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.

Georgie, We'll Hardly Miss You

In the couple of months between Election and Inauguration Days we were treated to reviews and tweaking of what has been referred to as "the Bush Legacy". The main problem with that phrase is that we no more want Dubya's legacy than we want Dubya himself.

We've heard the utterly meaningless mantras of "I've made the hard decisions" and "history will decide" and "protected America" repeated in the typically Republican magical thinking that insists that repeating a nonsense phrase enough times makes it so. Bush apologists have trotted out people who, largely with straight faces, claim that Dubya is "intelligent", a "nice man", "pleasant" and "engaged".

My parents' generation knew such propaganda for what it truly is: "The Big Lie". "The Big Lie" was the shorthand applied to Nazi and Soviet propaganda that painted monsters like Hitler and Stalin as benign patriots and benefactors to the world at large when in fact they were dangerous, totalitarian, psychopathic dictators. Dubya and his Svengalis, Poppy Bush and Dick Cheney, may not sink to the level of monstrousness of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. They may not even sink to the slightly less appalling level of Pol Pot, Idi Amin or Slobodan Milosovic but that doesn't mean that they are not denizens of some level of the same hellish pit that houses those refutations of the term "humanity".

I began writing this as the inaugural ceremonies for Barak Obama were under way. The pomp and circumstance of that day are now a bright, warm memory. Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is well and truly over we can say with some certainty that it was a presidency begun in fraud, pursued through crime and lies and concluded in unmitigated disaster for the United States and the whole world. Dubya has descended into an occasional run to a convention of congenial oil men sufficiently foolish, fascist or clueless to pay for a few inept words from him and a bit of glad handing. He's traveled as far as the plains of western Canada being careful not to venture into any country that might arrest him for his many and manifest war crimes. Cheney too emerges once or twice a month from the evil darkness that he carries within himself to croak warnings that restoration of the U. S. Constitution is an lure for terrorist attacks on Americans. However, Cheney's demeanor of hatred makes one wonder if his friends at Halliburton and the "re-branded" Blackwater are not arranging for the attack he predicts as inevitable.

Obama and his Administration have repeatedly and strongly expressed the desire to put the last eight years behind them even as they root about in the back-up of sewage that the Bush Administration left in its wake. In a pragmatic sense they are correct. Once the neo-cons turned the American ship of state into a Titanic, courts martial for the captain, designers, navigator and engineers would only get in the way of evacuating the ship and saving as many as possible. In the larger scheme of American politics, both parties understand that the vengeful Republicans would bide their time and hone their skills at hiding their criminal acts until they could again destroy a Democratic president out of sheer revenge for Nixon's impeachment and exposure of the Iran-Contra Affair as they did with the noisome prosecutorial misconduct known as "Whitewater". Never mind that the Republican wrong doing was criminal at best, traitorous at worst while the Democratic wrong doing amounts to some raunchy heterosexual diddling.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, to his credit, has proposed investigating the criminality of the executive branch from January 20, 2001 through January 19, 2009 but his proposed investigation is limited and entirely toothless. I have come reluctantly to believe that we need a full exposure of the criminal acts of the Bush Administration regardless of the distraction it might be. What has decided me on this point is the repeated croakings of Dick Cheney.

Cheney's allegations that Obama's policy of treating prisoners lawfully poses a threat to America needs to be challenged. We desperately need a wide declassification of documents to debunk the canard that the Bush Administration's disregard for human and civil rights, Constitutional and International Law and treaties did anything but make America and Americans less safe, less secure and more vulnerable.

I understand that I should "be careful what I wish for." The possibility that even one of those tortured in secret, foreign prisons may have provided some pertinent and useful intelligence could blow the whole process up in the Democrats' faces and make credible the Republicans who have so effectively discredited themselves. Still, I am confident enough that all the illegal, draconian acts of the Bush Administration were completely ineffectual that I'm willing to risk it. After all, would they have been so excessively secretive about the information they received if the least little mote of it had been of value? You might pose that question to Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson. The only way they can claim that their descent into fascism was justified is by the absence of results remaining a secret.

Also, we hardly need worry that the demagogues like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rash Lamebrain and Ann Cun...er...Coulter will come up with a rational critique of the policy. They are already off the deep end, flailing about in search of some epithet that will arrest the attention of and re-mobilize the lazy and thoughtless who filled out their core audience of knuckle-walking idiots.

No, we need an investigation, out in public. We need evidence of malfeasance and misfeasance and names, not just of the prime movers but of the quiet, minor bureaucrats insinuated into the government. We need the dismissals and resignations that root out the Monica Goodlings, Kyle Sampsons, the graduates of the "Law Schools" of Regent and Liberty Universities, the Bob Jones-ites and similar pseudo-scholars and shyster lawyers. In short, we need the kind of purge that the neo-fascists worked from 1946 through 1956 through HUAC and Joe McCarthy only this time for actual cause.

But then, we're Democrats and Liberals and unlikely to be so effective or decisive. Yet were we to act outside our nature this once we might finally, actually know the real Georgie, Dickie and their appalling attempt to destroy our nation. We might even go a long way to avoiding a repeat in the foreseeable future.

Scott Free: McClellan vs. the Army on the Potomac

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has written a book and the level of vilification from the Bush White House, neo-cons and other ultra-right wing loyalists has been swift and deafening. The gist of all the criticism from the neo-fascist propaganda mill from Ari Fleischer to the noisemakers at Fox and other ultra-right wing media is, "How dare he!" The amazing thing to me is that the response has been so swift and so rancorous the McClellan must, at long last, be telling the truth.

The criticism I've heard most frequently goes something like if Scott thought that something was wrong, why didn't he step up and say something at the time?

That question is what's known as a "gimme". McClellan saw what happened to Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame when Wilson reported honestly that there was nothing to one of the neo-fascists' rationales for the Iraq invasion. Looking at that and knowing how the Bush loyalists fetishized loyalty he had only two choices. He could resign in protest and probably be relegated to the same outer darkness that the neo-fascists are hustling him toward now or stay on and try to make money and connections that would support him should he eventually find himself in that outer darkness.

In some sense the choice he made is a quintessentially Republican one. He chose to stay on because he, even today, excuses Dubya and because staying was in his self-interest. Self-interest ahead of nation, community and law is the ultimate Republican characteristic. Thus, asking why McClellan stayed is both foolish and self-evident. For hitman, Karl Rove, to pose that question is deliciously ironic and reveals two more essential characteristics of Dubya’s neo-fascist crew and Republicans in general: they know neither shame or irony.

One of the other questions frequently asked is, “Why now?” Why did McClellan put his account of Administration machinations and perfidy out now? That too is obvious. It’s an election year. This year his book is likely to sell better than in any other year. Again, self-interest trumps everything. Still, being a little less cynical, I think that Scott McClellan, like several former denizens of this Administration like Colin Powell and George Tenet before him, knows that this crew of war criminals and civil rights violators is going to be called to account as soon as they are out of the White House and regardless of the raft of pardons that Dubya, like Poppy before him, is going to issue on his way out the door. McClellan is jockeying for position. He’s a relatively little fish. If he suddenly develops or counterfeits a moral compass the coming storm is likely to break lightly on his head.

In 1980 Cyrus Vance who’d differed with Jimmy Carter over the disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission allowed the mission to fail and then had the decency to resign once his reservations had proved all too prescient. But Vance was a Democrat a bit less steeped in total self-interest than Republicans. McClellan, like his Republican cronies, talks a good game when it comes to morality, personal responsibility and shared values but doesn’t stand up until it’s too late for the nation and profitable for himself.

To be a true Republican of this time it seems to me that one must have steeped one’s self in Ayn Rand’s pernicious screeds Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. The wildly misnamed Objectivism contends that nothing matters but the individual and what that individual deigns to grant to others and society as a whole. Indeed life is characterized by the struggle of the individual against society. In truth it is extreme subjectivism and a close, even incestuous, cousin of fascism. Scott McClellan hasn’t had a change of heart; rather he’s decided that his bread is buttered on a different side. Still, that he’s being more truthful today than he was while he was one of Republican minions is to be celebrated but much in the way that one thanks a match seller for turning in an arsonist he before sets another fire. While we congratulate him for his current honesty we should remember that had he found a spine in 2004 we would have been spared some of the depredations of the last three and a half years of neo-fascist rule.

A Diablo, Alberto!

The Garden of Ironic Delights

So Alberto Gonzales, Dubya's legal minion, has announced his resignation from a post for which his sole qualification was his toadying eagerness to torture people and the U. S. Constitution into any contortion that pleased his neo-fascist puppetmasters. As of September 17, 2007, the Constitution will be slightly better protected than it has been since January 20, 2001.

But that's not exactly the most striking statement of the day relative to this bit of news.

In responding to his minion's resignation, Dubya stated, "It is sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."

Don't you just LOVE irony?

Those words in the mouth of the entitled scum who attacked all and sundry to steal the 2000 election in Florida, who suggested that Ann Richards was a lesbian to get elected governor of Texas, who intimated that John McCain had an illegitimate black child to win the South Carolina primary in 2000, and who suborned the Swift Boat Veterans' scurrilous attacks on John Kerry are obscene despite the fact that Dubya is just plain too dumb to understand that he was being ironic.

I am reminded of Richard Nixon's speech accepting the resignation of 2(?), 278(?) "of the finest public servants it has ever been my privilege to know" when Haldeman and Ehrlichman departed the White House. The problem with the Republican Party is that they honestly believe that Alberto Gonzales is "a talented and honorable person" and that the criminals H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were "the finest public servants". For America's neo-fascist party no crime no matter how petty or how vicious is beyond ignoring as long as the perpetrator is of their ideology. They also believe that no crime, no matter how petty or specious is beyond magnification if it will reflect badly on the political opposition. It is one of the reasons that we should be honest and declare the Republican Party to be the criminal conspiracy that it is instead of pretending that it is simply an American political institution.