SOMETIMES WE DISCOVER TOO LATE THAT OUR 'PROTECTORS' ARE KEYSTONE COPS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Officials and campus police at Virginia Tech showed the judgment of parakeets yesterday morning. They had two bodies at a dormitory, both of them shooting victims, they’d recovered no weapons at the scene, so clearly an armed gunman or gunmen was at large, yet they waited two hours to issue an alert.

Instead they followed a blind lead, heading out to question the boyfriend of one of the victims. When asked why no alert was sounded, university president Charles Steger explained authorities were still gathering information.

According to his reckoning, one doesn’t notify the public about a crime until it’s solved. Evidently authorities made a mistake when they precipitously informed the community about the Manson murders, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and that New England Brink’s heist. Too bad they didn’t have Steger to advise them.

The first two murders were kept in-house with campus security. No other police organizations were called in to close off the campus and hunt down the killer. The campus community wasn't instructed to lock up and hunker down. Small minds under such circumstances are prone to cover up because it all looks so bad, thereby making things worse.

This morning reporters at the campus press conference focused on the psychological profile of the shooter, a known stalker, but the organizational atrocity here was in the panicked response to the first two murders, which made the other 30 possible in the classrooms across campus.

It’s terrible when we discover that people paid to protect us can be more prone to panic than your average customer sitting on a Denny’s stool. When Columbine High School was shot up eight years ago by two demented teens, the Sheriff’s Department waited two hours to enter the building because, they explained later, they feared there were booby traps inside. At least one person bled to death while they stood around with their thumbs up their ass. They also prevented anyone else from going in. Frantic parents had to stand there with them. The photo above is from the Columbine massacre. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In battle, infantrymen go forward all the time knowing the enemy's somewhere up ahead with explosives, automatic weapons, and who knows what else. They do it because it’s what they signed to do, just as the firemen and cops who poured into the World Trade Center died trying to fulfill their pledge to keep people safe.

Then of course we have a commander-in-chief who read The Pet Goat for seven minutes after being informed the nation was under attack. Eventually he rose, raced to Air Force One, and flew around in a wide circle, from Florida to Nebraska, and finally Washington. He spent the entire day running away. As an ex-soldier, I can tell you an infantry squad leader who ran off and left his attacked squad to fend for itself would be court-martialed, stripped of rank, dishonorably discharged, and imprisoned. A president leaves an entire country defenseless and no one even asks him about it.

Nothing happened to those panicked Colorado authorities, but something did happen to Bush. He got re-elected. It’s too soon to tell what will happen to Steger and his Keystone Cops.

VIRGINIA TECH, IRAQ DEATHS PART OF SAME BLOODY TAPESTRY

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Periodic slaughters by our well-equipped lone gunmen have become so common that everybody knows what to do and say afterward -- survivors, journalists, relatives, politicians, the people who set up those same sad, makeshift shrines to the dead. We're engulfed by rage, grief, sadness, then we go back to our lives to wait for the next psycho.

So we were well-rehearsed for the tragedy that landed on Virginia Tech yesterday. We know all about those fearful, twisted beings who in this country have access to semi-automatic weapons. Organized, fearful, twisted beings in the National Rifle Association pay politicians to make sure they have that access.

People kill people, yes, but they kill them much more easily when they own such weapons. We're the only industrialized democracy on Earth that protects the rights of lunatics to buy them. They don’t have to prove sanity or even rudimentary knowledge of gun safety.

Meanwhile, the day took its usual toll of killed and maimed U.S. troops in Iraq. The counts always lag, but there we suffer an average of three American deaths a day, plus many more maimed -- all this in behalf of a pointless exercise that weakens us, has stolen our moral standing, makes our enemies stronger, and has unleashed mindless homicidal fury against an entire nation.

America's big tent unfortunately makes room for the mad policies of an administration that panders to a twisted few who wrongfully claim the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights specifically protects the gun rights of homicidal maniacs. It simultaneously pursues a war on the fly, restating its aims as it continues playing its deadly, ad libbed charade. Those of us who see flaws in these policies -- and we are the majority -- proceed with our melancholy, curious acceptance.

Bush-o-ramusses tell themselves their Iraq doings are a necessary cost of business, but that's only so they don't have to face the truth of their sick, irrational longings. We get less oil out of Iraq than we did before the war. If we were to rebuild and properly protect its oil infrastructure, an accounting of the true cost would be in the thousands per barrel. Meanwhile we're a nation without a conservation policy. People still purchase 7,000-pound SUVs. Madness.

Virginia Tech and Iraq are all part of the same bloody tapestry of a nation that lets fanatics sit atop the political system – fanatics attached to a world view that finds Virginia Tech and Iraq unremarkable and necessary.

BUSH, FOR FIRST TIME, LINKED DIRECTLY TO JUSTICE DEPT. SCANDAL -- HOW COME THERE'S NEVER A COP WHEN YOU NEED ONE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Many of us who were around as Nixon slowly sank, one fact at a time, toward his political demise, considered it, if truth be told, a rewarding experience to see that lying, criminal bastard flailing about, his misdeeds pulling him inexorably toward justice's reward.
Now we’re seeing a repeat, with Bush as the new criminal, but it’s not rewarding -- not even a little bit. The problem here is, while the dummy twists slowly, slowly in the wind (yes, I'm mixing metaphors), people are dying in his vile, wholly impossible attempt to be vindicated by the blood of others.

My friend Tom Dowretzky, a former news desk colleague, sent me this link: http://www.abqjournal.com/news/special/554986nm04-15-07.htm. Tom pointed out that the lead is buried, because beneath the first paragraph we learn Domenici took his campaign to fire the U.S. Attorney who was tormenting him directly to Bush, and the man, David Iglesias, was subsequently fired. It leaves lots of questions. Did Bush take some kind of direct action in Domenici’s behalf after the phone call? Common sense tells us he did. Bush certainly didn’t do anything to call off the dogs. Since he had sworn an oath to the Constitution, it was his duty to admonish Domenici and report his behavior. No evidence of that, either. Circumstantial evidence tells us he ordered Iglesias fired. The investigation rolls on -- torpidly.

By January 2009, when Bush is scheduled to step down, odds are the Democratically-controlled Congress will have uncovered an enormous tonnage of impeachable offenses. But in the meantime in Iraq, three U.S. troops die every day, on average, and many more are permanently disabled.

Bush, avidly persuing his place in hell, said over the weekend that the Democrats in Congress must listen to the generals and continue funding his despicable war. But the generals told him long ago to seek a political solution and get out. So he kept replacing generals until he found some who would go along. Meanwhile, clearly planning to make Iraq a colony into perpetuity, he builds an enormous network of U.S. military bases there euphemistically called "enduring" bases. Congress in 2002 gave him the right to dig out the phantom WMDs. Everything else he did and continues to do there is the work of a despot.

Yet there’s no serious impeachment attempt in Congress. And Bush has even admitted violating the law – revoking habeas corpus and reading mail, intercepting phone calls, etc., without a warrant.

IRAQ BILLS WEAK

The two Iraq funding bills that supposedly stand up to Bush are weak. Military Families Speak out calls them totally unacceptable. The House has a withdrawal deadline of August 31, 2008. That, points out MFSO, “would mean the deaths of over 1,000 more US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi children, women, and men.” The Senate version suggests withdrawal by March 2008. Both bills are loaded with language allowing Bush to ignore them.

As justice for this tyrant moves at the speed of a glacier, more troops head for Iraq on 15-month deployments . . .

'THESE ARE THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S SOULS'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The way the Iraq war is structured, very few Americans are conscious of what it’s doing to them. Unlike the scattered families whose children come home in coffins that, by White House edict, can’t be photographed, or like the Iraqis who go to the market for a leg of lamb and return minus a leg of their own, most middle-class Americans just go on about their business.

They pay their taxes, go to work, go out to dinner, make love, chuckle over The Daily Show, buy crappy Chinese stuff at discount stores rung up by desperately poor people obeying edicts to smile without health insurance, they fume at this crappy government, but consider themselves mostly untouched.
Meanwhile the horrors deepen. The planet bakes, the fundamentalist churches siphon tax funds to raise more Creationist zombies, the vets come home broken and untreated, there’s no energy policy, Bush lies and lies some more, borrows and borrows some more, allocating the funds to programs that make everything worse and to heck-of-a-job Brownies he's placed throughout the government. He cripples food safety, worker safety, science, education, and access to education, dumbing everything down to his level.

Congressional members enjoy their free gym memberships and members-only elevators while the cauldron boils and we count down the days and hope our twisted electoral process will give us something better next time. But those boxes keep coming home.

MARIO SAVIO
The late Mario Savio (pictured above), facing circumstances far less onerous than today's -- when we suffer under an Orwellian regime that despises its own people -- said to a crowd of Berkeley students in 1964,

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Now there’s an idea.

Imus lost his job. Excellent, but let's stop patting ourselves on the back. Bush and Cheney still have theirs.

VONNEGUT KNEW BETTER THAN TO HAND THE WAR MACHINE TO VILE NITWITS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Kurt Vonnegut had a great run. And in his final book, the nonfiction A Man Without a Country, he got off some profound, clever shots against our present President. Imagine that.
Even as we mourn Vonnegut's loss we see Dick Cheney, his metal heart and test-tube blood refreshed daily by the Transylvanian earth on his coffin floor, wake each evening suited up and ready for another round of lies, mayhem, and feeding enriched batches of evil into the overloaded mind of the pathetic little nitwit sitting in the Oval Office in his Top Gun costume.
This country not only sells guns to its maniacs, it even installs them as President and places them in charge of the biggest, most lethal collection of war-making machinery in history. Had we known just how vile and demented this guy was, we’d have understood that our passive acceptance was making us co-conspirators in our own self-destruction.

BUSH BIDED HIS TIME

But if a candidate has enough money, he can hide behind an election process that fails to ferret out character and can even camouflage astoudingly low levels of ability and intelligence. So Bush bided his time for awhile cutting taxes for the rich, walking away from the Kyoto Treaty, planting heck-of-a-job Brownies all across the top of government agencies, making sure there was no energy policy to conflict with the goals of Exxon-Mobil and Saudi Arabia, and, curiously, impaling counter-terrorism strategies set in place by the previous administration, which he replaced with nothing at all.
But soon enough he mounted his toy steed and dispatched American forces down the mountain for oil, glory, and to scratch the itch of his homicidal pathology. Now his new man at Defense, Robert Gates, who’d signed off on the bipartisan Baker commission’s report, has extended Iraq tours to 15 months. That highly touted panel, remember, said we must begin using diplomacy to extricate ourselves. But after waiting two weeks for everyone to forget the report, Bush threw in more, rather than less, and Gates oversees this mad race toward the abyss.
The war is killing us, and the “surge” is doing it quicker. Congress must hold fast against war funding and impeach these bastards. It’s doubtful it will do even half of that, but we have to stay after its members and make them fear the next election more than they love their corporate paymasters.

FIRE IMUS & TAKE RADIO REPTILES STERN, LIMBAUGH DOWN WITH HIM

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Radio snake Don Imus, who may or may not survive his having referred to student athletes as “nappy-headed ho’s” on the air, could be legitimately fired for each and every moronic episode of his show – as should perverted Howard Stern, dope-addled Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of their ilk.
These radio personalities represent the dumbing down of America to absurd levels no one could have imagined just a few years ago. They're vicious clowns of no redeeming social value who have no allegiance to truth, fairness, or any sort of moral code west of Taliban country.

America suffers from dumbed down elections, music, TV, education, morality, logic, newspapers, weekly magazines, 24-hour news, you name it. And nowhere is it more evident than talk radio, where vocal reptiles like Imus race to the noxioius bottom of the listeners’ barrel to scoop up fame and profit from an alarming deterioration of standards and taste.

Imus is the guy who once told a series of terrible jokes based on Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affairs at a black-tie dinner attended by Bill and Hillary. He got what he wanted – publicity. Where I grew up a guy like that would have been instantly dragged out to the nearest alley for justice. Such a solution is neither terribly intelligent nor always fair, because the ability to pound lumps in a guy’s head is not always in synch with the justness of the pounder’s cause. But seeing it would have been a guilty pleasure.

In that particular case a dumbed-down radio personality was relying on dumbed-down politics to increase the audience of his dumbed-down show. No low-life could have insulted Harry Truman like that because he’d have turned it all around on the perpetrator. But Imus knew his man. He knew the Clintons, who are fuzzy on morals and can’t make a serious move without a focus group to guide them, would sit there and take it, and Imus would get the headlines he so desperately craved.

Years ago friends tried to persuade me there’s actually substance to Howard Stern, that I should try him out. The second time I heard his show he and his ghastly crew of ass-kissers superimposed their own catcalls and laughter over a 911 tape of tearful Joaquin Phoenix’s call to police as his brother River died of a drug overdose on the Sunset Strip. If there was something funny to say about the death of a 23-year-old kid, these fools didn’t find it. I’ve despised Stern ever since.

Limbaugh is a scumbag who styles himself as a kind of political analyst until you catch him telling a flat-out lie, in which case he pleads he’s merely an entertainer. The ascendance of Imus, Limbaugh, Stern, and their clones was aided by the fact that most of their listeners are alone in their vehicles where they feel safer indulging in a moral decay they find appealing.

Fire Imus? Of course. But not just because of his latest racist remarks. Fire him because of what he does every day to make dumbed-down America dumber – and viler.

McCAIN SOLVES IRAQ -- ON TO OTHER PROBLEMS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

John McCain never gets the credit he deserves. The man is a creative thinker whose smallest ideas sometimes contain blockbuster solutions to problems that grow apace while our 21st century Nero fiddles at the Texas White House.
What McCain inadvertently discovered last week was a sure-fire solution to Iraq’s security issues. He demonstrated that if we provide each of its 25 million citizens with 100 U.S. troops on the ground, Apache choppers overhead and military vehicles bristling with automatic weapons to block off streets feeding into their destinations, all Iraqi citizens, providing they wear flak jackets and don't let others know their destinations, should be secure enough to conduct their everyday business with reasonable assurance they won’t be kidnapped or blown to bits. That’s a darn hot discovery and it was pretty much ignored by news media, including all those blogger Bolsheviks who lay claim to some special handle on the truth.
What it means is we can indeed meet the stated goals of the present mission in Iraq of providing a stable foundation so democracy there may flourish like it does here, where a voter in Idaho has approximately five thousand two hundred percent more clout in electing a U.S. senator than a voter in California and where all the stories lately are about how much money a candidate can raise for the 30-second attack ads that will win the electiion.
But I digress. McCain showed us that if we merely allocate proper resources to this surge we should be able to accomplish Bush’s stated goal of staying over there as long as the Iraqis want us. (even though most of them say it's okay to kill U.S. soldiers -- and those polled include Kurds, just about the only people over there who can stand us and who had already broken free of Saddam before we invaded)
Yes, Bush really said that. But it's McCain who demonstrates with such unique vision and clarity just where we're headed. And in 2008 when we ask our new President what he/she is going to do now, the new boss can exclaim with glee, "I'm going to McCainLand!"

GET OUT THE FIRE HOSE -- MAD DOG CHENEY'S AT IT AGAIN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

You have to give credit to our chicken-hawk veep for his unyielding though insufferable persistence. When he gets hold of a lie, you can train a fire hose on him and he still won't let go. Yesterday the unrepentant loon repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein.
This flat declaration, made with the cruel impatience that only a severely impaired maniac can muster, conflicted with brand-new evidence on top of all the old evidence that no such link existed. The new evidence came in the form of the simultaneous release of a Defense Department report confirming that Saddam’s regime never cooperated with al-Qaida. Heads are gonna have to roll at the Pentagon.
As he is wont to do, Dick Cheney, a guy who appointed himself, made his goofy assertion before an audience of imbeciles -- this time listeners to the archbishop of all things hypocritical -- hard-core doper and gay-baiting gay Rush Limbaugh.

Terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Cheney said, “took up residence (in Iraq) before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June."
Only teeny parts of that statement are true, of course, but look carefully at Cheney’s language and how cleverly he integrates what's real with what's invented. Cheney’s a careful user of words. I particularly enjoyed his branding of Iraq as the “central front in the war against terror.” He’s very good at saying stuff that doesn’t say what you think it said.

Notice this time our tenacious Tyrant Number Two didn’t say Zarqawi received any sort of cooperation from Saddam, only that Zarqawi operated in pre-war Iraq. By these standards we should launch immediate invasions of both Spain and the United Kingdom, where al-Qaida functionaries operated and launched large-scale terror attacks. Oregon and New York should also be on the lookout for U.S. helicopter assaults, because al-Qaida wannabes were captured there as well.

Over the years I’ve come to admire the use of this administration’s rhetoric. After the invasion blew up in his face and timid reporters got around to asking Bush whether . . . well, maybe this invasion wasn’t such a good idea . . . Bush would kill his near-perpetual smirk, put on his Top Gun face and reply, “Everyone agreed Saddam was a threat.” And by God, it was true.
But no reporters followed up with something like Hey, numbnuts, the Soviet Union was a threat, but none of your predecessors was stupid enough to invade it. You don’t invade every country that dislikes you, do you, dickhead? Bush got away with this over and over, figuring, heck, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Speaking of questions that are actual questions reminds me -- where’s that credentials application for the next Rose Garden edition of the White House’s kook-encrusted explanation of the world? Oh, I remember. They turned me down in favor of a gay prostitute. (Long story)

WHITE HOUSE TRIES TO ERASE PUBLIC'S MEMORY OF 2 U.S. TROOPS CAPTURED IN IRAQ

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Our expanding casualty list from Iraq of 3,265 American dead and 26,188 wounded or med-evaced for other causes comes to us incomplete. In all U.S. wars before this, casualties included dead, wounded, and missing. This administration begrudgingly releases stats on dead and wounded but doesn’t want to remind Americans that two of our soldiers are missing, so it doesn’t, and our obliging nitwit mass media go along, making the two soldiers invisible men, trees falling in a forest uninhabited by real journalists.

The fate of these two soldiers is unknown. They should be listed on any casualty toll and not forgotten, which is what the White House would like us to do.
Among the many reasons this administration wants us to forget them is its blatant disavowal of the Geneva Convention, and innumerable documented instances of Iraqi prisoners being tortured, humiliated, beaten, and killed. It knows it can’t plead for humane treatment and be taken seriously after all the world saw photos of war crimes at Abu Ghraib, for which no one above the rank of sergeant has been tried.

Bush, Cheney, et al, see our troops as inanimate chess pieces they don’t identify as actual people – you know, the kind they see around the country club or the boardroom. Neither Bush nor Cheney has attended even one funeral of the fallen -- a first in American history for people filling those offices. If you want to know how much our tyrannical team cares for our soldiers, ask any of the disabled Iraq war vets who've been waiting two years for a check.

Army Reservist Ahmed Qusai al-Taie, 42, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was abducted October 23, 2006 when he left the Green Zone, reportedly to see his Iraqi wife. Al-Taie was born in Iraq, but moved to the U.S. as a teenager. His Military Occupational Specialty is translator. The accompanying photo of him (on the left) was released by a Shiite milita – you know, the pals our dimwitted warrior prince has allied himself with against the Sunnis. These buddies of his also killed Casey Sheehan, Cindy’s son.

Al-taie was first reported at "a relative's home when three cars pulled up to the residence," a U.S. military spokesman said. "The hostage-takers handcuffed him and forced him into one of their vehicles," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said.

Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, 23, of Batavia, Ohio, pictured on the right, from footage shown on Arabic-language Al Jazeera TV, disappeared in April 2004 after his convoy was attacked near Baghdad International Airport. He was a PFC at the time. His status originally was "whereabouts unknown." The military changed that to "missing-captured" after Al-Jazeera showed a videotape of Maupin held captive by insurgents.

Two months later, Al-Jazeera said it had received a videotape and statement from insurgents who claimed they killed Maupin, but U.S. officials were unable to verify this, and his status remains "missing-captured."

Maupin and al-Taie are our sons. If you’re a taxpayer, you sent them out there to do a job. We have a responsibility to get them back. Don’t let this administration get away with erasing their existence.

THIS WHITE HOUSE IS KILLING US FOR REAL

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

If you wonder how our warrior Prince George can so callously throw more American youths into the Iraqi meatgrinder in a moronic effort to salvage his blighted legacy, just look at how casually he kills other Americans in order to fatten the wallets of his greedhead friends.

His demented, malevolence has been proved to us over and over during our six-year nightmare, but most recently in two blatant cases involving global warming and sociopathic Big Tobacco poisoning.

Only a week ago it was revealed that his administration put the fix in for death by tobacco in a blockbuster six-year mega-case. In a March 22 report by Carol Leonnig in the Washington Post, ex-Justice Department attorney Sharon Eubanks related the Bush officials’ interference. Tobacco pushers had been utterly trapped at last, with documentary evidence showing they’d lied about a product they knew was inflicting regular disease and death on Americans. The court was poised to exact a $130 billion levy, much of which would have gone toward educating young Americans against the dangers of cigarettes. Studies show these programs work. But Eubanks now tells us that on the eve of victory, the department ordered the requested levy be sliced to $10 billion. That consigned hosts of Americans to a life of disease and early death, but before they expire they'll shell out blood money to a vicious industry that must create new addicts to replace the ones it kills.

Presiding US District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote, “Over the course of more than 50 years, defendants lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as ‘replacement smokers,’ about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke, they suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction, they distorted the truth about low-tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting, and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal—to make money with little, if any, regard for individual suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system.” These were the twisted, hateful, greedy geeks the Bush Administration chose to align itself with.

Then we saw the Justice Department go all the way to the Supreme Court to push its screwy thesis that the EPA lacked the power to monitor polluting emissions that exacerbate global warming. Here we have a power-mad administration that claims the right to read our mail and listen to our phone calls without a warrant, to suspend habeas corpus, torture suspects in the bowels of a secretive international CIA gulag, and ignore law through the stepped-up use of "signings" to legislation. Yet rather than help citizens breathe and fight against the ravages of our poaching planet, suddenly it claims it’s just a little ole toothless government with no power to exact civilized policies from Big Oil and other serial polluters.

The 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in favor of citizens versus the lunatics was encouraging, but those four votes against us were yet another wake-up call. Justice John Paul Stevens, instrumental in this and other cases defending us against the pirates who run the administration, will be 87 this month. Should Bush appoint his successor, the harsh legacy of his fiendish stewardship will follow us with greater strength for decades.

Meanwhile, more troops head for Iraq to suffer death, disfigurement, and possible capture (our inept corporate news media never, ever mention the missing when they cite casualties), dispatched by such a deeply deranged fool he has yet to re-examine any of the deluded platitudes and slogans that in the dim-witted recess of his mind pass for moral policy.

LOONY QUESTS OF POWER-MAD GIULIANI, McCAIN CLASH WITH REALITY; WHERE'S DODGEBALL HILLARY FIT IN?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

You have to wonder about the judgment and sanity of some of these no-hope presidential candidates. I don’t mean fringe players like Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who runs, apparently, without expectation of victory, but whose primary purpose is to direct attention to a cause (in his case, the cause of an aggressively liberal agenda that pays no heed to the demands of mega-corporate players).

What’s startling and almost inexplicable are the truly weird candidates out there expecting to win – Rudy Giuliani and John McCain being the most extreme examples. How could these two possibly have any expectation of success? Carrying baggage that positively reeks, they face two successive, towering hurdles – getting past the hard-core Republican zealots who vote in the primaries and then taking a sharp left turn to pick up the independents they must win over to prevail in the general election while still hanging on to the fringe-weirdo Republican vote.

Giuliani is so vulnerable to the facts of his history that in a national election he’d be in trouble against Porky Pig. Not just the fact that he married his cousin, was forced to admit marital infidelity during an ugly divorce proceeding, and is a serial cross-dresser. Not just the ugly history of his daffy, dog-torturing present wife, either. First, Giuliani put a particularly odious fix in to slide under the Vietnam-era draft (the facts, as I said, are there; one need only look). That bit of his past was overlooked in the run for NYC mayor, but it won't play in Peoria. As mayor, he got lots of publicity for the sharp reduction in New York City crime, but the real mover there was Police Commissioner William Bratton, who, using computer-mapping techniques to pinpoint crime, reduced serious offenses by more than one-third and murder by almost half in just two years. When reporters sniffed out Bratton, Giuliani got rid of him. Not the mark of a leader.

Then Rudy showed oddly wild enthusiasm for unaccomplished Detective Bernard Kerik, pulling him way up into the city bureaucracy and later getting dim-witted George Bush to nominate him to run Homeland Security. Kerik is about to be indicted for a trail of sleaze that followed him up the ladder of success, and Giuliani is stuck to him as Laurel was to Hardy.

McCain took his eye off the ball long ago. It’s nearly impossible to name an issue on which he hasn’t listed mightily from one side to the other, all in his mad pursuit of acclamation, approval, and the presidency. Now he’s unabashed leader of the wildly demented Iraq war hawks, who never saw an irrational U.S. escalation they didn’t love.

McCain is old, and like Giuliani, he’s suffered from both cancer and irrational exuberance for his blighted personal cause. Their unelectable national status is firm as the carvings on Mount Rushmore. Some other Republican will win the nomination.

The real question is whether hated, untrusted, eerie Hillary Clinton is just as crazy as Giuliani and McCain. Whereas McCain has taken every possible position on every possible issue, Hillary takes no clear position on anything. If you asked her whether she preferred cherry or apple pie she'd have to run it through a focus group before replying, and you'd still get no definitive answer. She's a phantom candidate with the beliefs of a snail. But like Giuliani and McCain, she believes in her right to prevail and to rule.

All three of those candidates have access to serious money from their elite paymasters. That won’t be enough to help Rudy and John. The story on Hillary has yet to clarify itself. Of late she's turned more and more to Bill to shore up her absence of charisma or clearcut policy. The strategy is to go after the nostalgia vote -- promising the same old dynasty with the same old Clintonite Klingons in the entourage, and a shared presidency -- a 21st century William and Mary, Ferdinand & Isabella setup. Can't America do better than this?

WHY ARE DEMENTED SLEAZE-O-CRATS LIKE CONDOLEEZA RUNNING AROUND GIVING OTHER COUNTRIES ADVICE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

This vile gang of inept psychos that stole our government out from under us is actually surprised when countries like Egypt object to their arrogant instructions on how to achieve a more perfect society.

Here’s a coven of creepoids that steals the presidency and instantly dumbs down the government by 40 IQ points, leaving us wide open for a terrorist strike. Then they wage the wrong war against the wrong people so they can achieve their personal, financial, and pathological objectives. They establish a gulag of secret prisons whose operatives torture even unto death, smack down habeas corpus, read our mail without court approval, refuse to abide by the Geneva Convention, and drop uranium-depleted shells on civilians while ordering a second helping of apple-cranberry tarts. And after our troops using third-rate gear get their limbs blown off, they're screwed again by an administration that denies them their rightful benefits.

Meanwhile, Condoleeza Rice, fresh off the bestiality circuit, parachutes into Cairo, and get this -- she gets in a snit over proposed changes to the Egyptian constitution because they don’t meet her standards of democracy. Well, there are subjects on which Rice’s suggestions are worth listening to -- for example, if you’d like to alienate the whole world, poach the Earth over a slow flame, or learn how best to fasten electrodes to someone’s genitals. These are all subjects on which she has more than casual knowledge. But when you’re tinkering with a Constitution, you don’t want her in the same time zone.

Our country has lost the right to make suggestions on civil rights, democracy, or standards of decency. Yet demented dolts like Rice scamper around the Earth like roaches with a license to kill, telling everyone else how to live. Banana republics run better elections than we do. Even when no one’s stealing them, they’re not fair. San Jose, one of California's smaller cities, has approximately twice as many residents as all of Wyoming. Yet each state gets the same number of senators? Gimme a break. Then we pollute this shaky structure of ours further by allowing a shadowy elite to choose leaders according to how much money they can raise for their campaigns. And after they take office, these morality-challenged creatures spend the rest of their terms paying back their contributors with policies that smell like rotting flesh. A country that kills the inheritance tax on billionaires while it fails to establish a civilized health care system and cuts aid to college students is crumbling. Even Egypt can see that.

WILL GONZALEZ BE THE RAT THAT LEADS US TO THE BLOOD TRAILS?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

This Alberto Gonzalez character – a shameless wretch who perfectly fits the role of chief law enforcement officer for this administration -- would, under normal circumstances, have already been thrown into the street with his belongings in a cardboard box. After all, he’s been caught lying blatantly and fluidly to Congress, therefore drawing way too much heat on the deluded sleazeballs and sociopaths with whom he consorts. The next time he goes up the Hill to testify -- and Cabinet members can’t hide behind executive privilege -- it won’t require much labor for Democrats to compare the transcripts of his previous testimony (“I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons,” blah, blah, blah) with the text of those damning emails.

So why hasn’t the White House made a patsy out of him and tossed him out? All they have to do is leak it around that Gonzalez lost his moorings and though he did so with the best of intentions, committed these atrocities all on his own. And Gonzalez, following the usual pattern, would then tell us he wants to spend more time with his family. That's that.

Yet he remains in the fold. Could it be that behind the White House gates, the chief swine are running scared? Fearful he’ll spill what he knows about the inner workings of the Dark Side? Maybe he's got so much on them they can’t afford to keep him and they can’t afford to have him out there spilling his guts.

The longer Gonzalez hangs around, the more likely that’s the case. That would mean he’s already led them to believe they can't count on him to behave like that guy who apologized to Cheney for getting shot in the face. He may be hinting that if they hang him out there alone he'll finger others – perhaps even members of the untouchable troika – Bush, Cheney, and Rove. Scooter Libby, counting on a pardon, didn’t take them down. Gonzalez might have other ideas.

The Democratic committee chairs in the Congress have barely begun sifting through the vileness and criminality of this administration. Armed with the power of subpoena, they’re going to find lots, lots more. For all we know, Gonzalez is a short cut to bigger cases, to a pattern of felonies around the globe. After all, he fired prosecutors who were exposing Republican crimes.

This could unlock the room where they keep the evidence of fixed contracts, payoffs, traded favors, war profiteering, body parts. We’re in a race to see whether these cowardly thugs who stole our country can reach January '09 before Congress finds the blood trails. At some point they'll begin turning on one another. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years, all right. Yet it’s impossible to enjoy them while people are still dying in Iraq.

To let these schmucks pursue their madness overseas in the midst of these revelations is crazy. It’s like letting some deranged nut wearing a cape and no pants perform heart surgery on one of your family members while he's also having phone sex with a congressional page.

'SUPPORT OUR TROOPS & BY THE WAY, WHEN DID YOU STOP BEATING YOUR WIFE?'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

“Whatever our differences in Washington, our troops and their families deserve the appreciation and the support of our entire nation.”

Those were Bush’s words in his nationwide address today. Our warrior prince asked for patience because heck, we’re just getting started. Give us a chance. If you weasels don’t like me, at least support our troops. His meaning and purpose were to perpetuate the “support our troops” device that worked so well so long. Three ghoulish words that are an accusation tangled inside a threat, pretending to exemplify sweet, positive thinking when in fact they’re an attack, an admonition, an ugly masquerade.

The three words on the stickers shitheads love to slap on their vehicles announce there are Americans out there who don’t support our troops, who wish evil things on our brave boys and girls, so maybe if the saintly, the right-minded, the true patriots all stand up and declare their loyalty, we can unmask these treasonous, terrorist-loving louts. Either you're with me, Bush tells us, or you're against the troops.

George Orwell, who predicted the next totalitarians would tell us that war is peace and freedom is slavery, would enjoy the perfect irony of “Support our troops,” a lie of demonic magnificence. It’s the Orwellian shield behind which the hard-core rockhead coalition of avid chicken hawks, pro-torture evangelicals, gun-o-maniacs, racists, anti-tax greedheads, and other disturbed geeks work out their little deals to bite off a bigger piece of the action for themselves while they feed our troops into the Iraqi trash compactor.

Today, the fourth anniversary of the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of our republic, is a good day to stand up to those words.

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS CONGRESS WILL OK NEW FUNDING FOR BUSH'S HECK OF A JOB IN IRAQ? BELIEVE IT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Monday marks four years since our self-anointed wartime leader, mounted on a stuffed pony atop the hill, raised his hand Sitting-Bull style and sent the Coalition of the Willing across the frontier into Iraq. Demonstrators will mark the anniversary on Saturday, but they won’t be numerous because there’s no military draft. The message from the public is if someone from your family loses a life or a limb or something over there, hey, you took your chances. Besides, I'm doing my part; I've got a Support Our Troops sticker on my vehicle.

What ever happened to the report from that bipartisan panel led by Daddy's consigliere James A. Baker III? The one that said start pulling out and go heavy on diplomacy? It got big play for a while, but now it's another forgotten news story, this year's Tanya Harding, only not, of course, as big as the already-forgotten death of Anna Nicole Smith. Remember the surge? It's going on right now and no one pays much attention.

Invading Iraq was a kind of neocon dream but never an actual plan. It was more like a 5-year-old kid saying he wants to be an astronaut. It’s something he might want, but he has no idea what’s involved in getting there – science, math aeronautics, that sort of stuff. He just thinks astronauts wear cool space suits.

So neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith and their weak-minded convert Bush Junior didn’t concern themselves with Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis, Iran, or any of the details. They wouldn't even bother to read a State Department report warning them of the danger, and when they found out they didn't have sufficient troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq they pulled troops out of Afghanistan.

Their duplicity, incompetence, and endless lying has been proved so many times in so many ways, there have been so many insiders who jumped ship and ratted out their former colleagues, that at this point answering the war's supporters is like arguing with the Flat Earth Society.

When it all fell apart – no ties to Bin Laden, no WMD – the Bush-o-ramusses went into a huddle and came up with a new goal they’d send other people’s kids to die for – establishing democracy in Iraq, making it a beacon of sweetness and light for all the Muslim world to see.

In the meantime the invasion and occupation of the oilfields infused crazies all across the Mideast – in Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt – with new strength. Also, Iran and North Korea decided they better really get moving on those nuclear bombs because they figured correctly that, ironically, if Saddam really had nukes, the U.S. would never have invaded. This new guy in Washington was so crazy he attacked countries just because he didn’t like them, kind of like the character in Johnny Cash’s song who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

It’s hard to believe that after all the these failures the chicken hawks atop our government stay on-message with their loony non-policy of endless occupation. As Zbigniew Brzezinski testified in the Senate, his greatest fear about an administration secret plan "is that there is no secret plan." The dead and wounded are still piling up, for which we pay somewhere above $6 billion a month, enough to finance a seriously good universal health care system, fight systemic poverty, and do something real to stop poisoning the Earth.

Bush, just before this damnable anniversary, sent down a new Iraq appropriations bill. Amazingly, Congress will approve it. All the Democrats could muster in opposition was a bill that sets the goal of ending the war in eighteen more months and is so full of loopholes that even when September 2008 arrives, ignoring the deadline will carry no consequences. Those members, like Nancy Pelosi, for instance, who say no to the war and yes to its new funding are basically taking a stand against cannibalism while writing a check (from our account) to buy Hannibal Lector new cutlery.

WAGING 'CLASS WARFARE’ ISN’T SUCH A BAD IDEA

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

If trust-buster Theodore Roosevelt, who managed to rein in the most blatant corruption of his day, saw how politicians operate today -- touring haunts of the super-rich where they openly beg for alms and then perform huge favors for them at the expense of everyone else -- Teddy would call in federal marshals. But then he’d discover that in most instances the bribes are legal.

The bribe-takers have long since cemented legislation in place designed to keep them out of the penitentiary while their gratuities roll in. Everybody knows what’s going on, but we’ve been taught to pretend the gifts have no influence on takers. They buy only “access.” At least that’s the story the givers and takers tell. Not coincidentally, the U.S. distribution of wealth is the absolute worst in the Western World and getting worse all the time. Nearly 50 million Americans were walking around without health insurance at the same time Prince George and Congress, including many Democrats such as Diane Feinstein, killed the inheritance tax.

These crazy excesses look very much like what was going on during the years preceding Teddy’s reforms. But nowadays the lower classes aren’t offended by the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. They just want to join the club. All across America people have taken out second mortgages to buy 8,000-pound, $90,000 SUVs to drive to the 7-Eleven for a quart of milk so they can pretend they're not desperate losers.

This new Gilded Age weirdly concides with a period of great religious awakening in America, the most religious country in the Western World. Curiously, the Christian Right, which is attempting and in many ways succeeding in putting its zombie legions in charge of schools, health, and science, is allied with conspicuous consumers like my neighbor Deepak Chopra, who's building a 20,000-square-foot home on the next hill. The church fascists provide a welcoming governmental environment for all the Fools on all the Hills. (See my March 2 LEISURE CLASS GOING BONKERS WITH EXCESS two posts below this one.)

“The politics of envy” is one of those hammers that hired hands for the super-rich start swinging whenever they run into someone who hints that lust for possessions has gone over the top, that perhaps corporate executives worth hundreds of millions who steal more hundreds of millions from their shareholders are a symptom of systemic disease. Their lackeys – authors, Supreme Court judges, senators, Fox newscasters, and the like -- are quick to batter us with slogans they apply to anyone applying rational thought to these bizarre phenomena. By using the same words, they can make their falsehoods seem more true.

For instance, they like to accuse critics of waging “class warfare.” In my case, they’re correct. I’m a proud, card-carrying warrior in the war between the classes, or at least I would be if such a war existed in this country. It can’t because whenever pollsters ask people about their status in the socio-economic structure, just about everybody says they belong to the middle class. That includes the very, very rich as well as people in trailer courts. And I’m not talking about the nice trailer courts with brave, well-tended little gardens. I mean the ones where the man of the trailer watches TV twirling a 14-shot, nine-millimeter pistol and sometimes can be seen on reality cop shows getting dragged out in an undershirt and handcuffs for cooking meth or beating his significant other.

Ask those guys being stuffed into the back seat of the patrol car if they’re middle class and they’ll probably say yes. The cop who’s doing the stuffing would tell you he’s middle-class, too – same league, but on a different team. Americans who can’t even identify their location in the economy are useless dingbats in the political world, sitting silently while politicans working for tips kick them farther down the ladder.

TO SWITCH WEIRDLY CONFIGURED POWER COUPLES, GIVE CLINTONS ANOTHER TURN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

What’s the matter, Bunky? Empty-suited President got you down? Sick of all the lying, posturing, faking, the theft of planeloads of cash, not to mention a six-figure death toll in a pointless war while the Gulf Coast remains a twisted mess of trash? Uncertain what to do about becoming in just a few short years the most hated country on Earth?

Tired of all the relentless ineptitude twinned with the most tenacious arrogance since DeGaulle tried to stare down Churchill and Roosevelt? Afraid to turn on the news because you’ll just hear about more dead and disfigured G.I.s in Iraq while Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Halliburton and all their parasitic pals romp through the oil fields? Are you bent out of shape by religious crazies who use government funds to convert new batches of religious crazies so they can attain new heights of church-statism, a Justice Department that fires people for doing their jobs, and an EPA whose goal is to wreck itself?

Well, don’t do anything real, like following the Constitution and impeaching this insufferable tyrant and his dangerously demented vice president. Don’t even stop funding the war that is not a war but really a madhouse of homicidal factions the simple-minded White House can’t even hope to understand.

Instead, step up and get not one, but two Clintons for the price of one. While they last. Not available in stores. Fresh out of the box.

Yes, starting in January 2009 you can wake up to the same tired old faces from the first eight Clinton years. Go backwards! That’s what monarchy’s all about. Comforting, isn’t it? Everybody gets it. That’s why it can work. Stop torturing yourself trying to choose leaders. Instead, just switch royal families! Give the other one a turn.

Because America doesn’t have just one set of imperial bounders. Heck no, fresh out of New York and Washington, following their previous rave engagements in the boondocks of Arkansas and straight off the cover of People, etc., we give you the Clintons! With Obama and Edwards hot on the heels of Hillary’s twisted pronouncements that don’t say what they appear to say, the desperate dynamic Clinton duo has proclaimed for all the world (at the civil rights commemoration in Selma and at various fund-raisers) that yes indeed, they’re a package!

This time you don’t get the puppet-puppeteer weirdly Oedipal kind of duo you suffered with the Bush-Cheney shared-power arrangement. Instead you get this one-time, unique opportunity to install a feuding, scheming two-headed hydra kind of president. Even Fox will be happier as it descends to record depths interviewing therapists, astrologers, feng shui experts, you name it, to speculate about the presidential sleeping arrangements, tortured decision-making processes, and who knows what else eight more years of monarchy will bring? Sleep together? Heck, we can't even guarantee the Clintons like each other. Doesn't that make it all the more exciting?

Operators are standing by.

LEISURE CLASS GOING BONKERS WITH EXCESS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

My neighbor on the next hill is building a 20,000-square-foot home. I haven't seen the blueprints, but that's big enough to house a multi-plex theater and a commercial bowling alley. The owner, Deepak Chopra, is a physician out of India who hit it big on the American self-help guru circuit.

His website says, “Dr. Chopra's work is changing the way the world views physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness.” The structure Chopra is building to tune up his personal mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness will spread over several lots, with fantastic shoreline views over the 25-mile stretch from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Malibu. Even without a telescope, Chopra will be able to pick out distant mansions of similar ilk that have been multiplying like giant rats and are now landmarks for jetliners flying in and out of Los Angeles International Airport. Among them would be the Brentwood mansion of environmental sympathizer Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his bride Maria Shriver, whose garage holds a fleet of Hummers.

Also down there are car dealers selling million-dollar Bugattis and Beverly Hills jewelry stores where you can pick up a $300,000 Patek-Philippe or order a specialty watch for over a million.
Of course this is not just a California phenomenon. All around the globe the super-rich are jumping into an arms race of purchases, but displaying obscene wealth is especially okay in America, where everybody figures he or she can be the next Donald Trump, only with a better haircut.

Ron Perelman, defined by the news media as a financier, sold his oceanfront estate in Palm Beach for over $70 million. He didn’t leave it for a bungalow. Yachts keep getting bigger and bigger. In late 2004, The Wall Street Journal, beginning to focus on the phenomenon of excess, discovered boat builders were slapping together plenty of pleasure craft longer than 200 feet on special order from buyers willing to put up $100 million or more.

All those adjoining lots purchased by my neighbor so he could spread out and be more comfortable had to be worth at least $3 million apiece. Figure in architect’s fees, gymnasium, marble floors, chandeliers, a place to store the lawn mower, and all the other what-nots and extras that go into such elephantine habitats, and we’re looking at something like $50 million for a single-family residence. For the record, my family and I live in a four-bedroom house that takes up 1,834 square feet. Years ago we lived in 3,000 square feet. To me the home seemed as big as Montana, and there I quickly discovered how inconvenient it was to live in a place where sometimes the inhabitants aren’t in shouting range of each other. I found myself wandering through too many rooms to find the damn newspaper.

In further irony, the owners of these monstrous mansions generally camouflage them with shrubbery, fences, and other architectural shields. They want the rabble to know they're in there, but don't trust them with the details. If you’re anything like me, you stand puzzled by all this grasping for stuff that has no use. I like luxury as well as the next person, but clearly at some point it crosses the line into Goofyland. “How much better can you eat?” Detective Gittes asked super-rich incest-monger Noah Cross in Robert Towne’s splendid script for Chinatown. “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”

This culture of the absurd was examined with precision and derision in 1899 when philosopher and economist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class. In it, he coined the terms “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” and took a piercing, wry look at what the ruling class of his time was doing with its immense wealth. He discovered that these people were infatuated with owning goods that had absolutely no use whatsoever other than to advertise to everyone else that they could afford to waste valuable resources on utterly useless stuff. They also, Veblen decided, had a secondary purpose – trying to make everyone who couldn’t afford expensive, useless stuff eat their livers. Ridiculously huge mansions filled with servants were among his many examples of such conspicuous consumption of useless stuff, along with stables full of riding horses and jeweled walking sticks. Inverse snob Veblen failed to see that some owners may have been caring souls pursuing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness.

'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.