'WHAT I HEARD ABOUT IRAQ'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Worn out from the unceasing barrage of ineptitude, arrogance, and falsehoods, beaten-down voters look to the future like sleepers in the blistered confusion of a nightmare about to end. They know they can get screwed badly over the next two years, but after that, whatever goes wrong will go wrong under another president, and heck, we can do two years standing on our head. Why, it’s not even as long as we had to endure the O.J. coverage.

Yet the night holds more nightmares: Innocents (that includes our own sons and daughters) will keep dying in Iraq. We may drop a nuke or two on Iran. The globe will continue poaching over a low flame. The Bush regime will resist pollution controls. Fundamentalist storm troopers and plugged-in corporations will keep picking our pockets. Corrupt Iraqi plutocrats who understand his weaknesses better than Democrats in Congress ever did will keep outsmarting our dimwitted prince. Our health bills will go up. Health delivery will go down. Al Qaeda will score more victories in Afghanistan and may yet pull another Nine-Eleven on us. And Bush will lie about all of it. As Leonard Cohen tells us, "Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed."

But in order to keep the damage down in the future, we need to understand more about how, during the previous six years we got beaten to the punch time after time by an administration chock full of cowardly, posturing chicken hawks.

A writer by the name of Eliot Weinberger, in a February 3, 2005 article in the London Review of Books, did it the right way. You can find it here. Copy the link and call it up. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/wein01_.html

Good writer Weinberger shows, rather than tells.
The article, “What I heard in Iraq,” should have been a knockout punch to this administration. Natually it wasn't ready for prime time in the U.S. In a series of chronological statements and events Weinberger catalogs the administration’s lies and denials as he cites indisputable facts the blunder-amusses disputed anwyay. We see how the wretched Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest relied on the media’s cowardice, incompetence, and failure to do even elementary research. We watch Rice, Powell, and the other usual suspects take advantage of their natural belligerence in a format that rarely leaves room for follow-up questions. They lie, wriggle away by answering another question, and sometimes launch a verbal assault against the questioner before calling on someone else (at moments like these Bush liked to call on a male prostitute posing as a reporter who’d been planted there by the administration. I wish I were kidding)

The article was later adapted for the theater by Simon Levy. Reviewers call the result devastating. Theater-goers walk out shell-shocked, beyond anger. BBC Radio will air it in April. The play has been to Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Scotland, and elsewhere. It’s set to run on March 20 in Los Angeles again and also in Philadelphia. Theater people are trying to organize productions in other cities. Go to this link for more information: http://www.fountaintheatre.com/WHATIHEARDABOUTIRAQ-FutureProductionsEvents.htm

Here, from Weinberger’s article, is part of what happens:

I heard a reporter say to Donald Rumsfeld: ‘Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said they would welcome us with open arms.’ And I heard Rumsfeld interrupt him:
‘Never said that. Never did. You may remember it well, but you’re thinking of somebody else. You can’t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said.’
But a little higher we already read,
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say there was ‘no question’ that American troops would be ‘welcomed’: ‘Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and al-Qaida would not let them do.’

I heard a reporter ask Donald Rumsfeld: ‘If they did not have WMDs, why did they pose an immediate threat to this country?’ I heard Rumsfeld answer: ‘You and a few other critics are the only people I’ve heard use the phrase “immediate threat”. It’s become a kind of folklore that that’s what happened. If you have any citations, I’d like to see them.’
And I heard the reporter read: ‘No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people.’
Rumsfeld replied: ‘It – my view of – of the situation was that he – he had – we – we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that – that we believed and we still do not know – we will know.’

To me, that was the high point. Tough-guy Rumsfeld counterpunched and breaking down under the weight of the facts. Truth can be ugly. But use it well and you can make lovely things happen.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, A COLUMNIST IMPERVIOUS TO REALITY

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Back when I was in the newspaper business, there was a saying repeatedly applied to the subject of idiots or tyrants at the news helm: when your ticket is punched, it's punched.

Once you reached the upper echelons of the swine-shit factory, this brought certain entitlements. So even when an editor, for example, who was only moderately talented to begin with drank six martinis for lunch, he still had the right to return to the newsroom and edit your copy. In fact, it was possible for him to talk his way into a bigger job at a bigger paper because what the heck, his ticket was punched.

Thomas L. Freidman is a newspaper guy whose ticket is punched. He’s a New York Times columnist and omnipresent talking head. As far as I know, he doesn't drink six martinis for lunch, but in his case, it couldn't hurt. This pretentious schnook gets it all wrong but looks -- and to the uninitiated -- even sounds like someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Friedman cheer-led us into a pointless war in Iraq, and when everything went wrong fast, he wrote one moronic column after another on how just a little tinkering with Bush's essentially correct policy would likely turn everything around in “the next six months.” He wrote that just about every six months without ever referring to the previous claim six months earlier. Like Bush, like Shotgun Cheney, like steel-eyed, vengeful Hillary, Friedman’s never wrong, never apologizes.

Word is out that this pudgy pissant now commands a $75,000 speaking fee. Why, one might ask, would chumps pay such a price for his opinions when they’re more likely to extract wisdom from the lady on the next stool at Denny’s? It all has to do with the punch on his ticket.

Friedman, who expounds without accuracy on the meaning of events twice a week in The Times, also writes best-selling books that relentlessly fail to perceive the situation. In The Earth is Flat, he practically giggles over all the lovely gifts this new global economy bestows on us without examining why American wages have remained stagnant for thirty years and why all those cheap electronic gadgets from China that drove out the competition with slave wages don’t actually work very well.

Here are some telling statistics gathered last year by Derrick Z. Jackson of The Boston Globe, which, ironically, is owned by Friedman's employer.

The Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the two liberal think tanks that annually chart the gap between CEOs and workers, list the gap in 2005 at 431-to-1, or $11.8 million to $27,460. That compares with a gap of 107-to-1 in 1990. In 1980, it was only 42-to-1. If salaries of the average worker had kept up with that of a CEO, he or she would have made $110,136 last year. Had the minimum wage risen at the same pace as CEO compensation, it would have stood at $23.01. But the federal minimum wage of $5.15 hasn't risen since 1997.

I mean, aren’t these danger signals? Shouldn’t Freidman's publisher, at least, bring to his attention the fact that his pretentious blather misses the whole point of what’s going on? Shouldn't we be examining ways to make the system work better for people instead of Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil? Isn't it past time to stop listening to Friedman's advice on Iraq?

But his employers clearly see the advantages of hiring a guy to shovel swine shit who doesn't ever seem to smell it.

AS BRITS PULL FREE OF IRAQI SWAMP PUS, ERITREA HOLDS FAST

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

As the lame-duck Great Leader and his toadies smile and wave fondly at departing British troops, they pretend not to see the inherent paradox as our own deployment into the swamp pus of Iraq -- to borrow an expression from our astute White House -- surges. You almost feel sorry for the Great Decider and his little helpers. They're like some nitwit who walks into a door and declares, "It's okay, I planned it all along."

Denmark, with hardly enough troops there to put together a game of Texas Hold’m, will be out by August, and South Korea by the end of this year. Lithuania, whose contribution to the Coalition of the Willing is down to 53 troops and perhaps a pet goat or two, is also thinking aloud about getting out entirely. Italy and Spain are gone, along with their prime ministers that said yes to the invasion that quickly morphed into an attempt to occupy hell.

The globally reviled Bush still smirks, but his deer eyes show new traces of fear and puzzlement. Yes, he sees the oncoming truck, but now what? The bullying belligerence of old has been tamed at least a little by his suspicion that there may be more to this governing stuff than Karl Rove explained back in Texas when he first pulled Junior out of the idiot box. Lately his handlers' lies are less spirited. Maybe their minds are on book contracts.

Blair’s retrenchment was of little consequence because it was clearly in the cards whether he went along or not. Unless he breaks yet another promise, he will step down by the end of summer. Heir-apparent Gordon Brown’s statements on Iraq have been mixed, vague, and elusive. But he will probably withdraw even more troops, maintaining a microscopic token force that will keep the alliance with the U.S. intact and minimize domestic damage. He’s unlikely to embrace a conflict so heartily detested by an overwhelming majority of the British public.

So unable to do anything about British retrenchment, Condoleeza Rice proclaimed that it adheres to “what is really the plan for the country as a whole.” And Shotgun Cheney sees the drawdown of approximately 25 percent of remaining British forces as “actually an affirmation.” But imagine if Blair, instead of bowing to the pressure of reason, had scrounged up another 50,000 troops for their "surge." Would Rice and Cheney complain? You decide.

Estonia has 35 troops in Iraq; Kazakhstan, 27 military engineers; Netherlands, 15 soldiers as part of a NATO training mission, and Slovenia, four military instructors. Good thing, too. If you want to win a war, don’t make a move without Slovenian military instructors. No one around the White House has mentioned the Coalition of the Willing in ages. But as far as I know, they’ve still got Eritrea.

Oh, you're probably wondering what this column has to do with the death of Anna Nicole Smith, depicted in the photo. Nothing.

ANATOMY OF AN ATROCIOUS CONGRESSMAN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Bear with me and read this pronouncement on the threat of global warming from the Website of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif.:

"Too often, when congress [sic.] is asked to pass environmental legislation, the legislation is based on emotional junk science rather than data based on reproducable [sic.], rigorous, tested, peer-reviewed results. In no area has this been more obvious than climate change. Because the Kyoto Treaty and much of the suggested environmental legislation would decimate jobs in southern California, constituents may be interested to learn of the growing scientific consensus that global warming is not manmade, if it is in fact even occuring. [sic.] "

Even some of the most hardened adversaries of science in the Bush Administration now concede the reality of global warming, but Rohrabacher soldiers on, disseminating the same disproved ratshit. He could probably plead ignorance, except he has no interest in knowing the real truth, making him an especially grievous liar. He figures the next generations inheriting the poisons for which he crusades (this includes his own three children) will just have to look out for themselves the same way he looked out for himself.

“Soldiering” on, though, is an inappropriate term in the context of Rohrabacher, an Iraq war hawk who ducked out on the draft during Vietnam. Witnesses contend he showed up to his Selective Service physical with an x-ray of a knee he claimed was beyond salvation. Yet he also boasts he was surfing regularly.

You might expect a hypocrite like him with the mind of a sparrow, a creep who never held a job outside politics or government, to hail from some deeply atavistic hollow in the furthest reaches of Dixie, where deprived, Dust Bowl constituents don’t have the wherewithal to sort out the goods on their congressional representative.

But no, Rohrabacher represents one of the richest districts in America – California’s 46th – which hugs a sliver of the coast from Newport Beach up to Palos Verdes. He’s elected by an educated bunch whose members drive luxury SUVs, live in mansions with breathtaking Pacific views, and have their plastic surgeons on speed dial.

Rohrabacher is an example of what extreme gerrymandering gets you. His district has the shape of a flattened salamander, carved carefully by the State Legislature to ensure its congressional representative can do what he likes with those few Democrats caught inside -- ignore them, insult them, anything goes. He once met with constituents from Military Families Speak Out and spent most of fifteen minutes yelling at them. Women cried.

As long as he's not convicted of a felony and continues to screw the middle and lower classes, the man can’t lose an election. He uses campaigns as an excuse to enrich his personal treasury, which can be freely drawn upon for all sorts of expense-account dodges. Democratic opponents, who can raise only pennies, are no more than sacrifices.

I live in the 46th, and I know its people. They don’t give a damn about the environment or the war. And they're no Creationists, either. They worship material luxury. Rorhabacher can say or do what he likes on superfluous issues because they have only one issue – tax breaks. They want lots of them. Cut their taxes and they don’t mind if you send poor kids off to Iraq to be killed, crippled, or permanently traumatized. These are the people who really run the Republican Party, and of course their net worth makes them a tiny elite. The party hands out what it considers trivial, non-fiscal favors to the far more numerous religious fascists, gun nuts, and racists who make up the rest of a coalition. Thoughtful, decent Republicans still aboard this macabre train delude themselves.

The irony is that huge spender-borrower Bush is wasting $2 trillion on his optional war while he starves us of social benefits. Like Rorhabacher and the bozos that elect him, he doesn’t care what happens to the next generations that must pay the debt he’s accumulating as long as taxes are low now. Apres moi, le deluge, as Louis XV pronounced. Thanks to vicious greedheads like Rohrabacher, there's another deluge coming.

HOW TO GET US OUT OF IRAQ: PAY CONGRESS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

What would get Congress to force Bush to pull out of Iraq? Money, of course. Washington is a bazaar, and if you want to buy something, you must pay the price. Congress has established and polished a system of legalized bribery that has most of its members spending most of their working hours raising contributions for themselves.

Members have proved repeatedly that they will vote against the interests of their constituents in favor of their paymasters and then rely on the inept media to allow them to escape consequences.

Generally, voting for what’s right doesn’t pay enough, which is why we’re saddled with a world dictated by insurance, banking, drugs, Star Wars creatures, creationists, and other industries willing to pay for what they want.

No, I’m not joking. During the seventies, in another life, I covered Congress for a daily newspaper, and during that time I convinced political operatives to give me details off the record about how their world works. They painted an ugly picture. Since then, the cost of campaigning – which means the cost of waging TV attack ads on opponents – has multiplied to staggering sums, and a corrupt system grew far more corrupt.

This week, during the Iraq debate, members of the House have been pretending to expose their political souls, with most of them prepared to vote in favor of a toothless resolution that objects to Bush’s military escalation. Only a minority is willing to stand up and use the power granted to them by the Constitution – the power of the purse – to end this pointless blunder of an occupation. In matters of foreign policy money is a lesser factor, true, but I guarantee you if we paid them enough to act decently, we’d get some decency out of them.

In the meantime, the relative lack of bribe-related motivation on this issue has members confused because it calls on them to actually scrutinize policy instead of checking their profit-and-loss ledgers.

Dead-enders consider themselves relatively safe funding Bush’s moronic war because most voters have been fooled into thinking withholding funds would be a stab in the back to troops in the field, leaving them out there on the battlefield with no bullets for their weapons. The Bush-Cheney team, though not trusted by a majority of voters, has successfully planted this lie in the public mind, just as it had a majority believing for years that Saddam Hussein knocked down the World Trade Center.

The media still do a terrible job of sorting out facts. The standard method of operation is to let both sides have their say and switch to a commercial. This works only when both sides at least try to tell the truth. Vicious liars are an odious thing to behold, and most of us, including the press, don’t know how to deal with them. First, you have to have your facts straight, then you have to challenge the lies.

During the Kerry-Bush debates in ’04, when Bush said he was an excellent steward of the environment, or words to that effect, Kerry was both flustered by the damnable, outright lie, and unable to muster the facts to prove that Bush had weakened the EPA and other key regulators in a determined and very specific pattern of abuse that dirtied air and water and defiled formerly protected land.

The most recent, reliable poll tells us 76 percent of Iraqis want us out of there within a year and think the presence of our troops exacerbates the killing. So it’s a mystery how the twisted Bush-Cheney team deludes anyone into claiming our troops are fighting for democracy.

You want more members of Congress to back off from the delusion? Pay them.

NOV. '08: ANOTHER 'BABEL' BREWING?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Did you see Babel? – an expensive, morbid malformity whose scenes veritably drip with mucus, urine, and other noxious fluids while it canvases the world to prove everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and that all this bleakness ties together in one humorless, hideous ball of twine we call Earth. It’s a load of crap designed not to entertain viewers but to impress Academy voters into assuming that anything so serious and lengthy just has to be smart.

Unfortunately the general elections of November ’08 could turn out the way Babel’s cynical, manic-depressive minstrels see everything:

Obama and Edwards split the progressive voters who want out of Iraq now, so Hillary, awash in campaign funds she uses to cripple her Democratic enemies with attack adds, wins the nomination, and of course loses the election to a shrewder batch of political assailants on the right. A repeat of 2000, with Gore and Nader destroying each other, thereby making it close enough for Bush-Cheney to steal.

We’d then get yet another President who’s a deluded nut case either belonging to the home-schooling fringe that’s itching to bring on the End of Days or somebody who peddles his ass to it daily while he hands over what’s left of the treasury to his corporate handlers.

Hard to say who the next Republican tyrant might be, but count on someone who’s not McCain or Giuliani. Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, ably points out Bush has alienated so many voters that the far-right evangelical fruitcakes looking to kill off the last of our democracy rule Republican primaries. They despise McCain for past slights no matter how passionately he debases himself before them. Giuliani will be seen as a gay-loving abortionist with a New York accent.

Some sly, conspiratorial jerk we’re not paying attention to will nab the nomination while the rest of us watch this administration roll around in a fake panic attack over Iran. The Republican nominee will then pose as a compassionate conservative before the general election. Only after he’s safely sworn in will we learn he’s out of his mind. This scenario is not a sure thing, but it’s credible and quite possible, something we can’t label life imitating art. But we could safely call it life imitating Babel.

WAIT A MINUTE -- BUSH ACCUSES WILSON OF NEPOTISM?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
As the Libby perjury trial peels off more layers of how Bush’s administration operates, we learn that it felt called upon to Swift Boat Ambassador Joseph Wilson because – my gosh – he was suspected of nepotism. Nepotism happens to be one subject this administration actually knows something about.

So when word spread around the White House that Iraq War critic Wilson was married to Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, messengers bearing leaks from Dick Cheney went forth to warn the media that something must be done to stop this runaway fixation on family connections or who knows where it might lead?. One of these days a vicious despot whose daddy was President and whose granddaddy was a U.S. senator from Connecticut, might steal an election and take over the whole shooting match.

Actually, Plame had nothing to do with sending Wilson on a pre-invasion journey to Niger, where he learned and later revealed to New York Times readers the report that Saddam was seeking nuclear apparatus there was bullshit. Purposely revealing Plame was an agent was a treasonous act for which it appears no one will ever be charged. But as long as we’re talking about nepotism, isn’t there something very spooky and downright incestuous about the same two families trading the presidency back and forth for decades?

The first Bush took the throne in ’89, and if Hillary is elected in 2008, that could extend this bi-family monarchy of Bushes and Clintons into 2013. A second term for Clinton would extend the line all the way to 2017 and counting. Even if we were talking about exceptionally decent individuals, this would be alarming. But the fact is, these two families are extremely odd and untrustworthy.

When this nation turned away from monarchy at its founding, it evidently was unable to turn away from monarchy in the hearts of people. A royalist imperative persists. Perhaps citizens inherited this weakness from all those ancestors who were, let’s face it, groveling peasants who flocked to the castle of their lord for protection.

Our present American lord saved us from what he preached was imminent annihilation from Saddam Hussein, launching an endless war that down to the wire continues to make billions of bucks for the right corporations. He convinced the most corrupt Congress since the Gilded Age to follow its instincts and alleviate the financial suffering of America’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of everyone else, and every time he promotes a "fix" for our failed health system he throws more dollars at insurance-HMOs and pharmaceuticals. Got an energy or an environmental problem? Same fix, different corporate recipients.

He continues handing over billions of dollars to zombie zealots who believe the earth is 6,000 years old and have made their mystic beliefs the foundation for the entire federal government. He gave power and funding to pathetic, pompous, platitudinous pissants like himself, whose boundless ineptitude ensured, for instance, that while Gulf Coast citizens slammed by Katrina died of dehydration, the EPA director was agonizing over where to make dinner reservations.

But it’s preposterous to think either George II or Hillary I would be President were it not for their family ties. George, whose family has attended Yale for six generations, doesn’t have the talent to operate a tire store. [Above, next to a photo of W's grandfather Sen. Prescott Bush (R-Conn.) is a portrait of Britain's George III] Hillary’s bland exterior coupled with her refusal to say anything that wouldn’t pull in a 70-percent ratings approval from a focus group make her an ideally forgettable candidate.

KISSINGER WAKES, SITS UP IN COFFIN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Somebody nudged Henry Kissinger, napping in his daytime coffin. He sat up, blinked, told a congressional panel maybe the President has a secret plan to end the war, and fell back into the comfort of his Transylvanian dirt.

Sorry, Henry, somebody forgot to inform you – this is a different maniacal Republican president – this one a whole lot stupider than the one you’re used to. Also, this is a different pointless war, and unlike the one you were so fond of, Henry, this one could pull in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, even China. A real bloodbath, Henry, the Armageddon this ding-a-ling prays for. Nothing like a disgraced President picking a few radioactive shards out of his teeth to give him a whole new start. He can be born again, this time maybe just missing a brain instead of a brain, courage, and a heart.

Anyway, Henry, brand new ball game, different pitcher on the mound.

In the meantime, over on Capitol Hill, senators are competing with each other to see just whose staff can write the most meaningless, non-binding resolution to fail to nail Bush and Cheney to the wall for lying, stealing, committing a string of felonies, and getting hundreds of thousands of people killed and maimed, millions adrift, all for no purpose -- while our prince and his chief minister continue dropping more borrowed dollars down the slot. “We’ll hit one this time, Georgie. I can feel it.”

And there are ugly noises coming out of long-overlooked Afghanistan, where the one-eyed mullah can’t wait for the snow to melt so he can vent his whatever down in the flatlands. What a guy. Still on the loose along with Osama Bin what’s-his-name.

Another little story ignored this week confirmed that incompetent White House fiends planted political operatives in virtually every government agency to put the administration’s own twist on global warming, Star Wars, family planning, stem cell research, vehicle emission standards, and etc. Nothing new there. It’s precisely what the Soviet Union did for 70 years, using political operatives called commissars. They were placed even in the armed forces, overruling general officers, just like right now with the commissars' little “surge,” which continues apace because, remember? – Congress refuses to get mixed up in the madness. Since they don’t want to get stuck with the blame and have no leadership qualities, [Hear me, oh useless Hillary] they stand back and squeak like mice.

Finally, our forces kicked the hell out of murderous Muslim crazies belonging to a secret Iraqi sect, killing, wounding, and capturing hundreds. Only one problem. What the hell are U.S. forces doing acting as religious police in Iraq, for Christ’s sake? (Get that pert double entendre?Couldn’t help myself) This is what happens when you occupy a crazy place and pledge to make it un-crazy. You get caught up changing somebody else's bedsheets.

In L.A., gang members are targeting members of differing races for drive-bys. Among the massacred was a 14-year-old girl minding her own business. Shouldn’t we be more concerned about that?