Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Iraq reconsidered: I agree with most of Jeff Jocaby's November 1, 2006 article in the Globe entitled "Scenes from the jihad." All the countries he sites have significant problems with Islamic jihadists within and terrorism in general including ours. In the very beginning after 9/11, going against all the Democratic inclinations of my political beliefs, I supported the invasion of Iraq. I supported it for several reasons.

First, I thought the highest echelons of our government had significant evidence of Hussein's attempt to get -- or that he already possessed -- weapons of mass destruction. I thought he would sell them to the highest bidder or use them himself as he had done in the past on his own people.

Second, I thought Hussein was undoubtedly aggressive and, if given the opportunity, would invade countries wherever he could and spread those WMD's. I thought it was in OUR best interest to remove him from power. I did not care a wit if the Iraqis fell in love with democracy but I did care whether that regime was capable of doing harm to us in the form of another possible attack.

Third, I thought, in the future, Hussein or worse one of his psychopathologic sons would ultimately try to hurt us or certainly the west.

Fourth, I thought Republicans would plan for the peace. I thought they would know HOW to wage war. War means nothing if the peace is not secured. I thought -- and I am incredulous today that I even thought this -- that Republicans some how now would not perpetrate a second Vietnam. I thought that they, being who they are, would bring whatever American power was necessary, listen to the military especially, and do what had to be done to ensure an absolute and total victory for our country including and MOST especially securing the aftermath. I thought they would do it right.

I made a mistake and many of them. All my reasons and justifications for the president taking us to war were undeniably wrong. Thankfully, I am not the president. Bush is and had access to all the intelligence.

First, and importantly, because our rationale for war was WMDs, no WMD's were found and later I found out that the evidence that Hussein had none was discarded or lied about such as in Colin Powell's address to the UN.

Second, not enough troops were brought to the task. Rumsfeld's miscalculations were insane. He overruled or fired those who said we needed many more and who did not agree with him.

Third, our incurious and unquestioning president knew NOTHING about the history of Iraq and who its warring factions were. Our president did not know for centuries Shia, Sunni and Kurd hated each other and that we could not secure the peace easily because of possible civil war between the factions. He did not realize we could be quagmired and caught squarely in the middle. He did not plan for that and did not keep that important fact in mind.

Fourth, we disbanded the Iraqi military, sent them home with no job to do, and with their weapons which they would ultimately use against us.

Fifth, we allowed anarchy to rule after Hussein was brought down. We allowed looting which showed we had no control. We did not secure munitions and lost billions of military hardware which until this day haunt our troops. We also lost billions of US dollars.

Sixth, horrifically and unbelievably, we did not provide our troops with the proper equipment like armor. I remember sending a package to our troops which included a pair of sunglasses. I though the USA cannot provide sunglasses to our troops in an area with lots of sun? Something should have clicked that we were doing this half baked.

It started to become clear fairly rapidly that this adventure was SERIOUSLY botched and that the Republicans did not care about our troops and did not care about Iraq. What on earth DID they care about? I am supposing Bush cared perhaps about being Churchill, and was coaxed by neo-conservatives into thinking he could reform the entire Middle East and/or into doing what his father did not do. He did not possess the intellectual acumen to think through things on his own. Cheney perhaps cared about America avenging Vietnam, regaining a perception of strength and, because of his Nixon years, wanted to strengthen the power of the presidency. Rumsfeld thought he could create a streamlined military and just wanted to strike back after 9/11. It did not matter on whom. The Congress was interested in giving a blank check to Bush so they could give a blank check to themselves and maintain their power to make lots of money. If 3000 servicemen had to die for that and thousands horrifically wounded, well, I suppose it simply did not matter to them. Generally, it was not their sons and daughters who were doing the fighting and dying.

I am only guessing what the rationales were. All were misguided grandiose schemes which had no chance of success except for, of course, creating a presidency, with a Congressional wink and nod, which had unlimited power. Now WE do not even have the kind of democracy that we want to export.

It became crystal clear that the very thing we were so fearful of is exactly what has occurred. Yes, Iraq is a major front on terror now because WE made it so. Hussein it turned out was the least of our problems and actually kept radical Islam from proliferating in Iraq. He was secular. Afghanistan where Bin Laden is near to this day, was the real front on terror. It was generally abandoned for Iraq. There is no Bin Laden to be found unless his capture or death will be the so-called Rovian October surprise. The second front should have been securing Saudi Arabia from whence the heinous philosophy of Whabiism and fundamentalist Islam came. There were many other fronts that should have been the recipient of a sagacious foreign diplomatic policy such as negotiations with Iran and Syria with the insurance that other more moderate Islamic regimes remained safe.

Instead we dropped a tonnage of bombs on a people who had NOTHING whatsoever to do with our 9/11 attack by admission of our commander-in-chief. That makes people who are the recipients of those bombs very mad and involves us in quicksand from which we do not know how to extricate ourselves.

We have emboldened Islamic fundamentalists' horrendous cause to our great peril and soon I would predict Iraq will have a Shite religious fundamentalist power structure just as Iran does today. This is not what I had in mind. Iraqis I fear are not buying what America likes to sell -- copies of itself.

Bush's policies have been reckless and could doom us in the end beyond the time of his tenure. We are in, I fear, deep trouble. It is this president and his feeble attempt to invade a country, which did not deserve it and who erroneously calculated what it would take to actually win and sustain a peace which are among his most egregious errors. It is he who is responsible for this disaster.

Why anyone could not see the folly of what has been done (or has not been done) on his watch is beyond me. If he were a Democrat who in August, 2001 did not heed the simple warnings of 9/11 and an impending attack, lied about evidence to take this nation to war, his most trusted advisors revealing a CIA agent's name and his perpetrating a usurpation of executive power, those Republicans would be calling for his head and indicting him for treason and, I believe, he would rightfully be convicted.

I pray that the American public is smart enough to see through this, as the author Tom Ricks calls it, fiasco. If we are not smart enough then we get what we deserve -- perpetual war, unattainable peace or God forbid something far much worse!
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Live and Become -- a Film Review: I am amazed by the fact that this film did not get more advertising exposure. Perhaps, it is because it surrounds a theme particularly interesting if one is Jewish and even then the plight of the Falasha or black Ethiopian Jews is little known among the general Jewish population. Despite that, there is, I think, much in this film to which everyone can relate. It captured my soul and I was emotionally enmeshed in it. A black Christian Ethiopian young boy in a Sudanese refugee camp, because of the urging of his mother, pretends to be Jewish to get to Israel to escape the horrendous conditions he is in. It surrounds a dire conflict in Sudanwhich took place in the 1980's and the Israeli Operation Moses rescue which air-lifted those Ethiopian Jews caught in the middle of that struggle and brought them to Israel. It could, however, certainly be the Sudan that exists today, Iraq or anywhere the brutality of warfare occurs and the innocents who are swept up, enveloped, brutalized and killed by it. It centers around concepts of racism and man's inhumanity to man. It is also about love -- especially a mother's love for her child, a stranger's love and a love between two people which transcends race.

For those who are Jewish, I think, it is an especially poignant film as it is about what it means to be a Jew, who is Jewish and how that is determined. It reflects the diversity in Israel itself about those core, ever-present and debatable issues which determine Israeli citizenship. It is about the plight of the Falasha or Ethiopian black Jews in Israel who are refugees and allowed entry into Israel solely based on their being Jewish. Sometimes, the larger Jewish populous who consider themselves white have ambivalent and less-than-welcoming feelings about the Falasha. Clearly, worldwide, being a Jew is more than being religious and this work points that out insightfully and with pathos. I have no criticism of the movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Scrupulosly Assessing Studds: I understand and agree, in part, with the October 17, 2005 The Boston Globe Op Ed opinion of Mary Breslaure regarding the late former Congressman Gerry Studs. There is no question he contributed much to his district and the State of Massachusetts. I support all gay rights legislative attempts.

Having said that, it still bothers me that a sitting Congressman had sex with a 17 year old page. The difference between former Congressman Foley and the late Congressman Studds was that Foley, in addition to committing unseemly acts with a page, belongs to a party that condemns the very essence of who Foley is thereby relegating the Foley act to the world's hypocritical archives.

The acts themselves, however, I believe, must be separated from the politics of the individual. In my opinion, actions of the late Congressman Studds and the former Congressman Foley give a black eye to a group of people who do not need it or deserve it. For everyone, a sexual liaison in the workplace -- most especially with an underage person --should be out of bounds period. Sexuality is not the issue but it becomes the issue because there are those who would like nothing more than to paint all homosexual people with the same brush.

Persons in positions of power because they are in the public arena whose decisions affect so many others, should scrupulously monitor the consequences of their actions. In my opinion, the late Congressman Gerry Studds, while a fine congressman on the issues, was forever tainted by an act he never should have committed. His censuring served only to reinforce the indictments about a group which was and is trying so hard to secure its rights but whose opposition for years has been trying equally as hard to crush those rights. Gerry Studds's actions had consequences for us all.
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Saturday, October 14, 2006

A Witch Hunting Trip for Kolbe: I believe there ALWAYS is a hidden motivation for ANYTHING the Bush administration does. The fact that page investigations are being done by the Justice Department headed by Alberto Gonzalez, a Bush appointee, to me, is suspect. Having said that, of course, if anything improper was done by Kolbe, retiring congressman from Colorado, on his 1996 trip to the Grand Canyon with pages and an army of other people including his sister, it should be brought to light post haste.

Still, I cannot help but suspect that the Bush administration's goal for the Republican page scandal damage control now is to make sure that enough Republican gay men are witch hunted so that they can conveniently put the blame on the country's new and Republican fueled target -- all gays. I believe they would like to reinvent old suspicions about homosexuals and at least project a commitment to drumming gays out of the Republican party to save their so called "base." Why any gay person would ever even WANT to be in the Republican party is beyond me. Why ANY person -- especially middle class or blue collar person -- would want to be a member of this inept, corrupt, lie enshrined, Republican party is beyond me too!!
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Thursday, October 12, 2006

Passionate about Gibson: I wholeheartedly agree with Joy Behr of The View when she commented recently about Mel Gibson and his anemic apology for his drunken comments about Jews when he was arrested. I agree with her that Gibson should be drummed out of the industry despite his feeble attempts to extricate himself from his own quicksand. It galls me, too, as indicated by a letter which was written to The View, when Catholics or other Christians compare anti-Christian statements to anti-Semitism. There is NO comparison.

For 2000 years of tragic Jewish history, Christianity and later Islam have made a concerted effort to marginalize and then, ultimately, to try to exterminate the Jew no matter how small the Jewish population was or is. The Holocaust came out of somewhere. It has strong roots in the metamorphosis of Christianity and its view of the Jew as a betrayer of God popularized in the culture of the Middle Ages and continuing in contemporary times. That baton, like a relay race, has been passed to Islam. The Jews, small as they may be, are a constant never- ending target. 6,000,000 Jewish dead are not enough for anti-Semites, they have to make a film called the Passion of the Christ to rub the accusation of decide in a little further and to remind Christians (as if they had forgotten) of the accusation emanating from the Gospels that the Jews, through betrayal, were responsible for the torturing and killing of their God. She was absolutely correct that film was anti-Semitic but Gibson waited until he was dead drunk to reveal the essence of his true being. The Passion reflects that core. No one else made that film. He did and reaped millions in profits from it.

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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Negotiate with N. Korea: Yes, the world has, indeed, gone crazy. Historically, though, it is no crazier than it has always been since our caveman origin. The stark difference, however, now of course, is the fact that nuclear weapons are a reality. Killing off millions of people by conventional weapons, horrific as that is, pales by comparison to the killing off hundreds of millions of people and even, perhaps, ultimately the entire human race in addition to stopping the ecological balance of nature itself by nuclear war.

This administration has been so horrific on so many of its policies and its actions, I could not even presume, unless I wanted to write a book, to list all of them. Perhaps the most egregious of its errors is its failure to at least TALK with an adversary. It is almost as if Bush and his minions WANT to go to war with Iran and N. Korea and his so-called "axis of evil" (as if our killing hundreds of thousands is not evil.) We KNOW he wanted to go to war with Iraq. The war in Iraq, of course, has cost us many things one of which is credibility. We have none. We have botched Iraq so badly it has emboldened Iran, made them the power supreme in the most volatile region on earth and should give us indigestion as to the potential for nuclear hand holding between the maniacs of Iran and the maniacs of N. Korea as well.

If the American public does not see the Bush follies from Iraq, to Katrina, to Foley, to corruption scandals, to lost billions, to Halliburton shenanigans, and now our refusal for one-on-one talks with Korea and hundreds of other egregious culture-shattering actions, then it never will. Can we not give this jerk Kim il Jong a phone call and make the guy happy? This administration's loathsome results of its actions are right in front of our faces for everyone to see. How the Christian Evangelicals, many of whom are poor, can even contemplate for one second a vote for Republicans and think that Republicans are in their corner is beyond me. The world sees the joke of this administration. The problem is the joke is on us!


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Thursday, October 05, 2006

It's the Hypocrisy Stupid! It's now all Foley all the time. 24/7 that's nearly all that one can listen to. Discussion of it is on every news channel, every radio station, the blogs, and the Internet. It, of course, involves rather scummy emails and instant messages with graphic inappropriate sexual communications between a Republican 52 year old Congressman and teenage male Congressional pages. We are saturated with the issue. I'll bet the American public is sick of it and would like it to just "poof" go away. Of course, it won't, at least not for awhile.

Why do Americans have an obsession with sex? Americans and sex have always had a difficult time together. Religion, I suspect, accounts for much of the discord. Our Puritan past complete with witches and demands for repentance for even thinking about sex did not help. Hester Prynne, the heroine in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, is forced to wear the mark of Cain in the form of the red letter "A," in Puritan New England because of her sin of adultery. This tells us much about the nascent American culture and its views of sexual sin.
Fast forward centuries later "banned in Boston" was the yardstick for profanity. The profanity that defined that era certainly is tame by the standards of contemporary American mores but D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, nonetheless, was banned and his work indicted because of it's sexual content. Many other authors and their books suffered the same fate.

Our TV culture of the 1950's would not even allow Lucy and Desi, who were, of course married, to sleep in a double bed together. They could only share a room with twin beds as if they were roommates at NYU. Although the network scandalously allowed Lucy to appear pregnant she could not say the word "pregnant." Lucy was "having a baby" certainly she was NOT pregnant. Sex was extracted from the always-glorified family. June and Ward Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver fame never, of course, spoke of sex and , indeed, it seemed as if their sons Wally and Beaver were hatched. One could not have conceived (pardon the pun) of Ozzie and Harriet naked, locked in a passionate embrace while David and Ricky were in the next room or in any room for that matter. Sex in the 1950's and early 60's was vacuumed out of and extracted from the culture and a seemingly sexless milieu enveloped that era like a shroud.
This country, however, in the late 1960's freed itself, at least in theory, from the sexual tyranny it had known since its inception. Like an inmate being released from jail, America could not get enough of that which it repressed and wanted so badly. Suppressing the potent biological urge of sex is a nearly impossible thing to do. Just ask the Vatican and Catholic priests. Human hormones will not allow it. It is an urge so strong it simply will not be denied with ease. In addition, let's face it, sex is fun and it feels great.

Unfortunately a new found freedom was taken to excess. The late 60's along with the birth control pill freed up, especially, women. It ushered in, as I call it, The Age of Sex. It was everywhere and permeated everything -- music, literature, arts, TV, film, advertising and even sports. If it felt good it was done. It became unbridled and extreme. Because of that unwanted pregnancies, increased divorce statistics, STD's -- among them the lethal virus AIDS -- arose. The culture experienced a crudity not known before and still exists today. Steve Allen, the great comic, intellectual and man of letters talked about this in his book Vulgarians at the Gate. He observed in America a culturally crude licentious decline which brought with it sociological and psychological fragmentation. It was a hefty price to pay for a change of culture which seemed, at first, so benign and so natural.

Today the Christian right has seen to it that the Republican party is now the party of the so called "moral majority." To buy a ticket to enter the hallowed Republican sanctuaries one must buy into its reactionary sexual politics of denial, repression and suppression and hope that it will buy one a ride back to a seemingly simpler time. Indeed, allegedly, it could buy an entry into heaven itself. This is a delusion. The ideal families of June and Ward Cleaver and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson never existed. They especially did not exist if one was black or poor, and certainly did not exist if a member of those families was homosexual. Those "ideal" families did not exist either for people who were abused in marriage or tormented by an unhappy marital life.

Putting the sex jeanie back into the bottle and repressing our sexuality once again is not so easy. Discord between two people is ever present and sexuality remains a constant force. It always will. Nature meant that to be so. Republican, Democrat and Independent alike should recognize that and accept it because everyone is subject to it. Denial of self creates bad behavior in the form of violence, suicide and even possibly child abuse. They should accept their sexuality and conduct themselves appropriately, because it's the hypocrisy, stupid, that will get them into trouble every time!
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Tuesday, October 03, 2006

What happened in Amish Country? Little innocent girls, sheltered from the winds of war and violence of our world were brutalized and some had their lives taken. They have been senselessly and bestially attacked and killed by, in my mind, the lowest insect that nature has ever in error created. To call him an animal is to give him an appellation much more than he deserves. Has our country gone insane? What is wrong with our culture, our country and our world?

Steve Allen the brilliant comic, commentator and man of letters entitled one of his books Vulgarians at the Gate in which he talked about the crudity that has enveloped this country that I think he thought never existed in more innocent times. After the late 60's cultural metamorphosis, our country saw this crudity and reacted. The Evangelicalization of America began. The Evangelical, religious and especially fundamentalist Christians ultimately put our present government in place. Since the era of Richard Nixon, they now have taken the Presidency, the Congress and even many of the Courts. They did so under the guise of returning America to a more moral majority. Politics has since then become the ugliest profession. We are divided like no other time except, perhaps, during the Civil War.

Since George Bush took office, we have experienced, 9/11, 2700 plus American deaths, thousands slaughtered in Iraq, multiple school shootings, world terrorist attacks galore, the Katrina debacle, sexual assaults, a Congressman's disgusting emails to a minor and its attendant cover-up to ensure a political party's power, unspeakable pedophilic crimes, corrupt politics, indictments of Congressmen, and so many more horrific acts too numerous to mention here. Hypocrisy abounds. It would appear unbridled religiosity uncompromising and extreme has not been the answer.

I do not know what the answer is. I do think, however, trying to become a more humane culture might be a start. I heard someone recently say that America is great if you are in good health and plan to work very hard. If you are not, however, do not come here because America has a kind of wild west mentality -- every man for himself.

Perhaps, all this needless, senseless, incomprehensible violence and cruelty could be averted if we nurture a softer core and if we begin to feel our government cares about what happens to its people. Until then, I suspect the violence by the alienated will continue. Those of us who lived the late 1960's were saying often a simple thing -- give peace a chance. We never did. Perpetual war begets perpetual violence. I suspect we need to try something else.
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Monday, October 02, 2006

MONEY MONEY MONEY: Is EVERYTHING about money? Everything? The middle and blue collar class everywhere and I do mean everywhere in this country should realize Republicans are NOT I repeat NOT about them. Republicans are about the very very very rich and simply USE the so called "moral issues" as a smokescreen to co-opt the middle and blue collar vote especially in the red states.

Those people need to wake up and smell the cinnamon rolls. Republicans are about dough alright but not that kind of dough. They are about money and LOTS of it. They are about contracts in Iraq, tax cuts for billionaires, they are about money with respect to employers of illegal immigrants, they are even about money where the Foley scandal is concerned, securing our ports, voting machines and they are about oodles of money where the Abramoff and congressional influence pedaling issues are concerned. How much more evidence does the American public need? One would have to have just emerged from under a rock not to see it.

Democrats are not perfect but they are a damn site better than Republicans where money and influence brokering is concerned. The Congressional balance of power MUST be changed quickly or this nation will go absolutely broke, hit again by a terrorist attack or both!
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FOLEY FALLOUT: Foley's conduct and the "investigation" of it is completely utter hypocrisy of the highest order and the most disgusting of politics. Now so the Republicans won't have to convene the Ethics Committee meeting they are putting this investigation in the hands of the FBI Justice Department headed by Alberto Gonzales? Talk about the fox guarding the proverbial chicken coop. They are doing this so that they can stall until after the elections and hope that the Foley sex furor dies down by then. What utter hypocrisy.

If this were between adults in the workplace it would still be egregious because it is in the workplace milieu but I would not be nearly as upset. If it is a consenting adult I do not give a hoot about what they sexually do. Let's face it sex is here to stay we are animals afterall. There MUST be limits and sexually grooming an obviously UNDERAGE page who is an employee of the US government is out of bounds. Worse hypocrisy, Foley's time was spent protecting children from Internet predators! These are the same Republicans that are the morality in everything advocates. These are the same Republicans who want to pillory gays and strip them of their human rights. This is simply dripping with hypocrisy it is hard to wrap one's brain around. To make matters worse, if that is possible, the cover-up was immense involving the House's highest leadership in Dennis Hastert and others.

All, absolutely all of those involved in passing the buck to save Republican skin, after knowing about Foley for over a year, to save the fall elections should resign forthwith. Gonzalez should recuse himself and a special NEUTRAL prosecutor should be appointed to investigate. They would demand nothing less of Democrats you can be sure of that. It should mean the same thing for them.
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

NIE Report: The President says the media stories regarding the NIE report were leaked and "create confusion in the minds of the American people." He decides to release part of the NIA report but not the whole thing because of "security concerns." Does he think we are absolute morons or just somewhat moronic? There is absolutely NO confusion whatsoever. Months maybe years before parts of that report were ever made public one would have to be hiding under a rock not to see the horrendous blunder of Iraq. It does not take a brain surgeon.

Speaking of hiding under a rock, after the bulldozing of everything this country has meant, that is exactly what I feel like doing. How he, Cheney and his minions sleep at night is beyond me!! LOTS of Xanax I'm sure! This administration train wreck is amazing truly amazing. I can just imagine what the hidden parts must say.

This inept insipid administration has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, treasure and possibly the security of this nation. How Christian they are. I'm sure Jesus would just love them all !
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Monday, September 25, 2006

Bravo Bill: Bill Clinton's appearance on the Fox New Chris Wallace interview was a delight. Finally, someone who is articulate and who possesses a razor sharp command of the facts, indeed was directly involved in the facts, could slam home the point that Democrats and others should have been slamming home consistently since September 11, 2001. As our former President said at least he tried to get Bin Laden several times. What did Bush do to achieve that end?

The Clinton administration upon leaving office warned the Bush administration during the very first moments they turned over the reins of power that getting Bin Laden was of paramount importance as was the war on terror. Bush and his administration did nothing. They did nothing to continue to pursue policy to get the perpetrators regarding the USS Cole bombing and they did nothing to pursue or stop Bin Laden and his minions before they committed the 9/11 deadly attack. When President Bush received the Presidential Daily Briefing that said "Bin Laden determined to strike within US" his response was zero.

The criminal acts that this administration has perpetrated are legion. He has initiated a futile Iraq war without end by lying and morphing facts about it to fit his pre 9/11 desire to take Iraq out. He has shredded the Constitution. Worst of all, he has killed thousands in Iraq, demolished a country for nothing and alienated the world. Terrorists within Iraq itself and from foreign nations have flooded that country. Iran, our enemy and soon-to-be a nuclear nation, is now the benefactor supreme of George Bush's badly executed policies. US security agencies today have acknowledged that Iraq has made the war on terror worse and not better.

At last former President Clinton, a person to whom people might listen and whose opinion is respected, stated emphatically what needed to be said for over five years. The things that should have been done immediately when Bush assumed office never were. Let's hope, finally, the American people will understand that and change the balance of power as the buck certainly stops with them!
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Monday, September 18, 2006

To Torture or Not to Torture: I often go back and forth like the proverbial tennis ball when attempting to arrive at the truth, as I perceive it. The latest undemocratic response of the Bush administration in its war against terrorism is the undermining of the Geneva Conventions and the implementation of torture as a means of extracting information from captured alleged terrorists. James Carroll in his article in The Globe entitled "Judge, jury, and torturer" makes a good case for the Bush inspired Kafkaesque metamorphosis of our nation because of the Bush administration's advocacy of using possible torture upon captives in his war against terror.

I think Carroll errs, though, when he does not see both sides of this issue in a contemporary historical sense. The treatment of prisoners as mandated by the Geneva Conventions has been a good thing for our country and the world. Torture not only is morally repulsive but it can, indeed, invite torture upon our own soldiers. However, the question of whether to torture or not to torture has to be asked, I think, from a contemporary point of view. Are the Geneva Conventions, as we have known them, relevant to international events today?

There is no question Carroll is right when he says the right of the accused to know the charges levied against him and to have the evidence presented to him is a basic tenet of our Republic and the Geneva Conventions. This doctrine is and has been fundamental to our system of government. It has, I think, made the US a blueprint from which other democracies have formed their procedures as well.

When, however, I think about maintaining those rights today toward captured possible terrorists I can understand the American public's, as Carroll calls it, "vague unease" [emphasis added] about the abridging of those mandates. We are only vaguely uneasy about their abridgement, I think, because we know that the consequences of terrorists actions in our WMD world are so egregious as to possibly warrant their abridgment. If only one terrorist knows about or succeeds in a biological, chemical or worst of all, a nuclear attack we may not be around to contemplate the joys of the Enlightenment inspired rules of evidence.

This issue, therefore, irrespective of political party, must be thought through with the utmost care. As much as I dislike nearly all Bush policy, I can understand in a subliminal synaptic recess of my brain, his firm advocacy of this position regarding possible terrorist interrogation. It is easy to argue about the rights of the accused when one is talking about conventional war. When talking about the possibility of WMD's in the hands of even possible users of those weapons on this country or elsewhere the tennis ball, as I perceive it, is in a different court.
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Americans and War: Why are we trying to fit a round peg in a square hole? Why don't we just admit Americans do not hate war. I suspect Americans love war. It's losing we hate. I think Gen. George Patton said that, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. It is why we keep electing presidents who take us to often unnecessary wars and it's why even Democrats do not want to say adamantly the Iraq war was a mistake, pull the troops out.

Democrats are in mortal fear of appearing unmanly or weak saying that we lost yet another war. The loss of Vietnam was about the most our country could bear. Now Being defeated by a bunch of Medieval fanatics in turbans is simply too much to endure. Let's face it, kicking the stuffing out of someone can be fun. Unfortunately, sometimes they kick back. The last just war, WWII, when America was on the side of the angels came to an end. Since then the US has been involved in futile unnecessary escapades all over the globe costing thousands if not millions of lives, billions of bucks and squandered our international prestige. Iraq is the worst venture yet. Bush's minions and the delusional neo-Cons have created a nightmarish quagmire of unprecedented proportions. Really, the Democrats do not have to say a thing, Bush, al are hanging themselves with their own ropes. All the Democrats have to do is stand around and watch!
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Saturday, September 16, 2006

The Pope's Un-Holy War: Doesn’t anyone have anything else to do but scream, write slogans jump up and down protesting what someone says about a belief?

I cannot understand why on earth the Pope would say what he did. I did read the whole text which seemed to say the Pope was advocating religions to be peaceful. He said it, though, by invoking an obscure 13th century Medieval monarch’s indictment of Islam for being violent. Even if the Pope’s words, if one reads them in their entirety, said what he said they said why wouldn’t the Pope, a supposedly bright scholarly fellow, know that those words would be taken out of context and that someone might just go berserk in Cairo or Istanbul. He is after all the Pope not just some guy on a street corner.

It’s just as absurd, too, when Christians picket local theaters for showing certain films or yell and scream about art exhibits. I remember not so long ago I had to walk through Christian picketers to stand in line to see the film The Last Temptation of Christ which I probably never would have seen were it not for the outcry against it. Of course, I will try to refrain from historical descriptions of the Christian crusades, inquisitions, expulsions, and a host of other cruelties the Church has inflicted. I won’t mention too much either about the cruelties during the Protestant Reformation. Nor will I mention too much about contemporary religious supporters of bombings of abortion clinics, murder of its doctors, nor the killing of homosexuals, firebombing gay bars, bombing of the Olympics and, oh yes, the Oklahoma City bombing perpetrated by a Christian Identity follower.

First it was the cartoons now it’s one sentence of a speech. This is the same Middle East where the eminent scholar George W. Bush wants democracy to flourish. I thought in democracies one has to put up with criticism of those thoughts, beliefs, values and opinions which are the most objectionable for some to hear because free speech is one of the most sacrosanct Constitutional protections a democracy is supposed to offer.

Somehow I think Muhammad, Jesus, God and Moses will thrive despite whatever criticism is levied against them. Democracy’s survival, on the other hand, I’m not so sure will.
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Friday, September 15, 2006

Who’s like Hitler?: May I scream? I feel like I want to tear my hair out and at my age that is not a good thing to do. The first headline I read on MSNBC is about a statement made by some Turkish official which says: “Turkish official compares Pope to Hitler. Politician joins outcry across Muslim world over pontiff's comments in Islam.” If this were not so serious I would think it was a bad comedy.

How many Hitlers can a world have? Cloning is not a reality yet, I don’t think, is it? So now the Pope is like Hiter, George Bush is like Hitler, Castro is like Hitler, Chavez is like Hitler, all the worlds terrorists are like Hitler, Abimenijad is like Hitler, Kim Il Jung is like Hitler, Hussein is like Hitler, Bin Laden is like Hitler, the Sudanese slaughter is like Hitler and oh yes of course the Israelis always the Israelis whose nation's composition of Jews, perhaps, more than any other group on planet earth, really DID suffer from Hitler -- well so what. Even THEY are like Hitler.


Now I’m screaming: NO ONE IS LIKE HITLER!!!!!! The headlines are insane. People’s stupid utterances are simply that (I’m spelling) S-T-U-P-I-D. This is all just stupid. How many people can be like Hitler? There is no one absolutely no one who was or is like Hitler except Hitler. Hitler was a UNIQUE, I repeat a UNIQUE phenomenon. As bad as most of the aforementioned tyrants are even they are not, were not and can never be Hitler. To say that the Pope, George Bush and Israel are like Hitler is purely inane and ridiculous on the face of it. I am a critic of the Pope and George Bush but I do NOT think they are Hitler.

To wax serious, I believe, by calling everyone Hitler one diminishes the incredibly unique horror that was Hitler. It makes him just another tyrant. I submit he was not just another tyrant. According to Wikipedia the free online encyclopedia source: “Some 62 million people, or 2.5% of the world population, died in the Second World War, though estimates vary greatly - about 25 million soldiers and 37 million civilians. This total includes the estimated 12 million lives lost in the Holocaust.”

Does anyone realize how many people that is? It’s unfathomable. I don’t think anyone can imagine the immensity of that number. There was a film called Paperclips in which students of a mid-Western American town collected 6 million paperclips to show just how huge the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust was. It is a massive collection. Hitler's contribution to world events was unique.

A unique man, Adolph Hitler, who lived on this planet at a unique period of world events singularly made most of that huge number of death possible. No one else is Hitler, no one CAN be Hitler and no one will ever be Hitler. As bad as some human destruction is and as horrific as some rulers are NOTHING duplicates the carnage of WWII and no one alive today is like Hitler was …YET.
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Thursday, September 14, 2006

To Hate or Not to Hate: Hate is simply an awful emotion. It is blood pressure pumping, heart pounding, adrenaline producing, anxiety provoking and an uncomfortable emotion to endure. Yet, as much as I try to overrule it I feel it.

Our military decided not to kill one hundred Taliban who were congregating at a cemetery. The Taliban treasure were sitting ducks for our marksmen. Our military refrained from shooting because the Taliban were at a cemetery. The question I and others have is whether our military, who had them in their crosshairs, should have killed them despite the fact that the Taliban were at a cemetery. Surely those Taliban will disperse and many will live to kill us another day.

I loath killing. Despite that fact my overriding feeling was that our military should have killed them and an intense anger that they did not. What is the source of my feeling? Why in this instance could I not put myself in their shoes as human beings, allow the better angels of my nature to prevail, and be glad that our military did not shoot? I could not because I hate the Taliban. I do not even know them individually, of course, but I hate them nonetheless. This bothers me. Why do I hate them? Obviously, the attack on our country on 9/11 has much to do with it. It is, though, I think, even more than that.

I loath ignorance. I loath fundamentalist religions which spring from ignorance and promote it. In my view, it imprisons one’s brain, crushes it and prevents the expansion of thought and cultural advancement. Worse, it wants -- no it demands -- I do that as well. The Taliban are representatives of that. Human beings who have the capacity to question and reason but do not because of religious dogma are an anathema to me. I hate the Taliban for their extreme religious fanaticism which wants to join hands with whatever power structure they can manage to employ and ultimately, like a tornado, control everyone and everything in their path. I loath them because they want to squash my free thought and everyone’s thought who does not believe as they. I progressed from there.

I, admittedly, loath nearly all religious power structures no matter what religion they are most especially if they are of the unquestioning fundamentalist variety. These religions have the dubious distinction of either historically converting people against their will, torturing and eliminating them or imprisoning those who stand in their way for a belief system often steeped in supernatural superstition which is completely arbitrary and scientifically unprovable and rationally absurd in its nature.

By extension, our President, many of his supporters and certainly the Christian fundamentalists he relies on for his support are cut from the same mind numbing cloth. Christian fundamentalism along with other orthodoxies in this country, in my opinion, have been responsible for the closing of the American mind, putting a regressive administration in office, squashing science and employing a crusade-like mentality catapulting us and the world into perpetual war. Religious fundamentalism, I believe, has always kept humanity from seeking and achieving its greatest potential, kept man quagmired in superstition and has been responsible for more deaths than the lives it professes to save.

I fear unbridled religion. The Taliban are surely representatives of that but so is the administration's fundamentalist minions we live under. I wish I could turn the proverbial other cheek but I am scared. Disturbingly the hatred of fanaticism and violence it begets is there. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb quoted from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita when he said "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds." Surely, I do not want to become as those I abhor. Hatred, all hatred and its offspring death springs from fear. They fear me and I fear them. It’s that simple.
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Monday, September 11, 2006

Thoughts of 9/11 after five years. I again saw news which showed the entirety of 9/11 in real time. I tried to give it some thought. Who could do such a thing and why? What is the etiology of it all?

I keep remembering an aunt of mine who, many years ago, used to discuss with me the larger questions of life. We continuously had discussions about the Holocaust. The Holocaust always has been, since I was ten years old, the yardstick I would use to measure most other areas of academic study. It shaped nearly everything about me. When I discussed it with my aunt she would always utter the phrase “man’s inhumanity toward man.” That was the reason behind all the cruelty as she saw it. I was ten years old and did not quite understand what that meant. As an adult I wondered how that could be the simple explanation for such a catastrophic event. Of course, when I became more sophisticated, I began to understand the Holocaust in a broader light. I understood it from an economic, political, psychological, historical, religious and philosophical perspective to name a few areas of study. Yet, my aunt’s phrase, “man’s inhumanity toward man” always struck a chord.

As I grew older, the Holocaust became so much more and yet when I look at it again the music of my brain kept replaying that song: “man’s inhumanity toward man.” It is that cavalier ability that some men (and women too) possess which can overrule their capacity to put themselves in another’s place, to actually gain satisfaction from the infliction of hurt to another man’s body and their inability to think or even to care what it would feel like if someone tried to hurt or kill them. The explanation of it goes beyond, I think, any historical, psychological, philosophical or other explanation.

The answer to me lies in our species’ and our brain’s emergence from our reptilian origin to our mammalian present. Layers upon layers upon layers encompassing millions upon millions of years have brought man from the sea to the surface. Our nature has behind it eons of biological and cultural development. We still are part sea dweller, part reptile, part primitive mammal and part man. All are in us. Everything that is in all of those species is in man as well. As I see it, different men have different parts in different quantities of all of that.

My aunt’s phrase “man’s inhumanity toward man” has meaning to me but so do the phrases: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man" said by Rabbi Hillel (ca. 50 BCE-10 CE), "Do to others as you would have them do unto to you" said by Jesus in the Gospels and "Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you" said by Muhammad (c. 571 – 632 CE) in the Farewell Sermon.

The truth is all men are parts of all phrases. How could the ovens of Auschwitz have been built by intelligent men and how could planes be crashed into huge buildings by thinking religious men? Didn't one ever think what the other fellow would feel? Didn't anyone have the empathy for the other person? No one is immune from the perpetration of inhumanity. Does anyone think what it must feel like to be at the receiving end of a huge bomb or a nuclear blast? Some did and do. Some did not and do not. Some have the ability to walk in another’s shoes. Some do not. What is the difference between those who do have that ability and those who do not?

I have a friend who literally cannot even kill a fly. She scoops it up, if she can get it, brings it to the door and lets it out. Perhaps that empathetic part of her brain is larger than another part that stops her from killing even an insect let alone a human being. Clearly, there are different types of men and clearly we do not have the totality of answers as to the why of 9/11. The answers probably do encompass the many studious complexities of life but one thing I still know, the discussion must encompass the phrase man’s inhumanity to man as well.

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Friday, September 08, 2006

U.S. Government Conspiracy and 9/11: The allegations of some that there was a U.S. Government conspiracy which perpetrated 9/11 is a completely absurd notion. I loath conspiracy theorists. Most are ridiculously inane, illogical, and utterly immovable when they get the conspiracy bug in their head. For every spectacular event such as Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, the Oklahoma City bombing, 1993 bombing of World Trade Center, and now 9/11 there are crackpots everywhere who think there is some well organized cabalistic governmental conspiracy lurking and plotting in the background who have their act so together that they could perpetrate a huge event such as 9/11 without a hitch and without someone spilling the beans. It has been my experience that it is hard enough to get a group together to organize a night at the theater or keep a secret for ten minutes let alone the government's unerring perpetration of a crime so huge as to bring down buildings of that immensity killing thousands. I do not think even George Bush with his Machiavellian crew would stoop to THAT kind of murder and THAT kind of treason against a country we all love. Anyone can say anything. The proof, however, is in the evidence and in this case there is absolutely NONE!
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