, Abraham.

Finally, I want to make one other point clear:

Peacefully demonstrating opposition to any government is NOT terrorism.

If you pass through a park, quadrangle, hall or room in which someone you don't like is advocating something you dislike you and only you are responsible for your feelings. Unless those you oppose accost you in some way you have not been harmed. Seeing something or someone from a distance and disliking it is nothing to you so long as you can leave the place and no longer see it. If you are free to leave or just turn your head and not see it and you claim this item is assault, it's you who need counseling and potential removal from society rather than someone else.

If someone shouts, "From the river to the sea!" from across a college campus in your direction that might be anti-Semitism but it's not any kind of assault until and unless that someone is shouting again when you are both toe to toe and nose to nose. Unfortunately, in the United States of 2025 shouting, "Support Ukraine" could get you deported regardless of your citizenship status or your distance from some neo-fascist either home grown or from South Africa.

But, as usual, I digress.

Neither Gaza nor Israel nor the world need another grieving father holding his dead children. The clear way to stop more such horror is to stop the murdering of civilians. The clear way to stop the genocide in Gaza is to remove Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet of fascist fanatics from government. By elections would benefit everyone but removal is the imperative and I'm open to suggestions as long as the remover isn't Palestinian.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM IN AMERICA

We won’t see Rep. Peter King (Neo-Fascist, N.Y.) bring it up in his hearings into domestic terrorism but if I were Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new leader of Al Qaeda, I would be finding ways to send all of the bin Laden billions and any change I could shake out of the sofa cushions to the Tea Party and the Republican Party. Flying planes into skyscrapers and government buildings isn’t anything compared to destroying the “full faith and credit” of the United States government. I have believed that the Republican Party has essentially been a criminal conspiracy since at least the 1950s. But with the passing of control from the old guard oligarchs to the young Turks of the supply side, Ayn Rand true believers who came in with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in the 1980s the Republicans have become a full blown terrorist organization.

I give some credit to President Obama on two issues. First, he has kept in mind that he is the President of the United States of America, not just the leader of the Democratic Party. He has consistently acted in the interest of the nation as a whole rather than following the Republican paradigm of acting solely in the interests of the relatively small number of super-rich backers who control the money that buys power for the Republican officeholders and finances the Astroturf movement known as the Tea Party. It was President Obama’s job to save the American economy in the face of Republicans, particularly Tea Party Republicans, who expressly stated that the nation’s economy was of less importance to them than making a statement about their perverse political ambitions and philosophy. The Tea Party and Republicans more broadly have read too, too much of that proponent of fanatical sociopath, Ayn Rand, and decided that they were collectively Howard Roark. Their stated solution to America’s problems was to blow up the nation in the hope that they could gain something by demagoguery while standing in the rubble. After all, they blew up the economy in 2008 after 30 years of relentless work at doing so and created the Tea Party by demagoguing in the ruins. The president is president of all the people regardless of how stupid, misled, craven or sociopathic they are. Barak Obama deserves immense credit for understanding that basic principle.

The second issue on which President Obama deserves credit for giving a nod to the “leaders of the Republican Party” in his statement following reaching the agreement on the debt ceiling on Sunday, July 31^st. Again, in the interest of responsible governing, President Obama has put aside partisanship, if only minimally, while Republicans have not. By contrast Speaker Boehner’s subsequent statement that same night was a purely partisan polemic.

Still, regardless of attempts at conciliation by the president, make no mistake, the terrorists won this round. The lunatic wing of the Republican Party (as opposed to the neo-fascist mainstream) embraced extremists like Michelle Bachmann and Ron and Rand Paul to create a crisis where none existed before. Their voices magnified by Majority Leader Mickey Kantor nearly wrought complete destruction of the economy in the name of saving future generations from onerous debt. So let’s look at that issue of “onerous debt”.

I could go into a history lesson but the fact is that Republican insistence on low tax rates has kept revenues low while spending has increased. Most of those increases have come from useless, pointless and unjustifiable wars and military excesses whether in Vietnam, Granada, Nicaragua, Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Persian Gulf and Iraq not to mention the similarly unjustifiable covert actions in places like Chile, Bolivia, and other parts of the world, especially the Middle East. Deficits rise under Republicans because of their commitment to a grossly unfair tax system that exempts the wealthy and burdens the middle class. During the 1990s after a tax increase the nation’s economy boomed and we were on track to reducing the nation’s debt. But the Republicans then switched tunes. Instead of allowing the Federal government to run at a nominal surplus which would reduce the debt, they insisted that governments shouldn’t have more tax money than was absolutely necessary to pay for operations. That gave us the Bush tax cuts that reduced taxes on the wealthiest 10% of the population more than on the entire remaining 90% and just to make matters worse the Republicans created a much needed Medicare prescription drug benefit but refused to fund it, they initiated two wars, one in Afghanistan that had some justification and one in Iraq that had no justification whatever and they either deregulated or refused to regulate industries and markets at home. The result of reduced revenues alone was that any surplus available to reduce the national debt ceased to exist and the continuing Republican waste and mis- or non-management ballooned the debt quickly and immensely.

In the meantime prices for goods and services kept increasing, often out of all proportion to actual costs while wages for most workers remained stagnant and the real value of those wages declined. Pressed by stagnant wages and rising costs the middle class was encouraged by banks, investment firms and the financial media to use credit especially to mortgage their homes to the hilt on the false promise that real estate prices never, ever fall.

We saw the result in 2008. The joy ride came to a screeching, crashing halt just in time for President Dubya and his crew of criminals to slink out of office and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.

There is only one tried and proven way to clean up an economic collapse on the world wide scale that befell us in 1929 and 2008. That solution is massive government spending on programs that put people to work and which also subsidize lower branches of government faced also with falling revenues. It increases the debt in the short term while reducing the economic disruption for states, counties, cities, towns and families. The subsidies to the lower branches of government prevent job losses in those sectors and generate private jobs by promoting municipal projects like road improvements, construction of and improvement to public buildings, parks and such. Programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s put people to work who might not have been able to support themselves otherwise and trained those people in trades that they frequently pursued in private employment for the rest of their lives. Both the CCC and WPA were major creators of middle class employment both in their time and for the rest of that generation yet they are reviled by the neo-fascists as “make work” programs.

Once again the Republican propaganda machine changed tack and went into overdrive. Having piled up a massive debt then wrecked the economy so that current revenues could not keep up with that debt the Republicans decided that debt was bad per se. It was an evil that must be stamped out, however, those most able to help reduce that debt, those who benefited most by running it up had absolutely to be exempted from paying a penny more in taxes. They conveniently ignored the fact that many of those wealthy ultra-right wing oligarchs already pay not a penny in taxes.

The neo-fascists party line is that we are burdening “our children and grandchildren®” with a massive debt. There is no question that our national debt is large but if the ultra-right wingers were truly concerned with anyone’s children or grandchildren they would pony up and use their billions to help reduce the debt by paying another percentage point or two in taxes.

But aren’t those people the “job creators” we here so much about?

If they are, where are the jobs?

Well, they can’t create jobs because of “uncertainty”!

What “uncertainty”? They have bought themselves a minority of a minority in Congress that makes retaining the huge subsidies for their corporations not just certain but holy writ. That same minority insures that they will never have to worry about increases in taxes so what, pray tell is the “uncertainty” that stymies these alleged “job creators”?

Well, look at Europe! There’s a debt crisis there that could tank the world economy.

If those poor, beset “uncertain” “job creators” were truly worried about a collapse of the world economy their money would not be flowing at phenomenal rates out of the United States into investments in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere. The “debt crisis” in Europe is no more real than Standard and Poor’s reasoning in reducing the U. S. bond rating or the tooth fairy. That “crisis” is the creation of bond rating agencies which are the wholly owned subsidiaries of the ultra-right wing oligarchs whose corporations those agencies purport to rate. Standard and Poor’s, for example, is all in a tizzy over the debt of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and a few other smaller countries besides the United States. By contrast they were just ecstatic about the bonds of Enron, AIG and all those mortgage backed securities that destroyed the world economy when we found that they were worthless in 2008. The European “debt crisis” is a fiction created by some enormously wealthy people speculating in currencies and bonds while using that speculation to destroy the social fabric of nations purely for their own profit.

The end of all this is that the ultra-right wing propaganda machine led by Fox News and the various Foundations and Institutes that those oligarch have established to give a veneer of rationality to their irrational greed promotes a bunch of “Big Lies”. The “Big Lie” was not invented by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels but he did bring it into the age of mass media. The “Big Lie” is a lie shouted often enough and loud enough that some fools begin to believe it. Worse yet, in the age of 24-hour news networks desperate to fill air time, people and media that should know better talk about those “Big Lies” as if they had some credibility. They trot out the con men of the Heritage Foundation, Hudson, Manhattan and Cato Institutes and their odious kin and allow them to peddle their snake oil as if it were efficacious medicine.

The result is terrorism. The American public lives in constant fear and anger. The purveyors of the “Big Lie” direct public anger away from the rich who pay little or nothing toward maintaining the American social fabric and direct it toward the poor and the unemployed. They dare not talk about eliminating Social Security or Medicare so they pontificate about reducing “entitlements”. The paid liars for the ultra-right wing oligarchs won’t say that your child shouldn’t have coverage on your medical insurance policy until he or she finishes her education or that a cancer patient should be denied care because he or she forgot to mention a minor surgery 20 years before the person got coverage but they can rail against “Obama-care”.

And should someone have the temerity to demonstrate how false and empty their arguments really are, they fall back to the equally craven and empty position of pretending to be protectors of “our children and grandchildren®”. These con men so concerned about the financial burden on “our children and grandchildren®” are simultaneously arguing that government should not intervene to protect those same children and grandchildren from contaminated food, water, air and unsafe products.

The true terrorists are the monied sociopaths like the Koch Brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife and their ilk who bought and paid for the Tea Party Republicans. They have done more to destroy America than ever Mohammed Atta and the rest of the September 11^th hijackers did or imagined that they could do. It’s time to treat them with the horror and disdain that we reserve for those Al Qaeda murderers because they are the true enemy within, the true domestic terrorists.

It’s Not You; It’s Me.

His guilt or innocence is irrelevant.

His reception at home is irrelevant.

The complexity of the government’s motives is irrelevant.

It’s not about him. It’s about us.

When the Scots Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill gave compassionate release to the only person convicted of the 1988 PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie on August 20, 2009 he faced a storm of criticism. The storm rose in volume and intensity when Abdelbeset al Megrahi landed in Libya to cheering crowds. The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has washed his hands of the matter while expressing outrage at Megrahi’s reception and President Obama has similarly expressed his dismay. Subsequent releases of government documents and speculation on the multiple considerations that lead to Megrahi’s release have further incited anger and conspiracy theories. Amongst the families who lost children and other family members aboard the PanAm flight a range of equally stormy emotions rage. Some are plainly angry. Others despair that they will never know whether Megrahi was a mass murderer or simply a sacrificial goat.

Before going further, let’s consider what we actually know. On Wednesday, December 21, 1988 a bomb loaded inside luggage at London’s Heathrow Airport exploded on board PanAm Flight 103 as it passed over Lockerbie, Scotland on its way to New York. The bomb killed 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 Lockerbie citizens on the ground. An investigation lasting nearly 3 years concluded that Libyans al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifah Fhimah had participated in the bomb plot. The Scottish arrest warrants for al Megrahi and Fhimah could not be served for 8 years during which time sanctions and negotiations proceeded with the Libyan government. Finally the parties created a compromise that allowed the Scottish Courts to try al Megrahi and Fhimah in the Netherlands on a former military base and under Scottish Law. The result was that al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was acquitted. Al Megrahi was sentenced to life in prison.

But al Megrahi and his attorneys continued to protest that he was innocent of the charges. Many people in Lockerbie and even some of the victims’ relatives came to believe that al Megrahi was simply the goat sacrificed to atone for and mask the guilt of others in Libya or possibly Iran.

Iran?

Yes, Iran. Possibly Iran

Lest we forget these things too quickly, on July 3, 1988 a missile from the USS Vincennes destroyed Iran Air Flight 655 over the Straight of Hormuz killing 290 passengers and crew. Some felt that it was a greater and far more proximate cause of the PanAm 103 bombing than the air strike on Libya on April 15, 1986 that killed 40, including a 15-month old adopted daughter of Libyan leader Muammar al Gaddafi.

The point is that there has always been some doubt about al Megrahi’s guilt. But whether he is guilty or innocent is utterly irrelevant. The facts, as we know them are that a plane was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 270 people. An investigation ensued followed by a trial and a conviction. Those are facts. Guilt or innocence are at best findings, judgments. Without specific evidence those judgments can be wrong. But in this particular case let’s grant out of hand that the judgment against al Megrahi was correct and just and he was guilty. Even so his guilt is irrelevant.

Let us also grant out of hand that doing business with Libya, exploiting its oil reserves was one of the complex of considerations that motivated the British Government in its acts or inaction surrounding Megrahi’s release. That too is irrelevant.

What is relevant to the issue at hand is that al Megrahi is dying. He has spent 8 years in prison. Now he will be dead in a matter of months…3…6…who cares? Al Megrahi is dying. That is a fact. The length of time until his death is not relevant to anything. That Libya has orchestrated a hero’s welcome for a murderer is not terribly relevant either.

What is relevant – perhaps the only thing relevant to MacAskill’s decision - is compassion. I think that we can agree that whoever blew up PanAm Flight 103 for whatever reason was utterly lacking in compassion. Whoever plotted and carried out that horrible murder showed no compassion for the people on the plane, those on the ground or the families who survived those victims. The act was despicable and criminal. Anyone who participated in that horrible act deserves ostracism from the community of all decent people. But it is a mark of our decency, our compassion that we supersede our anger and outrage and, especially, our lust for revenge.

If we are in fact decent people, better, more civilized and of higher moral standards than Megrahi, Gaddafi or any other person who participated actively or passively in the bombing of that plane 21 years ago MacAskill’s decision was correct.

When faced with vile acts the lust for revenge is understandable. Yet if we are to display why those acts are vile we must be able to rise above them. We must be able to assert compassion in the midst of our anger and disgust for by doing so we demonstrate that as a society we are not on the level of the murderers, the terrorists, the criminals.

Though I have never seen it adequately expressed the failure to understand that just chanting, “We’re number 1,” does not make it so. We have to demonstrate our moral superiority by our acts. In fact, the utter failure to understand that it is by our acts of empathy and compassion that we establish that superiority is one of the hallmark differences between the right and left wings of American politics.

George W. Bush demonstrated his absolute unsuitability for the office of president by proceeding with the execution of Karla Faye Tucker and further confirmed his unsuitability by mocking her pleas for clemency. That vile, vengeful inability to rise above his basest instincts also played out when he sent inadequately armed and armored American troops to die in an unnecessary war in Iraq. He also demonstrated his basest instincts with his insensitivity to the plight of the people of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit.

Bush and Cheney more clearly demonstrated that they are no better than the murderers and terrorists they claim to abhor by instituting their own reign of terror with secret prisons, renditions and torture. Certainly they cloaked their confirmation that they are no better than Megrahi, Gaddafi, or bin Laden in claims that they were defending the nation against a terror that their acts further incited. Still by surrendering to revenge and sadism their whole Administration demonstrated that they are not to be trusted with any level of power.

More broadly the neo-fascist Republicans have demonstrated that they are, as a group unsuitable for high office let alone leadership by defending those violations of law and decency perpetrated by the Bush-Cheney Administration. They continue to do so by sewing lies and fear to defend the profits of insurance companies in the health care debate and polluters in the debate on climate change.

In the health care debate Republicans have abjured any sense of compassion for their fellow citizens by actively campaigning for the implicit exclusion of their fellow citizens from effective medical coverage. The Republicans couch their arguments in red herrings like the cost of extending coverage when they really are concerned with the profits of their supporters in the insurance industry. They terrorize elderly citizens with false claims that they will lose Medicare coverage when the real purpose is to extend Medicare to every American. The opposition is mean, dishonest and utterly lacking in compassion for their fellows.

In the debate over mitigating climate change, the Republicans make great and loud lamentation over the cost to this and future generations of reducing dependence on oil and coal while defending their contributors and employers in the oil industries even as they jeopardize the health and welfare and even the life of future generations.

It is about us. Are we better? Are we decent enough to translate our concern for our children and grandchildren to the children and grandchildren of every person on our small, blue-green planet? Are we decent enough even to a murderer to show compassion? If we are, then we have some claim to that chant of “We’re number 1!” If we cannot, then we are down in the sewers with the murderers and terrorists we claim to abhor.

Kenny MacAskill did the good and right and decent thing in releasing a man, Abdelbeset al Megrahi, who is probably neither good nor right nor decent. I repeat, it is not about Megrahi. It is about us. It is about demonstrating our goodness, our rightness and our decency. Is it not, after all, what we are commanded to do in that cliché voiced by some old, dead white guy, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?