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Monday, August 01, 2011
A Defining Moment

I was watching The Office on television, when a commercial came on for an upcoming episode of The 700 Club. I began vigorously rolling my eyes, but before they completely dislodged themselves from their sockets, I couldn't help but notice that the upcoming episode was going to be about 9/11.

"Damn," I thought, "it's coming up on ten years."

Before I could slip into a proper state of melancholy, I heard the voiceover guy read that the attacks were "a defining moment for the US." That jolted me out of my Atheist's Prayer For The Death of Pat Robertson, and got me thinking.

Were the attacks ten years ago a defining moment for the United States? I honestly don't think so.

I think of defining moments in terms of the Civil War, the signing of The Declaration of Independence, or the moon landing in 1969. Events where the nation looked down the road into the future, asked itself whether or not it was up to the task of becoming more than it was, and then began the hard work of making it happen.

9/11? With no disrespect to the dead and their families, I don't feel like it measures up in terms of what it had to necessarily mean to America.

The closest comparison would be Pearl Harbor. When Japan attacked Hawaii, FDR declared that we were no longer sitting on the sidelines, it was time for the US to stop being a provincial backwater, and to either assume its destiny as a world leader, or perish in the attempt. My reading of history tells me that Roosevelt was a great leader at a time we needed one. But even without that, Americans knew what was going to be necessary, that the cost would be appalling, and your grandparents and great-grandparents created the arsenal of democracy, and began giving their lives by the thousands in Africa, Europe and Asia.

Pearl Harbor was not a defining moment. The selfless response of an entire nation was the defining moment. There was no other choice to be made.

In the case of 9/11, the attacks were not a defining moment. Instead, we stared at the moment, had a collective freakout, looked to the president for leadership, were told to go shopping, and just went downhill from there. And this isn't even about Bush, I'm pretty sure any of the weasels in office from LBJ on would have blown it.

This country has chosen to be defined by 9/11, instead of the event choosing our destiny for us.

We are now victims. We aren't simply the wronged, out for focused payback, we are a gigantic angry infant, lashing out at anyone and everyone who doesn't worship art the altar of American exceptionalism. Muslims? Europeans? Chinese? They're all against us, probably socialist, and definitely not Christian! We have been attacked (for some reason!), and it was because they hate our freedom, our iPods and our Jesus.

We had choices on September 12th, 2001. We could have taken effective, highly focused military action in specific places. We could have tried to act like adults who live in a scary world, and sorted out what the best short and long-term responses would have been. There were choices that could have been made that would have made the country and the world a better place for the next hundred years.

Alas, no.

I don't think 9/11 was a defining moment. It did not make plain for us what to do next. No, 9/11 was an illuminating moment, one which shined a harsh light on how truly small we have become since World War II. Walt Kelly called it 40 years ago:

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posted at 8:37 PM

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Sunday, August 19, 2007
Giuliani: Freedom Lover

I was having a good time this week, watching Rudy dealing with yet another brand of sketchiness surrounding his campaign, the discovery that one of his kids supports Barack Obama's campaign, and not her own father's. I have to believe that you may have electability problems when you are not polling first among people that you are actually related to. And these are the people that generally know you best.

Apparently, his daughter and a son from, actually, I'm not sure which of his three marriages, are a bit salty about his actions during the divorce, and perhaps embarrassed about having to look at Mister Mid Life Crisis go through such a hard-to-watch public courtship with the current future-ex-Mrs. Giuliani, while still married to their mother.

Let me correct something: The mother of the kids involved in this issue is Donna Hanover, his second wife, not his first wife, who was his second cousin. I don't know why he hides that fact, it plays well in banjo country.

But the press, voracious as they are, wants to know why, you know, a candidate's adult children would rather vote for anyone but the man who brought them into existence. I mean, that's a pretty big thing to walk away from. Hell, I'd vote for my dad in a second.

But Rudy is frank, and didn't walk away from the question, like he did about so many other things, like deciding to put the crisis command center in the one place in New York that had already been previously attacked by terrorists, or Bernard Kerik, or the radios that he spent $15 million on prior to 9/11 that he knew were inadequate for emergency personnel, or any of that stuff. He didn't tell a big lie, like how he was actually "just like" the firefighters and other rescue workers because he had spent as much time at the pile as they had.

No, he met this issue head on. Why won't your blood relatives vote for you?

"I love my family very, very much and will do anything for them. There are complexities in every family in America. The best thing I can say is kind of, 'Leave my family alone, just like I'll leave your family alone.' "

So, that's actually a piece of good news: Rudy will leave your family alone.

I take this to mean that Rudy will not break up your marriage by trying to have sex with your wife. But that's small potatoes. I also want to believe that Rudy will leave my family alone by not using extra-Constitutional rationalizations to spy on my phone, mail, and Internet communications. I would infer that he believes that a person's private business is in fact, private, and that he would actually seek legal avenues in order to catch criminals instead of running roughshod all over my rights. And he sure as hell won't flip-flop on his many previous public statements supporting a woman's right to deal with pregnancy as she pleases.

No, Mister Nine-Eleven supports a person's right to privacy. The one-issue candidate, the man who would be only a footnote if terrorists had not slammed planes into skyscrapers, allowing him to film a six-year photo-op calculated to one day make him president, yes, he will leave your family alone.

Tell me you believe this, you small-government crusaders who still, with byzantine logic, still support President Bush. Make me believe that you, in your heart, really believe that Rudy is your guy for any other reason besides you think he can win.

He can't win. He won't win. The dirt on Giuliani has only begun to flow, and it's not even new stuff, it's all the same crap that was documented when he was mayor of New York. I'll be interested to see what your breaking point is, conservatives. His support of gun control doesn't bother you, nor his pro-choice stances, his marital infidelities, support of gay rights, out-and-out lies about 9/11, none of these seem to matter to you.

So much left to report. So much left to uncover. Rudy's unraveling will be very slow, and very public, and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. We will leave your family alone, sir. We will be leaving you alone entirely.

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posted at 9:59 AM

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Monday, April 30, 2007
Look Who's Back

It seems that no one can stay away from the lure of the spotlight. Some people are famous for a little while, and then they drop off the radar. Not everyone can have a fifty-year career, like Peter O'Toole or Sean Connery. Although, judging by the cited examples, you ought to be from the UK if you crave longevity.

Bob Barker. I needed an American in there.

Someone once said that politics is show business for ugly people, and I wish it had been me. It's a great line, made all the greater by the truth of it. Like show business, most people in it don't stick around in politics for too long, which I attribute to the vast temptations of scandal that come with power. Of course, lots of people wield power without ever being elected, and those people are the best proof of the addictive nature of power.

Over the past twelve months, many retired generals have come forward to speak of their reservations about the war. Those on the left, especially before last year's midterm elections, were thrilled to have unimpeachable military figures speaking out against the war and the Bush administration's miserable inability to run it.

I was less thrilled.

Oh, sure, there was some relief in hearing that people in the know were saying what so many of us had suspected for a few years. But with so many dead and wounded over that period, saying "I told you so" was inappropriate, and furthermore, useless.

I wanted to know why these military leaders, the ones who have spent their lives training for war, fighting in wars, teaching and studying tactics for combat, why these people stood by while giddy dilettantes who shirked their duty during Vietnam, allowed the finest military in the world to be used in such a haphazard and pointless way.

And said nothing.

If even one highly-ranked military official had said, while still in Iraq, that the plan was flawed, that there was no apparent strategy, that American men and women were sacrificing so much in a conflict that we had no business fighting in, perhaps a meaningful dialogue could have started sooner. Saying the Titanic isn't unsinkable after you're already been rescued is meaningless.

Yes, you would have never been promoted again. Yes, you would have been removed from your command. And yeah, the Bush administration would have destroyed your reputation, as they value loyalty to the president over that to the soldiers, the country and especially the truth.

Which brings me to the new book by former CIA director, George Tenet.

The balls on me, to go after a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner.

Tenet is best remembered for his exclamation about the "fact" that Saddam Hussein has WMD. He called it a "slam dunk."

Four years later in his book, he claims that what he meant was that in regard to making a case that the public would believe, well, that was a slam dunk.

Like that's better somehow.

Tenet, in his recollection, was just a hapless guy who meant well, but got swept away in the feverish march to war by Neocons drunk on power. He was the head of the god damned Central Intelligence Agency, and knew the truth, but no one would listen to him.

And like these suddenly concerned retired generals, Tenet has found his voice. Too late, by several years, and thousands of lives.

If George Tenet had resigned and stated why in late 2002 or early 2003, the press might have found its collective balls, and done some actual investigative work that could have uncovered all of the lies and dissembling that the administration had been doing since September 11, 2001. But he didn't. Power and the limelight are tough to walk away from.

Not for everyone, though.

There is a man named John Brady Kiesling, a lifelong diplomat who was working for the State Department under Colin Powell during the run-up to war. In spite of the fact that he knew he was effectively ending his twenty-year career, he concluded his resignation letter to General Powell with the following paragraph:

"I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share."

Was that so hard?

Actually, I'm sure it was. Keeping your mouth shut so you can stay with the team is relatively simple. Telling the President of the United States and his alleged brain trust of sycophants that they are taking this country down the path to a costly, quagmiric foreign policy nightmare is hard. I suppose that's why so few people bothered to do it.

George Tenet has found his voice, and just in time to sell a few books. I heartily encourage you to ignore it.

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posted at 12:18 AM

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Sunday, April 01, 2007
Where are we?

I don't know why this topic popped into my head today, but I am not being influenced by the date, and that is all I can say for certain.

I guess I was thinking about 9/11 a little bit today, which I don't do very often, like most Americans, I suspect. I was watching television, and I saw Ari Fleischer from some old White House press briefing, and it took me back to just how much he used to irritate me. It was still kind of early in Bush's presidency, and I wasn't yet used to the fact that the administration would just say things that were either incomprehensibly stupid, or patently false.

Oh, sure, by the time Scott McClellan took the job, I was almost immune to the lies, and was hardly ever throwing things at my TV anymore. Hell, by the time McClellan left the job, I actually felt bad for him a lot of the time, having to stand there, defending the hypocrisy and immorality of the Bush White House. Ugh, it was cringeworthy.

But Fleischer seemed to really enjoy making things up, and spouting talking points, particularly just after 9/11, when the entire administration was puffed up and fake brave. It was a strange time for a lot of people, and I remember a lot of people were actually in a state of mind, asking themselves, "when will it be okay to laugh again?" Everyone was watching what they said, except Bill Maher, and you recall what happened to him.

It sounds ridiculous, but it was hard to find anything funny and topical on TV or the radio right after 9/11. There was a lot of speculation that "irony was dead" and it was time for America, and especially smug prick Gen Xers like myself to start taking things seriously. This was our Pearl Harbor, our JFK assassination, it was like the time I could have met Mr. T at the mall. The entire day I kept saying, "I'll go a little later. I'll go a little later." And then when I got there, they told me he'd just left. And when I asked the mall guy if he would ever come back again, he said he didn't know.

It was pretty terrible, is what I'm saying.

But these many years later, irony isn't dead, which is good for the most part. Irony is a bit overused, and I think most people should leave it alone, but in the right hands, it can still do a lot of good, like a scalpel in the hands of a skilled plastic surgeon.

On the down side, any national sense of purpose that we had (or pretended to have) after 9/11 is long gone, we are mired in an insurgent war in Asia, the administration has been exposed in nearly all areas as criminal, malicious and incompetent, and like on September 11th. 2001, I am without health insurance.

I don't need nostalgia. I live in George W. Bush's America, where things don't change, and when they do, it is only to somehow become markedly worse.

So irony is not dead. Roger Rosenblatt, writing in Time magazine just after 9/11, was completely wrong. Baby Boomers all think that they are the center of the universe, and I suppose Rosenblatt is no different. I've gone on and on about this giant demographic, in numbers and in weight, often enough that I need not rehash it here. Boomers like Rosenblatt crave the good old days, when men were men, America was #1, and people knew their place. You know who I mean...

Well, it's the 21st Century, the Boomers are starting to hit their Viagra years, and the United States, in many measurable ways, is in as bad of a condition as it's been in many decades. I don't care to listen to the opinions of the people who have been fucking up my country for the past couple of decades. Your choices and actions from adolescence up to now have been consistently and tragically wrong, and you can't be placed in substandard retirement housing quickly enough to suit me.

To be fair, I can't imagine any of my generation being able to run this country at any point in the future. We have been raised with diminished expectations, and even I can admit that people like that should not be put in charge of too many things. Although certainly Bush and the rest of us would have been better served had he not been told as a child that anyone can grow up to be president some day.

So irony isn't dead after 9/11. The only thing that has truly expired is the credibility of people like Rosenblatt to say that the younger generations are soft, and don't know anything about hardship.

Stay skeptical. These people know nothing.

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posted at 12:25 AM

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Saturday, September 03, 2005
What I did last summer

By George W. Bush

"I took a five-week vacation, ignored a bereaved mother, and slept while I should have been ordering National Guard troops to evacuate New Orleans. Then I got ice cream!"

Oh, summer with George. He knows how to take it easy, that's for sure. Remember his back to school essay from summer 2001?

"I took a month-long vacation! I cleared brush, and wore checkered shirts! And I read a memo about some bad man with a beard who wants to fly planes into buildings. But I didn't understand very much of it. Summer rocks!"

Now obviously, these are not the President's writings. I have corrected for grammar and spelling.

But where the hell was George? The hurricane hit New Orleans Monday morning, and they knew it was going to land there on Saturday. What was the administration doing for that 48 hours? Defending Iraq, comparing Pearl Harbor to September 11th (now corrected to have Iraqi pilots in those Mitsubishi planes), and just generally being an absentee landlord. And no one is more sickened than I that my previous posting was so dead-on.

No assistance showed up until Thursday. Nothing. The people stranded in the city were completely ignored by the federal government. There is a lot of talk that the reason is because they are black. That's really just part of it. The main issue is that, they are poor. The people with money, that is to say, who vote, got in their cars, and left. If you have no car, it's probably tough to evacuate with five days worth of food, water, and clothing. And it's not as if there was anyplace you could walk to, lugging all of that stuff, that would have been safe.

And now the backlash begins. Against the administration? Don't be stupid. We have to blame the media. "Look at them, covering the looters. What about all the people who got rescued? "

Come on.

The people who got rescued are the saddest of all. They are stuck in areas with far too many other people in the same situation, with no food, no water, no toilets, and all in 90+ degrees and 90% plus humidity. Under normal conditions, New Orleans is unbearable this time of the year. And the stench of death, and shit, and thousands of people stuck in the sun with no soap has got to be stultifying. It is a nightmare.

Could all of it have been prevented? Probably not. But nothing was done in advance. Nothing. I don't think George gave this thing a second thought, and if he did, maybe he prayed for his favorite philosopher to move that big bad hurricane away. Bush is simply disconnected from what the average person goes through. He hasn't got any understanding of what it's like to struggle. I don't know if he looks at all this, and just doesn't care. I think he sees it, and it's like a dog looking at a physics problem. He just doesn't see it, and what he does see, is alien to his mind.

"Your highness, the people have no bread to eat."

"Then let them eat cake."

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posted at 1:58 PM

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Friday, August 05, 2005
Slacker cool pays off

Yesterday, the media was all fired up about the broadcast on Al-Jazeera of a videotape featuring al-Qaeda's #2 man Ayman Al-Zawahari (he's #4 in the CNN/USA Today poll, incidentally). He basically said that we infidels can expect more carnage along the lines of what happened in London last month.

Funny thing is, I don't care.

It's not that I am not sympathetic to the victims of terrorism. I sympathize with their families, and I would like to see the perpetrators and financiers of this mayhem jailed or killed. What I cannot generate any passion about is fear of it happening to me.

"What are you? Some kind of tough guy?"

Hardly.

Here's the thing: I'm nobody. No one is out to get me. I am a million times more likely to die in a car crash or be shot by a red-blooded American than I am to get within 100 miles of a terrorist incident. When the media, at the urging of this Administration, goes on and on about things like this, it is to instill fear in the citizenry. A frightened populace doesn't ask too many questions, except for, "can you protect us?"

"Of course we can! Just be prepared to give up some of your freedoms."

(And no, they can't protect you. If you've been to an airport recently, you know this.)

Once again, my great failing is that I simply decline to be frightened or intimidated. It's not really even an overt, conscious thing with me. A meteor may fall out of the sky and strike me dead, but I can't let myself worry about it. If I am in the wrong place at the wrong time, then I will die. This isn't bravery, it's just being pragmatic.
I've stated many times that I am no patriot, but I do love my country. And I would prefer to live in a nation that, while possibly less safe, still allows me every one of my Constitutionally protected rights and freedoms. I know you can't exercise them if you're dead, but I still must insist that the liberty of human beings is a more important thing than the life of any one, hundred, or even a million Americans.

I wish we didn't all believe that we are so important and special that we are being hunted down by madmen. And I, unlike most Americans, am not religious. My outlook and lack of concern are not made possible because I believe God will protect me. I was granted the greatest gift of all: Anonymity.

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posted at 3:54 PM

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Thursday, July 07, 2005
London

Horrible, horrible events this morning in London, terrorists apparently setting off seven bombs simultaneously in the heart of the city. Dozens are dead, hundreds are injured, and once again we stand united against these bastard Muslim extremists.

But what if it was the Irish Republican Army?

I don't think this will turn out to be the case, to be honest. But what if it was? Are you somehow less angry? If you are American, try and remember back ten years. Try to recall how you felt when you found out that an all-American white Christian boy blew up 168 men, women and children in Oklahoma City. You were probably shocked. I mean, this wasn't some foreign wack job whose mindset you can't understand, this was your fucking neighbor.

The British will recover from this, because they are far more realistic about the state of the world than we are. They understand that the entire world is on the front line of a global war, and that they are not exempt. They didn't have the luxury of a 50-year cocoon the way America did. We had to grow up fast after September 11th, 2001. It was our chance to sit at the big table,and talk about the events of the day with the other adult countries. Instead, we retreated from the card table, and ran screaming back to the comfortable high chair known as mindless nationalism.

"They hate us because of our freedom."

This has to be one of the stupidest things that anyone has ever managed to say. It's so damned nonsensical, that I can barely respond to it. I've covered that ground before anyway.

The terrorists don't want anything. They don't envy us. They aren't jealous of our lifestyle or wealth. Hell, most of the people running the terror show are extremely rich. They think we are corrupt, and they want to kill us.

Let's face it, we are a decadent bunch. And these Muslim fundamentalists are every bit as hypocritical as our homegrown Christian ones. Islam is a beautiful, peaceful religion. A fanatic is a fanatic no matter what the insane motivation is, and whether you're bombing abortion clinics, gang-raping women to punish one of her male relatives, or just waging war on a country that is no threat to you, you're still nuts, and I wish you would just crawl off and die.

I hope they catch the people responsible for the atrocities in London, but it won't matter if they do. For every one we catch, there are ten more just waiting for any chance to kill in the name of God. The Protestants and the Catholics in Ireland are all Christians who worship Jesus as lord, and they've been murdering each other for centuries. The Jews and Muslims in the Middle East have been at war for thousands of years, and even Christianity has had its crosshairs on Islam since the crusades.

Keep your sick fucking religion to yourself. Once you think your god has a bigger cock than someone else's god, you're through. I'd prefer you just killed yourself, and left those of us who'd rather think and wonder alone, and in peace.

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posted at 6:38 PM

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Sunday, September 12, 2004
Three Years And A Day

I suppose this would have been more appropriate had I written it a few hours earlier. And sure, I could have backdated it, but I am all about keepin' it real.

Anyway, it's hard to believe so much time has gone by since that morning when reality was brought home to US shores by Muslim fanatics. Every time you see the video of the buildings on fire, in some ways, it's still like when you first saw it that morning. This is how the day began for me...

The phone rings and a relative screams down the line at me, "Turn on the TV! A plane crashed into the World Trade Center!" I hung up, and did as I was told.

Sure enough, the North Tower had a big gash in the side of it, and smoke was pouring out. Now, as an American, to a certain extent I wasn't immediately phased by this, and I will explain why. In the previous ten years, I has seen a bomb set off under the World Trade Center, and saw plenty of imagery of that, relatively speaking, damaged building. Additionally, I have seen tons of movies with outrageous special effects, and I know that at first, I probably reacted with the cool distance of seeing something that couldn't possibly be real. But it was.

So, I stand in front of my television looking at this insane image, and it's sinking in slowly. It's Tuesday morning, quarter to nine in New York, and there are people working in there. A lot of people. I assumed that some had to be dead already, seeing as the plane had made a 10-story high dent in the tower. Still, I think I had the natural reaction that most people were going to get out of there ok, if they could just avoid the fire. I stood there watching, trying to reconcile this event.

And then a plane hit the other building. I can only assume that the world, watching their televisions, and New Yorkers standing in lower Manhattan, must have let out a collective "What the fuck?" Why are planes crashing into the goddamned World Trade Center? Suddenly, obviously, this wasn't a tragic accident anymore. Someone was deliberately flying jets into these towers. And there were, I believe, another five thousand planes still in the air over the US.

What I did next may sound odd, but I turned on the radio to the Howard Stern Show. I wanted to get the word from someone on the ground in the city who wasn't constrained by the normal media spin horseshit. And there they all were, trying to describe what was going on, trying to get info, trying to find out if friends and family were still alive. It was probably the most real thing I've ever heard on the radio. Your opinion of Howard Stern may vary, but that son of a bitch stayed on the air live, literally risking his own life, in order to help pass information and help New Yorkers. You have to respect that.

As for me, I had to go to work. It was hard to tear myself away from the TV, but I still have to earn a living. I figured I'd better call first and see what the hell was going on. A friend of mine picks up the phone, and he tells me that the boss says that I can stay home if I want to, since they were closing the building down to traffic. By the way, it's a 28-story skyscraper, and we are in the penthouse. I headed in.

I take the train to work, so I was able to keep listening to the radio as I went, flipping between Stern, NPR, and local stations, seeing what else had happened. Planes were being grounded all over. And still two planes unaccounted for, the ones that would later crash into a Pennsylvania field, and the Pentagon. And I'm headed downtown to go sit on top of a big glass thing. Idiot.

I get up there, and we watch on TV as first one tower, then the other just seemed to melt away and crash to the street below. They were just gone. I knew that as many as 50,000 people could have been in those buildings, and that's just inconceivable. I know Joe Stalin said that if you murder one person, it's a crime, and if you murder a million, that's a statistic. And there's truth there, since humans just don't grasp large numbers in any real way. But I expected the death toll to be over ten thousand. A lot of credit is due to the firemen, policemen, and everyone else who remained calm enough to help get so many out of those doomed buildings. Still, we'd later learn that three thousand would die.

At work, we looked out the window all day. We watched news reports of people lining up at blood banks. We saw pictures of emergency workers preparing to go to New York to assist in the aftermath. And even though I'm a cynical pessimist, I felt really good about a lot of things that day. Most people, in a time of crisis, will step up, and try to do the right thing. Some people will never stop trying to kill others. I don't believe that will ever change.

Three years later, I don't think I've changed that much, although the country has. We have acceded to the stripping of many of our rights in exchange for an illusion of safety. Through utterly incompetent diplomacy, we have alienated nearly the entire world, even the Arab nations that expressed US support after these attacks. I don't think we should build that Liberty Tower (or whatever it's to be called) on the WTC site. It seems childish to build a bigger tower, as if we got punched in the eye on the playground, and staggered away insisting, "See? Didn't hurt."

We don't need to prove anything in that regard. Let's face it: We got our asses kicked. We were asleep, and we got beat up. We're asleep again, and we're going to get popped again. The fanatics who do such things aren't the type who give up. More Americans will surely die. And I can't help but wonder what the casualty figure will have to be before a majority goes to the polls and asks aloud, "We gave up freedoms to our government? For what?"

Obviously, you want to take sensible precautions. If a guy buys a one-way ticket with cash, and has no luggage, search him. But stop wasting everyone's fucking time pulling old ladies and Al Gore out of line for a goddamned patdown. You may not like Al Gore, but I truly doubt he'd ever blow up a plane on which he was riding.

I don't have any solutions here. But if you are from America, perhaps you should ask yourself if you are really any safer than you were three years ago. Ask yourself if the increasingly ominous presence of government in issues of culture is healthy. And think about what you did three years ago when you got the news that America was under attack. Try to remember...

I'll bet whatever you were doing, eating breakfast, working, mowing the lawn, fucking, whatever it was, my guess is you probably didn't spend the next seven minutes frozen, doing nothing.

You should be very angry. Remember. Think. Vote.

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posted at 2:36 AM

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Saturday, July 03, 2004
You're all just dying to know what I think of that movie

White Chicks, starring the Wayans brothers that AREN'T funny...

But instead, I think I'll discuss Fahrenheit 9/11.

This is a pretty impressive piece of investigative work, even given Michael Moore's political slant. Much of the information doled out in the movie has been public knowledge for some time, but to see it all presented together in a cohesive way is just overwhelming. And it is utterly damning of this obviously criminal administration. It begs the question of why the American press has never bothered to look into the actions of the President and Vice President, both previous to, and during their time in power.

One of the more interesting portions concerned George W. Bush's military records, particularly the sections where he was AWOL along with another officer whose name was blacked out when these documents were released to the press by the administration. This man's name is James R. Bath, and it turns out that after these two "patriots" dodged service in Vietnam, Mister Bath would go on to become financial advisor to a key investor in the future president's failed Arbusto oil venture. Mister Bath's client was a Saudi whose last name just happened to be Bin Laden, one of Osama's many brothers.

So, in addition to being considered family by the Saudi royal family, George W. Bush's wealth comes from, in no small part, the same family whose name will forever be connected with the murder of nearly 3,000 people in September 2001. This is not speculation, it is fact that anyone who bothered to get off of their asses could find out.

Perhaps you just take it as Michael Moore's spin on the situation. It seems that, realistically, there are only two ways to view these disturbing facts:

1) They are an interesting series of coincidences.

or

2) The president's ties to white collar criminals and terrorists go back so far that he has started an entire war to distract the world from connecting the dots.

Will any of this sway anyone? I really don't know. America is so polarized that I don't know if there really is such a thing as an "undecided voter." The lines have been drawn so clearly, and you are either a have or a have-not. The middle class is defunct, and we are left with the wealthy, who start wars to improve their portfolios, and the poor, who fight these wars, and are maimed and killed.

Some of the things about the movie that weren't in any of the ads, or in any of the pieces I saw on television about the movie, were the parts that weren't about the president. The footage of everyday life in Iraq before the war was absolutely heartbreaking, just people going about their lives, eating with their families, shopping, worshipping, playing...Just like we do all over the world. They didn't look like people who needed to be annihilated. The administration and the media do a fine job in keeping the war in the abstract, so it's just about numbers and objectives, and not names and faces. And not just about our "enemy."

Moore is from Flint, Michigan, as anyone who has seen his first movie, Roger And Me, knows. He spends some time with a woman from Flint who raised her family in the harsh economic conditions that existed there over the past 25 years. Because she knew she'd not be able to afford to send her children to college, she began instilling in them the noble idea that serving in the military could lead them to places that life in Flint could never hope to provide.

This woman and her family are typically American, and I mean that in the best possible way. They are hard working. They are decent. And they love America. They aren't looking for a handout, or special privilege. They don't feel that they are entitled to anything. They are spiritual, and willing to sacrifice for others.

As you may have guessed, her son was killed in Karbala last year. Watching her struggle with his death, and the ultimate emptiness of it is gut-wrenching. This woman's son is dead, killed in a country that was not a threat to the United States, and there is no explanation for any of it, except that the war covers up a great deal of embarrassing information about the president, his family, and their cronies.

This scene could have taken place in any number of cities all across the United States, and the details would not have been terribly different. A lower income family, a small house, a grieving mother or wife. Lives torn apart by the greed of men in power who have never had to sacrifice at any time in their privileged lives.

I don't really care what your political leanings are, go see this movie. Not for the litany of damning facts about the administration. Go see it for the stories about actual people who have been affected by the president's poor judgement. We are the individuals who bleed and die in the name if freedom. This isn't about a political party or group. You must think and decide for yourself, regardless of any party affiliation. Group thinking is dangerous, because as you must know, none of us is as stupid as ALL of us...

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posted at 11:28 PM

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Saturday, June 05, 2004
Tenet down, nine to go...

So, our esteemed CIA Director, George Tenet, has resigned. Interestingly, it wasn't for the many gross failures of the agency. It wasn't for the fact that even when the CIA had decent intel, the White House refused to listen to it. No, Mister Tenet's reason for resigning reached back to the great days of yore: Personal reasons.

"I'm being made a scapegoat for 9/11, WMD, and twenty other things. That doesn't bother me. But missing so many of my kids soccer games and piano recitals was really eating me up inside."

I feel badly for Tenet, to be honest. I don't really believe most of the crap that has landed on him is his fault. The President refuses to take responsibility for anything, and chickenhawks like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, etc continue to be praised by Bush as some sort of Squad of Geniuses. These people haven't gotten one goddamned thing right in years.

I see a lot of talk about people demanding Rumsfeld's resignation, especially over the Iraq prison travesty. Personally, I hope Rummy stays on until the bitter end. Even though, like his deputies, he's miscalculated at every turn, I find him very engaging. He's quite funny, toys with the press, and generally pretty damn amusing. He's a bright guy, but then, so was Kissinger, and that guy is a bloody war criminal in every sense of the word. So, my hope for Rumsfeld is he's forced to play Kissinger to Bush's Nixon.

"Pray with me, Donny. These liberals and their investigations into our leak of CIA operatives, and Halliburton scandals. PRAY WITH ME!"

That would almost make the past four years of fiasco after fiasco worth it. And you can nearly hear Rummy telling the President to stand up and act like a man.

So, will there be more resignations? My guess is that there will be. The President will try and shed as much baggage as he can by November. He'll need to. Even though Kerry hasn't engaged the voters yet, the administration is so arrogant and sure of itself that it will make another half-dozen huge errors by then. The dominoes have begun to fall, and I'm not talking about the Axis of Evil...

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posted at 2:42 PM

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Thursday, April 08, 2004
Gas

I used to think that this whole Iraq thing would be worth it, if we could just get gas for a dollar a gallon. But, it's NOT worth it. Lots of dead soldiers, and the oil companies that effectively own this administration profit in an obscene manner.

I hope gas goes to three, four, five bucks a gallon. Not that I can afford it, but maybe when these suburb-dwelling, SUV driving pricks have to give the guy at the bulletproof window 100 bucks every week to fill up their ridiculous Escalade, perhaps then we'll see a change in habit in this deluded country.

In a side note, is there any less than a 100% probability that every guy driving an H2 is packing less than four inches? Yeah, that's what I figured.

Anyway, I'm sick of seeing yuppies hauling their worthless asses around in 4-wheel drive vehicles that they have ZERO intention of ever taking off road. Just get a station wagon, you pansy. You aren't cool, you're just rich. The two things CAN go together, but I assure you, they do not in your case. Get a station wagon, and try reading a book once in awhile. Dumbass.

Here's a true story from my life. I'm driving to work one day recently, and I find myself behind this Lincoln Navigator. So, I'm already irritated, because you can't see over, around or through these fucking things. I scan down to the license plate, and I notice it's one of the specialty types that you can buy. You know, some say "Support Wildlife" or that type of shit. Well, this one is this sort of ghostly image of the twin towers in New York, and the words under it "We will never forget." I guess family members of the victims get a dollar or something.

Suddenly, the irony hits me. I am staring at a vehicle that gets 8 miles to the gallon. The fuel it uses comes from Saudi Arabia, and our indiscriminate use of that fuel has made fat Saudis obscenely wealthy. Those moneyed royals needed highways and other things built, and they hired Saudi companies to build them. One of these companies is owned by the father of Osama bin Laden. His family is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of that money was spent recently, as you may recall, to train men how to take over an aircraft, and fly it into a building. These buildings were now memorialized on a license plate to remind us of the tragedy that occurred 9/11/01.

What really made me angry, was the fact that I could try for an hour to explain the sickening irony to the woman driving this stupid truck, and I knew she would never EVER get it.

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posted at 3:33 PM

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Saturday, April 03, 2004
The Draft

Well, America is at war. We were attacked on September 11th, 2001, as some of you may recall. It was truly a shocking day in American history, and even though the President seemed like a deer in the headlights for most of the day, he eventually made a speech to the country. And I was absolutely prepared to be inspired. Some presidential addresses are the stuff of the gods.

"We have nothing to fear, but fear itself." FDR - 1933

"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what YOU can do for your country." JFK - 1961

Now, even the most gentle estimation of the president's verbal abilities would still not use the word mellifluous, but he has some amazing speech writers, and this was a once in a lifetime event. I wanted to be overwhelmed with a sense of purpose. So, I tuned in, and what glorious message does the leader of the free world have for his people in the wake of these disastrous attacks?

To paraphrase, "Go buy something or the terrorists win."

To put it mildly, I was disappointed.

We must not sacrifice, for we are already perfect. We must go to the mall to show our unity. We will not ration food or material to gird ourselves against the enemy. We will defeat them by getting fatter, and being more complacent.

The fundamentalists hate us for a lot of reasons, but I don't think they hate our freedom. They aren't stupid. They have a different mindset in many cases, but I can't just write them off so easily. There are millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. I think they know we are soft, though.

So, getting back to sacrifice, a US Congressman, Charles Rangel, I believe, put forward the proposal that we reinstate the military draft.

Were we really so desperate that we needed to reinstate military conscription? Well, not really. But the congressman, who is a black guy, noticed that a fairly large percentage of the men and women who were going to be asked to sacrifice life and liberty, are brown, black, whatever. So, his idea is to reinstate the draft, let everybody's kids roll the dice, and let the chips fall where they may. And you know what? I'll bet doing just that would change a lot of things in America in a very positive way.

First of all, assuming that America wasn't fighting any foreign adventures, certainly draftees in for a two-year hitch could provide valuable services in country. They could build houses for the homeless, clean up projects in inner cities, fix levees, plant trees, whatever. There is certainly an endless list of things that could be done.

Would I personally resent having two years of my life taken by the government? Probably so, Would it do me a hell of a lot of good? Realistically, yeah. And if the country is at war, then maybe my ass gets shipped overseas. America isn't perfect by any means, but it still seems to me that if the time comes where you are asked to defend it, you have to go. That's one of the costs, I'm afraid.

The volunteer military is an amazing collection of all kinds of people, but we all know it's made possible by the man and woman who come from circumstances that provide no other realistic chances at success. The military is full of kids from rural towns, inner cities, and others who just didn't have the sense to be born to Harvard alums. Obviously, many of them are minorities. And Congress is not exactly bursting at the seams with brown faces, so it's easy for these people to send the military off to measure dicks on the President's behalf.

If everybody went into the military, would these chickenshit fatassed Baby Boomers be so excited about their spoiled kids cleaning up some South Bronx shithole, or ducking snipers in the desert? I doubt it.

Perspective is everything, and our leaders lack it.

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posted at 11:52 AM

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Friday, April 02, 2004
Richard Clarke

Yeah, the guy who is making the current draft-dodging president look like what he is.

Sure, he's gonna sell a lot of copies of his new book and make a pile of dough. Secretly, I'm sure Dick Cheney envies this strategy, but may actually be well-funded enough, thanks to his kickbacks from Halliburton.

"Synthesizing the blood of your sons, brothers and fathers into real wealth since 1971."

So, Clarke testifies in front of Congress, and he gives it pretty good to both the Bush and Clinton administrations. Apparently, everyone was asleep at the wheel since 2001, and even Clinton had a couple of chances to launch air strikes or cruise missiles to nail Osama.

"Aha!" The chicken hawks cry. "Billy dropped the ball, too!"

Well, my problem is that I have the ability to remember things that happened more than twenty minutes ago. And I seem to recall that Bill Clinton was very busy the last few years spraying his genetic material around the Oval Office, and then defending himself as though it was an actual crime. It'd have been nice if he hadn't committed (GASP) adultery, but it really didn't affect his job performance. That should be obvious.

I also recall that on occasion during the impeachment circus, Clinton had cause for some reason or another to launch cruise missile at something or other. It was in the Sudan or Afghanistan or someplace. Remember the handwritten, hastily drawn "BABY MILK FACTORY" signs on the news? Milk for babies? Or milk FROM babies? Or is it just a wee milk factory? I digress...

The point is, finally, that anytime Clinton launched a cruise missile at terrorist camps, the Republican leadership would scream "Wag the dog!" As if this was the only way to get these hypocrites to change the subject from blowjobs to ANYTHING ELSE.

I'm not going to say that Bush is responsible for 9/11, but politically, it was a wet dream for a weak leader lacking vision, and I hold hope that America will awaken from it before November.

That, or reinstate the draft. NEXT! ON simsblog.

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posted at 9:58 PM

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