Wednesday, June 29, 2005

This Is More Like It

The Gadflyer's Jonathan Weiler writes
As much as Bush talks about freedom, an enduring legacy of his presidency will be violence and blood-lust and the price that countless innocents and people of good will have paid for that cheap talk. Many Americans endure life on a perilous sea of uncertainty and threat. Bush, by contrast, lives on a yacht on a body of water whose tranquility is undisturbed unless he instructs his crew to take the yacht out for a joy ride.

Sacrifice is never his own.
This reminds me of an earlier post "The President Does Not Mourn," quoting from E.L. Doctorow.

Tribune: Huh? Parsing the "Support"

Is the Chicago Tribune for real? By many accounts, Bush's speech last night was a bit of a dud. Nothing new, nothing different, lots of blah blah blah 9/11, blah blah blah, terrorists, blah blah blah, stand firm, blah blah blah.

So the Tribune, which can be reliably counted on to support the Prez in 99.44% of his endeavors, had an editorial of support that left so much out, it might have been printed on swiss cheese. Or a Flashdance shirt. Or something else with a lot of holes:
His message: Iraq, and the brave Americans fighting there, will face continued violence from terrorists determined to keep Iraq destabilized--and to hand the U.S. a devastating defeat. But a second courageous endeavor in that distant war zone, the building by Iraqis of the new government that eventually will secure and run their country, is on schedule and pressing ahead.
Everything is oh-so-courageous. Except for Bush's ability to speak clearly and honestly about what has gone wrong, and how he will address it.
With his citizenry impatient, his poll numbers down and some in his own party growing nervous, Bush needed to explain that the mission in Iraq has great long-term value for this country and that his administration has a strategy to succeed there. The president argued both lines of thought. But he wisely avoided the self-imposed treachery of timetables, he mouthed no empty promise about when peace would be at hand.
Uh-huh. Bush argues real good. Somehow I'm thinking that good rhetoric is not going to get Bush out of this. Good policy might. A change in policy. An admission of missed opportunities. Mistakes were made, that kind of thing. But the Tribune carries on, reliably supportive, predictably indifferent to the reality behind Bush's platitudes and arguments.
Tuesday night's speech was, then, the latest volley in a battle to influence Americans' will to win this war. Zarqawi and the other architects of attacks in Iraq have done a superb job of filling our television screens with images of violence and death. Their successes have stripped the war effort here of some support.
I'd say their successess combined with our failures have stripped the war of massive amounts of support. Only diehards are behind this war now.
Tuesday night, in response, Bush tried to help his countrymen see that orchestrated violence as an effort to intimidate them. "The American people do not falter under threat," he said.
Yes, but we do like to know what we're up against, and how we're going to defeat it. And we do like to know that our leaders understand the threats, analyze them effectively, and respond appropriately. So far, not so much.
Not that Americans watched his speech alone. On the far side of the globe, unsettled Iraqis no doubt measured every word as the leader of the free world pledged to complete their liberation.
Yeah, I bet they are. Especially those many factions aiming to thwart the liberation.

It was just so make my day if at some point the Tribune were to rise up from its torpor and really apply some critical thinking skills to our President's policies. I know wishful thinking.

Cool Flash News Site

Credit to Daily Kos for the link to this flash-based Newseum site, where you can view a map of the U.S. (or select other world regions); when you mouse over the city markers, a front page of that city's newspaper loads next to the map.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Friday, June 24, 2005

When Politics Wears You Out...

Just pay attention to celebrity news.

I could totally write a hilarious, snarky posted about Oprah and her civil rights battle. But someone beat me to it. And I was beginning to feel a twinge of sympathy for Oprah, subjected as she was to the Cruiseomatic 9000 on HyperMode.

Perhaps the topic of Oprah's planned show should be "When Celebrities Are Forced to Live in the Real World," rather than her "Crash Moment."

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Letter to Senator Durbin

Senator Durbin stood up to the administration, and then backed down. I wrote him a letter (via his website) last week expressing my support for him. Now I have written him expressing my disappointment. Here is what I wrote:
Dear Sen. Durbin:

I wrote to you last week with heartfelt praise and admiration for telling the truth about the illegal and immoral activities going on at Guantanamo Bay. I said then that you should not back down. What you said was absolutely true, and based on an FBI report.

I am very very very disappointed in you that you apologized for your remarks. I guess the national discourse today is such that we cannot tell the truth about what is happening in our country without being attacked. Surely Orwell would recognize this nation, where telling the truth requires apologies and hand-wringing, while the lies and the cruelty continue unquestioned and unexamined.

Unfortunately, now, YOU have become the story rather than what the Administration is perpetrating.

I am sorry that you felt the need to bow to right-wing pressure. I am sorry that our country cannot handle the truth. Actually, I think we CAN handle the truth - I am just not sure our leaders (sadly, yourself included) believe that we can.

I KNOW what you were saying was not that WE (our troops, our country, our government) are Nazis or Stalinists -- but we certainly could be mistaken for that based on the FBI report.

Why is that message so difficult to communicate? Because the Administration and its noise machine on the right will do EVERYTHING in their power to avoid answering, explaining, or opening up. Their tactics are secrecy, stonewalling and misdirection. You became the distraction; you took the blame.

I am not sure if you read my initial email to you last week; probably your office was so inundated with hate mail that it was lost in the shuffle.

I know you are a good man and I hope you remember that there are people out here like myself, my husband, my parents, my friends, and my sister (and our young children) who are residents of this great state who believe in democratic (small "d") values and want representatives who will fight, and fight hard, for those values.

God bless,

Fran Diamond
Skokie, IL
Durbin received a barrage of hate mail from the right wing. If you're a resident of Illinois and would like to express yourself as I have, contact Durbin at his website.

P.S. Eric Zorn agrees with me. Here's his idea of what Durbin's "apology" should have been:
"Hey, I'm sorry I played `the Hitler card.' It always inflames, distracts and confuses, and it never convinces. In this case, it let opportunists ignore my main point and gasbag instead about my unnecessarily overwrought metaphor and the many, obvious ways in which America is not Nazi Germany.

"But if you expect me to come before you and bite my quivering lips as I apologize to those who were spun into a dudgeon by the contemptible effort to draw attention from these infamous allegations, you'll be disappointed.

"I will not babble out a mewling defense of my patriotism to those with the vile audacity to have questioned it.

"A true patriot loves what his country stands for, not necessarily what his country does, and I will not shrink from holding America to her ideals...."

Monday, June 06, 2005

Bush is "For" Life, Except When He's Against It

The President is against abortion and using embryos for stem-cell research. He does not feel one form of life should be sacrificed to save another. OK. Fair point. I disagree that embryos represent "life," but that's my opinion.

The President is also pro-Death Penalty. His justification is that it saves lives.

Anyone else see this as a huge contradiction? William Saletan in Slate does. He lays out the multiple contradiction.

I guess if he said he were in favor of the death penalty because he believes in vengeance or retribution, that (while not quite so moral high ground) is at least a consistent position. But how he can defend embryos right to exist (if they even can be said to exist) but be in favor of killing real live human people?

But the real question is why can't anyone in the media ask the President to address this contradiction? Allowing this obvious craven, cynical hypocrisy to stand is just letting the President get away with it.