Wednesday, November 29, 2006

THE MEANING OF 'SECTARIAN VIOLENCE'

DIGGING DEEPER , By Ivan G. Goldman


Personnel inside the White House marketing division twist their words into knots to avoid calling the anarchic bloodshed in Iraq a civil war. “Sectarian violence,” they call it. They apparently believe if they tweak the terminology just right, no one will blame the boss for his hideous blunders. After six years of misrule and lies they’re confused, dangerous dolts, hypnotized by their own fictional devices and no longer able to distinguish slogans from reality.

Is their commander even aware of the meaning of the phrase “sectarian violence?” It means, of course, violence among sects – religious warfare. He and his handlers decided religious warfare doesn’t sound quite as bad as civil war, particularly if they call it by a name their base can’t define. In this regard the Bush-o-ramusses are actually partially correct, because as I pointed out in a previous column, trading murders back and forth – torturing and murdering random civilians -- hardly constitutes civil war. But sectarian violence doesn’t exactly define these events either, because some of the groups involved have motives divorced even from their own understanding of religion – the Ba’athists and the bandits, for instance.

Now we wait for a U.S. advisory panel to tell us what to do. An advisory panel made up of experts is actually not a bad idea. Too bad it comes four years too late. In the meantime, Bush tells us his policy is to remain there until we “win.” If he means it, panel members wasted their time. But then this is the guy who told us Rummy wasn't going anywhere a couple days after interviewing his successor. It’s going to be fun to see how the advisory panel, when it releases its report – or at least parts of it – defines the situation. It's walking on eggshells, because if you get too close to the truth it offends Prince George and his White House marketing stooges and they stop listening. Remember how he snapped at Senator-Elect James Webb, the father of a Marine in Iraq –for daring to mention that he wants him and the other U.S. troops home? Bush showed all the compassion of a Gila monster.

That little exchange with Webb also answers the question of whether Bush loses sleep over the hundreds of thousands dead, the million or so maimed, the refugees, and all the other horrors he thought might be a nice hobby for him.

Whatever this panel tells our tinpot commander, you can bet he won’t withdraw. The Smirkster drilled too many dry holes in Texas to just walk away from miles and miles of sweet pools of crude. Evidently no one told him that his chief contractor in the oilfields -- naturally that would be Cheney's dear old Haliburton -- is incapable of managing them properly and that there's less petroleum being pulled out now than there was before the invasion.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

WE ALL PAY FOR IRAQ, AND DARFUR PAYS MORE THAN MOST

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has been making an excellent case for some time now that something must be done to stop the genocide in Darfur. The Sudan government is systematically raping, torturing, and murdering citizens, and it has the backing of virtually the entire Muslim world.

But there's a barricade across the path to action. As the world's only superpower, we're the ones expected to lead the way, but if we were to try, no one would follow us because of the identity of our President. He’s been unmasked as a dangerous clown. His chances for assembling a military coalition to take action are near zero. Unilateral action? We don't have enough U.S. troops to fund his pointless war, and those deployed in Iraq won't be leaving any time soon. They should, but they won't. Those are the facts. And if we sent a small force into Darfur with insufficient air, armor, and artillery, our troops could be cut off and murdered, as they were in Somalia.

We pay in all sorts of ways for allowing a hideously incompetent fool to steal office and keep it, and Darfur is only one of those ways. We’re stuck with Bush 26 more months, and the problems of our nation and the world around it are all magnified by this reality.

Congress doesn’t have the power to withdraw troops from Iraq and it won’t ever cut off funding for those troops. Bush recently said the only way we can lose there is if we quit, which is the kind of logic one might expect from a tangerine. It tells us if we keep doing the same thing, maybe it will start to work somehow, sometime, some way, that maybe something will save his place in history. I wouldn't count on it.

Whatever pressing needs you bring up – national health care, anti-pollution measures, action on global warming, our dangerously shot educational system, immigraton -- require the application of brains and money. Meanwhile, the mindless theocrat steering the ship is spending $8 billion a month in borrowed money on a war that has no mission and helps only our enemies. And if you let him, he’d lower taxes (for the very, very rich of course) still more.

We're all screwed by Iraq to some extent, but some of us are screwed worse than others -- those who get blown to pieces, maimed physically or emotionally or who go to prison because of actions taken or not taken in relation to the war. To be least affected, one must scramble up the American hierarchy. It's no good to be a torturer, for instance, as enlisted people at Abu Ghraib found out, but it's quite safe to be pulling the torturers' strings. If you're sent into combat day after day without respite and you snap and kill the wrong Iraqi, you can get life. But if you can dispatch those same troops and own some Haliburton stock on the side while you grant it no-bid contracts, you'll do quite well.

The people in Darfur are, unfortunately for them, just another group that's particularly screwed by the mess our Bushoramous has made and continues to make in Iraq.

Friday, November 10, 2006

REPUBLICAN VOTERS MAKE GLASS NEARLY HALF-EMPTY





DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Call me a cockeyed pessimist, but isn’t anyone else alarmed that approximately 47 percent of the electorate is still lame enough to vote Republican? Just who are these imbeciles and how did they get that way? Even Wiley Coyote knows there’s trouble when he looks down and sees he’s run off the cliff. How bad does it have to get before they agree it’s bad?

The way I look at it, the glass is 47 percent empty because how can anyone feel comfortable with all these cuckoo birds stumbling around and wandering into voting stations? NPR asked a congressional candidate in Georgia to identify the most important issue in the campaign and he answered gay marriage. He sounded sincere.

The Republicans have no energy policy, think it’s A-OK that we’re the only industrialized nation in the free world without national health insurance, and provide only slogans to fix their failed hobby war in Iraq. For the Supreme Court they’ve been approving lying inept-ocrats whose eyes twirl around inside their skulls. They even voided our signature on the Geneva Convention and treated the Bill of Rights like it was a fatwa from Bin Laden. They borrow like there’s no tomorrow, and if they were to continue getting their way on global warming and the poisoning of air and water, there won’t be a tomorrow.

And nearly half the voters voted to keep these corrupt-oramusses in office. Some of them have an excuse. They want to reach the End of Times and are savvy enough to see that Bush, Cheney, Hastert, etc. are the shortest, quickest route. But what about the rest?

These people Lincoln was talking about when he said you can fool some of the people all of the time seem so much more numerous in the de-brained culture of MTV, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Britney Spears. Recent high school graduates who can find Afghanistan on a map are as small a fraction of the whole as the percentage share of Americans who are even aware that Bush’s handlers were caught inserting a fake journalist-gay prostitute into White House press conferences to lob powder-puff questions at their answer-challenged leader.

Yes, this election gave us grounds for cautious celebration. But as the next Congress seeks to undo some of the criminally corrupt practices of the last one – particularly in regard to the job of making an aquarium out of the fish soup they call Iraq -- it ought to pay serious attention to providing a decent education to our citizens so perhaps someday down the road Americans will be able to field our 1-800 calls as capably as native Hindi speakers.

Friday, November 03, 2006

AMERICAN PRINCES, BARONS, AND SUCH


DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
It seems more and more powerful politicians are sons and daughters of polticians or sometimes their spouses -- Bush, Bayh, Clinton, Gore, Chafee, Dodd, Dole, Kennedy, Murkowski, Rockefeller. The list goes on. I just named our President and nine percent of the Senate. There are also governors, House members, and others, such as Jerry Brown, who’s been California governor and who, as I speak, is sneaking up on the state Attorney General’s office. You’ll also notice this is a bipartisan list.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn’t this country fight a revolution to prevent people with inherited titles from running the government? But evidently people are more comfortable with the old system, and so they invite it back one politician at a time. Many individuals don’t really want to be free. That’s why they become Scientologists Moonies, fascists, Communists, Islamists, etc. Freedom can be a scary thing, especially to truly demented sonsofbitches and the uneducated, two types we have in abundance around here.

The Founding Fathers understood this inclination, but fought it. Washington, for instance, refused to be king. And to this day, as I understand the law, Americans aren't allowed to accept inherited titles, though no one does anything about it when they do. Remember Princess Radziwill?

The purposes and good intentions of the Republic’s founders have been mangled so thoroughly that I doubt they’d even recognize the sleazy structure we’ve stuck over their building blocks, with politicians openly soliciting money from their corporate paymasters and letting them actually sit down and write the midnight legislation.

We might at least stop being hypocrites and call things what they are – not only change the law but take it one step further and start awarding these titles right here in America. If Bush, Bayh, etc. were princes, barons, counts, dukes, stuff like that -- our voters would know they’ve inherited their offices and that no competing candidates should even be considered. And When Exxon-Mobil or Merck want something done, they can skip the charade and just purchase a royal decree. It would simplify things.