Bill's Blog on Western Civilization and Other Trivial Matters

2007-07-08T11:56:00.000-07:00

Tar and feather them

Having converted from Republican to Democrat before the guns began to shoot I feel empathy towards members of the GOP who are now jumping from the president’s badly listing Iraqi ship. Lugar, Domenici and many others are fast jumping to the ship of common sense and converting to the Church of Political Pragmatism, and they want us to know that the new oaths are being taken freely and without mental reservation. Should we not welcome the prodigal? Hell no!

This conversion represents the end of Reaganism, and those pushed it well beyond the Gipper’s wildest fantasies of national greatness must pay for their sins and stupidity.

Just as the Democrats had to spend decades in the wilderness for their folly in Vietnam and for the excesses of the Great Society that signaled the end of the New Deal, so these enablers of the neoconservatives and the evangelicals who pushed for world hegemony with hubris that would make a Roman emperor blanch with shame must climb the mountain and meet the gurus of realism.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearl, Wolfowitz, Feith, Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, Bolton, Coulter, the late Gerry Falwell, and literally thousands of other political and religious zealots nearly took our nation over the abyss of ignorance and into the folly of remaking the world in our image. But it was the millions of enablers who waved the flags and beat the drums for these artists of madness and their representatives in the Congress who until they saw the end of their power coming quickly into view and got the new time religion and who now make a turn to the middle and point their fingers at Bush and his lackeys as being responsible for it all.

Now that the gash made by the iceberg in the ship of state is becoming visible to all, the Republicans on Capitol Hill blame it all on George. He made them spend and spend on bridges to nowhere; he led them down the garden path on Iraq; and he twisted their arms on diverting us from the war on terror to the fool’s errand of remaking the world. They never wanted to bankrupt our grandchildren. They only wanted to save the world, and they followed George because he said he had the plan.

What are we to do? Welcome their late conversions? Hell no! Drive them to hell out of Washington and tar and feather them on the way out and order them to contemplate their sins from the heartland.

Democrats, vote the straight ticket; Republicans, vote against any of your brethren who enabled these morons; Independents; vote Democrat. Nobody who leans to toward the center or right should worry; the Democrats, true their base, are already laying plans for the next Republican resurgence.

A decade in the desert will do wonders for the GOP. Their younger adherents can work on their tans as they contemplate what might have been. Actually being Bush’s proconsul in Iraq really wouldn’t have been much fun. They’ll soon see that they’re better off learning how to do political dirty tricks for their return to power.

America is already recovering from the nightmare. The Republicans are taking the first steps themselves; we just have to help them along. Do not be fooled by those proclaiming their recovery from folly and inoculate yourself from their phony bleating. They have to be treated and the pharmacy is the ballot box.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Sky is Falling

2007-06-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

This is a review of Nemesis: The Last days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson. This is a big seller and, therefore, an important work.

In Nemesis: The Last days of the American Republic Chalmers Johnson makes strong claims about the danger we’re in from our own leaders. I’ll stipulate to many of his warning signs and dangers, but I come up way short of his conclusions.

We’re an empire. I have no trouble with that; we’ve been acting like one since the days of Jefferson and Monroe. Certainly we acted like an Empire in the Mexican War, in our behavior during the Spanish American War and in the period since World War II. But Johnson makes us sound like the only nation to exhibit such behavior since the British started assembling their world of pink and we’re not. The Italians, Germans, and Japanese got all caught up in imperial thinking, and don’t forget them old Soviets.

With the end of the Cold War, we were the only ones left standing tall and with money to burn, and we’ve been throwing a lot of that money and our hard power around, often recklessly, and Johnson points out many of our flaws and warts, sometimes very effectively. But, frankly, despite being riveted by the tale, I didn’t like the book very much.

Those like me in the middle of the political spectrum don’t have many people screaming for our side – I suppose the center isn’t a side. We‘re caught between those on the right trying to scare the bejesus out of us with the idea that every Muslim woman in Kansas City has a bomb up her burka and that every young adherent of Islam in Detroit wants to cut off our heads with his scimitar. On the left we have writers like Johnson pointing out every action by George IV and Dick Cheney, aka Richard III, as another step in our enslavement under the new tyranny of President for Life George W.

Unfortunately for Johnson, the book came out prior to the November 2006 Congressional election, and the Democrats have made the emperor and his prime minister look something less than Augustus and his head of the Praetorian Guard. That’s not to say that we in the middle don’t see all or many of the dangers that Johnson points out in his `sky is falling’ style.

To Johnson it seems that every soldier is a jack booted maniac intent on terrorizing innocent civilians. Frankly, I think our warriors come off pretty badly but through little fault of their own. In Johnson’s world half the soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen stationed across the globe do little but act as hooligans and rapists in terrorizing the locals. Here again a little truth goes a long way. I’m not excusing our troops with a boys will be boys escape clause. Certainly, many horrible acts have been committed, and we should be cracking down on all violence against our allies. But the vast majority of those wearing our uniform have got to be half way decent men and women. Exceptions can’t be used to prove the rules, and Johnson really does this.

Johnson’s thesis is that we use our soft power to force allies across the globe to swallow our presence. Let’s get real, the leaders of the host countries have to see some benefits to having our bases in their countries, or they simply wouldn’t do it. Not everybody in power in other countries is on the take. I know that many of our bases are unwelcome. Guantanamo comes to mind, and certainly Fidel would like us out of there permanently, but, in the absence of the ability to chuck us into the Atlantic, he does permit Cubans to go to work each day and bring greenbacks to his side of the fence.

The author’s complaints against the military industrial complex are right on the money, but he’s hardly the first to see the danger. Washington and Madison were way ahead of Johnson and I heard Ike’s direct warning loud and clear. The dangers and techniques of the practitioners are well known and we are indeed in danger of tyranny if we don’t do better in dealing with this threat. I’ll also grant Johnson that he’s right in his fears about missile defense and space warfare.

He’s also right that Bush and Cheney were overly aggressive in aggrandizing executive power, and I support his views on this. His fears that the imperial presidency and the military industrial complex have neutered the Congress is scary, on target, and not to be dismissed lightly, but it’s also true that the Democrats – joined now by more than a few on the other side – are beating that jack back into his box. It’s an unending battle between branches, but my friends and I have been preaching the benefits of divided government for the entire period of these present abuses. The people, despite the bombardment of fear from both sides, seem to understand the problem and are supporting the new found courage of the Congress.

Before closing, I want to say something personal about Bush and Cheney. I hate what they’ve done in Iraq and despise the tactics they’ve used to gain power to diminish those who oppose them. But I do not for a minute believe that their intent was to become tyrants and dictators. They’ve done a lousy job, but they’re not of the evil intent to destroy the Republic.

Johnson is quick with `some say’ and `some think’ arguments that cannot be truly tested, and there are some technical errors – I think. For example, he points to an air base in Asia that has a 13,800 foot runway and which is manned by 3,000 Americans, all this on 37 acres. They must be packing those troops into a mighty tall high rise barracks building and the planes must have a very narrow wingspan.

Despite all my complaints, I recommend this book, but as a practicing propagandist I warn you that it’s a little more than over the top in its assertions and accusations.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Mea Culpa

2007-06-13T06:58:00.000-07:00

Mea maxima culpa!

I thought it was just a little white fib designed to carry Iowa, Nebraska and Alabama. When during the race for his first term for president Bush was asked, “What political philosopher do you identify with…?” his disingenuous reply of, “Jesus Christ,” seemed to many viewers, including me, to be just a little hokey. I was wrong; he meant it. And his behavior since has shown that he still doesn’t know the difference between philosophy and religion.

Yale graduates should know the general difference between the two with philosophers pursuing the truth and theologians (and I’ll place the Lord in this category) possessing it. The president has demonstrated time and again that he is governed more by theology than by an objective view of the world around him.

Mr. Bush’s messianic behavior and his certainty and stubbornness in all things have brought him and his followers (that includes all of us) to grief. His certainty that Saddam’s government had weapons of mass destruction and in failing to show patience with the U.N. inspection program before attacking Iraq has led to his standing with the public and America’s low standing in the community of nations.

I blanched when Dubya named his political philosopher, but I went to the polls in November 2000 and pulled the lever next to his name. And while I was among the earliest of Republican defectors when the war drums began beating for an attack on Baghdad and only lately has that trickle away from the GOP turned into a flood, it was my great fault for not seeing that the man was telling the truth and portending all that has come to pass with his simple and direct reply.

Mea culpa America; mea maxima culpa. It’s my fault as much as George’s. I should have known.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Damn Them

2007-05-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

As Republican and Democratic lawmakers and office holders and seekers seek to cover their slimy butts over their roles in the Iraq fiasco there is only one universal: George Bush made them do it. George Bush’s incompetence in making the policy to go to war and his total ineptitude in prosecuting it created all of life’s problems and is now the mantra for both parties to rise from the ashes by stepping on him as they grasp for straws.

Even the neoconservatives are laying it all on George’s foolish errors of not invading with a sufficient force, disbanding of the Iraqi army, firing of all Baathists, failure to recognize the signs of insurrection and just about every other sin known to man. Now George Tenet lays the blame on those around the great man (who, of course hired all of them.)

But it’s always the incompetence thing! This just doesn’t wash; while the mess was indeed managed totally incompetently, the bottom line is that we should never have invaded Iraq and all of the current posturing is an effort to get the American people to take their collective eye off of that terrible decision.

While you and I had no sources to refute the intelligence that Bush and his lackeys (actually his masters) used to flimflam us into war - that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction is the least of the sins in the run up to war. Based on the information in the public domain, I firmly believed that Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons and that he was seeking nuclear capability. Even if this were true, that is not the basis for preemptive war.

Under international law, preemptive war requires and imminent threat of attack by the opposite party. Even with all the baloney about mushroom clouds that Bush, Rice, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld and untold numbers of neocons used to scare the crap out of the populace, they never claimed that Saddam’s potential to attack us or our allies was anything but in some far future time frame.

The United States under President George W. Bush, despite much internal misgiving about the quality of the intelligence concerning the actual status of Saddam’s weapons stocks and programs, preventively attacked a sovereign state that all of the decision makers knew was no immediate threat to us, our allies or our interests.

All of the dancing by those members of congress of both parties, the neoconservatives inside and out of government and all the drum beaters in talk radio and elsewhere cannot change the real situation which existed, that we violated international law and badly damaged our country and the nation of Iraq. All the songs about the world being a better place without the monster Saddam is so much bull. He posed little threat to us our interests and containment was working, and we have spent more than 3,000 lives and committed $2 trillion in treasure for that fool’s errand.

While I am committed to whomever the Dems run in ’08, don’t be fooled into thinking that they have no culpability in this disaster. They only look good in comparison with the others. The Republicans beat the drums and deserve to be driven from Washington. The neoconservatives are fools actively involved in rewriting their part in the mess; do not ever forget that the greatest responsibility for this calamity is theirs. All of them (GOP, Dems and neocons) have failed us.

But try to remember the few on the Hill and in the media who stood for principal as the drums were beating so very loudly, and,God, they are very few indeed.

George Bush is the greatest fool of all, but don’t you be fooled into believing that it was all him, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith. Many now pointing fingers have blood on their hands. A pox on all their houses!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Careful Now

2007-04-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

I’m going to support the Democratic nominee for president in’08 - period! That said there is no doubt in my mind that among those running, some of those Democrats will look better to independent and moderate Republican voters than others, and I’m more than a little concerned that the Dems are being snookered by right wing pundits and party stalwarts. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Barack Obama described by our kindly conservative friends as a phenom who is taking America by storm, a wunderkind galvanizing the voters, and a dozen other great adjectives.

It’s wonderful that Obama has the likes of David Brooks of the New York Times almost speechless with admiration. But I really don’t buy this baloney. Frankly, I think they’re trying to set up the Dems with a `don’t throw me in the briar patch defense’.

The Republicans are in grave danger of having overplayed their trump suit of strength on national security matters. The adverse impact of the Iraq War on the electorate and the incompetence of the Bush administration in prosecuting that conflict and the war in Afghanistan has the political right frightened silly, and I perceive their mock horror at the freak of nature Obama possibly sweeping them from power is simply a sham.

They overtly call on the Dems to nominate Hillary so that they can get a four year extension on the lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and openly cringe at the prospect of an Obama headed ticket. But do they mean it? I don’t believe it for a minute. I think Hillary is truly the one they fear and that they’d welcome the chance to fire away at the relatively inexperienced Obama.

I’m convinced the Republicans are begging to be thrown into that old thicket. Beware of frightened neocons!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Thank your local neocon today

2007-03-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

Neitzian supermen - and women – have been in charge of American foreign policy for six years with clear results: we’re isolated in the world community of nations; these ubermen have committed us to internationally illegal preventive warfare against a state that posed virtually no risk to us or its neighbors; in the name of saving a people, they’ve caused them more harm to its citizens than the immoral regime we toppled to help them; by their blundering they’ve empowered the two most important members of the `Axis of Evil’ that they intended to cow; they’ve lost more than 3,000 American lives; and they’ve committed the nation to spending more than two trillion dollars as a result.

In addition, they’ve strengthened the hands of our major rivals China and Russia. They’ve turned the vast majority of people of one of the world’s largest and most important civilization from probably mild dislike of America to open hatred of us. They’ve stretched our Army and Marines to the breaking point. It goes on and on.

Frankly, you’d expect a reaction from the White House that would diminish the power of these neoconservative ubermen – and women - who pointed the president and the nation on this course, but, of course, you’d be wrong. Instead the president has doubled down his bets in Iraq. Next time you’re out, thank your local neocon.

In mitigation of this madness, however, we have to take into account that those in charge, Dubya and Dick, are really lost and confused souls. Need I mention Katrina again? How about their inability to get their stories straight on firing a bunch of U.S. Attorney’s; hasn’t anyone ever told them that they shouldn’t write down their most brilliant Machiavellian schemes? Actually, underlings always write that baloney down because they assume that their ideas are going to work out just as they dreamed and they want full credit for them. And poor Scooter, has there ever been a nobler one man hara-kiri? Instead…

By the way, Dubya’s surprised about the scandalous treatment of our wounded warriors at Walter Reed and elsewhere. Of course he’s surprised. The only thing he ordered was that the DOD budget be wrung out to the point that the costs of the war are back loaded to the greatest extent possible. How could he ever know that brain damaged men and women wouldn’t be afforded the best possible long term care? He couldn’t, but something had to give if he was to escape to Crawford with his successor left holding the big bag of manure.

Dubya and Dick have lost control of almost everything but their war powers. Real Republicans and conservatives are diving for cover in foreign policy, the Iraq War, education and law enforcement. While I might have been a few days premature in naming Bush a limping water fowl in January of ’06, have you seen his imitation of Walter Brennan or heard his imitation of Donald Duck over these past few months? Sure bears a resemblance to a sorry duck in my book.

Not to worry, only 677 days from noon today.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Sky is Falling

2007-03-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

The fat’s in the fire. The two most argumentative people in the Washington, DC suburbs are at it fast and furious. Walt Francis, economist know it all v. Wild Bill, just plain vanilla know it all, are going to discuss climate change for the masses of our readers.

Walt is in the corner of the debunkers of global warming and Bill is kind of half way between an agnostic and a follower of the consensus. We invite your comments to brennan01@cox.net and WaltonJF@aol.com.

As usual, this round began with Walt’s flinging of a take no prisoners gauntlet to his large mailing list. Naturally, I couldn’t resist commenting. And Walt could not restrain himself from a point by point refutation of the pearls. Since it’s my blog that he invited me to use, naturally, I won the debate, but I leave it to our readers, known and unknown, to judge if the sky is truly falling.

The first item is the gauntlet; the second the response and, finally, the refutation. It began with this from Walt:

Friends:

For your amusement and edification, I pass this along.

Sparked by an article in this morning's NYTimes science section, quoting the scientific disagreement with the "chicken little" global warming "apocalypse coming real soon" crowd, I googled one of the quoted scientists, "Don J Easterbrook", a distinguished climatology expert with more credentials on this subject than the entire Board of Directors and President of the AAAS combined.

He's done a superb Power Point slide show on the science and facts on this topic, which I hereby append. Or you can simply go to the following URL: gsa.confex.com/gsa/viewHandout.cgi?uploadid=215
After you've watched it, which will take only five or ten minutes, see if you don't agree with me that we have more to fear from an ice age than from CO2-driven global warming.

A couple of days ago the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, a distinguished economist, issued an attack on "ideological environmentalism" after the European Union leaders struck a deal to cut carbon emissions in Europe that would create economic havoc in the Czech Republic. "Mr Kaus said the global warming movement was just the latest environmental scare campaign, following on the short-lived fears of a population explosion in the 1970s and the expanding ozone hole in the 1980s." "They keep shooting at a moving target," he said (Wash Times article. The Post doesn't cover global warming "deniers".)

Too bad that the Bush Administration isn't more careful on this topic. They're wasting billions on climate research that could better be spent elsewhere. But I guess all politicians have to follow the latest fad scare, until it is forgotten and replaced by another fad.

Walt "Keep Pumping that Carbon" Francis
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Walt,

As laymen involved in the political process, we’ve got to decide between dueling scientific scenarios. The possibilities for the planet include: the earth is warming; the earth is cooling; the earth is warming and the engine is man’s degradation of the environment by various means; the earth is cooling but that trend is being overridden by man’s activity; the earth is warming and one of the (major) factors is man’s use of fossil fuels, etc. There may well be other options that I haven’t thought of but these will do for my points.

Based on what I’ve read and the number and qualifications of the vast majority of scientists who seem to be on that side, I’ve pretty much made up my mind that man is having an adverse impact on global warming. I do note, however, that in addition to the many crackpots who have taken it upon themselves to debunk the role of man in what is happening there are a number of highly qualified scientists and engineers who have participated in the process and have examined the data and do not agree with the majority. The latter group may be right, but none of this will mean anything in my lifetime or in the several decades that follow.

Let us assume that only two of the possibilities are correct: first, man is not having an adverse impact, and second, that he is. Let us further assume one of the implications in your note to us: that in fact the globe may be cooling and we’re merely part of a long cycle. If the earth is cooling, my question would be what’s the harm of man cutting the use of fossil fuels and limiting green house gas emissions? If we’re in such a cycle and man isn’t impacting the process, then cutting back would not harm the environment or adversely impact human and animal health and well being. This not to say there is no economic impact, but that would have to be considered in the light of all other plusses and minuses on health and well being.

I think the cleaning up of the environment would not have a very great adverse impact on the world economy, assuming the very difficult prospect that all of the world’s great economies participate, including North American countries, Brazil, Argentina, the EU, Russia, China, Japan, India, etc.

In the scenario in which the fears of the vast majority of scientists now seem to agree - that man is adversely impacting the climate – let us suppose they are correct and the world’s governments cannot agree on a program and we do little or nothing to mitigate the problem. The results would almost certainly be tragic. Even assuming that the rate of the impacts is only a fraction of those stated by the `Chicken Littles’, clearly the ocean levels would rise when the ice caps retreat and the warming water expands. This alone would adversely impact the highly populated Bangladesh and some of the small island nations. I think it is not challengeable that hurricanes (cyclones) would do considerably more damage to these low lying areas and others such as the Gulf Coast and Florida in the U.S. In this latter point, I’m going to ignore the `Chicken Littles’ who say that that storms would be more common and more severe; my basic point is if the water level is higher coastal areas will be more adversely damaged even if storms are not more frequent or numerous.

My basic bottom line is that I’m going to go along with the vast majority of the scientists in this case. They may not be correct, but I see a lot less harm in trying to hammer out a consensus of world governments on this course than doing nothing. My fear is that those on the other side may be profoundly wrong and that their obduracy will do grave damage to our planet and our species. I’d rather be wrong in my position then have you be wrong in yours. We’ll never know – those of us who are adults today, but if we’re wrong and do nothing, our grandchildren and theirs will have a lot more to curse their ancestors about than they should.

An imperfect analogy might be the tobacco fiasco. For decades the federal government, the industry and many highly qualified scientists opined that smoking was not overly harmful. Many of these people were stating honest positions. Six or eight decades later we find that they were gravely wrong and hundreds of thousands of people die each year because they believed the product was not harmful. Had a more conservative position been taken by the government, a lot of folks now pushing up daisies would still be among us.

In any event, I’m going to keep an open mind on the subject, but I’m leaning against your position at this minute.

Bill

----------------------------------------------------
The rebuttal (alternatly, my comments then Walt's):

Walt,

As laymen involved in the political process, we’ve got to decide between dueling scientific scenarios. The possibilities for the planet include: the earth is warming; the earth is cooling; the earth is warming and the engine is man’s degradation of the environment by various means; the earth is cooling but that trend is being overridden by man’s activity; the earth is warming and one of the (major) factors is man’s use of fossil fuels, etc. There may well be other options that I haven’t thought of but these will do for my points.

Based on what I’ve read and the number and qualifications of the vast majority of scientists who seem to be on that side,

Bill, I believe that of the qualified scientists, normally called climatologists, the majority are on the "we don't know enough to reach any conclusions, but there are likely other causes of this minor blip" side. The messianic believers include dogcatchers and sociologists and biologists and chemists and other unqualified folk to pad their totals. Regardless, science is not about consensus, but truth. A lot of people used to believe the earth was flat, and still others in phlogiston, etc.

I’ve pretty much made up my mind that man is having an adverse impact on global warming. I do note, however, that in addition to the many crackpots who have taken it upon themselves to debunk the role of man in what is happening there are a number of highly qualified scientists and engineers who have participated in the process and have examined the data and do not agree with the majority. The latter group may be right, but none of this will mean anything in my lifetime or in the several decades that follow.

You are correct that nothing of import wll happen in our lifetimes, or our childrens'. Sure seems like a good strategy to engage in watchful waiting.

Let us assume that only two of the possibilities are correct: first, man is not having an adverse impact, and second, that he is.

Pardon me, but what oracle decided that global warming was "adverse"? Best as I can tell from the actual literature (not news stories) it will have mostly positive impacts on both humans and critters.

Let us further assume one of the implications in your note to us: that in fact the globe may be cooling and we’re merely part of a long cycle. If the earth is cooling, my question would be what’s the harm of man cutting the use of fossil fuels and limiting green house gas emissions?

What's the harm? You jest. However, the Francis plan is to make it illegal for anyone believing in global warming to use any electric power, natural gas, or gasoline. We will distribute polar bear rugs to you folks in the "consensus". That will not "cut the use" of fossil fuels, but will reduce the rate of increase slightly. What is your plan for cutting the use? A $100 a gallon tax on gas? A $1 a kilowatt hour tax on electrictiy? You won't do a damn thing except impoverish Americans. Are we going to enforce those taxes on the Chinese? The Africans? I am unaware of any sane proposal to change energy utilization that would do anything more than reduce slightly the rate of growth. An all out nuclear program, which I support on national security grounds, with 500 new nuclear plants in the USA in the next 50 years, would not reduce the use of carbon. Get real! (I trust you know enough to understand that solar and wind power are jokes in this context, advocated only by the scientifically and economically illiterate.)

If we’re in such a cycle and man isn’t impacting the process, then cutting back would not harm the environment or adversely impact human and animal health and well being. This not to say there is no economic impact, but that would have to be considered in the light of all other plusses and minuses on health and well being.

There are no consequential minuses. No one has shown any adverse impact of global warming, if that is real, worth talking about. I hope you don't believe any of the nonsense about 20 foot increases in ocean level, or the polar bears being wiped out, or Malaria wiping us out (did you know that Malaria was endemic in the USA until we wiped it out a hundred years ago, during the little ice age?) that you read in the religious sermons on this issue. Not one reputable scientist in the world agrees with that crazy fearmongering stuff. Only reporters and newscasters repeat it.

As to "cutting back", that is, in a word impossible. There aren't enough machine guns in the world to make any nation impoverish its citizens in the name of this religious cause, based on the phony "consensus" of unqualified "scientists" speaking on subjects of which they are ignorant.

I think the cleaning up of the environment would not have a very great adverse impact on the world economy, assuming the very difficult prospect that all of the world’s great economies participate, including North American countries, Brazil, Argentina, the EU, Russia, China, Japan, India, etc.

Not one, not one single one of them, will "participate." You had better plan to relax and enjoy it. As to "not have a very great adverse impact" that is right up there with the tooth fairy. Just try and find one single study, by competent economists, that asserts we can reduce carbon use with no adverse impact that is not ten times greater than the great depression. P.S. I have a great book on the "solar power scam" that debunks that nonsense.

In the scenario in which the fears of the vast majority of scientists now seem to agree -

The "great majority" of scientists are not competent to render an opinion on any subject, let alone this one. They specialize, and the cosmic ray guys don't have a whole lot to say about the fruit fly guys, or vice versa. Where on earth did you get the idea that the "great majority" agreed on anything except the chicken little theory of the apocalypse, a religous rather than scientific belief?

that man is adversely impacting the climate – let us suppose they are correct and the world’s governments cannot agree on a program and we do little or nothing to mitigate the problem.

Well la de da. Who said the "world's government's" would consider, let along implement, the economic destruction of their own countries. The EU just voted to reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels 20 years from now. That is what they agreed in Kyoto. In total, they are 10 percent above those levels after 10 years of lip service. The latest proposal, according to the papers, is to impose speed limits on the German autobahns. The Germans are enraged. But if the EU bureaucrats get their way, that little move will increase, not decrease, carbon emissions. I leave it to you to work out why.

The results would almost certainly be tragic. Even assuming that the rate of the impacts is only a fraction of those stated by the `Chicken Littles’, clearly the ocean levels would rise when the ice caps retreat and the warming water expands.

I beg your pardon! The global warming scam IPCC says sea level in the next century will rise one foot, six inches above the natural level of increase as we come out of the last ice age. Al Gore says 20 feet. Guess who doesn't agree with the alleged scientific consensus? As to Bangladesh, even in the Al Gore scenario they can do what the Dutch did. It is a no brainer. Of course, they can't do what the Dutch did if we reduce them to the stone age by banning coal and petroleum.

BTW, under global warming the ice caps grow, not decrease. They are growing today. True, the arctic ice is shrinking but that is not an ice cap and if that trivial amount of ice melts completely, which it won't, the oceans will not rise one tenth of an inch. Meanwhile, the real ice caps in Antartica and Greenland grow rapidly, fed by increased precipitation from warming, freezing that increased precipitation, and thereby reducing the ocean levels. I think you've been reading too many scare headlines by Washington Post envirofreaks, and not enough of the actual literature on the subject.

This alone would adversely impact the highly populated Bangladesh and some of the small island nations. I think it is not challengeable that hurricanes (cyclones) would do considerably more damage to these low lying areas and others such as the Gulf Coast and Florida in the U.S. In this latter point, I’m going to ignore the `Chicken Littles’ who say that that storms would be more common and more severe; my basic point is if the water level is higher coastal areas will be more adversely damaged even if storms are not more frequent or numerous.

The actual scientific consensus among meteorologists is that storms are NOT going to get worse, Al Gore to the contrary. I totally fail to understand your concern. Yes, countries that put their buildings on low lying shores will get pounded, with or without global warming. We call it the "New Orleans Syndrome." Yawn. Bangladesh will have no greater problem a hundred years from now than it has today, but a great deal more national income to use in building dikes. Yawn.

My basic bottom line is that I’m going to go along with the vast majority of the scientists in this case.

I prefer to go along with the vast majority of flat earthers, who certainly have more credibility than whomever you think you are believing. And just what is it they say that you believe? Suppose you believe the alleged consensus put out by the ICC, and the oceans rise a foot a hundred years from now. So what? Just what are you "going along" with? Do you think that a single one of those physical scientists, sociologists, and soothsayers has any competence whatsoever to estimate the economic impacts of any actions whatsover? Let us assume, illustratively, that biologists can "prove" that global warming will wipe out 90 percent of the frog species in the world (it turns out, in fact, that a human spread fungus is the problem. But let us ignore that inconvenient truth). Let us "go along" with them. Just what are we supposed to do? Mandatory sterilization of all women? Ban the automobile? What is their proposal and what competence do those frog scientists have even to discuss the subject? I would rather "go along" with witch doctors than biologists.

They may not be correct, but I see a lot less harm in trying to hammer out a consensus of world governments on this course than doing nothing.

There won't be a consensus to do a damn thing, let alone "this course", whatever that is. The reasons are that few climatologist believes there is a problem beyone that one foot ocean rise, and irregardless no government is going to shaft its citizens for the apocalyptic fears of the scare mongers. The United States response so far is "better" than average: we subsidize the corn farmers to produce ethanol that burns more carbon than it saves.

My fear is that those on the other side may be profoundly wrong and that their obduracy will do grave damage to our planet and our species. I’d rather be wrong in my position then have you be wrong in yours. We’ll never know – those of us who are adults today, but if we’re wrong and do nothing, our grandchildren and theirs will have a lot more to curse their ancestors about than they should.

Some of us think that the coming ice age is a bigger problem, and we should burn more carbon to prevent it. About half the climatologists are on that side. Suppose I agree with you that no price is too high: which side of the qualified scientists do I beleive? And why would I believe any of them when the science on this subject is not even in its infancy? Some would think being cursed for doing the wrong thing out of irrational fear is a lot worse than being calm, cool, and watchful.

An imperfect analogy might be the tobacco fiasco. For decades the federal government, the industry and many highly qualified scientists opined that smoking was not overly harmful. Many of these people were stating honest positions. Six or eight decades later we find that they were gravely wrong and hundreds of thousands of people die each year because they believed the product was not harmful. Had a more conservative position been taken by the government, a lot of folks now pushing up daisies would still be among us.

A "conservative" government position is to ban anything someone thinks, correctly or incorrectly, kills people? We tried that once before, and the "ban it completely" crowd was right: alcohol kills. Are we going to ban gasoline? Ban home heating oil? Ban automobiles? What on earth are you talking about doing that could possible slow down, let alone reverse, the growth of carbon emissions on this planet? (I can actually think of a workable option: nuke the Chinese and bring on nuclear winter. That will stop the warming!)

In any event, I’m going to keep an open mind on the subject, but I’m leaning against your position at this minute.

My position is that we don't know enough to be on one side or another. Your position is to do something, you don't know what, at some price in human misery you have not calculated, to prevent an imaginary harm that you can't even describe. I don't know what basis you have for disagreement. Apparently you believe the nonsense you read in every Washington Post story on this subject, in the grotesque distortions they print. If you decide you are interested in the science, I have a half dozen books by qualified scientists on this subject who ravage and ridicule the true believers. The latter have published no rebuttals.

Meanwhile, if you actually read the powerpoint slides with any care, ask yourself the following question: is there a single scientist in the world who can dispute what you saw? If so, what is his name? What is his counter evidence? And what data does he have on all those dreadful things that happened to Bangladesh or the polar bears or whomever the last ten times we entered a global warming cycle?

BTW, did you know that the oceans have risen 400 feet in the last 12,000 years. We are still coming out of the last ice age. Human used to walk across the English channel and the Bering Straits. Just what awful thing will happen if the oceans rise another foot in the next hundred years? If the January temperatures in the arctic rise on average from minus 40 to minus 30, but are unchanged in the continental USA? Until someone can describe with some particularity the harm, the consequences, the alternative, and its consequences, this is all rubbish.

Walt responding to Bill. Just pass this along in your blog or whereever.

The issue here is not science, but irrational religious fears of armageddon and apocalyse by true believers. There is actually nothing to discuss except what causes their peculiar mental state, and whether or why it may or may not be different than the mentality of the Salem witch trials or the people who fled hearing the Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" martian invasion radio show. By all means pass this one.
---------------------------------------------------

That's it.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Slopping the Hogs

2007-03-04T07:44:00.000-08:00

How could so many petty scandals and corrupt practices occur under the noses of President Bush and his administration? Actually, there are several simple explanations.

Maintenance is neglected at Walter Reed Army Hospital; outpatient treatment there and in other facilities is a scandal; classifying of disabilities among the wounded is late and adversarial; in Iraq, Humvies continue to be fielded with inadequate armor; national guard and reserve forces are not adequately supplied, VA hospitals are not prepared to handle the problems of continuing care casualties; and on and on. What’s going on?

First, one that I and many others have been yelping about for years, divided government works. The Democrats are able to investigate what the unified Republicans have been able to paper over during the entire period of the Iraq War. The administration and its lackeys on the Hill routinely tabled investigations of such scandals until this year.

Second – related to the first – the media now has access to a branch of government that is ready to hear the truth about the war and its consequences and is ready to call the administration to account at committee hearings. These hearings, broadcast into the homes of Americans by C-Span and the cable news networks make it impossible for the administration to deny or reject the obvious as it has for the past four years.

Okay, the scandals are there; why? As always, it’s about the money. The president and his sycophants are in a war that has gotten completely beyond their ability to control. The cost in blood and treasure is way beyond their wildest projections and instead of being honest with the congress and the voters, they’ve gone to great lengths to fight to the last dime of veterans benefits, military health care funds, and equipment for our ground troops in order to hide the true costs of the war until they can get out of town.

They must continue to slop the military industrial pigs and can’t cut high tech programs in which they wallow and that have little to do with the Iraq. Thus, fighter planes designed to control the skies in a war against a super power opponent two decades hence cannot be slowed. The same goes for other high tech weapons systems; we simply can’t cut them or even slow them as the military industrial complex might turn on its nominal masters.

That military experts opine that the most likely conflicts in the near and mid-term are likely to be similar to those being waged today in Afghanistan and Iraq means little when it comes to the suppliers of high tech – and very high cost - systems be they land, sea, air or space based. Arming ground troops and their support systems is costly and it puts far too little in the pockets of those becoming rich designing futuristic systems for wars generations down the road. Rifles, bullets, body armor, medical care, field rations and land troops themselves are expensive and put little lucre in appropriate larders.

Thus to assure that the fattest pigs continue to be slopped, cuts must be made from the least politically powerful of the defense accounts, the protection and long term care of those who actually do the fighting. Mold on the walls of out patient rooms at Walter Reid would have remained until the transfer payments from poor to the corporations supplying the high tech equipment not now in use in Iran was actually in the appropriate accounts. So we must satisfy the poor troops and ourselves with symbolic yellow stick on ribbons on our SUVs until some later date when the magnitude of the full bill for Iraq becomes obvious – some time after January 20, 2009 when Bush takes up brush cutting in earnest.

Until the new president takes office, we will also have to be satisfied with the canning of a few scapegoats so that we can continue to shovel defense dollars to the fat cats who buy the television ads proclaiming that they love the troops – usually shown operating high tech devices.

Why the Republicans rail against transfer payments is beyond me. Between tax cuts for the rich, subsidies for corporate farmers and carving the defense budget out of our wounded and dead, I just don’t get their beef - or ham. Oh, you may be sure that these petty scandals will be solved, but be further assured the funds will come from the hides of some other poor constituency rather than from the rich and high tech defense sectors.

Blog on! Only 688 more days until Inauguration Day.

Wild Bill

Beware of Counterfeits

2007-02-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

There they are – tall, straight, lantern jawed, square shouldered, pin striped suits, perfect smiles – just waiting to wave and smile at you, our counterfeit men and women. Six years ago, they bore these same marks but they were smoother then and we could not determine their authenticity. But now we can; they’re as phony as three dollar bills. Look closely, the veneer of confidence is worn and cannot cover their angst; the surface lines are etched six years more deeply. These are actors struggling to make their exits, hoping you won’t notice that they’re totally inauthentic human beings, mere knock offs of those confident beings who took office on January 20, 2001. The lines they mouth were written for an audience that has long ago soured on this failed and rotten play.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and a half a hundred more – some already gone - simply mouth their lines in what was supposed to be a pleasant melodrama that has turned fatefully calamitous. Now they face tomatoes being tossed from the cheap seats and beg us to listen to their words.

The chorus of loyalists in congress and even in the audience can no longer quiet the cat calls. For six years, they had center stage and played to the crowd with happy words and phrases as the set fell apart about them. Now they’re alone with just their frayed costumes and worn makeup spouting repeated lines that used to inspire but which now are simply comic, tragically comic.

Give ‘em the hook, the Gong Show’s over.

Be gone you phony bums!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

How the Republicans got Snookered

2007-02-08T14:54:00.000-08:00

It’s very sad to see how the party of Ike, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, the party of little government, got taken in by the neoconservatives. It’s really poignant because I don’t even blame the likes of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld or George W. Bush. (I do, but for the purpose of entertaining you, you’ll have to bear with me.)

A couple of postings ago, I talked about the influence of Machiavelli on our founders and how old Nick’s ideas were incorporated into our constitution. Students of republics, like Nick, saw that a major flaw in republican government is that factionalism, even during times of war, prevented such states from acting effectively in their own defense. I opined – and not being a real scholar - can only assume that I wasn’t the first - that our most brilliant founders such as Jefferson, Madison, Jay and Hamilton took the views of the author of The Prince into account when they drafted the role of our chief executive.

Having drifted from the liberalism of my youth to the moderate conservatism of my middle years, I was becoming an advocate of the `that government governs best which governs least’ crowd. Of course, I had to do the requisite mental gymnastics to get past the buying of loyalty by Reagan and Bush 41 as the federal budget became the ATM machine of powerful congressmen and the military industrial complex.

The story of how the neoconservatives - and others not relevant to this posting - bucked up the federal government in the years following the debacle of Vietnam and who found in The Gipper the perfect man to represent their philosophy of over the top hubris and world hegemony has been expressed many times by me and dozens of others.

The neocon philosophy melded perfectly with the deficiencies and weaknesses noted in our system of government by the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney when they saw power flow from the executive to the legislature when Dick Nixon drowned in the tsunami of 1974. So, as a philosophy of power prescribed by the founders for times of true crisis was seen by those who saw a classic imbalance in the powers of the presidency and the legislative branches, there came a confluence of actors and events that has come to lay low the Grand Old Party.

Until 9/11, Cheney, Rummy and like minded malcontents who failed to recognize that the wisdom of the founders in permitting the likes of Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Wilson to assume the great and very awesome and fearful powers of the Machiavellian inspired powerhouse of a chief during only in times of very real crises of near total war had to squirm in their seats as uppity congressional members whipped the men – and women – of Tricky Dick and later presidents like so many whipped dogs.

But – to call upon another member of the permanently disgraced who cannot be asked for assistance in governing – the neoconservatives saw a Rasputin like opening and they drove through it. While the first reaction of most Americans to 9/11 was righteous anger towards al Qaeda, the Taliban in Afghanistan and toward other terrorist organizations, especially of radical Islamic origin, the neocons saw an opportunity to solve a whole host of power imbalances all at once, and they were as quick as a mad monk to whisper into the eager ears of those in power.

It was time to attack Iraq. Look what this could accomplish: teach more powerful members of the Axis of Evil that the U.S. and George W. Bush were not to be trifled with; demonstrate that we could topple any tyrant who threatened us or our allies; demonstrate far better than the rural and mountainous backwater of Afghanistan the fighting ability of U.S. forces; AND MOST IMPORTANT, TO CREATE A FALSE PREMISE FOR SEIZING THE CONSTITUTIONAL POWERS RESERVED FOR PRESIDENTS IN TIMES OF TRUE NATIONAL CRISES.

Thus, sadly, did the dimwits and innocents who called themselves Republicans get caught up in the martial airs of Hail to the Chief and sell out their true beliefs of limited government, avoidance of foreign entanglements, and tightwad spending, and become champions of a hubris that ranks with Rome, Napoleon, and nineteenth century England, with the notion of building bridges to nowhere and to centralizing power that would make our greatest war time leaders blanch.

Now our dear friends – innocent, decent, warm and fuzzy cloth coat Republicans worthy of Cal Coolidge and Ike – face being turned out of power for a generation because they were led down the – dare I say – the primrose path by these neoconservatives. Sad, but their wrath should not be directed solely upon the cynical neocons but rather on Dubya, Dick and Darth who should have known better.

Now the innocents circle like so many retarded musk ox before modern weapons to defend leaders they now see through. If they really believed in Republican and conservative principles, they’d be the ones calling for impeachment instead of avoiding a debate on Iraq.

Never mind, it will all turn out well. They’ll pass this fiasco off to the next crowd and the nation will survive, and they’ll have thirty years to lick their wounds and think about their folly. Well they can say to historians with honest hearts that they impeached a president, the wrong one, but they did it.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

A Life

2007-02-04T15:05:00.000-08:00

Life is good! Sometimes I fear that people reading this electronic rag think that I’m a pessimist; nothing could be further from the truth. While evil deeds are committed daily and there are truly malevolent people among us and only fools believe that man is perfectible, the species can better itself by degrees and there are members who give lie to the idea that we cannot do good.

Every day, the news is filled with man’s inhumanity to man and we hear the lament that that good news is never reported. That’s not quite true, as once in a while the story of life so extraordinary as to be almost divine comes to our attention and makes us happy to have lived in its time. Such a story was reported yesterday. A person who lives not far from me whom I have never met has done something so extraordinary that I cannot let it pass without comment.

A professor at George Mason University was awarded a one million dollar prize for his life’s work. That’s the least important part of the story. This great person devoted his being and overwhelming gifts to solving a problem that was the bane of the existence of millions of people living in poverty stricken parts of the world.

Abul Hussam, professor of Chemistry at George Mason, devoted his life and extraordinary talent to discovering a cost effective way to remove arsenic from the drinking water available to those living in many parts of the third world. This problem has killed literally millions of human beings before their times. And he did it, really.

I am pleased to be able to incorporate the AP article about this great person in this posting so that you can see that life can be very, very good. Professor Hussam proves that devoting ones life to solving a great problem is far more important than celebrity or in achieving material success. That he has been financially rewarded for this breathtaking breakthrough is simply icing on the cake.

I am pleased to include this article and I hope that you will read it and find it as inspiring as I did:

The Associated Press
Saturday, February 3, 2007; 8:32 AM
FAIRFAX, Va. -- A professor who developed an inexpensive, easy-to-make system for filtering arsenic from well water has won a $1 million engineering prize _ and he plans to use most of the money to distribute the filters to needy communities around the world.
The National Academy of Engineering announced Thursday that the 2007 Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability would go to Abul Hussam, a chemistry professor at George Mason University in Fairfax. Hussam's invention is already in use today, preventing serious health problems in residents of the professor's native Bangladesh.

After moving to the United States in 1978, Hussam got his citizenship and received a doctorate in analytical chemistry. The Centreville, Va., resident has spent much of this career trying to devise a solution to the arsenic problem, which was accidentally caused by international aid agencies that had funded a campaign to dig wells in Eastern India and Bangladesh.
The wells brought fresh groundwater to farmers and others who previously had been drinking from bacteria- and virus-laced ponds and mudholes. But the aid agencies were unaware that the groundwater also had naturally high concentrations of poisonous arsenic. As infectious diseases declined, arsenic-related skin ailments and fatal cancers began to increase _ a problem that attracted much attention in the 1990s.
"I myself and all my brothers were drinking this water," said Hussam, who added that his family did not get sick, possibly because they had a good diet, which can help stem the effects of digesting arsenic.
Allan Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said arsenic poisoning affects millions of people worldwide and it has been difficult to convince people that what seems to be good water might be toxic.
"You can't see it or taste or smell it," Smith said. "The idea that crystal-clear drinking water would end up causing lung disease in 20 or 30 years is a little weird. It's unbelievable to people."
Hussam spent years testing hundreds of prototype filtration systems. His final innovation is a simple, maintenance-free system that uses sand, charcoal, bits of brick and shards of a type of cast iron. Each filter has 20 pounds of porous iron, which forms a chemical bond with arsenic.
The filter removes almost every trace of arsenic from well water.
About 200 filtration systems are being made each week in Kushtia, Bangladesh, for about $40 each, Hussam said. More than 30,000 have been distributed.
Hussam said he plans to use 70 percent of his prize so the filters can be distributed to needy communities. He said 25 percent will be used for more research, and 5 percent will be donated to GMU.
The 2007 sustainability prize is funded by the Grainger Foundation of Lake Forest, Ill., and the contest was set up to target the arsenic problem. Among the criteria for winning was an affordable, reliable and environmentally friendly solution to the arsenic problem that did not require electricity.
Hussam's award will be presented Feb. 20 at Union Station in Washington.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Shame of Virginia

2007-01-31T14:33:00.000-08:00

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Virginia’s House of Delegates has passed a bill that would strip charities of state and local funds if they provide services to illegal aliens. The land of Jeffersonian ideals has become the home of fear driven reaction.

Under this bill, if enacted, when the homeless and hungry ask for food, clothing or shelter, instead of living their lives in imitation of Christ, the volunteers who give of their time and their humanity will, instead of providing succor to the down and out, have to demand valid green cards before providing the most basic of human assistance. By law, they will be forced to choose between providing for the diseased, hungry and homeless or forfeiting the funds essential for assisting the many legitimate and legal among us who are truly needy as well.

The Virginia House of Delegates is intent on turning the most altruistic among us into a reactionary police force. That President Bush and his administration who are charged by law with enforcing the immigration laws of the land have failed so miserably in this task that those challenged by the blind fear of illegal immigrants have turned to their state representatives and these gutless wonders, instead of demanding that the federal government do its sworn duty, turn to churches and other selfless groups and demand that they become the Nazis of the new millennium.

Those guided by the Bible or just simple altruism who would serve as Good Samaritans will be destroyed by representatives of the Commonwealth of Virginia. If they wish to maintain their ability to receive public funds to assist the legal recognized poor, these kind, Christ like people will be required to turn away those pathetic creatures, hungry, homeless, and cold, standing at their doors unless they can document their immigration status.

How cruel! How Pathetic! These delegates, in their cowardice and desire to maintain their offices at the price of their souls and character, would instead of demanding that the federal government enforce or change its immigration laws force the best and kindest among us to act as Fascists.

This bill is the epitome of cruelty. As these fools and charlatans in Richmond play with the lives of the truly needy who are among us only by the wink and nod of President Bush and the Congress of the United States, and, instead of demanding redress by those charged by law with protecting our borders and our citizens from being overwhelmed by illegals from abroad, play to the mob by turning the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and other religious and secular charities into the brown shirts of our times.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Ralphie Rules

2007-01-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

As I’ve said many times, the second most disastrous decision ever made by George W. Bush was to choose Dick Cheney as his running mate. That decision led almost directly to the worst blunder ever made in American foreign policy history, the attack on Iraq. Whew! That’s pretty heavy stuff. Maybe I ought to go to the third worst; that’s easy it was putting Dick in charge of finding Dubya’s running mate. And guess what? Only one person in 280 million fit the bill – and we know who that was. As the ship lists from leaks sprung fore, aft, starboard, port, top and bottom, it’s very difficult to see it ending happily for the crew.

Case in point, the trial of Scooter Libby is both horrifying and riveting. Everybody is scrambling to save their butts as the most disciplined administration since that of Tricky Dick Nixon simply implodes and explodes at the same time. (Is that a violation of the laws of physics?)

You’ll remember – those of you old enough anyway – that as Watergate unraveled the same phenomenon was exhibited. Insiders pointed fingers at everyone else to avoid stays at the Graybar Motel, and dimes were dropping on the Justice Department and the FBI like confetti at a ticker tape parade.

Things are so bad that the big bad guy had to come out of hiding and save the turf from the dweebs and geeks in the media and in the prosecutor’s office. For those of us who love to see the Scut Farkuses of the world get their comeuppances. (Note to the very few not familiar with The Christmas Story: Scut was the bully who tormented Ralphie and his buds to the delight of his toady, Grover Dill, until Ralphie turned the tables.)

So Scut, I mean the Vice President, decided to smack down Ralphie, I mean Wolf Blitzer, and show the American public how a real pro handled the media. Sadly for Dick, Wolf Blitzer was in his best Ralphie mode and exposed Cheney for what he is: a bully with nothing to back himself with but bluster.

You’ve all seen the clips of the interview and roared at the cartoons that resulted. Great things are happening in Iraq, and, if it weren’t for Ralphie and his playmates, the American public would see that we’re winning. But Ralphie wouldn’t back down and Scut’s nose got plenty bloodied.

But Cheney’s mistake is far greater than having stumbled on CNN. He’s now a laughing stock and sends no fear into the hearts of prosecutors. He’s going to have to testify in the Libby trial, and, damn, it’s hard to look like a credible bully with a packed nose.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Ready, Set, Go!

2007-01-20T07:21:00.000-08:00

No matter what time Google says this was posted, I pressed the button at high noon Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 2007. George W. Bush has exactly two years left in his second and final term as President of the United States. Seven hundred and thirty-one days may not seem long to some, but to those of us who feel we’re serving prison sentences, it looks like an eternity.

As I cross off the days one by one from base camp, the mountain of 731 days looks like Everest. My only hope is that in being superannuated, I’ve served such terms and even longer ones in the past. I only hope that my oxygen supply is sufficient to get me to the peak and back.

These six years have not been without ups. I supported John Kerry, and I’m happy that he lost. Had Bush lost, Kerry and the rest of us appalled by the fiasco in Baghdad would be blamed for losing Iraq. Hard as it is to believe in retrospect, George Bush was able to fake out 51% of the voters in 2004 and convince them that he was the answer. Again, what was the question?

Another positive, the neoconservatives are losing credibility as rapidly as the Titanic took on water. John McCain is done as potential president. Joe Lieberman is the president’s leading publicist and is outed for what he really is, a Republican neocon. These people are dangerous to America, and the voters now fully perceive it. Many evangelicals are also awakening and are beginning to understand that separation of church and state may have some good points and are splitting down the middle.

In every era good ideas are carried to illogical extremes. Ronald Reagan was indeed the embodiment of neoconservative and evangelical hopes and dreams after Vietnam. Republicans following him carried out his philosophy far beyond what reasonable and pragmatic politicians should have, and George W. Bush, clearly a messianic zealot, took Reaganism to heights of folly.

Sadly, the downs of this presidency are beyond discussion. The costs of this madness will be with us for decades. Since we’ve been over them hundreds of times, I’ll simply close by saying that I intend not to miss a single opportunity to cross out another day in this horrible term. The decider has been working too hard, and thinking is not his game. Count with me to the day we can send him home where he can ride his bike and cut brush without ever having to strain his brain again.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Making it UP

2007-01-14T09:34:00.000-08:00

This is the continuation of my series on how you – yes, you - might write the Great American Novel. Those of you who have already made up your stories should ignore this posting and keep on typing. This note is for those stuck staring at a blank document.

I guess we might begin by attempting to figure out what kind of story might make a novel for you. I think the novel must have a plot rather than simply relate a story. Think about it; stories are simply recitations of the facts in sequence while plots are stories that have causes.

A pretty straight forward story might be: `Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.' There is no plot here; rather it is a recitation of what happened in time order.

For there to be a plot causation must be added. Even in this little fairy tale the possibilities for cause are almost infinite. Jack might have fallen because he tried to get fresh with Jill and when she reacted badly he stumbled and fell on his head. Conversely, she might have surprised him with attention and he fell down in trying escape. And on and on go the possibilities.

There have been successful novels written without conflict and barely a hint of causation but they’re few and far between, so you might want to add a little conflict. A violation of one or more of the Ten Commandments is always a good starting point when you’re seeking trouble. Murder, adultery, and coveting one’s neighbor’s wife or goods have been the sources of lots of ideas. War is a solid starting point for many great stories, and the battle of the sexes is the fodder of many tales. Coming of age is big so is court room drama. But you get the point; the more rage the better.

As I’ve said, novels may be characterized as belonging to an almost endless number of genres from private eye, Gothic, anti-war, fantasy, to whatever, but, in addition to plot which I discussed above all genres spend time on character development.

I hate to say it, but the process of creating novels gets a little dicey at this point because there’s no clear line of distinction between character and plot. One of my favorite books on writing novels, Oakley Hall’s The Art & Craft of Novel Writing, cites one of the great novelists of the past who was also one of the first and best analysts of the craft, Henry James, whose opinion was that character determined incident and incident was the illustration of character.

Let this very humble novelist try to clarify the difference. Writers who emphasize plot leave character development to a secondary role. Action books such as those written by Tom Clancy stress the intricacies of plot and their heroes demonstrate character by tending to punch, shoot, sweat and bleed a lot. Ian Flemming easily fits into this mode as well, and his James Bond, while memorable, is not a person with whom we can empathize, except in fantasy.

Character driven novels on the other hand stress the impact of events and conflict on the ethical, moral, or psychological aspects of their protagonists. Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, and Atticus Finch are memorable for their moral courage, ethical dilemmas, or epiphanies rather than for scaling tall buildings in a single bound.

I might pause here to opine that if in this day and age your goal is to become rich from your writing – truly a long shot but there’s no harm in trying – you might stress plot. On the other hand, if you want to try your hand at literary excellence then character driven tales might just be for you. I’ve chosen the latter without great material reward to date. Although the annual pizza parties for the grandkids is a very happy affair even if I have to dip into capital to spring for the tip.

Those of you already well along with your story might wish to take time to make judgments on whether to stress plot or character. Those still working on your opening sentence, how about: “Call me Ishmael.” Or, “It was love at first sight.” Just kidding, these have been taken by people who sat before the blank page too.

I’ll be back.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

UP and DOWN

2007-01-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

People tell me they could write a book but don’t know how. In my last posting, my bona fides as a novelist were clearly established and, based on this great track record, I’m going to tell you in one sentence the great secret of how to write a novel. MAKE IT UP AND WRITE IT DOWN.

I’ve read more books on how to write novels than anybody I know and probably more than people paid to tell you how to create the great American novel. The answer is always the same: UP and DOWN. For those of you that are among those included in the first sentence of this posting, you should already be at your work station and working right now. You’ve already made it UP so now write it DOWN.

You’re skeptical? Don’t be. If you really want to write a novel you have to have story. It could be a Tom Clancy knock-off, a bodice ripper, a private eye story, or, like mine, a story from history, whatever. Tolstoy went to a coroner’s inquest on the suicide of a young woman. It seems she threw herself under the wheels of a train after an adulterous affair ended badly. Voila: Anna Karenina. Hemingway went off to the Great War as an ambulance driver. Enough blood and gore to turn his stomach and he produced A Farewell to Arms.

I’m not advocating that you have an affair or join the marines and go off to Iraq. My point is that inspiration is all around us. It’s up to you. J.D. Salinger went to a museum and got an idea, and people are still reading about that little snot, Holden. I museumed too and wrote my novel, Au Revoir, L’Acadie, about ethnic tensions during the Great Depression.

How the bodice rippers do it is beyond me, but they do. And so could you.

The experts, those that have written books explaining the process, can’t make it any simpler or say it more clearly than this: MAKE IT UP; WRITE IT DOWN. You got your story from this morning’s newspaper. Eureka!

So now it’s down to business, and, as you write, you just have to figure out what makes it interesting to others. There’s where the experts come in. It really is just technicalities and tricks that great writers like Tolstoy, Austen, Hemingway, Dickens, Alcott, and hundreds of others have discovered and applied, and you can use them too. But not now; for now, just write your story down.

Obviously, the enemy is inertia. Hemingway, when asked how he went about writing a best seller, replied as any honest procrastinator would, “First you clean the refrigerator.” Okay, so you’ve cleaned the fridge, cut the grass, and put the dog to sleep. No more excuses? Go!

It’s as simple as that. UP and DOWN.

Remember your high school English class; write your topic sentence. Done? There, you’re already crawling, and, in future postings, I’ll describe more baby steps you can easily take. Goodness, before you know it you’ll be racing to the climax of that great novel. Your grandkids deserve pizza as much as mine; do it!

Remember: UP and DOWN. Till then,

Blog on!

Wild Bill

You can do it

2007-01-10T13:16:00.000-08:00

I’m beyond outrage and have said everything within – and even beyond - the bounds of propriety about George Bush and his war in Iraq. Since my goal is to build and store bile until the 2008 election cycle, I have little to add to my displeasure with the president over the coming months; besides, Ted Kennedy and other Democrats are giving voice to my complaints and there’s little need for me to pile on. But I do want to maintain your interest until the time comes to gear up for the big one that will send the decider back to Crawford and let him settle on what brush must face the machete.

Since I am a professional novelist, I thought you might find some of my experiences and observations about writing interesting. This especially true since I make enough money from my royalties to indulge each of my grandchildren with half of a pizza (medium) and a soft drink (small) every year. I’m actually one of the better sellers among present day American novelists, so don’t give up your day job until you hear me out.

Should every one of my readers give authoring a novel a try? That’s for each of them to decide; George Bush won’t help with this one. You should consider, however, that more than 10,000 novels come on the market each year, and most of them, like mine don’t make much – or even any - money for the owners of their rights. In addition, tens of thousands additional tall tales fail even to make into print every year. Are you clear on my point? This isn’t really something that most people can do to keep the wolf at bay. Do not give notice or describe in detail the talents of your bosses until you have a satisfactory publication advance in hand – make that cashed and in your account.

Let me begin by saying it’s easier to get published today than ever before. You write it; it can be printed. I self published my first book, A Tattered Coat Upon A Stick. I had a fairly high opinion of it but couldn’t get a single agent or publisher or agent to even read it. Had they read and rejected it, I might have given up and there never would have been the market for half pepperoni and half onion and green pepper pizzas that has surged since I plunged. The cost of self publication is small and has never been easier; more on this in a later posting.

My three published novels represent but the tip of the iceberg. I began by attempting to be a commercial novelist and wrote two thrillers. They weren’t bad, but let me tell you the people who successfully write in this genre are very good, very competitive and very well connected. After looking over the products I was seeking to displace, I concluded that I wasn’t up to the task. I’m proud to say that draft copies of these two great books along with hundreds of rejection slips make up a significant part of the highest point on the South Coast of Massachusetts. Methane from these rotters will be lighting homes in the Bay State for decades to come. Those trees did not die completely in vain.

But should you attempt such a work for your personal satisfaction? Why not? The Young and the Restless, the soap opera my wife has been watching for more than thirty years, preaches that everyone has at least one novel in them and there is almost always one author in residence on the set at all times. It appears that a working writer provides the show the necessary gravitas to keep the homebound intellectuals glued to their chairs with minimal guilt.

My friends, after much private laughter, now treat me as if I am a real writer, albeit one who starves. A thick skin and a decade of work will do that for you. I can remember the shame and unworthiness felt when I told the local bookstore owner that I was a writer and wanted to have a signing for my self published masterpiece. She didn’t laugh in my face although there were same strange noises emanating from the back room when she excused herself to get writing material.

I’ll drop it here and pick it up next time. Perhaps Home Depot can provide our motto: “You can do it; we can help.”

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Congratualtions Connecticut

2007-01-07T18:14:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to moderate Democrat, Republican and Independent voters in Connecticut. In polls taken prior to last fall’s election it was clear that while the vast majority of these folks were unhappy with the Iraq War, they were reluctant to vote for the ultra-liberal Ned Lamont who was painted by Joe Lieberman as a Senator likely to call for precipitous withdrawal from the fray.

It is very clear that these voters wanted as rapid an end to the conflict as possible consistent with the best national security interests of the nation so they stuck with tried and true Joe Lieberman for their senator. Joe promised to remain an independent voice in congress and to caucus with the Democrats.

Now that President Bush is in the final stages of planning a major surge in troop levels in Iraq and especially around Baghdad despite what even strictly objective observers such as Wild Bill viewed as a repudiation of the entire misbegotten venture by the electorate last November, he has two major cheerleaders in the Senate, John McCain and JOE LIEBERMAN.

So to you good folks in Connecticut who thought you were voting for a rational phased withdrawal from Iraq, welcome to the new world of building up the troop levels and preparations for allowing the next president to begin the escape from this nightmare with all of its attendant casualties and costs to our troops and to the Pin The Tale on the Donkey Party for the winner of the Who Lost Iraq Contest.

If you’re unhappy with the way things seem to be turning out, tune in to the lamentations emanating from the Senate Democratic Caucus which I guess Joe uses as source of information on Democratic strategy for his Republican cohorts and blame the face in your own looking glass.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

2007

2007-01-01T06:52:00.000-08:00

As the New year begins, we are filled with the need to resolve to make changes in ourselves. The media is filled with the contemplations of wise men and women, and there is little need for Wild Bill to add to your woe.

The following piece from the New York Times is the effort by one very old historian to shed a little light on his passion and our guidepost. As an amateur historian, I felt a real kinship with the assertion.

I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

By ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER Jr.
Published: January 1, 2007
MANY signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. “The longer you look back,” said Winston Churchill, “the farther you can look forward.”
But all historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and of our age. We cannot seize on ultimate and absolute truths. So the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise — the quest for an unattainable objectivity.
Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present. When new urgencies arise in our own times and lives, the historian’s spotlight shifts, probing at last into the darkness, throwing into sharp relief things that were always there but that earlier historians had carelessly excised from the collective memory. New voices ring out of the historical dark and demand to be heard.
One has only to note how in the last half-century the movements for women’s rights and civil rights have reformulated and renewed American history. Thus the present incessantly reinvents the past. In this sense, all history, as Benedetto Croce said, is contemporary history. It is these permutations of consciousness that make history so endlessly fascinating an intellectual adventure. “The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, “is to rewrite it.”
We are the world’s dominant military power, and I believe a consciousness of history is a moral necessity for a nation possessed of overweening power. History verifies John F. Kennedy’s proposition, stated in the first year of his thousand days: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient — that we are only 6 percent of the world’s population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”
History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience. Self-knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives. It should strengthen us to resist the pressure to convert momentary impulses into moral absolutes. It should lead us to acknowledge our profound and chastening frailty as human beings — to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly displayed, that the future outwits all our certitudes and that the possibilities of the future are more various than the human intellect is designed to conceive.
Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity — the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture. Three decades ago, we suffered defeat in an unwinnable war against tribalism, the most fanatic of political emotions, fighting against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests. Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same arrogant folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable. The Swedish statesman Axel Oxenstierna famously said, “Behold, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”
A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to manage the tragic temptations of military power. Let us not bully our way through life, but let a growing sensitivity to history temper and civilize our use of power. In the meantime, let a thousand historical flowers bloom. History is never a closed book or a final verdict. It is forever in the making. Let historians never forsake the quest for knowledge in the interests of an ideology, a religion, a race, a nation.
The great strength of history in a free society is its capacity for self-correction. This is the endless excitement of historical writing — the search to reconstruct what went before, a quest illuminated by those ever-changing prisms that continually place old questions in a new light.
History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation’s history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who has won Pulitzer Prizes for history and biography, is the author, most recently, of “War and the American Presidency.”

I can see clearly now

2006-12-29T08:54:00.000-08:00

It’s so easy to see when it’s happening to us and so hard when we’re doing it to somebody else.

When Hugo Chavez calls George Bush the devil or tells us what to do, Americans are offended and tell Hugo where to go. (That rhymes nicely.) The same goes for the Chinese, Iranians or whatever other bunch of gangsters knows better than we how to run our affairs.

But we’re oh so hurt when Iraqis, Saudis, Palestinians, Israelis, Koreans, Frenchmen, or Germans tell us we shouldn’t be telling them what to do or how to do it.

Why is it so clear one way and not the other?

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Gerald Ford

2006-12-27T12:10:00.000-08:00

Any of you who read this blog with regularity know that Gerald Ford was one of my favorite presidents. One of my close friends and long time colleague, Gordon Vander Till was a close personal associate of the late president, and I asked him to share some of his memories of the man with you and me. Here's Gordon's short take on Mr. Ford:

It was my great pleasure and privilege to serve Mr. Ford as his first full time special assistant in the Grand Rapids office. When he asked me to become his presence in the district, neither of us really knew fully what a position description would look like. I spent two weeks in the Washington office learning their protocols, meeting congressional liaison persons in various department and agencies of the federal government, and learning the personal predilections of the staff located in H-230 of the U.S. Capitol.

On my last day of this accelerated indoctrination, March 19, 1969, Mr. Ford and I had a brief sitdown and review. One of the most enduring admonitions I recall was his explicit direction that there was no political test in his office. "When someone comes in to seek help," he stated, "remember that I was elected to serve ALL the people of the congressional district." He told me that I had his permission to sign his name on correspondence if I felt it was necessary, and he gave me his telephone credit card (at&t) with a dime in the slot -- "call if you need something," was his final direction.

After press notices were sent to local media in the 5th congressional district of Michigan, the office phone rang "off the hook" as we used to say. Local service clubs were anxious to hear about what was transpiring -- and after some initiatory dealings with media, people started showing up on our doorstep. The next five years of my life was spent trying to help constituents resolve their problems with government, especially the federal government.

Along the way I also managed to oversee two re-election campaigns, find time to speak at commencements, and help people resolve "barking dog" complaints. When Ford was dedicating a new section of expressway in the northern end of his district, one of the media types asked him for speculation on the future of Spiro T. Agnew. . . and then asked if Mr. Ford would be interested in becoming vice-president. Ford gave a hearty laugh and said, "We still have a vice president." We left the ceremony and two weeks later Ford was named by Nixon to succeed Agnew.

Sorta like me, you know, son of a trucker to assistant to a President of the U.S. Along the road of life, one never knows the little surprises that may arise.

Gordon

Coming Through!

2006-12-19T07:54:00.000-08:00

I’m pulling on the cardigan and getting Andy Rooney angry again, and, as you well know, that’s mad as hell. Today I’m angry with the press – like I’m usually not. Today it’s different because a major news story in two papers that I checked (The Washington Post and the Boston Globe) reported the facts in one of their news stories and offered no editorial balancing. How bad is that?

It seems that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a non-profit organization that appears to have no axe to grind – right - says that if you buy a small car and you get hit by a big car you’re more likely to be pushing up daisies than if you’d switched sides. Now the people at the Institute didn’t act surprised; in fact, they seemed to understand the laws of physics.

It’s kind of like Wild Bill deciding to play running back for the New York Giants breaking through a hole on the right side and meeting Brian Urlacher, linebacker for the Chicago Bears, coming full speed the other way. Despite wearing the same protective gear, guess who the memorial service will be for?

But don’t the morons buying those mini-movers have a number of motives beyond wanting to have their relatives hit the lottery of a huge insurance settlement after they’ve gone? Could it be that these folks have been told that they shouldn’t be burning up too many hydrocarbons, so they’re trying to save the planet? Couldn’t they also know that putting the feedbag on their magnum SUV is expensive to the point of hurt and that it burns up an ever scarcer natural resource? Some of them may have actually though through the process to the point that they think the manufacturing of these vehicles uses less steel and that they’re are cheaper to build and sell. And there must be other selfish and do good reasons for their stupid decision to drive these rolling coffins.

In the continuing debate on personal safety, selfishness, hubris, and screw the losers in life’s economic lottery on the EIB Broadcasting Network , el Rushbo repeatedly declaims to his brilliant ditto heads that they should run out and buy the biggest heaviest monster they can fit into their mega-garages. Rush knows that Global Warming is nothing but a figment of Al Gore’s overactive imagination and that revving up the Sherman Tank in the back yard is the best way to show your independence and your true blue American patriotism.

It’s all well and good that the Institute should describe the facts that the little guy in a collision is likely to get the worst of it. But don’t you think the papers have at least a little obligation to point out some of the reasons why – beyond the price of gas – people should be conserving natural resources and thinking about the environment?

In a related story, it is reported today that the Navy is going to retire the USS John F. Kennedy next year. This mega-ship, many football fields long and twenty-three stories high is one of the last ships to burn oil. Wouldn’t it be prudent for a rich ditto head to put training wheels on `Big John’ - as the sailors call it – and drive it down the freeway? Nobody on that bad boy is going to get smushed in a head banger with a Toyota.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Only Thing We Have To Fear

2006-12-16T08:41:00.000-08:00

Given the U.S.’s difficult position in Iraq, the rest of the Muslim world and the lowly opinion in which the rest of the world holds America, can there be reason for optimism? While conservative talk show hosts and many of their left wing counterparts see the world – and especially the United States - as going to hell in a hand basket, I don’t share that view and am actually quite optimistic about our future.

The end of the Cold War left the United States as the world’s only super power. The Soviet Union, a social, economic and political bankrupt, threw in the towel and became conservative, inward looking, and well liquored old Russia. George H.W. Bush (Bush 41) became the first president of the modern era, and the elites that defined our world view basked in the glory of the last side standing.

Two groups took most credit for this great and largely unexpected turn of events, the neoconservatives and the evangelical Christians. Having read many books on the subject – none better than Andrew Bacevich’s, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War – it appears that the rise in the political standing of these groups as a result of their apparent success in the Cold War and in providing the foreign policy theories for Bush 41’s successors gave them the right to call the opening moves in the twenty-first century.

We are fortunate that the first great foray into the new millennium was a relatively modest one. How the president proposes to get us out of the quagmire that he created will be difficult, costly and cannot yet be fully fathomed. This decision to invade was probably the worst foreign policy blunder in American history, but, while tragic, it is probably not going to be as costly in blood and bullion as Korea and Vietnam.

Bush 43 will be the poster boy for future presidents who are feeling their oats, and it will be a bold chief executive who takes this nation into an optional war in the next thirty years. Our nose bloodied and our hubris exposed, we are looking forward to a new role in the world.

We may wind up being the leaders of a completely new civilization. We seem to be drifting away from Europe and forming a new and vital grouping of states, including perhaps all of North America. Certainly, Europe seems to be looking east as it incorporates the states formerly part of the Soviet orbit. The Europeans seem revitalized as result of their great union and seem inclined to thumb their collective noses at us. Oh, we’re still friends, but they resent us as an overbearing partner and have convenient memories of our contributions to their riches and safety over the last sixty years.

But Europe appears unable to solve an ancient riddle that has vexed our species since we walked out of Africa. Should people be assimilated and have upward mobility based on merit or on their traditional place in society. The present owners of the land are not reproducing themselves sufficiently to assure continuity of the society, yet they are unable to successfully deal with those flowing in to fill the longer rungs on the social and economic ladders.

China’s model, while appearing successful on the surface, is fraught with peril for them. The gangsters in charge have opened the economic valves to the creativity of the population but intend to hold onto the levers of political power. Think about that in futuristic terms. The Indians, however dynamic, are still struggling with problems of caste and an over burdensome system of regulation.

Meanwhile the North American Free Trade Agreement appears to have brought Canada, the U.S. and Mexico into a new and powerful amalgam whose workings seem quite different from our old world parents and major competitors. Our internal arguments are creating dynamism qualitatively different from what Don Rumsfeld termed, `Old Europe.’ Even as we struggle with the problems of race and assimilation of newcomers, it is clear that that those committed to equality and upward mobility based on merit maintain the upper hand. Many new groups - regardless of origin, race, religion, gender, or ethnicity (including many from the Islamic world) – have succeeded as individuals and their groups often exceed the wealth and income of the White majority.

These advances have not been made without social difficulties. No matter, America, for all its problems, faces the age old battle of mobility with political and economic power in the hands of those committed to solving it based on equal opportunity, social justice, and ultimately on merit. That is why despite all of our problems, people are willing to give up everything to move here and prosper intellectually, economically, spiritually, and politically.

As these changes take place domestically, China, Russia, Japan, India, and the Islamic civilizations are setting limits on our power, and we seem to be settling in to a slightly more conservative place on the planet. We’re still the biggest kid around, but we’ve been brought up short with a bloody nose in Iraq. Our days of stealing lunch money and picking on the little kids in the cafeteria line of the world’s resources seem to be behind us, at least for a few decades. This is good; our internal creativity far exceeds that of our competitors.

A lot of neoconservatives and evangelicals find this discombobulating, but is it really that bad that we don’t run the whole world? I don’t find it so, and it’s going to be a lot cheaper than the Cold War and the world reach we’re still trying to project. It isn’t like we’re surrendering; we’re just adjusting to a world in which we remain the biggest and strongest nation in the world but one which the rest of the residents have us checked – but not check mated.

Our thoughts of empire have been inspired by Rome and England. Maybe we should rethink our definition to that of Florence. We are the city on the hill. Our residents can create wealth, power, and civilization without conquering everyone in our way just as the Florentines did in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

We’ve still got the world’s most dynamic economic system. Rugged individualism will provide us with ideas and organizations second to none. Our major competitors such as India, Japan, Russia, China, and Europe have leagues to go in deregulating business and industry to the point of our best.

Our richest and most successful citizens while compensated too greatly are showing signs of emulating Renaissance princes and merchant kings by creating such programs as the MacArthur awards to encourage creativity in all fields, and look at what’s happening to the great wealth of such stars as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as it is being harnessed to cure the world’s ills. Dozens of fortunes have been converted to foundations and trusts designed to make America better. Things are not all bleak, and despite the conscious efforts of many of our leaders to frighten us, we will prevail against ignorance, disease, and poverty.

And look at what the little folks are doing to keep the mighty on the straight and narrow. Tens of thousands of bloggers daily point out that the emperors are without fig leaves. And they can’t be shushed or shot – not all of them anyway.

No, the world’s not all bad and America is far better than many pessimists think; there are many more positive than negative signs. As we move toward 2007, I see the glass as well over half full, and I hope you do too.

Happy Holidays! Peace, prosperity, good health, and happiness in the New Year!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Snow Job

2006-12-13T06:23:00.000-08:00

Baby its cold outside. Indeed a fierce blizzard is raging in Washington, and it’s unlikely to end before mid-January.

The White House press corps is spitting mad at Tony Snow for his dodging and pleas of nolo contendere on all questions involving Iraq. “I don’t know,” is the answer de jour by this hubris filled wind bag. Snow came to rescue Bush not to bury him, or so the mouth that roars nothing but ignorance once proclaimed.

The silver tongued hero of the neocons was to provide our ever eloquent president with an English translator. All that was lacking in Washington was a spokesperson who could translate Bushisms into the plain speak of the American people, and the administration would be on its way to winning the war on terror and transforming the Middle East into a land of milk and honey where the lion and the lamb could lie down together in peace and harmony.

But Washington is a land of snow jobs – everything from the Rumsfeldian snow flakes falling gently over the Pentagon to the howling blizzard of `I don’t knows’ roaring from the White House Press Room.

Only now are some – certainly not all – of the neoconservatives beginning to fathom that if things are going right and you’re riding a good horse even Wild Bill would make a great press secretary but if you’re in a tar pit aboard a swayback nag, even Winston Churchill couldn’t bullshit his way out.

Look around Tony; you’re in deep and dark stuff and that horse... And all that slick restating of `I don’t know’ is nothing but a tony snow job.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Everything's Great - I Quit

2006-12-12T06:50:00.000-08:00

I feel particularly optimistic today, so I’m resigning from the Democratic Party. That may seem strange as I worked so hard to defeat the Republicans, but, truly, I’ve held myself out as a person beholden to no party and of the center.

Obviously, at this moment I’m likely to support the Democrat in the ’08 run for the roses, but, if they dive to the left or do anything really crazy in trying to clean up the mess created by Bush and his neoconservative Svengalis, no one should be surprised if there’s a change in my registration.

The Republicans are doing a great job of imploding without any more assistance from me, so I’ll just watch as the self destruction much like the war that caused it accelerates. My fear is that the Democrats will see this administration weakness as the voice of the people telling them to take a left turn; that will be my signal to attempt to bolster the morale of the cloth coat Republicans with whom I parted company when Bush showed he’d lost his way and was listening to the hard right neocons and the evangelicals.

By the way, I’m a big time Democrat who gets `Dear Bill’ emails from all the party big shots. I’m sure that I’m the only one in America who receives such personal notes, but I’m not going to write back and tell them of my likely defection, and, right now, I’m counting on them for some real oversight of these jackasses who’ve taken the country in such dangerous directions.

This is a very antsy time, and I certainly don’t have a clue as to how to get out of Iraq and set the ship of state on the right course. While I was desperate for us not to go into Iraq, I have no idea on how to get us out in a somewhat whole fashion.

But I feel good about the direction of America today. The old bulls of the Republican Party have drawn a line in the sand that stands for no more neocon adventurism. The most serious of our defense and foreign policy intellectuals are thinking of ways to end this fiasco without blowing up the planet, and virtually all serious thinkers are working to curb the mess without further wrecking our standing in the world.

There are only two important people – and they’re both real factors – George W. Bush and John McCain who are still looking for victory in Iraq. Even Joe Lieberman is in a run silent run deep mode.

All in all, I’m looking for a Christmas message from Bush that may include both `mission accomplished’ and a new direction that heads us toward the egress.

Happy holidays to all!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Birds Are Singing

2006-12-07T06:53:00.000-08:00

The birds are singing, ten of ‘em. Canaries play two roles, they sing and they croak.

As we carelessly drove the ponies down into the deep, deep mine, we paid no attention to the horrible conditions of the walls, ceiling, or air. As we found ourselves facing an endless seam of soft coal that was crumbling about us and as the timbers and bulkheads groaned and creaked, with no other alternatives, we called for the canaries.

Ten old birds to the rescue. “Get the hell out!” is their unanimous refrain.

These birds are scared to death. Sure, Lee Hamilton can work with anybody, and Jim Baker can fake it. Sandra Day O’Connor is a civilized person. Senators Robb and Simpson were never partisan crazies, and the same goes for all but two of the other members. Ed Meese is a real Republican and Leon Panetta is a fire breathing Democrat.

That Meese and Panetta can agree on 79 points and not withhold their approval of a single finding is both wonderful but really, really scary. The air in this mine is bad, really bad, toxic. If these two partisans join hands it’s not for their parties; it’s for America.

Already, the cries that this map to the mine mouth isn’t realistic are being heard from both sides – those that want to stay the course and those that want to cut and run. I admit – and the members do too – the commission has created a corridor of mirrors within the smoky air.

But it’s time to board the carts and whip the crap out of those ponies in the direction being pointed out by the canaries. There’s little time for face saving or for better ways. All aboard! The birds are beginning to cough.

The Congress better damn well start acting like an oversight committee and the partisan sniping better be held to a minimum. This America we’re talking about, not Republican or Democratic platform planks. Both parties better buy in and kick some executive butt.

The air’s bad, and it’s time to face the truth. We’re in way too deep. Our exit strategy is on the table. It ain’t what we’d like – none of us, but the walls are creaking. Get with it or get the hell out of the way; otherwise the next phase will really be like Vietnam.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Who Cares?

2006-12-06T08:07:00.000-08:00

The media abounds with stories about George W. Bush’s place in history. His decision to attack Iraq has historical tongues wagging about whether he is the worst president in American history or perhaps just the worst since Richard Nixon. James Buchanan has been plucked from the dustbin of history, vacuumed off, and held out as the absolute bottom of the barrel – until maybe now. Other commentators have resurrected such presidential luminaries as Herbert Hoover and Andrew Johnson to parade their stuff in the contest for the bottom.

This must be very difficult on Mr. Bush and even more so on Laura and Barney. It can’t be nice to read bout yourself as bracketed with the most incompetent people ever to occupy the White House or to learn that your husband is a total moron – or worse. What does the loyal staff do when they pick up the papers in the morning and find front page comparisons with Bush’s forty-two predecessors – and find him wanting against all of them?

Were I on staff, my reaction would be very swift; let Barney use the Post and Times for whatever he has to do and tell Laura that the paper people skipped the White House this morning. But every day? That would be tough on even the most dedicated of lackeys and sycophants.

In thinking about the problem, I figured out the bottom line; it doesn’t matter. So you’re the worst in history; who cares? Do you really think that Jimmy Buchanan, or Herb Hoover, or Dick Nixon wake up each day on their clouds or – heaven forbid – spits and try to explain themselves to their neighbors? Are you kidding? They’re definitely cool – or hot – with their situations. Although there may be some thoughts of readjustment as they ponder George’s predicament.

And just who cares what so called `presidential experts’ care. They were wrong about Harry Truman and they could be wrong about forty-three, and while I don’t think they are, who cares what a loser like me thinks anyway?

I’ve known and met dozens of people with names like Lincoln, Buchanan, Grant, and I’ve bought vacuum cleaners called Hoover, and I’m sure many of you have too. It has never crossed my mind to ask the Lincoln if he was descended from Abraham. Do you think I’d open up with Buchanan with, “What the hell was that bozo great, great, great uncle of yours doing asleep at the switch when the country was going to hell?”

Would you get in a Lincoln automobile and ask the owner if his vehicle was manufactured by relatives of our late great president? Of course you wouldn’t.

What it really boils down to is that except for a few of the very top guys – maybe Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt (the second guy) – nobody even knows who was president before Bill Clinton. Golly, our intrepid reporters have dig out obscure Ph. Ds just to get the list of the president’s anyway.

So George and Laura and Barney should relax. Look at it this way; has anyone ever been able to even read through the list of names of Egyptian pharos without falling asleep? And except for Rammer and Tut, whoever heard of even one other of them? And there were some very incompetent people on that list – and good ones too; had to be.

The same goes for the Kings of England or the list of the Popes. Their only use today is as substitutes for counting sheep by these same over educated characters who are saying George is the worst. Maybe George should be asking who these jerks are. Could they be the worst evaluators of presidents? Maybe Barney would like to pee on some of their books. Who knows? Who cares?

So be cool George and all you worry warts in the White House. After we get out the mess you’ve created, you can go off and join Jimmy Buchanan in a pinochle game and never be disturbed until some phony baloney Ph. D comes rummaging around to see who’s winning. Even then, who cares?

Blog on!

Wild Bill

It's Morning in America

2006-12-05T07:49:00.000-08:00

An article (A Virtual Chalkboard For Budding NFL Fans) in today’s Washington Post describes how millions of mostly young males in the U.S. are becoming expert in the Xs and Os of professional football. The number of people who can glance at a defensive set on their TV screens has expanded exponentially as a result of `Madden NFL’ a video game. This phenomenon is worthy of front page coverage by one of the nation’s leading papers.

In my Andy Rooney moments, I wonder if this is a good thing – a really good thing. Millions of kids are spending hundreds of millions of hours to be able to tell at a glance what only John Madden and Bill Belichek used to know. But there’s an obvious upside to this, instead of only dozens of people being able to break down tapes for NFL teams, there is a developing cadre of millions of potential candidates. On the other hand, since this is highly desirable work, the wage rates will soon plummet to minimum wage levels.

It’s a great world we live in. We’ve come a long way since Classical Civilization when the government provided circus for the masses. Today, the private sector in the form of Madden NFL and its thousands of counterparts and the NFL itself and its pro sports and college competitors deliver circus right into the homes of the consumers. Not only that but those who feel compelled to really attend the circus must compete to buy high priced tickets to many sold out venues in order to be part of the show.

There’s an even better side to this situation. Young people can be passionate about things and are willing to toil for long hours and pay big money to learn what used to be the province of an ascetic priesthood of coaches. Bill Belichek apprenticed at his father's knee and honed his skills for years just to get the chance to intern for nothing with other experts. Now his life’s learning and that of other equally qualified clergymen of the Church of the NFL is available to the masses. So instead of just dozens of boys wasting their time in hopes of coaching the Packers, millions can aspire to be fired losing in the great zero sum game. So while they exercise only their thumbs and their noggins and cannot ever hope to play and get hurt running up huge medical bills, they will all be qualified to coach the Cowboys.

Even better, among the millions of youngsters learning Madden NFL there are tens of thousands who otherwise might have gone bad, and these will have no time for mugging old farts like me or working part time to support illicit drug habits. And they’re not driving cars while they play – I hope – and therefore the roads are safer.

And they say there’s a decline in Western Civilization. Give me a break!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

It Never Happened

2006-12-04T06:46:00.000-08:00

An examination of possible Republican directions as we move toward the 2008 election leads me to conclude that the Iraq War – as I understood it – was nothing but a figment of my overactive imagination. In checking my mirror for signs that I might have morphed into a cockroach but finding only the usual gray stubble, I wondered, could it have been that it was only a nightmare? But the morning paper still reports that our troops are being blown to bits, but it is equally clear that only George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld got the troops into harms way.

The neoconservatives were obviously betrayed by the big three. Rummy never followed the script of sending in enough troops or setting up a real national democracy. It’s obvious from a review of the Doug Feith conspiracy papers (on which the Cheney charges of treason against those of us opposed to the fiasco were based) stating that there was an al Qaeda operative in every Baathist office in Baghdad, so we should have had enough troops to arrest every government employee in the country. Never happened.

The real conservatives said all along that the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force was not followed, so we can’t blame them. Never happened.

The evangelicals were merely supporting the president in pursuing a war of values. How can you doubt that there were a whole heck of a lot of evil people in Iraq and killing a million of them and letting God sort them out was very good thing, so we can’t blame the evangelicals; there really were lions eating the good folks. Never happened.

Obviously, no Republicans – other than Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld – are responsible for what happened, so now that our sinuses have been cleared by last month’s, why can’t we just move on?

Sure, almost all of the Republicans – and a lot of wimpy Democrats - voted to let Bush handle Saddam, but, like I said, they thought he’d do it right. And he didn’t, so how can we hold them responsible? Never happened.

Damn, they reduced my taxes by sixty bucks and up to a thou on the rest of you in the middle class. Why can’t you thank them? Real wages fell, but, hell, the economy’s growing and we should be cheering as the stars like the Waltons pocket their billions. In the Great Depression when we were all broke and out of work, didn’t we love it when the silver screen showed the winners? Why can’t we just cheer The Donald and make him our surrogate in the winner’s circle?

Looks to me like I’m a bad sport; instead of saying we’ve got punish those people who enabled all these fiascos, I should be looking beyond Bush and giving the Republicans the benefit of the doubt in 2008. They are not going to nominate a guy named Bush. Heck, Jeb may not run for eight years now. You know they’re the party of small government and reduced spending. If it hadn’t been for George Bush, you’d have seen. They’re the party of the little guy; golly, if you’re a small farmer worth only eight or ten million bucks and being subsidized by the Department of Agriculture, they’re all for you and your family. Can’t we just let bygones be bygones?

It was Bush – and Cheney and Rumsfeld – who did it. Don’t blame us; we’ve got some small government candidates we want you to consider in ’08, and we’ll build you a bridge to nowhere while we’re at it.

Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe all those people who six months ago were calling us cutters and runners and who have now turned on Bush really weren’t responsible for any of this mess. Right! Never happened.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Rest Easy

2006-12-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

They say there is never any good news. This column from today’s Washington Post puts that canard to rest. This is one of the most touching stories I have ever read and couldn’t wait to share it.

The author, Marc Fisher, is a columnist for the Metro Section of the Post. This such an extraodinary piece that I can't believe that it wasn't placed in the Main news or Outlook sections.

I know I'm building this up but assure you that the subject is heroic and the presentation perfect.

Wild Bill
---------------------------------------------------------------------

By Marc Fisher
Sunday, December 3, 2006; Page C01
E very year for more than a decade, at the height of the season, Morrill Worcester would pack up a truckload of his Christmas wreaths and head down from Maine to Arlington National Cemetery. Without fanfare, he and a dozen or so volunteers would lay red-bowed wreaths on a few thousand headstones of fallen Americans.

There was no publicity. No crowds gathered. The gesture was one man's private duty, born of a trip to Washington he won as a 12-year-old paperboy. Of all the monuments and memorials he saw, it was the visit to Arlington that stuck with him -- the majesty and mystery, the sadness and the pride, the sight of all those neat rows of government-issue white headstones.

Years later, after he had started his Christmas products business, at the crunch point of one season Worcester asked some men who were building his new factory to find some wreaths and buy them for him.
They went a bit overboard: When Worcester heard that he was the proud owner of 4,000 wreaths that couldn't possibly be sold by Christmas, he called a friend who owned a trucking company, contacted his senator in Washington and, two weeks before Christmas 1992, was at Arlington, laying wreaths.

It seemed like the right thing to do. So he continued the ritual each year, honoring those who had died so that he and other Americans might live as they saw fit.

Then, a few months ago, the e-mails started. Maybe you got one: a heart-wrenching yet elegant image of Worcester's wreaths, each adorned with a simple red ribbon, resting in front of seemingly endless rows of identical gravestones on a snowy day at Arlington. Beneath the photo, a few lines of poetry:

"Rest easy, sleep well my brothers.
Know the line has held, your job is done.
Rest easy, sleep well . . . "

And then just a paragraph about Worcester's annual pilgrimage.
The e-mail became an Internet phenomenon, forwarded so many times that the professional skeptics who spend their time checking out urban legends at Snopes.com mounted an investigation. Sure enough, this was the real deal.
A week from today, Worcester will leave Columbia Falls, Maine, to lead the trailer full of wreaths down the coast. This time, it won't be just the trucker, Worcester and his wife, Karen. This time, there'll be an escort of a couple hundred Patriot Guard Riders, a national group of motorcyclists who take it upon themselves to display their respect for fallen service members.

This time, Worcester and friends won't barrel down the interstate; they're taking the slow road, Route 1, so that more motorcyclists -- perhaps thousands more -- might join the caravan.

This time, the wreath-laying won't be a private affair. Instead of the 10 or 12 volunteers who had been rounded up in past years by Wayne Hanson, a retired federal law enforcement officer who lives in Springfield, at least 500 people will be ready to help lay the wreaths Dec. 14 -- and maybe many more.

Morrill Worcester, who never served in the military, said of the wreath-laying project he started: "This is the least we can do." (By Gregory Rec -- Portland Press Herald)

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There will be a busload of school kids from Skowhegan, Maine, a Civil Air Patrol unit from up that way and all manner of Washington-area volunteers, too.

They're still calling, every day. "It's the e-mail that did this," says Hanson, 62, an Army veteran of the Vietnam War. He got involved with the wreaths in 1993, when Worcester sought help from the Maine State Society, a Falls Church-based group of transplants. "I had a man call from Iraq, a civilian contractor who got his company to give him R&R so he could come back and lay a wreath."

Every year, the superintendent of the cemetery assigns the wreath brigade to a different part of the grounds. Last year, the volunteers completed their circuit of the cemetery, and this Christmas, they start all over again.

Every year, Worcester makes certain to reserve a few wreaths for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the John and Robert Kennedy gravesites, the memorial to the USS Maine and the resting place of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine.

Even as his personal ritual morphs into something much larger, Worcester, 56, wants to ensure that its original purpose remains. "It's just my way to say thank you," he says. "I've got a lot to be thankful for." When he started Worcester Wreaths in 1971, he sold 500 wreaths. This year, that number will top 500,000, mostly to the Maine-based retailer L.L. Bean.

This time of year, the wreath company employs more than 600 people in Harrington, about 45 miles up the coast from Bar Harbor.

Worcester has always returned the checks that people send him. The wreath-laying is his personal statement: "This is the least we can do."

Everyone connected with the wreath project takes pains to note that it has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with anyone's opinion about Iraq or terrorism.

"It's just a way to pay respect," Hanson says. "When I came home from Vietnam, well, it wasn't the best time to be in the military, or to be coming home. But this -- it brings tears to my eyes to see 5,000 wreaths laid out across those white government headstones. You can't think about anything but that ultimate sacrifice these people made to give us our freedom."

This year, the interest in Worcester's project has exploded to the point that he had to find some way to extend the tribute, so he has launched http://wreathsacrossamerica.org, a Web site that coordinates similar rituals at more than 200 military cemeteries around the country.

"The veterans are going to get their due," says Worcester, who never served in the military. "It's going to be quite something."

E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com

Blog!

Wild Bill

James Webb, U.S. Senator-elect

2006-12-02T08:24:00.000-08:00

I supported the candidacy of James Webb for United States Senator from Virginia. I worked for his election, harder than some but not nearly as diligently as others. I’m happy that he won. But something happened this week that is very bothersome.

Jim Webb was invited to the White House for a reception for incoming members of congress. As a newly elected senator to be, Mr. Webb would be one of the stars of the show. Reports of the event indicate that Jim appeared to make a point of avoiding the host, the President of the United States.

During the course of the reception, it is reported that the president made a point of finding and engaging Mr. Webb and that Mr. Webb reacted in a manner that was reported to be unusual, if not confrontational. Mr. Webb is reported to have avoided having his picture taken with his host and in making smart remarks about that.

The president asked about Mr. Webb’s son who is serving in Iraq, and Webb is reported to have responded with something akin to, “That’s between my son and me.”

Naturally, a food fight of that nature was reported in the press, and I among many was shocked by Mr. Webb’s performance. George Will opined that the senator-elect’s performance was boorish, and I – again among many – agreed.

Many of Webb’s supporters rushed to his defense with such arguments as that it was about time someone shook the hypocrisy out of politics and told the emperor that his fig leaf had been dropped or that Webb’s campaign was based on straight talk and that anything else would have been phony.

Mr. Webb, in my view, was right on target during his campaign when he denounced the Iraq War. His views and mine were almost exactly the same on the most important issue – and as far as I can see on many others that were addressed in the election. Despite having been a long time Republican, Mr. Webb made himself available to the Democrats to run against George Allen, primarily because of his rejection of the invasion of Iraq and the new course of the larger war on terror being pursued by George Bush.

I was a registered Republican in 2000 and voted for Bush. Like Webb, I broke with Mr. Bush and the Republicans when the war on terror lost its focus by shifting away from Afghanistan, its Taliban rulers who were harboring al Qaeda, and the terrorists themselves who were planning and training in that country.

My disgust with the president and his congressional enablers was as palpable as that of Jim Webb, and I became an avowed critic of the president and his war. While having zero knowledge of Webb’s evolution, when I found out he was running and his policy positions, I was very pleased since I had trod virtually the same path.

My break with Bush and the Republicans was eased by my view that in the president I had voted for a `uniter not a divider’ but had been sorely disappointed to learn that I was just plain wrong in this. Mr. Bush had turned out to be the worst kind of partisan, and I was going to look for candidates who would restore some sense of civility to government. During the campaign I came to believe that Jim Webb was such a person. While he pulled no punches in his opposition to the war, his interaction with his opponent, Senator Allen, was always civil, far more honest, and almost devoid of the mud being thrown at him.

Many of the people defending Mr. Webb for his alleged faux pas are those from the liberal part of the coalition that elected him. Many of these same people were angered by the heat of the charges by Senator Allen, and they were the ones calling for civility.

Mr. Webb is obviously far more conservative than the left wing of the Democratic Party. He and many others recruited to be candidates by the Democrats were far more centrist than the hard core, and this was acknowledged by virtually everyone associated with the campaign.

I am a Democrat – now – and far more centrist than the vast majority of his Northern Virginia supporters. Almost every analysis that I have perused since the election leads me to conclude that Mr. Webb’s narrow victory was based on votes garnered from Democrat centrists, moderate Republicans, and independents.

I am convinced that Mr. Webb made gross mistake in attending the function at the White House with the intent of avoiding the host and in responding badly to a very civil question concerning the well being of his son. Obviously, it is acceptable to say things in the course of a campaign that are not appropriate in the home of a political opponent. If Mr. Webb cannot abide the person of George Bush, he should not have attended the reception. His absence would not have created nearly the stir as his performance.

I continue to support Senator elect Webb and wish him well. He is a man of significant intellect and is far more honest in thought than most people in public life. But if there are many more repeats of the performance at his first White House reception, the narrow victory that came with the building of a coalition built on civility as well as policy positions will quickly erode.

I am angrier with Webb’s overzealous supporters who have the gall to encourage such behavior than with the senator elect who should be given room to back down gracefully. Their partisanship is showing, and they ought to realize that the great victory by their candidate – and mine – was built on far more than bad manners and incivility.

There, I feel better. I hope we can move on.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Seventeen!

2006-11-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

Seventeen! That’s assuming that none of the angels is obese by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services standards and that the pin head has not been hammered into a wider platform than Bureau of Standards tolerances permit. Now that we’ve settled that age old conundrum, maybe we can address the pressing issue on our national agenda: is Iraq now in a civil war?

This morning, Tony Snow can be seen pouring over Webster in a hundred snapshots posted in dozens of newspapers as he rails, “Is not!” The Los Angeles Times, NBC, and a sizeable portion of the media scream back in unison, “Is too!”

Across the country, we’re being treated to a medieval fest to determine for all time just who is responsible for what happens in Iraq. The White House is leading the charge that Iraqis are in charge of their destiny and even Democrats are joining on the side of the president. Carl Levin of Michigan and dozens of others are screaming for air time with their versions of the `Iraqis are going to have to stop the sectarian violence or call a halt to their civil war.’ We gurus of the Middle Ages just haven’t heard enough of these arguments to establish with finality just what kind of a fray we’re in over there.

In today’s Washington Post, Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University takes this question and dozens of related ones and boils them down into a renaissance style cut through the baloney opinion. We’re in the beginning stages of a national search for `who lost Iraq?’ As we prepare to bug back out of Baghdad, the fig leaf de jour that the president is holding to hide his imperial nakedness is that the elected Iraqi officials are going to have to wind up without a chair when the music stops.

I’m with Carl and the Dems in agreeing with the president. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to provide the kid with an escape route. The president’s latest truism is that al Qaeda is behind the sectarian violence (or civil war). I have no idea if that’s correct or not, but is this something the president should be really spouting? Al Qaeda is, according to the president, our mortal enemy and what would a normal person expect from such a source? Mass surrender maybe? The crazy thought that ran through theologically challenged brain was, “Isn’t this kind of like blaming the Nazis for the Battle of the Bulge?” It’s what they do. You have to wipe them out. Or rather, the Iraqis have to kill them all.

It appears that we’re assembling everyone who had anything to do with Iraq – Iraqis, Americans, neocons, Don Rumsfeld, the CIA, Dick Cheney and thousands of others - and organizing them in a huge circle in the Pentagon parking lot. When everyone is posed and pointing in both directions, then from the roof we’ll snap the group shot of who lost Iraq. It’s kind of like the old Miller light beer commercial in which great big former football players traded the shouted bards, “Less filling!” and “Tastes Great!”

But we careful medieval theologians will ponder this for years on end before we get to the `seventeen’ of this great question. Only then will we pronounce the final answer. (But I‘ll let you in on a secret; the answer to who lost Iraq is George Herbert Walker Bush.) President Bush 41 by failing to topple Saddam during the Gulf War laid down an irresistible challenge to George W. Bush. “You can’t top me, ever, twerp!” Daddy made him do it.

You read it here first.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Decider's Dubius Decision

2006-11-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

Words uttered can never be recalled. If they could, Mel Gibson and Michael Richards would move heaven and earth to change recent events. Actually, we’ve all said things we regret, and, thankfully, with the passage of time and the understanding of those we’ve offended or hurt the impacts have faded. But Richards and Gibson are celebrities and their words went round the world, and they’ll never again be received by their publics in the way they were prior to the transgressions.

Decisions often have similar impact. We ordinary mortals can often move on after making some of our bad decisions and, even if they change our lives, some, even many, bad moves don’t destroy us. But really important decisions made by powerful people can be destructive on their institutions, nations and even the world and by extension destroy them. History and literature are filled with examples going back to the times when deeds and decisions were first recorded.

History seems to be making a comeback in the upper reaches of the government of the U.S. Don Rumsfeld’s last bit public advice was for folks to read history. Leading American generals are now reading the history of Vietnam to seek guidance for our forces in Iraq, and even George Bush may be getting in on the act. The president is famous (or notorious) for not being a reader, but in recent days there have been hints that he’s read – or been briefed – on important events in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Recently, he addressed similarities between the Tet Offensive and our present situation in Iraq.

It is very good that we look to history for lessons that might apply in our circumstances any time we are involved with great ventures, but it’s usually better to do the reading before the deciding. I’m a great fan of history – but not a scholar by any means – and have a healthy respect for what happened in the past as a guide for proposed action. That’s not to say I’m in any way an historicist who sees inevitability in the march of time. In my eighth decade, the world’s experience with Karl Marx’s historicist view of the inevitability of history has lowered the absolutes in this department.

But when big deciders do their thing, the rest of the world better watch out. Hitler, another historicist, decided on war and some sixty million people died. He stuck with his decisions, but in the long run he didn’t have enough resources to win. On the other side of the ocean, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt made the strategic decisions that ultimately did the Nazis in.

On March 5, 2006, a posting on this blog “The Die is Cast” described one of the most fateful decisions ever made and examined not only the impact of the determination but also the immediate impact of it on the decision maker. Again, I’m an amateur historian so I’m not going spend hours on my references, but as Tricky Dick Nixon used to plead, “Trust me.”

The Die is Cast is a case study of an extraordinary decision, in this case General Dwight Eisenhower’s decision to go forward with the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944. In short, the invasion was predicated on two major elements: surprise (as to place and time) and on the tides in Normandy. You may recall that a major storm system was battering the coast of France during the days leading up to the narrow window of time when the tides would be appropriate for the landings. If the invasion were to be called off until the next favorable tides some weeks later, the element of surprise might well be lost, and a whole host of logistical problems, including loading up all the men and equipment, that had successfully accomplished might not go nearly as well a second time.

The invasion, perhaps even the war and the future of civilization, hung in the balance. One man alone, Dwight Eisenhower, was charged with the responsibility for the go or no go decision. The story is old, subordinate commanders awaited Ike’s word, Tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen from the U.S., Great Britain, Canada and other allied nations were fully armed and ready onboard the ships of the greatest armada in human history. Eisenhower was the single most powerful man on the planet that day. Everything depended on his decision.

We all know Ike made the decision, the invasion succeeded, the third front was opened and Hitler’s armies were doomed. But it could have turned out differently had the storm had not abated. But the great and fateful decision was made and the entire venture was no longer in Ike’s hands. Even he could not recall the effort. Once made, on imperfect information like most important decisions, there was no way to undo it. Nine thousand Americans died on the beaches and, had it been a bad one, many more would have succumbed. Yet the switch pulled, Ike was now little more than a powerless observer. But, as I said and as we all know, we won!

So George Bush, that poor student of history, was faced with the decision to send allied forces into Iraq in March of 2003. In the weeks and months leading to the invasion, tens of thousands of troops, many ships, and hundreds of planes made ready to sweep through Iraq and into Baghdad. George Bush always the most powerful man on the planet during his presidency had much of his might focused on one small part of the planet. He alone would make the go/no go decision.

Eisenhower had thought deeply on his responsibility and had even prepared a note to his president and the peoples of the allied nations assuming full responsibility for the failure of the invasion. He knew his role and responsibility and the pros and cons of his decision. He knew that had it been a bad decision that thousands of soldiers and sailors would have died in vain and as would perhaps even more millions of people on the European continent who were waiting for the third front. It was almost certain that had the invasion failed the war would have ended later and with many more deaths. It might have ended with a settlement rather than unconditionally. Ike knew all that as he mulled his choices.

It appears that George Bush did not think long and hard on the consequences of anything but a happy outcome of his great decision. All of the long term implications and possibilities seem not to have been taken into account. The history and sociology of the society about to be invaded appears in retrospect to have been ignored. The most powerful man in the world was about to unleash the most potent force ever assembled. But in his personal hubris, all of the voices being raised in protest of the attack were about to be ignored.

The decision was made; the invasion took place; and Saddam’s government was easily toppled. George Bush’s decision was heralded, “Mission accomplished.”

Not so fast! In the blink of an eye, we became the occupiers of a broken country. George Bush went from being the most powerful man in Iraq to a captive of the situation. His presidency was doomed, and the self proclaimed `decider’ was caught in his own web.

Yes indeed, read that history but on the front end, damn it!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Murphy's War, ISBN: 1-4241-3781-0

2006-11-20T11:59:00.000-08:00

Happy day, my latest novel, Murphy’s War, ISBN: 1-4241-3781-0, is available for order from the online bookstore of Publish America. Visit www.publishamerica.com and click on the bookstore icon and type in my name, William Brennan or the title and you’ll see the new baby ready for your adoption.

The book is also listed on Amazon and the image of the cover can be expanded and viewed there. Unfortunately, it is not yet available for sale there, and the prices of those dealers promising early delivery are very high. The initial sales price offered by Publish America is below that which will be charged on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in bookstores; it is really good to go. It may be a few weeks before Publish America can gear up to print and deliver but, guaranteed, it will be worth the short wait.

Murphy’s War is a completely fresh view of the internment of Japanese people living in the Western States during the early months of World War II. The story is unique in that it describes the horrible program from the point of view of government bureaucrats charged with implementing the effort rather than that of the victims. It is a character driven story that examines the life of Thomas Murphy who while coming of age becomes embroiled in this most controversial of programs.

Murphy, a Massachusetts native, is inspired by campaign appearances by Franklin Roosevelt to become one of the president’s `Whiz Kids’. Despite the remoteness of his goal, Murphy becomes a lawyer and obtains a reserve commission in the Judge Advocate General Corps of the Army.

In 1941, Tom is assigned to the Office of the Provost Marshall General – the military police – in Washington, DC and prepares to settle into the routine life of a young army attorney. But immediately he becomes involved in an interagency task force charged with identifying German, Italian and Japanese ethnics suspected of having ties with potential national enemies of the U.S. The task force is developing plans to intern these people should hostilities break out.

Soon after Pearl Harbor, the trap of the interment program is sprung on the task force, and the Provost Marshall General becomes one of the most rabid advocates of removing all ethnic Japanese from the West Coast. Both Tom and Sid Frank, his associate, are appalled. Frank argues so forcefully that he is transferred to the Pacific. Murphy, while suspected of treachery by his superiors, is thought to have been cowed into compliance with the office’s position.

Murphy visits one of the collecting camps in California and is shocked by the conditions. He makes his concerns known and a descending spiral in relations with his superiors begins. He is counseled and once more sent to west where he visits one of the most famous camps, Manzanar. While there, he innocently violates an order to not interact with the Japanese and is horrified by the internment. He is confronted by important army supporters of the program on the West Coast and threatened with court martial for his transgression.

Surprisingly, the reaction back in Washington is quite the opposite and Murphy is courted rather than punished, and he is ordered to give a presentation to key War Department officials on his observations on the West Coast. He protests that he will be unable to make his report on Western military preparations without describing his views on the internment. Every effort is made to browbeat him into making the report, but they come to believe that he is not trustworthy, and Murphy, too, is summarily exiled to the Pacific.

Justice Department officials who served on the task force with Murphy intervene on his behalf. En route, his orders are changed and he is ordered to Hawaii where he is assigned to the Territory’s military district. Delos Emmons, the Commanding General, is one of the true unsung heroes of the internment who has been fighting the notion that all ethnic Japanese should be removed from Hawaii and interned with their mainland counterparts.

In the months following the decisive naval Battle of Midway in June 1942 it becomes increasingly clear that Japanese forces will never be able to mount an attack on the U.S. West Coast and whatever weak intellectual underpinnings for the internment existed after the attack on Pearl Harbor become completely unreasonable and the program is obviously no longer tenable.

Forces opposed to the program ascend within the government and hard line supporters of the program are reassigned. Murphy follows his commanders from Hawaii to California where they assist in dismantling the program. Tom visits Manzanar again. He finds a completely different climate and rides back in a train to San Francisco with a man with whom he interacted during his initial visit. Tom is shocked into awareness that even though the Japanese are being allowed to return home their problems are far from over.

Murphy is sent to Washington to participate in a conference about the end of the program. On the way, he takes home leave and the dilemmas in his personal life are shakily resolved. During the conference, President Roosevelt dies and his role in the internment is considered. The war is winding down, and Murphy’s role in the main plot is resolved.

The secondary plot of his personal life runs in parallel with the primary story. As the book closes, Tom’s future, like most soon to be veterans, is bright, but in the end the reality is that he is a far less dashing figure than he perceived himself to be when the adventure began four years earlier. While changed by his experiences in this sad chapter in American history, Murphy can be seen to be influenced to act morally by the positive echoes of American Transcendentalism that are quietly evident throughout the novel and which have trickled into mainstream Irish American thought over the previous century.

Murphy’s War examines the actions of many of the historic characters involved in this sad episode and praise and blame are apportioned. The casual racial and ethnic prejudices in wartime America are clearly shown, and, for the first time, the reader can see how this travesty came about and how a small group of mean spirited but adroit people acting under cover of national hysteria can precipitate reprehensible actions that would be otherwise unthinkable.

I hope the story sounds intriguing. It was fun to research and is an easy read.

I haven’t advertised anything on this site until today. But today’s the day!

Read Murphy’s War. You’ll be glad you did, so will Wild Bill.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

It's in the Genes

2006-11-16T08:47:00.000-08:00

This is a great day for Wild Bill and his 800 readers. It seems that scientists are close to unraveling the DNA code of the Neanderthals and soon will be able to prove (or not) that some humans are indeed descended from these prehistoric humanoids.

For years, friends (is that the correct term?) have been comparing my stands on many issues to these long gone beings. Thankfully, from now on my answer will be that I’m simply a creature of my genes.

On the other hand, I’ve tossed the term Neanderthal around as a pejorative at some of the obviously low life creatures who cannot grasp the wisdom of the postings on this site. And there are some – more than you pure Homo sapiens will ever know - who persist in attempting to bludgeon the obvious truths of these objective essays. Now I understand; they really are Neanderthals, and I forgive them with unconditional love.

We live in wonderful times.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Consistency is the Hobgoblin...

2006-11-14T17:56:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pondering the personal dilemma dropped on me by that eminent wag, Steve Brennan of Ohio: how could I ever support the Democratic nominee for the president in 2008 after beating to death the argument that divided government is vitally important to the nation?

When this ethereal rag began its assault on the Republicans, my former party, all three elective power points – the presidency and both houses of congress – were firmly in the hands of the G.O.P. It was my constant thesis that the executive was grabbing power – excessively and well beyond both the norm and the constitutional limits – from the legislative and judicial branches.

In my last posting, I made light of the problem of divided government but in retrospect it is clearly more than the joke I made of it even though I’m still smarting from the entry wound where the dull blade of failed consistency entered my thorax.

A better answer to the wise guy would have included the word `balance’ as a major element. As blogging is a relatively new enterprise and since I’ve been at it only for a couple of years, my library of postings – forever recorded on the left of this page – goes back only to August 2004, but my friends and I have been debating the issue of division of power since at least the 1974 the constitutional crisis created by the behavior of President Nixon and his operatives in the Watergate scandal. Of course, the question has been one open to consideration and complaint since George Washington rode home to Mount Vernon.

The issue of divided government came up in the seventies when Nixon, as in the present situation, was perceived to have his party members in the Republican controlled congress under his thumb. The abuses of that period were so serious and notorious that Republicans in the congress turned on Nixon – as did even judges who had been appointed by Republican presidents – leading of course to the resignation of the president and criminal conviction of many of his closest associates.

The issue of presidential power enhancement was front and center at that time and among my earliest postings (August 2004) were discussions of the roles of my friends and me in the efforts to better coordinate the delivery of grants to state and local governments. There was also a posting on the minor role I played in the aftermath of Mr. Nixon’s resignation.

The bottom line is that while guilty of overzealous preaching on the benefits of and the need for divided government, my pleadings for such division cannot be made in a vacuum. We voters must balance the obvious benefits of divided government with the nature of the times, the likely tendencies toward abuse of power by one branch over the others, as well as the weight of the merits of the programs and the perceived talent, and character of the candidates. Even while admitting bias toward divided government this should not bind us to voting for a party or candidates whom we believe to be inferior in talent, character, or objectives.

For four years, I’ve been appalled by the preventive Iraq War and all of the abuses of power from the executive. (Surely a recitation of my many laments on these matters is not required here.) I have condemned the president and all of his advisors for leading us into this catastrophic blunder and decried the performance of the Republican congress that enabled the fiasco by failing miserably in its constitutional oversight responsibility.

My small role (I am taking full credit for 0.000001 percent of the responsibility for the Democratic victory in last week’s election – especially in the Virginia senate race, and I have friends who deserve far more.) in kicking the bums out gave me great pleasure and a feeling of successful activism.

It is the duty of voters to elect those who they believe will best further the interests of the United States and its republican form of government. To find myself turning away from a qualified Democrat presidential nominee only because the congress is in the hands of Democrats would be worse than irresponsible; it would be foolish. In 2008, it would be silly for me to vote for a neoconservative who was an aggressive enabler of President Bush’s efforts to remake the Middle East in our own likeness.

It is the role of the government of the United States to preserve protect and defend the people, the interests and the territory of the U.S. from all enemies foreign and domestic. That includes the belief that the government should act in the enlightened self interest of the nation by entering into alliances for collective security.

I remain in the camp of foreign policy realists and believe that the Iraq War represents the worst side of our government. Our government is duty bound to represent the interests of our people and nation and not high sounding ideals that lead us into traps such as Iraq.

Obviously, much of the rhetoric that got us into this mess was simply baloney. The grave mistake of preemption was made for more realistic reasons than those expressed. Clearly, if it were for purely altruistic purposes, we would already be fighting in places like Darfur.

The present administration and its many enablers in Congress have not yet been punished sufficiently for leading us into this horrible situation and for diverting our attention away from those who attacked our homeland. Should one of these enablers be nominated, I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to vote for the Democratic nominee, the lesser problem – at this time – of division of government not withstanding. In fact, at this moment, my opening is that I’m going to have to be dissuaded from voting for the Democratic nominee.

So there, Ohio smart guy!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

I Have No Choice

2006-11-12T09:06:00.000-08:00

My dear departed mother always bragged about her grandchildren, so cute and so smart. Unfortunately, they believed the old girl and continue to rely on her assessments, never realizing that the she was just the first practitioner in the school of unwarranted self esteem and simply was the earliest of the modern grandmothers, now ubiquitous.

One of those beautiful children – now on the shady side of forty - has the audacity to demand top billing in this blog posting. Steve Brennan of Dublin, Ohio, informed me that it was his terribly sad duty to let me know that I, Wild Bill, will be unable to support the Democratic nominee for president in 2008. It broke the poor lad’s heart to advise me that my own logic and tens of thousands of my own words will make it impossible for me to share in the joy of Hillary, Al or whatever other champion the Democrats choose when the results of the election of 2008 are made known.

Steve, a solid supporter of conservative causes but a convert to Wild Bill’s impeccable logic that only divided government can save the republic, was near tears when pointing out that by my own reckoning that since both Houses of Congress are now solidly in the hands of Democrats, I have no choice but to support Bill Frist, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or whatever other defender of Intelligent Design is anointed by the GOP to extend its lease on the White House. The choking voice and the sad demeanor made it clear that he could feel my pain.

What’s a wild man to do when faced with mathematically certain logic that he must become a supporter of a Constitutional amendment to prevent flag burning or be charged with being as big a hypocrite as the brilliant lad’s own conservative champions?

I'll begin by explaining to the poor boy that until undivided control of government is a reality there is no mandate for the wild man to fight for division. Obviously, should Hillary, Al or another Democrat take the oath of office on January 20, 2009, at that very instant Wild Bill will begin his paroxysms in favor of divided government. Lincoln Chafee will be called from retirement to run for the Senate from Rhode Island; I’ll demand the retirement of Robert Byrd of West Virginia (provided the present governor is still in office); and the dynamic qualities of Dennis Hastert will be aired far and wide from this blog.

Ma was right, they are so very smart, and I have no choice but to be true to myself as pointed out so solicitously and tragically by my brilliant children.

Stay tuned!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

You Know What's Bothering Me?

2006-11-10T16:20:00.000-08:00

I’m having an Andy Rooney moment. You know what I hate: people who compare the occupation of Iraq with those of postwar Germany and Japan.

Smart people, including the incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the out going guy (what was his name?), and Shotgun Dick Cheney love pulling the wool over the eyes of yahoos like you and me. When we slobs complain that the Iraq War appears endless, they pat us on the head like the morons they think we are and say, “Sonny, it really hasn’t been that long. Why World War II’s been over for more than sixty years and we still have troops stationed in both countries. Case closed you bird brains. How stupid can you be? Leave the thinking to us smart guys you jack asses.”

Who the hell are you kidding, smart boys? We quit occupying Germany and Japan eons ago. Our troops were stationed in Germany to prevent the onslaught of Moscow Pact troops into Western Europe and in Japan to defend against China, the Soviet Union and North Korea.

If you readers of this electronic rag buy into that Germany and Japan line of malarkey from our smart folk betters, please go back to getting your views from the funny papers. These guys and gals in the Bush administration have been gulling us endlessly with this phony baloney.

An even bigger line of bull is that we’re occupying Iraq. We‘re occupying the Green Zone in Baghdad and other enclaves around the country that make up maybe one percent of the countryside; Iraq’s out of control and to really be an army of occupation they’d have send in tens of thousands of additional troops.

Our poor troopers are hanging on by their finger nails. Every time they leave the occupied zones they become targets for not only terrorists but insurgents of all stripes who want us out so they can get on with killing each other.

Let’s hope this Baker/Hamilton crowd can deliver a fig leaf to Dubya so he can get our poor lads and lassies to hell out of harm’s way before we destroy the army, marines national guard and the reserves. Otherwise we’ll be sending fresh targets for the militias for another five years.

On Tuesday, we the people sent a message that we want this fiasco ended. We’ve got two years of holding our collective breathe before we find out if these new pols and Democrat holdovers really got the word. If they've got wax buildup, we’re gonna have to saddle up again and drive them out, too.

Now that’s what’s bugging me an’ Andy.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Alert

2006-11-09T14:53:00.000-08:00

In the first chance at bi-partisan cooperation, President Bush threw sand in the faces of the Democrats by attempting to get John Bolton confirmed a U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Bolton has been serving as U.N. Ambassador under a recess appointment made after a Republican controlled Senate could not muster sufficient support for him. Bolton is one of the most contentious people in the administration, a person for whom even Republican senators have only lukewarm feelings.

Bolton is a neoconservative and was and remains a champion of the invasion of Iraq. He was accused of being a terrible manager who bullied and harassed his staff to the point of being a public spectacle. Mr. Bolton is a partisan Republican, and his nomination flies in the face of the president’s conciliatory words to the incoming leaders of both Democratically controlled chambers of congress.

This eleventh hour nomination which is likely to fail does not bode well for true cooperation between branches of government and makes the President’s opening to the incoming leaders appear false and hollow. Given the timing of the announcement – two days after the election and on the day of Mr. Bush’s lunch with incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi - this nomination looks like a gauntlet being thrown down before the Democrats by the President.

Clearly, this is a bad omen for the next two years. The President has not heard the voices of the people and that is extremely regrettable. The Republicans in the Senate better throw this nomination out the window.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Day After The Day After

2006-11-09T09:28:00.000-08:00

The sweetest day is the day after the day after the election – if you win. We know! There’s no doubt. We’re not tired. This morning, I wrapped the Washington Post election section about me and wallowed in its excesses. It felt good, really good.

Yesterday was the day for our leaders to make nice. Today, the sniggering about sending the losers to the basement of the Capitol to hold their unattended press conferences crept into winners’ thoughts; woe is them poor survivors. The perks of the majority will be ripped from their hands and, like precious jewels, fondled by the other side – our side, the winning side.

The finger pointing among the losers makes my heart dance. They all have their candidates for defenestration; unfortunately for all of them, it’s another part of the coalition and the blame circles the room like an endless NASCAR race and is terribly sad to watch. My crocodile tears runneth over.

One truly alarming note, they’re all blaming the others for incompetence rather than for the unsoundness of their policies, especially Iraq which did them in. They are blind to the reality of that war, unable to understand that it was the unprovoked attack based on ideas articulated by the neocons that brought them to this low state. Instead they blame Don Rumsfeld for their failure; Don as a perfect scapegoat – a mantle he well deserves - will only help for a few short weeks.

Soon the president and the Dems will have to get down to the business of closing down the calamity in Iraq in some reasonable and face saving way and time. My fear is that the Republicans, egged on by the neocons, will continue to believe that we can impose our national will whenever and wherever we like. If that’s the case, their sentence will be exile for life from Washington, with no possibility of parole.

But all of that’s in the future. My happy time extends at least through next Monday when a couple of my like minded buddies and I will bask again in the brilliant light of victory and toast Nancy, Harry and Jim and our great win one last time.

Imagine, this poor man’s Tom Paine is going to have to stop electronic pamphleteering and attempt to write objectively. Wow! I’ll think about that tomorrow.

But for now, what a day! What a country!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Tomorrow, it's just a day away

2006-11-06T11:23:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, tomorrow, it’s only a day away!

There’s no more time for convincing. It's time to act and only those who vote can have a say. If you don’t like the Iraq War, if you’re in favor of stem cell research, if you think Intelligent Design is a hoax, if you believe in equitable Social Security reform, vote for the Democrats tomorrow.

I must say that I’ve busted my gut to get to this day. I’ve made almost 300 postings on this blog, the vast majority building to tomorrow’s Election Day, and I’ve made more than a hundred cold calls for Jim Webb for U.S. Senate and for the three Democrat congressional candidates from Northern Virginia.

But I also admit that all this work was against the present incumbents rather than for a positive agenda to take the place of the failed programs I’ve fought so hard. My argument is that those in office must be held accountable for those things they instituted that voters believe to be wrong; I hope you join me in that belief.

I voted for George Bush in 2000 and I suppose for many of the other candidates that I’m working against now for enabling the president to carry out so many things I believe to be bad for the country. I thought that George Bush was exactly the right man to lead us in the aftermath of 9/11, and only when he diverted his attention from the War on Terror and took his eye off of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and turned our great power on Iraq instead of following through on those who’d attacked us did I change my mind.

The president screams for the Democrats to state their plan. Frankly, I don’t know if they have one. But I don’t think the president has a viable plan either, and I think that he and his Republican enablers must be driven from office. If the Democrat House and, hopefully, Democrat Senate do not act to rein in the president’s grab for power or if the Democrat presidential candidate cannot articulate a plan for getting us out of Iraq, I’ll be rethinking my position on them come 2008.

Until then, I want only to whip from the halls of Congress these incompetent fools who failed their Constitutional duty to oversee the Executive.

After a rest, I’ll be back in support of Democrats seeking to win the White House on ’08.

I’m tired of the work, but I done my damnedest and still have enough energy to get to the polls tomorrow.

It’s tomorrow, just a day away. Do it! VOTE!!!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Pelosi is Coming

2006-11-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

…
Listen my children and you shall hear,
Of the last minute ride of Bush in fear,

To every Bible Belt village and farm---
A cry of defiance with lots of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
“Pelosi is coming! Pelosi is coming!”

Thus was the last minute ride of Bush in fear.

Of course you knew that Wild Bill could never resist this opportunity, and he sends his apologies to Hank Longfellow.

Three days to go.

You heard the joke that Bush wants Rumsfeld to stay on for the remaining two years of his term? He said that whopper even as he was mixing the hemlock for Don’s lunch next Wednesday. Funny guy that George.

Vote! George is beating the bushes for Christians in fear of stem cells, Chuck Darwin, and same sex couples.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Five Days and Counting Down

2006-11-02T15:19:00.000-08:00

Just a handful of days remain until the counting commences. This is a fateful election. If both houses of Congress remain in Republican hands, the American people will have spoken; Attacking and occupying Iraq will have been judged the right things to do and to have been handled competently enough.

If there’s no change, Katrina will have been considered to have been handled properly. The President will have been given a green light to revisit his vision on Social Security reform. Stem cell research will not be approved during the next two years. And, according to the president, there’s no reason why Intelligent Design will not have equal access with evolution to the minds of America’s public school students.

If those of us who believe that America’s foreign policy needs a course correction and that the state of our standing in the eyes of the rest of the world is terrible do not prevail to the extent that at least one house is awarded to the Democrats then the present course will have been approved.

Your vote counts. Vote! Ask your neighbors and coworkers to vote. Ask your friends to go to the polls. If you live in a blue state, call a friend in a red state and ask them to vote. This is the most important by-year election since World War II.

Vote and work for change or accept the status quo.

Vote!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

They done him wrong

2006-10-30T11:05:00.000-08:00

It was the deep thinkers who did George in. Obviously, heavy ponderers have been telling men of action what’s wrong since the newcomers moved into the cave next door and ruined the neighborhood. Plato had a fascist solution and Marx a commie one. None of these catchall means to enlightenment and progress was too terrible until doers decided that the thinkers were right and moved to implement programs for mutual betterment.

Most utopian solutions aren’t very dangerous and go away without having harmed too many folks in the process. The small ones such as Brook Farm and the Amana Community just withered away, but occasionally, as in the case of the Bolsheviks, the efforts to save the rest of us from ourselves can get downright frightening and vast nations and their neighbors can be devastated in the name of good, or at least their version of it.

So it was with our friends the neoconservatives. Like Marx, the neocons read history carefully and, like Karl, saw an inevitability in their reading of the past that would lead to a new nirvana. Much like one of their heroes, Ronald Reagan, they saw before them a city on a hill and the certain spread of democracy, capitalism, and globalism to the unwashed of the world. But aside from flag waving and sloganeering, their view of history wasn’t very important and certainly not harmful until their man in the White House – George - had a real problem.

Obviously, September 11, 2001, was one of the defining days in our history. The attacks on New York and Washington and the downed plane in Pennsylvania galvanized the American people like nothing since Pearl Harbor. Retribution was demanded, and George Bush was open to suggestion on how to act decisively.

The first steps for the U.S. were very simple: follow the trail to those who had conspired with the perpetrators of the attack, kill or capture them, topple governments that were aiding and abetting those who had attacked us, and call upon all of our contacts in the world to otherwise undermine this group of killers. Virtually all Americans were on board with these and any other reasonable actions.

But there were men and women about with bigger and better ideas on how to deal with this world wide conspiracy of Islamic fundamentalist killers and at the same time advance the interests of the United States by spreading the neocon world view. While the military and security forces of America went about their tasks of justice and retribution, the neocons saw an opportunity to spread democracy and prosperity to the heart of Islam from whence the attacks had sprung.

This is not to say that the neocon view of history is invalid but just because they might have been right in their analysis that doesn’t mean that by applying outside pressure the tipping point could be achieved and the inevitable creation of free, independent, and prosperous nations across the great swath of Islam would be the fruits of America’s labor.

While I won’t argue that things don’t look good for capitalism and democracy, it’s my view that by buying into this neocon dream, George Bush created a hornets’ nest of problems for us. Instead of encouraging the acceleration of history with carrots, he was happy to apply the birch switch and therein lay his doom as a successful president.

From all that I have read and the little I’ve seen, Mr. Bush has a messianic personality and it took little prodding for him to buy into this solution to many of the problems he faced. In retrospect, the invasion of Iraq is seen clearly as a blunder without peer in American history, but the confluence of so many needs and opportunities for so many sectors of society was almost irresistible to a person of Bush’s type and tens of millions of his followers.

It’s Bush’s war and Bush’s blunder, but he was tempted by so many interests: military efficiency, energy independence, Middle East pressures, the pleas of Iraqi expatriates, the need for national vengeance, and many more. But he needed a rationale for the attack on Iraq that answered a higher calling, especially after the WMD and the Iraq/al Qaeda conspiracy fell through, and the neocons with their offer of a chance to tip history in favor of the president’s messianic view provided it.

So, while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will get the most of the ink when the histories of this failed presidency are written, the neocons will get very few column inches on their fateful role in this blunder. Too bad, they deserved far more.

One week to go. Turn out the enablers of this fiasco. Be sure to vote; the enablers will be out in force.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Words to Ponder

2006-10-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

There are just fourteen days, a fortnight, two weeks, until judgment day. I’ll be running silent for a few days as I’ll be spending time in the land of liberals, capital of the Left Coast, the stomping ground of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy - as el Rushbo names it – with a smile.

This morning a word association game popped into mind:

WORDS - REPUBLICANS - DEMOCRATS

Iraq - Progress - Disaster

Schiavo - Life - Exploitation

Stem cells - Living Beings - Cure

Congress - Values - Losers

Katrina - Tragic - Incompetent

Estate - Death Tax - Fair

Rumsfeld - Incompetent - Bingo

Leaks - Levees - Woodward

Gays - Bash - Tolerance

Flag - Protect - Huh?

WMD - Fear - Lies

Stay the course - Flexible - Flip Flop

Enough already. It looked a lot funnier when it was laid out in my mind, but when the rubber hit the road - words in the columns - I'd struck out. But you get the picture. It's something you might try at your next party.

Had enough? Vote Democrat!

Get your friends to the polls: fourteen; 14; fortnight; two weeks, right around the corner.

VOTE!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Social Security Redux

2006-10-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

The Bush administration has openly signaled that it intends to revisit Social Security when the new Congress convenes in January 2007; this is both welcome and frightening.

Given demographic trends, there can be no doubt that Social Security and Medicare are not completely sound for the long term. That the president is willing to tackle this thorny process again says something positive about his resiliency, if not his judgment.

Since the point at which benefits as defined in the Social Security program will be unable to be paid in full is a generation in the future, this is a difficult problem for sitting legislators to face. Sadly, the president’s rigidity in his unwillingness to consider options that much of the population favors makes negotiations between the parties extraordinarily difficult. For example, you may recall that during the last debate on the subject, Mr. Bush would not entertain any option involving greater contributions by the most affluent in the workforce.

Social Security shortfalls should be addressed as soon as possible since the costs of making the trust fund sound for still another generation only grow with each day the problem is put off. But it is clear that if there is going to be a reform package passed in the next two years, all options must be on the table and that both parties are going to have to put themselves on the line.

If the president is serious about this debate, he must have a Congress that represents a broader spectrum of the population. Entitlement reforms undertaken by the Republicans, the party that has wielded most power since the nineteen-seventies, have generally favored the affluent at the expense of the middle and lower economic classes. Mr. Bush’s proposals to reform Social Security last time around also favored higher income workers capable of making greater contributions to their individual SS accounts, this is another good reason to turn out the vote among lower and middle income segments of society and for electing Democrats.

There should be no doubt that the Republicans have a great capacity for turning out their base supporters. Sadly, many among that base will be voting against their own interests when they vote for the Social Security reform favored by the GOP.

It is absolutely essential that those with positive ideas on how Social Security should be reformed which are different from those of George W. Bush and his Wall Street cronies work hard to get out their voting block too. It is also essential to attempt to engage anyone in the Republican base damaged by the administration’s program for SS reform and to make an effort must to debate them on the points of their personal interests.

Had enough? Vote Democrat! Only two weeks to go: VOTE!

It’s definitely time for change!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

White House Beautification

2006-10-21T07:54:00.000-07:00

As you regulars know, Wild Bill is a resident of the Washington area so an occasional word or two about what’s happening in the capital should not be surprising.

I’m beginning to think that the Iraq War, tax cuts and budget deficits are having an effect on our fair city. In walking past the White House the other day, I noted a very unusual sight: maintenance of the beautiful and historic grounds just isn’t what it has been historically. Any of you who have been in the mansion and on the grounds knows that it has traditionally maintained to the highest possible standards.

As I strolled along the fence line of the gorgeous estate, I noted a hole that had been dug on the inside by an animal. Since it appeared freshly dug, I thought little of it and assumed that the damage would soon be repaired by the large crew always on duty. But as I continued along the perimeter, it became obvious that there was a significant infestation of the grounds by badgers or other digging animals, and I became truly concerned.

With less than half of the fence line walked, it was apparent that the holes and digging were happening at intervals of perhaps only ten feet. Some of the sites had been recently filled but it was obvious that there was a race on between the animals and the grounds crew. There could be no doubt; a creature was attempting to dig out and the crew was working overtime to repair the damage and prevent the escape.

I made up mind to write the White House Foundation and call for a stepped up program of eradication of the pest. But at almost that instance I came upon a docent just saying goodbye to her tour group as they looked upon the south front of the grounds. I stopped her and asked if she’d noted the damage to the grounds? “Oh, that’s just Barney trying to get out. He’s withdrawn his support for the president’s Iraq War and just wants out.”

I’m not going downtown again until after election; I’m afraid I’ll see a sign in the bedroom window indicating that Laura is looking beyond the fence.

If you come to Washington, please don’t be too critical of the level of care being given the White House. This will all be taken care of in the near future.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Saving Face

2006-10-20T17:05:00.000-07:00

As a youngster - long long ago - I learned that when China or Japan committed grave errors of policy requiring significant correction, they did everything in their power to save face while retreating from their errors. If one of these nations made a disastrous misstep and was forced to back down from the blunder before face could be saved, the Gods would be outraged. Neither of these great cultures and powers could be seen as having created a fiasco before they could withdraw from the field of diplomacy – or battle. There was no way that the error could be admitted; there had been no mistake; surely those observing the situation were wrong. My world history teachers snickered at this primitive requirement of the oriental mind. How backward could a mindset be?

Today, the great nation of the United States of America is caught in a trap of its own making. It attacked a smaller weaker nation for reasons that did not pan out. American citizens were told that that Iraq posed a mortal danger to them, that the national leader, Saddam Hussein, had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use it against our personnel or facilities or those of our allies in the region, or, just as importantly, he would sell or transfer these weapons to our deadly enemies, al Qaeda or its surrogates, with which he had been working against the U.S.

If anything, the war went far better than expected and the government of Iraq was overthrown within a few short weeks, but the basis for the invasion, WMD and conspiracy with al Qaeda, was never proved. Great shuffling of reasons was undertaken and it was determined that we hadn’t just attacked to disarm Iraq but, more importantly, we would deposit upon them an almost carbon copy of Western democracy which would deliver Iraq into the family of free and prosperous nations. This was good since the citizens had been suffering under the painful yoke of Saddam and his henchmen and they yearned to be free and were prepared to welcome our troops as liberators.

I won’t go on with this baloney. We’re occupiers; they hate us and, while terrified of the possibilities, want us gone. We’ve tried many different strategies to set up a democratic regime to deliver peace and prosperity to Iraq but no matter how hard we’ve worked it simply hasn’t happened as anticipated.

The vast majority of the American people have wised up; the Republican leadership which enabled this fiasco is rising from its slumber, and even George Bush is acknowledging that the adventure is not going as planned or as it was recast a dozen or more times. Our Iraq adventure is the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history.

The Republican majority has quietly determined that it no longer has confidence in the president of the United States and his administration. Signals are everywhere. U.S. Senator John Warner, Chair of the Armed Services Committee, returned from Iraq with a message that the situation was not going as advertised and quickly had to be changed. The U.S. Army flat out stated that its pacification program for Baghdad was not successful, even Virginia Senator George Allen, one of Bush’s great sycophants, admitted that a change of tactics was needed.

It’s a mess and a failure.

We’re now in a great waltz to the exit. But we just can’t admit we were wrong and get the hell out. If we did that, our great rivals, China, Russia and the European Union and our enemies in the Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea, might get the idea that we failed and were just rushing for the egress, weaklings dragging our tails. We couldn’t let that happen because we’d lose face.

But we have failed, and if you think that China, Russia, France, Germany, Iran and North Korea aren’t completely aware of our predicament, there’s a bridge over the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan in which you need shares. We’re in the process of changing our strategy at warp speed. There is a commission preparing options for the administration to disentangle us from this fiasco. But the report won’t be available until well after the elections that are coming up in less than three weeks. The bottom line – take it to the bank – we’re going to begin disengaging from Iraq in a New York minute starting in early 2007.

All of this commission b.s., all of this waltzing, all of the options will be designed to get the neoconservatives and evangelicals who encouraged these incompetent fools who got us into this quagmire to get through the election with some semblance of their dignity – and a minimum of lost seats in Congress.

Hundreds of additional soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis will die or be maimed so that we can get out in a face saving manner. More billions of dollars will be squandered and our military forces will be weakened so that a small coterie of fools and a large number of their enablers can save face. And our real war on terrorists will continue to be operated at half speed while it happens.

How quaint that these backward oriental civilizations that I studied as an adolescent had such profound influence on modern America. Whatever, we must endure what we must to get out of this mess. We’ve got to save face!

Vote Democrat! The Republicans in Congress have walked in lock step with these fools who have taken us down the awful path; they must be punished for their folly.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

State Of Denial

2006-10-16T06:02:00.000-07:00

State of Denial, Bob Woodward’s new best selling book, will be the fodder of historians for generations. This is not due to its examination of sources but because everybody who has had anything to do with Iraq needs a confessor and Bob’s the man. As the fullness of the folly becomes part of the consciousness of the vast majority of the citizenry, those with even tangential connection to the massive blunder feel the need to thumb through the rolodex to `W’ and explain how they were the only ones who saw the freight train bearing down and tried to warn the president not to gun it through the crossing.

Sadly, bad people stood in the way of all these good folks. Naturally, we all know by now that the Darth Vader of this unhappy galaxy is Don Rumsfeld, but there are lots of other incompetents who stepped forward to assist the great man in bringing ruin to the presidency. Dick Cheney – who delivered Darth in a basket to the back doorstep of the White House, Scooter Libby, Gerry Bremer, George Tenet, and Condoleezza Rice get key speaking roles on the dark side.

But there are good folks who did their damnedest, too; Jay Garner, Richard Armitage, Andy Card, NATO Military Commander James Jones and many others net out positively, but they didn’t stand a chance when matched with Dick and Darth.

On the balance point, the tragic figure of Colin Powell who saw the train but still helped gun the truck through the flashing lights shares that side of the stage with lesser performers like Steve Hadley.

This is a book that will have no legs, most of the names and whisperings will be forgotten in short order when this sad chapter of history ends leaving only George, the ever in the shadows Dick, and the ever hovering Darth to share space in the history books as the villains.

While we won’t be talking about State of Denial ten minutes after the polls close in November 2008, what a tasty read it is. I loved it. Woodward, as other reviewers have noted, pounds away with endless delicious details. His writing style is plain and he never loses control over the long complex narrative, and only because I’m old was I able to put it down to get my beauty rest.

As Woodward drops the whispered bonbons that prove that what the bad guys said in public was more the anxious wishes of a single man in deep denial and the lamentations of a Greek chorus of his lackeys trying to support him.

But this is journalism – what, where, when, how and why. Woodward does very little editorializing for a man with sufficient facts to make solid judgments. He leaves it to Arthur Schlesinger to condemn the president for leading the nation in a preventive war. And he lets the other characters do the opining. As late as this summer he catches the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace connecting the dots between 9/11 and our attack in Iraq.

Rumsfeld comes off as the arch villain. He emasculates the officer corps and hides behind his second to none debating style. The president and even Cheney come off as being unable to deal with the bureaucratic infighter nonpareil.

In the end, this is a sad book that does little other than to condemn the Bush administration for gross incompetence and not being square with America. It lets the president off by deflecting its laser onto Rumsfeld. To me this is a tragic error. The person responsible for this historic blunder is George W. Bush. In the book he comes across as uninquisitive and messianic as he does in most of the books pouring into the market. He operates on will power and it is not enough.

George Bush made the fatal error that sank his presidency when he took the advice of the head of his vice presidential search committee who could find no one better than himself to run with Bush. George Bush placed Dick Cheney on the ticket. Almost at that moment Bush came under the spell of a stronger intellect and personality. Cheney brought Rumsfeld along and the rest is tragic history.

Both opponents and supporters of Bush should read this book; there are cautions and opportunities for both. If the Democrats win the Congress next month and do not act responsibly, they may lose the prize on ’08.

Republicans can take heart from this mess and this book about it. Woodward can be read to see this not as a great policy blunder but rather a comedy of errors by the Keystone Kops. The kops will be gone on January 20, 2009, and with careful packaging, the GOP can claim to have done the right thing but with incompetent people. Both parties had better beware for the next two years and three weeks.

Read this book before it gets too old.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Mark Warner for President

2006-10-13T06:24:00.000-07:00

Draft Mark Warner! Yesterday former Virginia Governor Mark Warmer dropped out of the race to become the 2008 Democratic nominee for president. This cannot stand.

Warner’s reasons for ceasing to run like a madman were that the effort was too taxing on his family and that he wanted a real life. A real life – really?

It is very clear that this contemptible person is claiming normalcy as an excuse for his inability to maintain the heroic façade necessary to pose as General Washington in the Oval Office. Obviously, as George Bush would say, “This is unacceptable.”

Those of us who have long observed politics, especially at the presidential level, are used to candidates willing to push their mothers under the wheels of busses and to have their children deprived of drugs and teen sex just so they can puff up as their wives gaze adoringly on their magnificence.

Only two presidents in my lifetime had the audacity to claim authentic and normal personas, Harry Truman and Gerry Ford. Goodness gracious, neither of these men sought the White House. That makes Mark the first person in modern history to begin a run and to abort it because he’s too normal and wants to be a real person.

While I’ll support the Democrat nominee, no matter whom, in ’08, the very idea that a flesh and blood human being might have actually had an outside chance at the dubious honor is too much to fathom. Clearly, this glitch demonstrates just how dysfunctional the Democrats are.

Be that as it may, those of us who say we’re for normalcy and authenticity in our own lives – hypocritical as we may be in our humility – have no choice but to demand a Mark Warner for President Campaign, starting this minute.

I’m okay. Are you okay?

Whatever. Charge!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Strike Three

2006-10-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Three strikes and you’re out. Both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republicans for more than a decade. George Bush has been president for almost six years. Early in his tenure Mr. Bush identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the Axis of Evil. It has been more than five years since 9/11 and, sadly, his record in dealing with the Axis is abysmal.

Iraq’s government was toppled in 2003 and it was discovered that the stated reason for the U.S. attack could not be supported. There were no WMD and no connection could be made between Saddam’s government and al Qaeda. We are now going on four years of occupying the country and even the Republican Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, views the situation on the ground as dire and approaching civil war.

Iran is alleged to have supported Hezbollah in its attack on Israel and is perceived to have been the big winner in the Middle East situation. The Iranians are thumbing their noses at President Bush and our European allies as Tehran marches toward the development of what the U.S. alleges are nuclear weapons.

North Korea is reported to have set off a nuclear weapon test last night. This is stated by the president to be unacceptable to the U.S. He’s writing a strong letter to them telling them they can’t do this. Better post date it!

We have 140,000 troops bogged down in Iraq. The situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated over the past six months. We are 3,000 American deaths into these two conflicts with more than 20,000 wounded. We are spending $2 billion per week in these wars and have a long term obligation of $2 trillion as a result. Almost 50,000 innocent Iraqis are dead and countless thousands are homeless.

We now face a national referendum on Bush and the Republicans and their control of both the Executive and Legislative Branches of the federal government. The position of the Republicans is that they are the party of national security.

Have I missed something? Vote Democrat! They have to be able to do better than the sorry job the Republicans have done over these past six years.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

My Garden Jungle

2006-10-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

There’s a bright cardinal knocking on my window. I’m sitting less than three feet from him; still he bangs away. He’s been at this drumming for about a week now, and I’m both sick of his antics and intrigued by his persistence.

Thirty or more years ago, this fellow’s great grandfather used to tap away each day in similar fashion at another of my houses just up the road from here. I began to think that he was trying to call me, and I’d rush madly to our nearby feeder with a fresh supply of sunflower seeds. There seemed almost to be a direct correlation between the tapping and feeding, but I found out from fellow birders that he was simply challenging his image in the looking glass. No Pavlovian response here, at least by the bird. Brilliant Bill!

Last year we installed new windows in this house that are far more reflective than most, and now I have a daily show by this bird brain demonstrating to his image just who’s boss in this territory. At this moment he’s perched in a nandina bush about six inches from the glass. I rose from my chair and only when I got within a foot from the window did he sense my presence and hop to another nearby bush waiting for his buddy to appear again. Never have I been so close to a wild animal without startling it.

One winter – again about a generation ago – a mocking bird took up residence in a small pear tree on the sidewalk strip in front of my house. Emerging each morning to await my carpool, I would strike up a conversation with this very tough little fellow. We got so we’d shout back and forth from a distance of about five or six feet. This time I was even more certain that I’d struck up interspecies communication and only gave up on the idea when I saw that he was just defending the tiny fruit from other feathered friends and probably from humans fools like me walking too close by. Brilliant Bill!

On more than one occasion, flocks of starlings descended on the pear tree, but even fifty or more of these tough, aggressive and nasty little beasts had to back down in the face of the screaming and enraged little mocker. All of this took place in the winter, and as with those ancient events, I thought it strange that my new cardinal resident was becoming as aggressive as we head for the colder weather. Strictly counter intuitive as far as I was concerned, as I thought they’d defend territories only in breeding season, forgetting they have to eat. Brilliant Bill!

Last week, I opened the door to my patio and a middling sized Black Rat Snake exploded in panic. My trash barrel stands just to the left of the entrance, and I was startled by the gong as the poor beast banged its head in a panic on the empty plastic container drum. He froze and recovered to quickly coil for a strike as I emerged. Not to worry, he was a good four feet long and twice as thick as my thumb, so it had little to fear from me, the fraidie cat of the neighborhood. After a moment to collect wits and dignity, it slithered slowly away under my fence.

A couple of months ago, my wife took some great photos of a small garter snake trying make a living by moseying around the garden and sliding through some prostrate junipers that line the front of our largest bed. She’s petrified of snakes but was able to force herself to get very close and to compose some great shots.

Even tiny gardens are teeming with wildlife. Henry Thoreau would be pleased at our observations but perhaps not at my hasty conclusions.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Remove Denny Hastert

2006-10-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Hey! They’re politicians; what do you expect? Politicians at the highest levels – congress, president, governors, etc. – are the best in the business at what they do: compromise and pretend to lead. They’re our champions, so like football players and rock stars we turn them into celebrities. But their business isn’t catching passes from star quarterbacks or making them at our surrogates, it’s compromising on legislation, pretending to be outraged and waving the flag.

There are no compromises in zero sum games. The running back flies through the hole, runs for hundred yards every week and streaks into the end zone at least once per game: standing `O’ every time he comes out. The wide receiver loses a step or develops short arms and no longer makes the big plays. Boo! Gone!

The star, slim, sleek and sexy, sings directly to us: two albums, please. A little flab here, a tiny sag there: hey, who’s she kidding? Off to the trailer park with her butt. Get me a newbie.

But with big time pols there are two tracks: big enough – committee chair, and up or out – to the Senate, the State capital, and – ultimately – La Casa Blanca.

While that halfback’s scoring touchdowns or the rockette’s a rocking, we don’t care what they’re doing on the side. More than a few of us rather enjoy reading about their escapades, jetting to exotic getaways with glamorous consorts.

But pols are celebrities of a different sort. They’re us as we’d like to be – with nice suits and great hair – even if it's not their own. They’re us as our idealized notion of ourselves: Jimmy Stewart off to Washington. To be big time pols, they must play the role, and whenever they’re being observed – which is a lot of the time – they’ve got to be on stage and in costume. In effect, they’ve given up their humanity to succeed in their chosen field.

As you well know, everybody’s up in arms about the Mark Foley scandal. It seems that Foley was known to many on the Hill and in his home state of Florida to be gay. That was no big deal, but he also liked to over-communicate with under age Congressional Pages in a less than proper manner. It eventually caught up with him and he was gone within twenty-four hours.

The question is rightly turning out to be about the action of the Republican leaders rather than about the disgraced former congressman. It is very clear that more than a few very important House Republican leaders knew about the activities of Foley for a long time and did less than the American people expect in such cases.

In today’s Washington Post, Joe Califano describes how he – a Dem – and Rudy Giuliani – a Republican – were called upon by the late Speaker Tip O’Neill to investigate a not dissimilar page scandal a generation ago. Joe righteously calls on the Republicans of today to get with the program and out the damned spot as they did.

But it’s not as easy as it appears. Tip had it made. The Dems don’t and didn’t represent the goody goodies of the country who know how we should all behave and want it enforced by the government. Poor Denny Hastert and his minion represent God. While O’Neill and his sidekicks may well have been God fearing men, they really didn’t see that they were his representatives on the Hill, so they let the chips fall where they may and went on after the mess was cleaned up.

But the poor Republicans are doing God’s work. They don’t condone gay marriage, abortion, gay bishops, stem cell research, euthanasia, congressmen writing hot letters to kids and host of other issues entrusted to their care by the Christian right. Sure, it’s easy for the Dems to get past peccadilloes; everybody knows they’re human – sex fiends and wastrels all. They’re pigs; so what can you expect?

But despite the fact the Denny and his boys knew they had a problem with Foley, they had another even bigger tsunami bearing down on them, the fall election – which they knew was going to be close even without their bad boy perp. What were poor humans masquerading as heroes to God’s children to do? They had no damn clue, so they did nothing.

Now a humungous posse of God’s other representatives is out for the scalps of Hastert and everyone else who covered up this outrageous scandal. Never mind that the leaders of this pack are simply other humans with a long history of having similar outings from within their own group – Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Baker, and the fictional Elmer Gantry just to name a few.

I’ve got compromise. I want Denny out too. How about we just un-elect his hypocritical butt and those of the other poor slobs pretending to be what they ain’t? The fault of the Republicans in Congress lies in this scandal and a lot more. They’ve had too much power for far too long, and they’ve been corrupted by it.

Let’s get some people who know how to be corrupted without all this guilt. We don’t want people to check themselves into rehab when they’re caught; we want extensive medieval discussions hanging on the conjugation of the verb `to be.’ Then when they’re fully vested in their corruption, we’ll send them packing too.

Vote for Democrats; they’re not quite such hypocrites!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Don, We Hardly Knew Ya

2006-09-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

Even I’m beginning to feel sorry for Don Rumsfeld. It appears that every Republican politician in the country has always known that Don was the guy who screwed up Iraq. Little did I know when I was asking for his head on a platter some months ago that the insiders of the Bush administration were way ahead of me in calling for his scalp.

Andy Card - everybody’s nicest guy in Washington candidate after Don? Say it ain’t so, Andy? Laura Bush – who’d o’ thunk it? Condy Rice, Colin Powell, and Joe Lieberman – oops he’s a Dem, er independent – all of ‘em knew all along that Don would screw up anything he touched. Wow!

The Republican strategy is becoming very clear. Don’s the incompetent moron who screwed up Iraq. It was the right thing to do but we turned it over to Don. How could we have known he’d goof it? He had a nice record under Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 41, so you can’t blame the president for thinking he could do the job.

Mistakes were made – Don said the aluminum tubes were for centrifuges; al Qaeda and Saddam weren’t playing footsie – that was Don; the museum looting – Don; over de-Baathifying – again, Rummy; on and on Rumsfeld did it all. Now Bob Woodward says he’s really indecisive and makes sure that he leaves no finger prints on bad moves; the Republicans knew that all along. It’s even rumored that he ordered the firing on Fort Sumter.

But attacking Iraq was really the right thing to do if only Rumsfeld hadn’t been incompetent; just ask any Republican. It was the right policy but the wrong guy was in charge.

It looks like Don’s going to have to come up with health problems some time in mid-November. Sad, he still looks good for the old man who screwed up Iraq, Hewlett Packard, Sony batteries, the war on terror, and Hurricane Katrina.

So long, Don; even Wild Bill had no idea just how incompetent you were. And if Bill didn’t know, how can we hold George accountable? Impeach Wild Bill!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Standing in History's Dock

2006-09-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

The fat’s in the fire. Those of us opposed to the Iraq War, the newly passed bill on the treatment of enemy combatants or who took the side of Bill Clinton in his interview with FOX last week are naïve fools. Imagine if you will the horror that the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman has become the party of cut and run.

While it is true that FDR and HST stayed their courses, might it be prudent to remember that the Empire of Japan attacked the United States and that Germany declared war on us before we fired a shot at them? Would it also help to recall that North Korea invaded the South?

Dare we mention that the party of George W. Bush was doing its damnedest to stop FDR from preparing to assist England as Hitler moved to overrun the continent? Would not history support the notion that the Republicans in Congress did their very best to undermine Harry as he tried to stop the communist onslaught in Korea? You’re damned right!

Now the president has bullied his party and a few sheepish Democrats into supporting legislation that protects American agents who treated detainees worse than permitted by the Geneva Convention, permits the holding of enemy combatants without charge indefinitely and which would allow detainees to be subject to treatment unprecedented in American history, what's left to say?

The president called for the legislation on enemy combatants to show that we’re all in this together. Well we’re not. The vast majority of Democrats and a few Republicans would not sign on. While I’m far from a liberal, my civil libertarian instincts demand that I cite Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch who was quoted in today’s Washington Post with saying of President Bush, “He’s been accused of authorizing criminal torture in a way that has hurt America and could come back to haunt our troops. One of his purposes is to have Congress stand with him in the dock.” That has to be the most damning statement ever made about an American leader and those in Congress who supported the measure.

Back to Japan and Germany for a moment, Mr. Bush’s tortured logic on Iraq v. the charges he makes against those of the party of FDR and HST implies that Iraq is the equivalent of W.W. II for staying the course. What? We stayed the course against enemies the forties because they started it. While the facts now show that Iraq clearly never posed a threat to us or our allies and certainly didn’t start anything more than a series of tauntings – which is a foul in the National Football League but not in international relations.

Perhaps if I put it this way, when attacked by Japan and with Germany having declared war on us, we should have minimally held them off and put the brunt of our forces into attacking Spain and Portugal that did nothing to us but did in fact share ideology with Germany and were governed by fascist dictators. After toppling Salazar and Franco, we might have turned our attention to those who really had it in for us.

As I said in a recent blog, nobody’s afraid of the big bad wolf. He’s huffed and puffed and blown no one’s house down. But he’s covering his butt and dragging others in to share the blame. Those in Congress who stand with him on Iraq and on the treatment of detainees will have the rest of their lives to consider these stands.

Meanwhile those of us who aspire to be small time Tom Paine’s will just have to buck up and face the music - that is getting louder but not better.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Don't Be Distracted

2006-09-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

The main themes about Iraq are: the Democrats have no ideas and can only propose to cut and run; and the Republicans propose to stay the course, even if that means forever. Both parties flirt with some semblance of cut and run proposals after the Iraqi military and internal security forces are trained and ready to take over. And both are so desperate to get out of that terrible land that they’re ready to deem the Iraqis good to go in the very near future – like the day after the election.

The bottom line is that the parties are fully ready to cut and run with honor (whoa!) as quickly as possible. All they want in the interim is your vote to see who’s in charge.

Bush says we’re safer now than after 9/11. He’s right; we’ve got lots of new procedures, systems and people in place to watch over us. The Dems say we’re not as safe. They’re right; our misadventure in Iraq has spawned more terrorists than we’ve killed or captured and the Muslim world is filled with rage at our obvious efforts at hegemony.

For whom should we vote? The Democrats, of course. Either way after the election, the effort to extract our forces will look pretty much the same, but there has to be an accounting for the massive blunder that is Iraq.

Iraq is hamstringing our efforts against those who would destroy us. It is galvanizing our enemies. There was no good reason to attack Iraq. We have lost nearly 3,000 troops; we’re spending billions of dollars each week and will be obligated to pay about $2 trillion before we’re done with Baghdad. And more than 40,000 innocent Iraqis are dead.

I won’t bore you with domestic policies that are aimed against the vast majority of the people.

Those who made these horrible judgments and those in the Congress who voted to support them must be driven from office. Vote Democrat in ’06 and ’08.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Big Lie

2006-09-22T08:56:00.000-07:00

It was close; but for the lack of a few pieces of military hardware we would be under the thumbs of a neoconservative controlled government fully vested with the power to carry out mad hegemonic schemes of world domination. The other day, I heard one of el Rushbo’s callers explain how the Saddam government, recognizing its imminent defeat, had quickly gathered up all of its weapons of mass destruction, placed them on trucks and trundled them off to Syria. Aside from the difficulty of the trick, the desire to protect the weapons rather than use them on the invaders strained my credulity. Hey, but I’m just one listener. Rush’s millions of ditto heads probably ate it up.

It is amazing that after all is said and done on WMD and the connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government, about half the American people still believe that that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons at the ready and that one of his key aids was working hand in glove with one of the 9/11 plotters. Such is the power of lies.

While the president has been repeatedly forced to back down from claims of an Iraqi prewar arsenal of WMD and a conspiracy between agents of Saddam and Osama, none of this has stopped other members of the administration and, more importantly, its friends in the neocon community from continuing to pump that great lie.

The administration has been quick to complain when their actions have been equated with fascism, and I have more than once leaped to its defense in this regard. Yet they have recently taken to pointing out how those who find their actions to be in error are themselves quite like those who appeased the Nazis when they agreed to permit Germany to swallow its neighbors. Yet the opponents of Bush’s Iraq War are in no way looking to back away from confrontations with the terrorists from al Qaeda who attacked us and who are now in Iraq - because of us.

Bush and his supporters have also taken to likening the actions of the terrorists to those of fascists. While I have written that this comparison is not without merit, it should be noted that with certain major exceptions – such as Iran – these comments are directed at non-governmental entities such as al Qaeda. Clearly this charge is warranted but it as easily obtains to individuals and groups in many places, including the United States. The actions of home grown terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph and many of the militia groups that have waned in popularity since Oklahoma City and 9/11 could as correctly be charged with being fascists.

But one thing is abundantly clear about this administration, it has adopted one of the most important elements of Joseph Geobbels propaganda machine, that of the big lie. Tell the whopper over and over shamelessly. Even if the president can no longer tell it, the underlings – including the vice president - can continue to say that the last word is not in on WMD, and of course Saddam was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program, the proof being the aluminum tubes deemed by agencies of the United States government to be unsuitable for use as centrifuges to enrich weapons strength uranium. The administration knew that but it chose to push the whopper. It’s a lie; but it whispered daily as part of the big lie.

The lie even if suppressed at one point pops up elsewhere. Saddam was a menace and the only course to protect the American people was to attack Iraq and depose the government. Even if Saddam had no WMD, he was a menace to civilization. Just what the hell does that mean? Iraq had no WMD and unless name calling and idle threats were as powerful as nuclear weapons, he posed no threat beyond his borders. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me. Saddam could do little but shout into the wind that he was going to kick Israel’s ass.

Yet, I believed my government and had little doubt that Iraq had at least some semblance of a WMD arsenal – but not nuclear. Our government pounded that line unendingly, and I doubted not for a minute that when the dust settled on Baghdad proof positive would be available for all to see. Yet I never thought that Saddam’s supposed arsenal would be a true threat against our troops. Chemical and biological weapons are extremely limited in usefulness (the Kaiser found that gas blows back on the shooter and others have seen that germs have a way of working against the using nation) against a real modern military force, and Saddam would soon be facing the world’s best.

My complaints were and remain twofold. While I had no doubt that our troops would easily destroy and overthrow the regime, the attack would be against a sovereign nation that despite having WMD really posed no threat to the U.S. or its allies and, second, the prospect of occupying a nation divided by tribalism, ethnicity, and religion as is Iraq would be far more daunting – it would be better described as almost impossible - to subdue despite assurance from Iraqi expatriates and Dick Cheney that our troops would be welcomed with open arms as liberators.

The war opened with `shock and awe’ and ended in just weeks when the president announced victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. The mission had been accomplished and the threat to America and its allies removed. The only thing remaining was to gather the WMD and put them on display for the world to see. A dozen canisters of gas and a couple of mobile labs for biological experiments would do even for me.

But something happened on the way toward pacification of the Iraqi nation. Nobody could find those canisters. Iraq wasn’t really a threat after all.

Not to worry; the big lie would cover their butts. Saddam was menace and even without WMD it was a good thing to remove him. Why? He had the capacity to talk big and scare George Bush. So each day the noses of the president, Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, and the host of neocon policy makers and claquers grow longer. And still almost half of all Americans believe the whopper.

“For want of nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse, the rider was lost.” Poor Richard’s Almanac

“A horse! A horse! my kingdom for a horse! Wm. Shakespeare

For want of a canister; the excuse was lost; for want of an excuse; the truth was lost; for want of the truth; the presidency was lost.

My presidency for a can of gas! Wild Bill

George Orwell and Joseph Geobbels would have little trouble understanding the techniques being used by this government.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Be Sure to Vote

2006-09-19T06:50:00.000-07:00

It was my goal to work like a madman through the congressional elections in November to push the message that President Bush has made a strategic blunder of unprecedented proportions by attacking Iraq in the guise of furthering our struggle with terrorism. In my view, he and his administration have undermined much of what America stands for and they and those in Congress who support them must be rejected at the polls.

For more than two years, beginning as a member of a relatively small minority, I worked tirelessly to produce postings designed to divide the government; to me the single most important means of assuring our personal liberties and sane public policies. I made almost three hundred postings, most in this vein, and it was my goal to continue this work until the election when I was going to retire from the fight, exhausted.

Fortunately for me and my readers, I do not have to continue the mad pace of a blog posting almost every day. The mainstream media and tens of thousands of bloggers have picked up the gauntlet and the airwaves, blogosphere, and the print media are filled almost to overflowing with pieces that bear uncanny resemblance to what I’ve been publishing for these many months.

This administration, contrary to all its predecessors, has encouraged fear in the hearts of Americans. Instead of leading the nation and asking for sacrifice, the president has called for the people to delegate their rights to the central government and to leave the governing and protecting to George.

Now even many Republicans (of which I was one until the build up to attack Iraq) are picking up their cudgels and joining the millions in pounding on the administration for its excesses. So, unless I think of something that is fresh and creative to say about my world, I’m going to kick back and watch the electorate correct the course of the ship of state.

BE SURE TO VOTE!!! You can make a difference.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

There's Good News and Bad News

2006-09-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

There’s bad news for the White House.

The administration and its right wing supporters had to go all out in supporting Lincoln Chaffee for U. S. Senate in the Rhode Island Republican primary. They won and they’re gagging.

They also have to support the Independent candidacy of Joe Lieberman for Senate in the general election. I don’t think he’ll win. They’ll be sick but relieved.

I heard el Rushbo describe both men as nowhere near to being moderates but rather dyed in the wool LIBERALS. The president’s right flank never eases up on him.

As soon as the president opens his mouth, the Democrats lambaste him. Nobody’s afraid of the big bad wolf any longer. Tying Iraq to the war on terror is now a non-starter among the two thirds of the population that sees through the baloney.

The troops and junior officers on the ground know that Iraq and Afghanistan are not going according to plan. They no longer believe their promotion seeking generals who see progress everywhere.

Two thirds of the electorate believes that the president was playing politics by mouthing his stay the course mantra on the fifth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11.

There’s good news for the White House.

One third of the voters still believe in George Bush, the Republican led Congress, the Tooth Fairy and in connecting Iraq to al Qaeda.

While the president cannot leave his bubble, he can work out and rest to his heart’s content. He’ll be in perfect physical condition to clear brush in Crawford come January 20, 2009.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

We are Safer than Prior to 9/11

2006-09-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

Are we safer than we were after 9/11? Yes, much. The administration and the Congress have worked feverishly and spent huge amounts of money to make it so. The FBI and CIA coordinate far better than they did prior to the attacks, and the same obtains with all other intelligence and security agencies at all levels of government. The bureaucrats who work in these fields should be proud of their efforts. To reiterate, we are much safer from terrorist attack now than we were before 9/11.

The Bush administration has clearly taken national security very seriously and has done all that we could expect them to do. I won’t go into complaints about the administration carrying surveillance too far. The question is have they done all that could reasonably be expected and their intent is clearly our safety and security?

Are we safe? Hell no! We’ll never be completely safe from terror, foreign or domestic. There is always the possibility that another attack could succeed. My friend and golf partner, Dick O’Brien, nailed it with, “If we can’t stop all armed robbery and murder in Washington, how can we be expected to stop all terrorist activities.” It’s obvious that attacks such as that by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City and the 9/11 attack are far less likely based on far better intelligence, police, and regulatory changes. But clever madmen and determined terrorists are out there constantly plotting, so we can only work hard and smart and apply all reasonable resources to the job.

Are Bush and the Republicans better than Democrats at making us secure? That friends is a loaded question and, in my opinion, the answer is, “Hell no!” The nation is fully awake to the danger from both foreign and domestic terrorism. While the Republicans are beating up on the Democrats for being weak, there is no truth in the assertion whatsoever. You think the Gore administration would be one degree different in its response to the attacks? Of course not.

One thing Gore wouldn’t have done, however, was to attack Iraq and divert resources away from chasing down Osama. The record is clear; Al Gore spoke forcefully against invading Iraq as the run up to war became obvious. I won’t grant the administration’s constant mantra that we are better off as a result of regime change in Iraq. I think we’ve radicalized far more Islamic terrorists than we’ve killed or captured.

Iraq has ruined the presidency of George Bush and it has made it essential that we punish the Republicans for this gross blunder. The mitigation created by their feverish efforts to increase national security not withstanding, they must be turned out in November. While the homeland is almost certainly more secure than it was five years ago, our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and our interests and those of our allies all over the world are in greater danger than they should be because of the blunder in Iraq.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Two plus two makes five

2006-09-10T08:42:00.000-07:00

Everywhere the media, Democrats and even a significant number of Republicans are challenging the latest administration onslaught against opponents of the Iraq War. The president and his gang characterize those who disagree with them as weak, appeasers, unpatriotic, stupid and worse. Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Democrats and media questioners of the war have been beaten into reluctant retreat and submission, but this time it’s not working. Why?

There are dozens of theories but I’ll share mine - which is not unique. Simply stated, the president’s arguments on Iraq simply don’t make sense and more and more voters can no longer be swayed by Bush’s demands that he be trusted with the nation’s future. Beyond no WMD, no al Qaeda/Saddam connection, we’ll be welcomed with open arms, democracy can be imposed by us, and all of the June is busting out all over rhetoric about how good things really are in Baghdad, I won’t bore you with all of the propaganda that has proven to be false or far less than accurate.

The limp strand of spaghetti the president is currently pushing up the long steep hill boils down to: Iraq is the central stage for the world’s war on terror and we must stay the course. The course to be stayed is that we will stand down in Iraq as soon as the security forces of the Iraqi government are ready to take over.

The president proclaims that Iraqis must take over their own national security before the U.S. and its coalition allies can draw down their forces. That sounds impressive until an examination of what that simple declaration means is undertaken. The undeniable logic of Mr. Bush’s policy is that Iraq is now (sure mistakes were made but regardless of how it came about) the center of the civilized world’s battle against Islamic Fascism. Further, as soon as the less than stalwart forces of the horribly divided society and government of Iraq has enough physical clout at its disposal to stop the sectarian violence and turn its attention to the al Qaeda terrorists operating in the country, we’ll stand down.

The stated policy position of the president is that when the wobbly government in Baghdad is ready to face down Sunni and Shiite insurgents, the U.S. will stand down in the central battle ground in the war against terror and delegate the outcome of the central battle to save the United States and all civilization to the rag tag security forces that the weak Iraqi government and we are cobbling together in Baghdad. As soon as the Mahdi Army is nationalized, the world will be safe from international terrorism.

This is the logic that no longer moves America. Where’s the beef?

Had enough? Vote Democrat!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Fire Rumsfeld

2006-08-30T16:01:00.000-07:00

The spouse and I are off to Ohio to spend time with loved ones from the heartland. We have family - a son, daughter-in-law, two grandsons and a granddaughter – and long time friends in the Columbus area, and we enjoy interacting with all of them in an effort to interpret life from the point of view of good folks outside the Beltway.

But before I go, I have to fire a couple of shots at celebrities: Don Rumsfeld and Rush Limbaugh.

I’ll begin with everybody’s pal, el Rushbo. Today, from the EIB - Excellence in Broadcasting - Headquarters, in Downtown Manhattan where he had set up to deliver his daily diatribe in the far north safety from Hurricane Ernesto that was threatening to pummel the EIB center in Miami, the Great One railed against the drive by media and the National Hurricane Center in Miami for outlandish alarmism. His attacks were unending on the fools in the media and the bureaucrats in the Weather Service for creating panic among the chickenhearted Floridians when the object of their affection was nothing more than “a rainstorm.” Can you believe it? Ernesto is nothing but rain?

To the bureaucrats and the drive byes, every piddling storm becomes a potential Katrina and the media spreads Chicken Little type fear and panic everywhere. Ernesto is nothing – not even a tropical storm, yet the drive byes and its information source, the hurricane experts of the (even the word is difficult for him to say without breaking into a sweat) government. These people have created panic causing all the fearful Florida folk to run whenever the word `h-------‘ is uttered. Can you believe it? Every girly man in Miami ran from nothing but a spot of rain.

Oh, I forgot to listen to his explanation of how he – the Great One – happened to be scared all the way to New York City by a shower. It must be disgust at the sight of bureaucrats and reporters fanning the flames of fear among the chicken hearted in Florida.

On to Don Rumsfeld! Don’s firing away with the Islamic Fascist jargon that’s catching on with the neocons and the other elements of the hard right as we approach the election. As I indicated in a posting some days ago, the label is not without some merit, and I applaud the guy or gal who thought it up. If there’s any word that’ll scare the hell out of everyone it’s `fascist’. Having found a great pre-election buzzword that will panic everyone in the Republican base, the neocons are compounding the fears of their army by charging that anyone for withdrawing from Iraq is `appeasing’ these fascists. How’s that for doubling down on your bets?

The neocons – and now Rummy – are saying that anyone not willing to stay the course in Iraq is ignorant of history and that they’ve forgotten the last time the Fascists were appeased. Great linkage, eh? For those few of you who don’t know, those are code words for letting Hitler have the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia without a fight in hopes that he wouldn’t ask for more. As all those, according to Don, who don’t know what happened then: World War II broke out then and there as a result of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Fuehrer.

I’ve never thought Rummy was likeable – I’m sure he doesn’t care in the least - nor do I think he’s above twisting words; he’s an expert at it, but I never thought he’d twist them to the point that he’d look like a fool. But in intimating that those opposed to staying the course in Iraq are appeasing somebody – whom or what I don’t know and can’t imagine – he’s shown that himself to be both a fool and a charlatan.

To appease is to pacify by buying off parties to a disagreement. The American public is not for appeasing anyone. The people recognize that a huge blunder was made by our leaders when they attacked Iraq under false conditions. There were no weapons of mass destruction threatening us or our allies in the region, and there was never any cooperation between Saddam’s government and al Qaeda in world terror. The war was an act of hubris by George Bush and his advisors, and they are twisting in the wind unable to get away from it.

More than twenty-six hundred American servicemen and women have died over a false premise. Twenty thousand troops have been wounded; among these, a huge number has been horribly maimed. $300 billion has been wasted and the long term outlook is for a total approaching $2 trillion of our national treasure. More than 40,000 Iraqis have been killed and tens of thousands more are homeless.

Question for George Bush and Don Rumsfeld – just who are we appeasing? NO ONE, that’s who. Fire Don now! This is the worst blow of the war so far. The presidency is failed and they want us to stay the course. Give me a break!

Had enough? Vote Democrat!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

P.S. I’ll be back on duty on Thursday next.

I'm a Divider Now

2006-08-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

It’s time for a change! I don’t mean George Bush and the Republicans in Congress; well not just them. I mean it’s time to marginalize the neoconservatives and the hard Republican right wing. There is no doubt that America is a conservative country, and I place myself to the right of center, a moderate conservative if you will. As I’ve admitted before, I voted for George Bush in his race against Al Gore; I was for a moderate intent on being a uniter not a divider. Got it; yeah, right.

Recently, I asked friends to suggest reading material for me and Allan Patterson of Washington State responded with a recommendation for Barbara W. Tuchman’s The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. I read the book for altogether different reasons than the purpose of this posting. I had read her earlier work and was particularly impressed with her book about Vinegar Joe Stilwell, Stilwell and the American Experience in China.

But in The March of Folly I was unable to avoid reading Tuchman’s analysis of our Vietnam experience without reflecting on today’s crisis. It has never been my objective to compare what I consider the great blunder of Iraq with our earlier catastrophe in Vietnam. But I must say that while there are many more differences between the two follies than similarities, the old canard usually attributed to Mark Twain (who said everything Oscar Wilde and Yogi Berra didn’t) that `History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes,’ popped into mind - many times.

Since almost three and half years have passed since on May 2, 2003 President Bush landed on the desk of the USS Abraham Lincoln and under the banner `Mission Accomplished’ announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, I intend to begin blogging in earnest on the similarities between the two calamities in the not too distant future.

But something even deeper struck me in Tuchman’s writing: the depth and virulence of the right wing reaction to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and his leadership in WW II. It is Tuchman’s view that the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the extreme right wing of the Republican Party as we’ve known it since WW II arose in Reaction to FDR. She does not dwell on this analysis, but I believe it is an accurate portrait.

Her principal early point on Vietnam is that John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, set what became the inevitable course for the nation in the conflict. This course was channeled so narrowly that no administration that followed was able to change the direction until the nation was completely humiliated. The domino theory was established by Dulles and stated by Eisenhower, and no amount of rationality was adequate to turn the ship of state sufficiently to prevent failure.

The Democrats, especially President Lyndon Johnson and the large majority in both Houses of Congress, are most responsible for the historic damage done to America in Vietnam. But it was their fear of the right wing reaction if they had not continued the madness that ultimately ruined Johnson and did much damage to Richard Nixon (who was able to find his own way to self destruction.) Despite the fact that our failure to achieve our aims in Vietnam never led to our loss of super power status as was the trumpet call of the right, no administration could get out of the war without be tarred as being weak and cowardly in the face of world wide communism. The Vietnam War was never in the vital interests of the United States. We could not prevail at any reasonable price, and the black wall near the Lincoln Memorial is the primary reminder of our folly.

Now we’re engaged in another war in which the words of the consequences of failure rhyme almost perfectly. Even George Bush has been forced finally to acknowledge that there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11, yet somehow we must persist. Why? Because if we don’t the hard right will punish all connected with appeasement.

What appeasement? According to our generals, there are fewer than a thousand al Qaeda agents in Iraq. The rest of the killing is being accomplished by sectarian warriors really not intent on doing 9/11 type damage to the U.S. They just want us out of their country so they can have it out. Meanwhile, we’ve lost our focus on the world terrorist organizations that do want to kill our citizens, wreck our infrastructure, and destroy us as a world power. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, among others, are well beneath our radar screen as we waste time, lives and resources on a conflict which we started for no valid reason and that we can terminate in a reasonable time period, although not without impact on those we tried to help.

It’s time we turned our attention to these neoconservatives and evangelicals who bludgeon our politicians. We must challenge them, not from the positions of the supporters of the likes of Cindy Sheehan and other `crazy leftists’ such as Michael Moore but from the perspective of cloth coat Republicans and independents. These neocons and hard right Christians are the ones who must be beaten back. Republican administrations have been unable to stand up to them, and certainly the Democrats who are tarred daily by the talk show handlers who sic their baying hounds on the cowardly `liberals’ must know that the middle is standing with those demanding reason in the war on terror.

We must have divided government and backbone implants for our politicians. Vote Democrat – this time.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Divided Government Forever

2006-08-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

In his wonderful book, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, Andrew Bacevich shows that the making of American Defense policy has been snatched from professional military officers (and even their civilian leadership) and gathered into the clutches of high priests of policy from a small number of elite institutions such as the Rand Corporation, The American Enterprise Institute, The Brookings Institution, and a very small number of elite universities. In reading the book and observing what has happened during the presidential administrations since WW II, I am convinced that Bacevich has it right.

Administrations change and one set of military intellectuals takes over as those formerly in power scramble for fellowships and tenured vacancies in Cambridge, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Palo Alto. With the appointment of Robert S. McNamara to the head of DOD a new trend line was established; no longer could old time amateurs line up for appointments at the Pentagon. The days were over for the likes of Charlie Wilson of, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” fame, and the beginnings of Bacevich’s priesthood can be seen – with discursions for highly qualified old bulls from Congress such as Melvin Laird and Les Aspin.

More than that, however, prior to the Cold War, creating foreign policy was the responsibility of the U.S. Department of State. The Foreign Service – the professional corps of the department - was the principal source of intelligence and American policy direction. When times were good, the secretary - usually highly qualified semi-pros such as Dean Acheson or Christian Herter - was the key figure in establishing policy. Under darkening war clouds and strong presidents, the White House became the center of our relations with other powers with the diminished secretary acting as a coordinator.

But as the Cold War heated, information and communication technology was revolutionized, and the priesthood sponsored by the military industrial complex became ascendant. During the period roughly encompassing the presidencies from Kennedy through Reagan, the making of foreign policy shifted inexorably from the Foggy Bottom to the Pentagon. Again, the intellectual horsepower of the presidents and luminary Secretaries of State such as Henry Kissinger clouded the situation, and it is only in retrospect that the diminution of the professionals at the State Department becomes obvious despite having more titled Career Ambassadors than ever walking around Virginia Avenue. More and more those in the front office of the State Department were able to deal directly with foreign leaders without the need for information historically supplied by professionals.

Some time between WW II and the middle of the Cold War, professional diplomatic stars such as Robert Murphy, and George Kennan passed from the service - never to be replaced at the professional level - and were supplanted by the nearly invisible thinkers from the institutions shown above. All the while, the information provided by the CIA, DIA, NSA and elsewhere in the now vast federal system flowed away from Foreign Service and military professionals – also despite more generals and admirals than ever - to the front offices of Defense and State and to the White House with it’s souped up national security staff.

As with the downward slide of Foreign Service luminaries, generals and admirals declined in visibility. During and after WWII generals with brains could have panache as well. Four stars such as Maxwell Taylor and even three star Jim Gavin were celebrities. No more; generals and top Foreign Service officers recite the news according to text supplied in Washington when they get on TV and editorialize at their peril.

But if the executive has been captured by representatives of the military industrial complex, Congress has suffered even greater decline. In Iraq, it took strong – and secure – senators and representatives to stand against information that in retrospect was highly flawed but which was pushed by the full weight of the executive and its external claque.

In reviewing our time in Vietnam, it is interesting to read the history of that war’s near declaration, The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and see a document at least as badly flawed as the document that sent our troops into Iraq. It is also educational to see how the Congress, then Democrat led, was no match for the White House in that tragedy as well. And look where that led us to as a nation.

Now we are spectators as right wingers scare the hell out of us with regard to the failure of the bureaucrats – military and civilians – to do their jobs in getting the dangers posed by Iran to the hands of policy makers so that they can defend the American people.

There is only one answer as far as the neocon priests presently in charge: apply American power.

If our representatives on Capitol Hill can’t or won’t provide oversight in the process of life and death for the nation, the future is bleak indeed. A Congress that is unable to do anything but rubber stamp what the president says is no legislature at all, and the Constitution itself is badly wounded. Unified government during Vietnam and now in Iraq failed the country. The Democrats failed us in the sixties and the Republicans are leading us to ruin now. Divided government is a must if we are to remain a free republic.

It’s time for a change! Vote Democrat in November.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Saddam Hussein is a Bad Man

2006-08-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

This posting is for your grandchildren - and you if you'd like it clear and simple.

You’ll note that my title is not qualified. I didn’t say Saddam is alleged to be a bad man; I didn’t say some people think Saddam is a bad fellow. I said he was a bad guy. So sue me, Saddam; you’re a bad guy. I’m a straight shooter compared to Don Rumsfeld; he says and knows that Saddam’s a bad actor, but he used to make kissy face with him back when we liked him, a flip flop if there ever was one.

George Bush and Joe Lieberman keep saying that Saddam is a bad guy and toppling him from power was a good thing. Let me be very clear; I agree with George Bush and Joe Lieberman that Saddam is bad and toppling him was a good thing. Regrettably, I don’t agree with them that the United States was the power that should have removed him from power. Had the Shiites revolted and toppled him, I’d be cheering the end of a bad guy. Had the Kurds turned him out, I’m on the cheer leading team. Had his sons overthrown him; whoa, they were even worse.

Kim Jong Il is a bad man and I hope he gets toppled. Yeah, you can sue me too Kimmy. More than a few of the Iranians are bad dudes and should bite the dust. And there are some African dudes who need changes of venue. But unless they pose a threat to us or our allies, sending troops in to fight and die shouldn’t be done. By the way, Iran and North Korea are very close to posing direct threats to us and our friends; when are they going down? Screwed up in Iraq and can’t muster the support for what’s really needed boys?

George and Joe begin all of their speeches with the canard, S. bad/ toppling S good. I’ll grant both parts of that premise all day long and twice on Sunday. But I can’t grant the next assumption in their argument: we were the ones to do it. Bottom line: the Iraq War was an illegal preventive war based on cooked intelligence that Saddam posed a danger to the United States. He didn’t. George knew it. He goes back Crawford in disgrace, a failed president.

Joe may not have known that Saddam didn’t pose a threat to the U.S., so pushing for the attack by Lieberman – and lots of other Senators and Representatives – can be forgiven. But Joe persists in saying Saddam was bad and should have been deposed by us. Wrong, Joe, wrong! Bottom line: Joe’s wrong to continue to insist that the U.S. should have attacked Iraq; Connecticut Democrats were right to dump him.

Joe’s running as an Independent. Wrong, Joe, wrong! Joe’s still defending the Iraq War as needed. Saddam did not pose a threat to the U.S. There were no WMD. There was no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. America goes to war when it or its treaty allies are in mortal danger.

In Iraq, nearly three thousand Americans have died, twenty thousand Purple Hearts have been awarded. $300 billion has been spent, $2 trillion is the likely total bill, tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, and hundreds of thousands are homeless because of that terrible decision. Those responsible must be held accountable. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and a number of others knew the truth. Their decision to attack Iraq has diminished our ability to fight terror. They should all resign. They won’t!

Joe Lieberman didn’t know Saddam was all baloney in February 2003. Nothing wrong, Joe; say it was a mistake and get reelected. Persist in saying we were right to attack Iraq and get trounced in the primary. Run as an Independent and say you were right some more and get whipped in the general election.

Both George and Joe say we just can’t walk away from Iraq. I’m not saying they are wrong. But they were wrong for going in and continue to be wrong when they say we were right to attack Iraq. George and Joe were wrong. Send them a message. Vote against all those who continue support the war in Iraq as the right thing.

This war is the worst blunder in American foreign policy history. If your representative persists in saying we were right to topple Saddam, throw the bum out! Get some oversight in Iraq, the war on terror, and homeland security. Those in charge have made huge errors and continue to compound them every day.

Had enough? Vote Democrat!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Gray Clouds Above

2006-08-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

George Bush is a lightweight! Wild Bill’s not saying that; George Will, Joe Scarborough, and a host of other conservative pundits are chucking the poor lad overboard even before half his second term is up. These right wing mavens are flat out saying that he’s simply not up to the job and can’t compare intellectually with his predecessors of living memory. Quack, Quack!

It takes a strong constitution to stand in the face of a hurricane and spit into the raging wind that Iraq’s not in a civil war. George plants his feet and lets go but you might wish to re-read the paragraph above to see why he’s getting the blowback. The Washington Post Outlook Section in today’s paper pulls no punches; Iraq’s factions are in a deadly struggle that we have little power to stop. Even the neocons are beginning to admit it; as if we didn't know. Is it time for an exit strategy from the right?

The old bull elephant is badly hurt and the hyenas of his own party have him surrounded and are tearing the flesh away pound by pound. Do you suppose he wishes he’d been on the wrong end of that Supreme Court decision in 2000?

Joe Lieberman has a big lead in the Connecticut senatorial race. The Republicans are dropping their own candidate and backing Joe. Initially, it looks like a cake walk for him, but I think Lamont will win going away. Those Democrats who stuck with Joe in the primary – mostly reluctantly – will drop him like a hot spud, and the independents and moderate Republicans who don’t like what they see in Iraq will drift toward Lamont or stay home. Joe’s icing a very stale cake, but there’s still time for him to come to his senses.

George Allen also had a bad week. He may (may) still win his senate seat in November, but he’s going straight to jail without passing go as a candidate to succeed his buddy, George Bush in 2008. He joins Mel Gibson in the wishes he hadn’t said that department.

A genius in another arena has feet of clay that seems to be metastasizing up his spinal column. Boston Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein, the boy wonder who brought Bean Town its first World series Championship in eighty-four years, watched forlornly as the Sox caved three times (so far) before the mighty New Yorkers right in Friendly Fenway. The Knights of the Keyboard dropped their adoring façade and gave Theo a resounding Bronx cheer. He had walked away from Boston early in the year but was lured back. Sorry about that, Theo.

And you think you’ve got it rough.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Islama-fascism

2006-08-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

The Republicans have coined a new term in connection with the war on terror that is at once clever, compelling, and incorrect. They are now calling every anti-government movement in Muslim lands `Islama-fascism.’

While quite a number of governments and movements in Islamic countries would appear to be covered by some sort of broad brush treatment of labeling them `fascist’, many do not, but, of course, the term has deeper meanings designed to differentiate between Republicans and Democrats in the upcoming congressional election and the ’08 presidential election. And we know who’s weak and who’s strong on national security, eh?

Without getting technical, fascists have classically reacted to the world of modernity and represent a conservatism that’s often based on race, class, or ethnicity. Anyone familiar with the ousting of the Shah and the present theocratic regime in Iran would have to see a darn good match, and, obviously, any reading of al Qaeda propaganda would draw one to a similar conclusion as it relates to the goals of Osama bi Laden and his followers.

The definition begins to fall apart when it - consciously – covers many other groups in Islamic countries that do not neatly fit the simplistic definition above. For example, one of the groups giving us great trouble in Iraq, the Baathists, does not appear to qualify. They were – and still are - a largely secular group of thugs formerly led by Saddam designed to impose their will and government on that country as we knew it prior to March 2003.

But if we lump the Baathists with the Shiite reactionaries in Iraq, who do seem to fall quite neatly under the new label, it is only a short step in justifying the Iraq War as part of the larger war on terror. If you buy that, I’ve got bridge that I want to sell the toll rights to that you might be interested in.

Last night on CNN, I saw Ed Rollins, a Republican insider who is almost always very clever in making his points without leaving right wing finger prints, move far right and imply that the Democrats were soft on terror and Islama-fascism. The evidence submitted in support of the thesis was the Democrat repudiation of Joe Lieberman ‘for voting his conscience’ in the Iraq War. That was clever, nasty, and wrong. Lieberman was dumped for a whole host of reasons not including his initial support of the war but for his insistence that the conflict was going well despite the constant pictures to the contrary being viewed by his constituents.

The Democrats seem far better organized this year - helped mightily by the obvious failure of our government’s efforts to impose democratic governance at the point of our guns - and they cannot cede the national security issue to the Republicans. If anything, the Republican led Iraq War has created more security issues than it has solved, and the far more dangerous members of the president’s Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea, have far more flexibility in dealing with us than they would had we not unilaterally attacked Iraq.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

It's Not Easy Being Right

2006-08-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

It’s not easy representing the far right in politics, and it’s doubly so if you make it to the White House and get into serious political trouble.

I listened to President Bush’s second Mission Accomplished speech on the recent Israeli Hezbollah war in Lebanon and couldn’t make any sense of it at first. On one channel, I see poor Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert fighting for his political life over charges that his government had failed the nation by attaining none of its original objectives in Lebanon. Flipping channels, I see Dubya proclaiming that Hezbollah was the ultimate loser in the conflict.

On the way home from the golf course this afternoon, I tuned in to el Rushbo, and he was smashing Ehud and Condy Rice - but not Dubya - for blowing the war with Hezbollah. Ehud is weak, indecisive, spineless, and I don’t know how many kinds of stupid. Condy is such a disappointment to Rush that I can’t even begin to explain. The great man was explaining to his intellectually heavyweight audience exactly how the war on terror should be fought, and let me tell you it’s not the way those namby pambies Ehud and Condy are doing it. You’ve got to make an example of these terrorists and wipe them out to a man – everywhere.

Thinking back to poor Dubya; it was easy to see that all he was doing was feeding the wild beasts on his right. Tough job the presidency when things aren’t going the way your base thinks it ought to be. Hang in, George, only two and a half years and you’ll be back on the ranch without having to ever wear a suit again.

Are all of you folks out there running for president sure that you want the job? I bet George would rather be running a baseball club right now.

Whatever!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Trouble in River City

2006-08-14T12:08:00.000-07:00

We don’t get it! War is changing and the traditional powers are trailing the lesser lights in understanding how to cope with the new paradigm. We sent 500,000 troops (at a time) to Vietnam and could not defeat a poorly armed but highly motivated insurgency. We send more than 130,000 troops (at a time) to Iraq and we cannot stamp out groups intent on killing other Iraqis and Americans.

According to the New Yorker Magazine’s Seymour Hirsch, Israel and the United States had seen the provocation from Hezbollah coming in Lebanon for a long time and had decided to stamp them out at the sign of a convenient border incident. Both countries were confident that Hezbollah could be destroyed in short order and that the techniques used would be transferable to Iran where the U.S. was contemplating taking out the nuclear program under development.

After a month of heavy fighting and tremendous air attacks on Lebanese infrastructure and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, the Israelis were unable to put Hezbollah out of business. A heavy propaganda war intended to make Hezbollah the bad guy among non-Shiite Lebanese and other Arabs also fizzled, and the U.S. and Israel are wearing the black hats across the Islamic world - and in European countries.

I have no idea if Hirsch is right, but he has a solid track record for unearthing such intelligence. All in all, the neocons do not seem to realize there is a limit to American power, especially if it is used unilaterally or nearly thus.

This is extremely unfortunate as it appears that Iran is indeed highly dangerous and clearly has a connection with at least one world terrorist organization, Hezbollah. But this administration has shunned talking with Tehran, perhaps with good reason in the halls of American power. But failing to talk with a nation because we don’t agree with it can be counterproductive.

The administration manipulated intelligence to topple Saddam. There were no WMD and no working relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. But here with Iran we have a larger more powerful opponent that admits to working on advanced nuclear technology, but not on nuclear weapons. In a few weeks, the United Nations is going to have an answer to its demands for Tehran to stop its so called `peaceful program’, and if they won’t who’s going to do what?

The neocon spear appears blunted, but we have a problem. Are the unilateralists going to cry uncle for once and actually try to negotiate? We were perceived as stalling in New York while the Israelis knocked out Hezbollah but got caught in an embarrassing situation when they successfully held out against the modern military force.

In the face of Vietnam, Iraq, Lebanon and other insurgencies, will we attack again? This time it appears that a menace to us and our allies is truly out there, but Bush and the neocons have lost the support of the vast majority of Americans for wild adventurism. We’re lower than whale manure with the U.N., and many competitors and rivals want to use it to check us.

We’ve sunk so low, that we’ve had to deal with France to help us save face in Lebanon. No wonder the president felt the need to provide back rubs at the last G-8 Meeting.

Folks, there’s trouble in River City and it ain’t pool. The scariest part is that these guys and gals ain’t up to dealing with it.

Had enough? Vote Democrat?

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Show 'em some skin

2006-08-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

Heavyweight Boxing Champion Joe Lois was right when he once said of challenger Billy Conn, “He can run but he can’t hide.” But that was obviously a reference to the squared circle about which the world sports media hovered and not the public arena of the twenty-first century. Clearly, Louis had little understanding of the sophisticated techniques of the future White House of George W. Bush to hide from his constituents and the press.

Today’s Washington Post describes a White House that is in hiding from the media and from the American people - a president so isolated by the Iraq War that he can no longer stand the scrutiny of the light of day. His pronouncements on policy and reactions to events are made to small bands of loyalists who pay exorbitant sums to see these private performances. Audiences bereft of reporters and local Congressmen – who gladly take their cut from the gate at these burlesque shows but who dare not be seen with the president in public for fear of being tainted in the eyes of the voters.

The president has become a caricature of a public official, exposing himself only to the faithful on a circuit of true believers – a peep show for loyalists. It is akin to pornography for capitalists, Evangelical Christians, and neocon wannabees. They pay huge entrance fees and watch the performance as the president tells them that everything is going great but that only he and his sidekicks can defend them from the evil outside the tent – but he's not allowed to go outside without sun block.

While only George W. Bush can defend us from terrorists and axes of evil that he finds behind every bush – no pun intended - he cannot come into the light to be viewed by ordinary men and women or by big bad reporters who ask those ridiculous questions like: Where are the WMD? What’s the connection between Saddam and Osama? If everything is going so swimmingly, why are they killing each other?

Well, you get the drift; it’s a sign of bad times when a president can't find a real baby to kiss.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/11/AR2006081101834.html?nav=most_emailed

(Unfortunately, I've goofed up my site - I think while registering it with a blogers site, so you may want to read this in the Post. It's the thrid most popular article to be emailed today.)

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Door? What Door?

2006-08-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

We began by knocking on the door. Now we’re knocking the damn thing down.

Check this out from the LA Times:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rosa Brooks: Antiwar Wackadoos Are Winning
Opposing the war in Iraq is no longer fringe -- it's American.
August 11, 2006

WHAT DO YOU have to do to get a little peace and quiet around here? It used to be possible to adopt an antiwar platform and be left entirely alone by most mainstream Americans. Sure, you'd be sneered at by the media, ostracized by the major political parties and, from time to time, your in-laws would accuse you of living on the radical fringe.

But at least it was quiet out there on the fringe.

That's the whole point of fringes, right? They're not supposed to be too populated. The antiwar fringe used to be sort of like the frontier: nothing but virgin territory, big sky and social misfits. Yep, in those days, you could stand on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and shout, "Hey, the whole war in Iraq thing, it's a huge mistake!" And no matter how loud you were shouting, it would be a big empty space all around you as senators and representatives scurried to avoid antiwar contamination.

But lately the antiwar fringe has been getting awfully crowded.

First there were the MoveOn.org types — rowdy, tech-savvy youngsters who sent too many e-mails and sometimes even showed up on your doorstep. By 2004, blogs opposed to the war in Iraq had started to multiply like bunnies: Suddenly you couldn't take a step in the blogosphere without tripping over them.

Then somebody started giving the antiwar bloggers money and letting them publish books on real paper and inviting them to grown-up conferences. By the end of 2005, John Kerry as well as a battalion of retired generals were repudiating the war in Iraq.

Today, the antiwar fringe is starting to resemble California during the Gold Rush of 1849. When gold was discovered in 1848, California had a nonnative population of 14,000 and technically belonged to Mexico. By the end of 1849, the lure of gold had brought the nonnative population up to a boisterous 100,000 — and California had been formally absorbed into the United States.

Similarly, when the war in Iraq began in 2003, only about a quarter of Americans disapproved of President Bush's Iraq policies. But by this month, the trend had reversed, with 60% of Americans telling CNN pollsters that they oppose the war and savvy politicians rushing to stake out an antiwar claim before it's too late. (To paraphrase Kerry, who knows a thing or two about this, who wants to be the last politician to go down for failing to admit the war in Iraq was a mistake?)

Opposing the war in Iraq isn't fringe anymore — it's become part of what defines ordinary Americans.

You wouldn't know it, though, from listening to the pundits. As far as many in the "mainstream" media are concerned, those who oppose the war in Iraq are still oddball extremists.

Take the reaction to antiwar candidate Ned Lamont's successful effort to oust incumbent Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman in this week's Connecticut primary. Lieberman spent the last five years cozying up to the president, defending the administration's foreign policies more vigorously than many Republicans. Given the widespread public opposition to the Iraq war, Lamont's victory was hardly a shocker — yet the media persist in furthering Lieberman's fantasy that he lost only because "the Democratic Party … has been taken over by people who are not from the mainstream of America."

Back in May, Jonathan Chait worried in these pages that Lieberman's opponents were "left-wing activists … exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s."

Jonah Goldberg, in his Thursday post-mortem on the outcome, comes to a similar conclusion: "The Democratic Party is, simply, a McGovernite party…. But … that is not necessarily where the voters are." In the New York Daily News, Michael Goodwin doesn't bother with subtlety, calling Lieberman's defeat a win for "the wackadoo wing of the party."

No, fellas. What happened was just that the whole democracy thing worked just the way it's supposed to, for once. A majority of citizens oppose the war in Iraq, so they went to the polls and voted for the guy who shares their views, instead of the guy who doesn't.

Lieberman's defeat only illustrates what most Americans already know: Mainstream Americans are tired of watching young Americans come home in coffins from an unnecessary war, tired of reckless foreign policies that have increased rather than decreased the threat of terrorism and really, really tired of incumbents who still don't get it.

But with antiwar views now as ubiquitous as cellphones on Main Street U.S.A., where can you go if you just want a little solitude?

For those of you who just can't stand being mainstream, here's a thought: Maybe it's time to go visit the neocons. It looks like they're getting a little bit lonely out there.

Neoconservatism: It's the new fringe.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Are We Safer?

2006-08-11T07:12:00.000-07:00

Are we safer now than before 9/11? Who knows? My guess is yes and no.

Two distinct lines played out in the wake of the British breakup of the most recent airline plot. I watched with pride as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described the Department’s actions in response to what appeared to a real, deadly, and gigantic plot to kill trans-Atlantic passengers.

Chertoff was professional and apolitical in tone and in his description of what the United States’ response was to the events and its cooperation with his U.K counterparts. The Secretary and the Department have come under tremendous pressure and criticism for internal failures to communicate and coordinate and for obvious failures in real events such as Hurricane Katrina. Unlike the leaders of the Departments of State, Justice and Defense, Chertoff did not spin the event for political or bureaucratic advantage.

On the other hand politicians of both parties reacted to the foiled plot and to the defeat of Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in completely partisan manners and sought advantage in November. The Republicans said the plot proved that they were on top of the terrorism situation, we are at war with an implacable foe, and the win by Ned Lamont shows that the Democrats are weak on national security and sending the wrong message to the terrorists.

The Democrats, naturally enough, found the opposite answers in these same tea leaves. The plot shows that we have not turned the corner on terrorism, that the Iraq War is creating more terrorists than we are eliminating, and any erroneous messages being sent to those who would harm us are the result of a failed administration policy of dealing with the problem and not by Connecticut’s voters.

Had we found WMD or a connection between Saddam’s government and al Qaeda, the Republicans would have won yesterday’s food fight with ease. But we didn’t find either and the Republicans find themselves on the defensive. Iraq was not working with al Qaeda, but the war is now certainly generating both terrorists and even greater hatred for America.

The war is also not going nearly as well as the administration said it would. I think Iraq is a lot closer to civil war than the administration will admit, and it is now the commonly held view that the leaders are doing their damnedest to hold on until the end of Bush’s term and leave it to the next president to withdraw our troops as the situation becomes obvious, making it possible for those slinking into the sunset to claim the debacle was the result of the Democrats failing to stay the course.

Unfortunately for the administration and its neocon supporters and drivers of both parties, the Lamont victory is not being perceived by the majority of Americans as the liberal wing of the Democrats effort to derail a successful national policy but rather an intervention in a failed and foolish diversion from the true war on terror that all Americans fully support. Thus no matter how cynically Dick Cheney proclaims that Joe’s defeat is a victory for al Qaeda, the vast majority of Americans - including a growing share of Republicans - are convinced that Iraq was a foolish blunder that is undermining the war on terror and the safety of our citizens.

Bush, Cheney and Republican Party leaders are less and less successful in painting the Democrats weak on national security. The American military fatalities in Iraq are fast approaching the number of deaths from 9/11, and the public no longer sees a direct connection between the two situations.

The Republicans won the last two national elections by playing the strong on national security card, but the public now sees the flaws in the argument; the most blatant hole being the canard that we’ve chosen to fight them in Iraq so we won’t have to do it here. The plot in Britain shows that our enemies continue to plot to kill Americans in our own planes in our own air space. Obviously, the Iraq War is not stopping plotting outside the war zone. Case closed!

Theorists in this country and Britain believe that the television pictures from Iraq and Lebanon are generating more jihadists than we’re eliminating in the various wars across the globe from Lebanon to Russia, China, and the Southwest Pacific.

Sixty percent of Americans now see the Iraq War as a mistake. This figure is growing daily and will continue to increase as November approaches. It is no wonder that that our leaders look more weary every day. They are stuck with a failed policy, and no matter how well intentioned they were, they have failed and must be turned out of office by the voters.

We are safer through the better performances of Homeland security, the FBI, the CIA and others, but we are endangered by our national policy in dealing with the terroists in Muslim lands. Yes and no!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Note to Joe

2006-08-09T14:48:00.000-07:00

Don’t, Joe, please. It’s hard, I know, but don’t bolt the party that permitted you the opportunity to become the great man you are. Everyone - including those who voted against you - recognizes you for a lifetime of achievement and grace, so don’t run against the party that you still call your own.

You didn’t get it until it was too late. Like most highly successful mortals, you believed that you knew what was best and forgot that sovereignty rests with the people. It’s no sin. It’s a flaw, and you lost. No big deal. You’ll get over it in a few months, and there’s much to do. You can still be a star if only you don’t run as an independent.

Surely you know there are only four potential outcomes if you run as an independent and none of them will turn out as you might be thinking today.

You win and caucus with the Democrats; you have to know they’ll strip you of your seniority and committee assignments. That’s death.

You win and caucus with the Democrats but find out that they’ve disowned you and you move to the other side. That’s worse than death. It repudiates everything you’ve ever worked for.

You lose and the Republican wins. Worse than death; see above.

You lose and Ned Lamont wins. Who’s going to listen to you then? NOBODY!

Be graceful. Support Ned and work to help the ’08 nominee. Surely, the Democrats will win. You, Joe Lieberman, will be in line for a very senior Executive Branch job - Secretary of Defense, State, or Homeland Security, or head of National Intelligence, Director of CIA, whatever, something very big. You’ll cap your career with honors galore, and you’ll play a major role for four more years.

You’re sixty-four years old, Joe. Down deep you know that when you go to the dance, ya have to stick with the girl what brung ya. Think about it; don’t run.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

In The Great Big Sandbox

2006-08-08T08:20:00.000-07:00

In my very naïve and amateur view, George Bush is much more than simply a neoconservative. The neocon philosophers have been very successful in appealing to the president’s messianic view of the world and to all outward appearances he is following their game plan line by line with all of the `i’s dotted and all of the `t’s crossed.

The president’s speeches are filled with images of freedom, democracy, and universal prosperity and, more menacingly, of the apocalypse should we fail to follow his commands. But in my view, there is more, much more to the president than a great father figure reading from stone tablets; there is a little boy playing with rockets, planes, tanks and soldiers in a sandbox in which his orders are never questioned by his forces or by those opposing him behind the little dunes and rises. Unfortunately, the real world is not George’s sandbox, and America’s enemies, rivals, opponents, and even its friends and allies do not jump to the bidding of the master of the playpen. And George – and his philosopher kings - cannot comprehend why the world does not jump to America’s bidding.

All that the president desires for friend and foe alike is freedom and prosperity for everyone, an end to fighting and dieing, and eternal happiness for all peoples and nations. It’s as if Woodrow Wilson has been reborn – on steroids. Who can possibly argue with this idealistic world view? If I correctly read my daily paper and information websites and the pictures coming into my house on television, quite a lot of folks, starting with most Americans (including many in his own party), the vast majority of the citizens and governments of our traditional Western allies, an even higher proportion of the peoples and leaders of the Muslim world.

Of course there are many who are pleased to see America hard at work on this great vision. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and others watch our daily progress in Iraq and elsewhere and are encouraged by our idealism – so long as we’re too bogged down to help them democratize their shares of the planet.

On 9/11, the American people were unified in our horror at the attacks upon us and in our resolve to punish those who perpetrated the atrocity. This vision was supported by most of those now opposed to George’s vision. The president’s initial moves against el Qaeda and the Taliban government of Afghanistan drew protests from almost no one in the civilized world. But the neocon vision of a peaceful world presided over by the United States as defined by George Bush has brought us to our sorry state where almost every one in the play area is kicking sand in George’s face – and ours with him.

The world is not full of people wanting to do right according to the messianic image of George Bush. It is populated by human beings with differing views of the world, with different economic, political, and social ideas and, most importantly, interests. These people are willing to resist America, and our super power capacity is of limited use when we deal with these people who have studied the ways and means of thwarting our military and economic might.

We have to regain the initiative in dealing with those who would hurt us. And we must think in terms of doing it initially where possible by means of diplomacy, economic and political assistance rather than at the point of a gun.

Had enough? Vote Democratic in November?

Blog on!

Wild Bill

2006-08-08T05:57:00.000-07:00

Technorati Profile

Good Morning

2006-08-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

Well we survived the heat wave; day after day of heat indexes above the one hundred degree mark do take a toll. It’s actually quite cool here in the garden this morning, and the ice coffee is just what the doctor ordered. I don’t see why we can’t start making tee times again.

Not much happening, the paper shows nothing but the same old stuff. 40 Lebanese civilians killed at Houla; 15 Israeli soldiers and civilians blown to bits at a kibbutz; 700 hundred Lebanese and almost a hundred Israelis dead in the last twenty-six days – with no end in sight. Murder, pillage and rape seem to be at normal levels in Darfur, and the usual thirty or forty Iraqis moving on to the next life each day.

Oh, and we’re staying the course in Iraq. More than ninety-five percent of our casualties have come since the President announced that the mission had been accomplished. Thank goodness we won. eh?

Oh, and a round of applause for the U.N. The latest Security Council resolution will certainly be read with interest and awe in Beirut and Jerusalem. Those diplomats sure know how to stop carnage in its tracks.

I guess the new Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, isn’t quite on board the spin machine. He admitted that the take home pay of ordinary Americans is not increasing as rapidly as the costs of energy and health care. What can you expect with Karl Rove spending more time worrying about his legal situation than to what administration officials are saying? Now that it’s clear that he won’t be indicted for outing Valerie Plame, he should have time to take Henry to the woodshed.

Hope your world is good. I’ve got to cut this off to make a reservation at the course.

Ciao.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Stupid? Cowardly? NOT!!!

2006-08-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

We Americans are living in a dream world. We hear that al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and many other groups are cowardly for failing to fight us straight up and that basically they’re all cut from the same cloth. This comes from the propaganda emanating from the White House and its apologists. I don’t blame them for putting out this malarkey since previous administrations did the same thing with world communism during the Cold War. But that’s how we got enmeshed in Vietnam with communism being seen as a lock step monolith directed straight from the Kremlin. Unfortunately – and unforgivably – the names on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial are mute testimony that when we left that beleaguered country nothing much happened, except the fall of much of world communism as we thought we knew it.

Whenever I tune in on el Rushbo, I learn that the cowards of Hezbollah are hiding behind the innocent residents of Southern Lebanon and undermining the Israelis’ efforts to kill them. Am I missing something here? Hezbollah terrorists should stand up and exchange fire with the obviously superior force in front of them? Let’s begin with the assumption that anyone standing up to superior firepower simply to show they’ve got guts is stupid and unbalanced. I’m pretty much convinced that that’s not the case. As a boy, I played the old card game of whist for hours on end with Arabs and can assure you that many of them are mighty smart – a lot smarter than a lot of Irish Americans. Intelligence is not one of their short suits.

There is a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post from Raymond V. Rush of Stanardsville, Virginia that inspired this posting - it’s the last letter of three, in case you click onto the link – which points out the obvious stupidity of the traditional view of insurgencies.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/04/AR2006080401370_2.html

First, let’s try to back down some of the propaganda. Labels limit our ability to see these people for what they are. Hezbollah has far different goals than al Qaeda. Sunni Baathists in Iraq may well be blowing up Shiites, but they’re quite different in their goals from al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Hamas is significantly different from Hezbollah. While Hamas and Hezbollah both want to damage – even destroy – Israel, they have significantly very different objectives.

If we can’t see that most of the insurgents, terrorists, and whatever other bad labels we apply to people revolting against the status quo around the world are not products of the same cookie cutter, we’ll never get anywhere in attempting to deal with the problems at hand. Much of the confusion goes back to the initial reaction to 9/11 by President Bush. He lumped together every group at war with established governments as international terrorists, and we’ve spent the next five years trying to separate them in our minds.

One thing that is becoming clearer to me – and which I’ve recently started blog about – is that modern armed forces are no longer organized properly to deal with their enemies. Massed attacks are no longer viable. The Battle of the Bulge, Stalingrad, and the human wave attacks by the Chinese army during the Korean are out – period. The overwhelming fire power of modern armies makes such attacks suicidal. Insurgencies and terrorism are the tools of choice by nations and groups who can’t stand up to their adversaries frontally.

So in Iraq, we find the fire power of our forces insufficient to overcome the insurgents. The war raging in Lebanon is beginning to show that the best and most modern army in the region – that of Israel – is not equipped to deal with the problem of rousting out dedicated foes fighting in the guise of local residents.

Israel and the U.S. have re-think their positions in the region. The overwhelming conventional advantages that carried the Israelis to rapid victories over Arab states in the past are not nearly as effective as they used to be. The insurgents in Lebanon are extremely well trained and adequately equipped. Clearly, they’ve been paying attention to Vietnam, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and our own ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are not stupid. They are not cowardly. They learned a lot over the past decades, and we seem not to have kept pace.

It is also clear that much of the reasoning behind the maintenance of land conquered in previous Israeli victories is suspect. To occupy territory as a buffer against infantry, armored and artillery incursions against Israel proper no longer makes sense if such attacks aren’t coming. It also doesn’t make sense to spend lives and treasure defending territory from artillery when rocket attacks clearly demonstrate that the range of these weapons is well beyond all the strategic territory that can be defended.

As Lebanon and Palestinians in Gaza suffer and as Israelis die fighting amorphous insurgencies – call them terrorists if it makes the reader feel better - the strongest power in the region, Iran, becomes stronger by the day without losing a single soldier.

The rationale for all of our actions in the region over the past five years appears wrong to me. We’ve got to create divided government in November and elect a Democrat president in ’08. This crowd is all wrong as far as I can see. Their only answer is to stay the course, and that ain’t gonna do it.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Scary Times

2006-08-04T05:38:00.000-07:00

It is not my habit to watch Congressional hearings but yesterday, anticipating fireworks, I tuned in on the Senate hearing on the situation in Iraq. Senator Hillary Clinton lit her fuse but I thought that her presentation was a complete dud. She denounced Secretary Rumsfeld personally and bitterly but there was no effort at soliciting information needed for Senatorial oversight or for public enlightenment. It was very disappointing as she is the front runner for the Democrats in ’08.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), as usual, was a star. His simple questions seeking the number and types of enemies of orderly government in Iraq drew equally straightforward answers from Rumsfeld’s top generals. Bottom line, the generals guessed that there were about 40,000 terrorists and insurgents of one kind or another. Graham then quickly extrapolated that 40,000 outlaws in a population of some 25 million (about one in 600) certainly could be quelled if the major populations (Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd) were intent on forming a viable government and nation. There was no ready answer from the DOD representatives. Obviously, things have to get worse before they get better – if they ever do – in Iraq.

Senator John McCain who has long been committed to the Iraq War and was one of Bush’s key supporters in the run up to the attack appears to recognize that what we’ve been doing in the country has failed but that we can’t allow anarchy to take over by withdrawing.

If they come to power in November and in ’08, the Democrats better be very careful. We’re stuck in Iraq until that country is relatively stable, be it one nation or three smaller ones. The pity is that the quagmire will be ongoing until this question is settled and a government or governments are in place and in control. With luck and diplomatic skill, pray that we can work with them. The Democrats would pull out troops in advance of equilibrium at America’s peril.

There can be no doubt that terrorists want to drive us out of Iraq and from all Muslim lands. They are doing their absolute best to acquire WMD to use on our interests in the region, on Israel and on us at home. The tragedy is that George Bush took us into Iraq based on a false premise and now he is stuck there without a plan to get us out, and we’re stuck with him. 40,000 extremely dangerous people are working overtime to kill our troops and Iraqis. While no operational connection was ever made between Saddam’s government and the terror networks clearly intent on hurting us badly, those networks are present in Iraq now and they want us gone so that they can take over the country and use its resources against us.

The Dems better understand that we’re firing Republicans for horrendous errors not to pack up and come home from the region. We should never have gone into Iraq. The administration should have kept up the pressure in Afghanistan but chased a red herring and the better targets of opportunity in Saddam’s realm. Because of the administration’s bungling and relative weakness, Hezbollah and Hamas came from behind and started a diversionary war with Israel to take pressure off of their patrons, Syria and Iran, even as Iran works like mad to acquire WMD.

The commitments in Iraq made by the Bush government simply cannot be abandoned; they must be managed. There can be no doubt that the intentions of the Bush administration were to keep America safe. They simply made terrible errors based on the prejudices of its officials and advisors. We want them out to punish them for incompetence, bad decisions and maladministration of the government. The Dems better not attempt to walk away from this war; they better damn well fight it more effectively.

While I’m voting for Senator Clinton or any other Democratic nominee, it’s a vote as much against the present crowd as for a change in direction that further endangers the country and its allies. A major problem is that Bush decided that we could solve the problem of international terrorism on the cheap by simply killing the terrorists and insurgents instead of investing in something akin to the Marshall Plan in postwar Europe. This has cost far more than what was perceived to be the more expensive approach that will ultimately have to be taken anyway.

Iran has outflanked the U.S. with the Arab world, and we have failed ourselves and Israel by our bungling in the Muslim world. These are scary times and the incumbents have endangered our interests and even our homeland. The die hard supporters of the president’s plan must be voted out, but moronic reactions on the part of the Democrats to simply hide from jihadists would be worse than what we’ve experienced under George W. Bush.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The House that George Built

2006-08-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

While our enemies, adversaries and competitors are smart, it’s doubtful that they could have conceived of how effectively they would be able to tie us up in difficult struggles across Islamic lands.

Osama bin Laden must have known that the U.S. would come after him and al Qaeda after 9/11 and must have anticipated going to ground much as he has. But I find it difficult to believe that he thought that we would attack Iraq as a result of his terrorist attack on America.

Now embroiled in Iraq for well over three years, the administration has no firm plan for disengagement. Our goal of establishing in Iraq a democratically elected government that promises to have staying power beyond our exit seems very shaky, and the cost in lives, bodies and treasure for Americans and Iraqis has been astronomical and is rising rapidly.

Iran appears to have far greater influence in Baghdad than we ever intended, and the Shiite Iraqi prime minister – apparently looking anxiously toward Tehran – condemns the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. It is likely that Iran at least gave a nod to Hezbollah’s initial attack on Israel. Whether they anticipated Israel’s overwhelming response is beyond my knowledge, but it has certainly embroiled Israel and the U.S. in another very difficult situation that makes aggressive moves toward Syria and Iran less likely.

By its perceived role in backing Hezbollah, Iran, a traditional enemy of Arabs, especially Sunnis, and most especially of Iraq, has put itself in a stronger position with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other moderate Arab states. Its soft alliance with Syria against Israel has also strengthened its situation with the Arab world. With the U.S. bogged down in Iraq and Israel involved much more heavily than anticipated in Lebanon, attacks against Syria and Iran look much further down the road. And, of course, in the meantime the Iranians are working feverishly to create the ultimate deterrent against attack, nuclear weapons.

Anticipating a far quicker and more decisive result against Hezbollah, our approach to the U.N. of stalling as Israel degraded its enemy is now working against us and our prime ally in the region. It is likely now that both sides will claim victory, but outside the U.S. and Israel, the result of the propaganda war will not likely to be favorable to us.

All in all, the house that George and his neocon friends built appears ill suited to stand against the blowing of the big bad wolf.

The Congress must have more oversight. We’ve got to elect Democrats in November. It’s time for a change.

Had enough? Vote Democrat!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Unconventional Warfare

2006-08-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

I came upon an interesting article, The Futility of Force, posted on the website of The Guardian, one of the U.K.’s moderate to conservative newspapers. The author, Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian’s Security Editor, states that military leaders in the United Kingdom, the United States and other powers are rethinking their situations based on experience in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots around the globe.

Norton-Taylor lists a hierarchy of force that has become clear over recent decades but which I had never attempted to categorize. He begins with the premise that U.K. defense officials see little or no real threat from traditional conventional enemies over the next generation. Strong nations are unlikely to be confronted directly by their peers or near peers. Lesser powers have learned that funding and backing terrorist groups is a far safer means of dealing with their military betters while nations weaker still that are under occupation proceed to next level of force available to them, insurgencies from within.

The article has piqued my interest greatly and I’m going to look at events through that prism to see if I continue to agree with the premise. At this point I thought that you might like to read it and see if any of this resonates with any of you.

Your reactions would be welcome and read with interest either on the blog site or at my regular email address brennan01@cox.net.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1834630,00.html

Blog On!

Wild Bill

Miscellany

2006-07-31T12:16:00.000-07:00

Today, el Rushbo sank to a new low. He stated that those criticizing the neocons were anti-Jewish. No doubt, many of the leading neoconservatives are Jews; among the better known are the Kristols, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. But not all those associated with the term are Jewish; I believe John Bolton is not an American Jew and he’s clearly in that camp.

The point is that Limbaugh is tarring anyone opposed to the neocon inspired foreign policy of George W. Bush as being anti-Semitic. Obviously many of the intellectual stalwarts behind the neocon philosophy are American Jews, but the overwhelming majority of American Jews are not neocons. It’s heavy stuff indeed that these right wing supporters of Bush Middle Eastern, Iraq War and war on terrorism policy are aiming at the opposition, eh?

Rush also attacked Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as being a liberal, inexperienced in military affairs, and as being soft on Hezbollah. Things are not going as well as planned for us and Israel, especially in light of the bombing and killing of innocents at Qana, Lebanon. It has to be somebody’s fault other than flawed U.S. and Israeli policy and Rush gives Olmert the nod. Lucky Ehud!

Things are stalled in New York as the U.S. is pressing for a U.N. resolution on the Israeli/Hezbollah fighting that cannot gain French or much other European support. France has countered with its own proposal for an immediate cease fire. It appears that we are stalling to buy more time for the Israelis to smash Hezbollah. While I continue to believe that would be a good thing by itself, the vast majority of other nations and world public opinion, especially Muslim, and most especially Arab, sees this as U.S. hubris and aggression that is being carried out by its surrogate. Even if it succeeds – and it is no slam dunk – do we and Israel win?

These are far from the best of times for George Bush, The United States, Ehud Olmert and the neocons, but there is not a lot of wavering as they push forward. Let’s hope they’re right. I doubt it and can’t wait to vote for Democrats in November in hopes of getting some oversight on the administration.

Supporters of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut have been very successful in ascribing the Senator’s troubles to far left wing Democrat bloggers, but the New York Times unraveled it all and endorsed Ned Lamont in next week’s primary. I want Lieberman to lose, but wouldn’t it be awful if what happens in little old Connecticut determined control of both houses of Congress? It could happen.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Just You Wait and See

2006-07-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

Assume for a moment that George Bush is correct in his solutions to all things Middle Eastern, terrorism, and Iraqi. I read something in the last couple of days which indicted that he and Tony Blair are convinced the approach they are taking in that part of the world will be borne out, even if the time frame is no longer the short term they began with but extends out many decades, but those of us alive in this time may not be around when this great vindication comes about. In fact, the remainder of the six billion of us here is likely to be a small minority of those walking the planet after the middle of this century when conditions are supposed to reveal whether George and Tony are owed a debt of gratitude. Timing is everything.

Suppose that by the halfway mark of this century that democracy is indeed, making headway in the Middle East and the Muslim world in general. How much of this will those alive ascribe to the wise policies of George and Tony as compared with the normal course of events?

The United States and The United Kingdom are investing huge amounts of capital – human and fiscal – to advance the cause of freedom across the globe in our time expecting a huge payback in another era. Much of the world sees that investment as narrow self interest and an example of American imperial hubris.

The bottom line question is: how great an input of present resources is worth the long term payout predicted? We all make such calculation in our lives. Parents and talented offspring must decide whether postponing personal gratification for twelve or more years for medical training is worth the price in prestige and income likely to result from this great input of time and money on the front end. How much present sacrifice should we make to assure secure retirements? Such choices are made every day.

And nations make these calculations as well. For example, after WW II our leaders had to decide whether to invest billions dollars in the reconstruction of Europe was worth the sacrifice in the face of the threat of Soviet expansionism. The Marshall Plan was approved in the belief that the investment would save lives, capital, and quality of life down the road. It was; the Western countries recovered quickly and stood with us in the containment of the Eastern Block. This is looked back upon as one of the great investments in American history.

President Bush looks back to President Truman’s experience and the great rehabilitation of Harry’s reputation as his model. There is, however, a misreading of history in this. While Truman did lead in the restoration of Europe and is remembered fondly for it, his reputation had suffered not at all for that decision but for his bold move in standing up to communist adventurism in Korea. After an initial surge of public approval, Truman began his drift downward as his drive to restore the approximate balance on the Korean Peninsula became extremely unpopular. At the time, his political critics wanted a far more aggressive response, including a nuclear confrontation with China.

Truman held firm on a policy of world wide containment of the communists, and from the low point his reputation was restored quite rapidly to the high level of approval that he bears in history. By the time of President Kennedy, Truman’s rehabilitation was virtually complete – not much longer than a decade.

In Bush’s case, citizens of the United States backed him without reservation when he proclaimed war on the terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11. His orders to take the fight to al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan were supported by almost every American. A clear connection among the Taliban, al Qaeda and the attackers of 9/11 was established, and we were prepared for total war upon all of them. It never happened.

We sent a force to topple the Taliban and to capture or kill the al Qaeda members present in the country. But George Bush, the Decider, determined that a more comprehensive approach to terrorism was in order. He said there were weapons of mass destruction available and under development in Iraq and that the government of that country was cooperating with al Qaeda. The Iraq War became inevitable. Unfortunately for Bush – and us - neither WMD nor a connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden was ever proved and we are an occupying force in a country being torn apart by sectarian strife.

Our mission in Afghanistan was not carried out thoroughly, and we find ourselves supporting a government that does not control all of the country. The vast majority of al Qaeda operatives, including its primary leadership escaped to parts unknown, and the Taliban is has regrouped and is a threat to the current regime.

We have kept Iraq and Syria under pressure. Syria removed itself from Lebanon under great pressure from the international community, especially the U.S. Iraq is alleged – and I believe it - to be developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons and the U.S. and its allies have been applying pressure to stop them, thus far unsuccessfully. In what is alleged to be an Iranian and Syrian inspired plot, Israel was attacked by Hamas from Gaza and by Hezbollah from Lebanon.

Israel responded aggressively in Lebanon and a much wider war is under way. Our Western allies and most of the Sunni Arab and secular Arab states have become very outspoken in favor of a cease fire with Hezbollah which has proven to be a far more formidable foe than was expected. President Bush has backed the Israelis as they moved to destroy Hezbollah, and Bush and Israel find themselves losing ground in world public opinion and, worse, find the effort to take on Hezbollah far more taxing than they thought and now both seem to be for a less than completely satisfactory outcome as compared to two weeks ago.

Bush’s approach to militant Islam bears almost no comparison to the efforts of Harry Truman and his successors through to Bush 41 to contain Soviet expansionism that ultimately fell of its own weight. The flaws in the system were too great to maintain the consent of the governed and the system collapsed.

The present Bush was not content to fight those who attacked us; he was intent on solving all of the problems that created the rise of terrorism. This was undertaken not by investing billions to support economic growth and the rise of freedom but at the point of a gun.

We have lost some 3,000 lives in Iraq and Afghanistan with tens of thousands wounded. Tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanistanis have perished and many more have lost their homes and livelihoods. We have spent more than $300 billion with no end in sight.

You may see this playing out happily as in the case of the collective security pursued by the U.S. after W.W.II. I don’t.

It’s four o’clock.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Anybody Out There Seen Eddie?

2006-07-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

It’s been coming for a long, long time, junior high school back in the forties, to put a time frame on it. Every social studies teacher of the era was a cheerleader for our late beloved Woodrow Wilson. Aside from studying all of the line items in the budget for the City of Brockton, MA and otherwise being brow beaten into becoming responsible citizens, we spent hours on Woodrow’s fourteen points and learned how one of our own senators, Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., was a wicked old man intent on nothing more than ruining the future of not only the United States but of innocent people everywhere.

By the time I reached the age of reason (Please!) the idealism of Woodrow was at the ready, and I was about to become a do gooder ready to make your world a better place. What could be more reasonable than the right of self determination for all peoples? Why shouldn’t the ethnic groups of the Balkans have rights to space? Why shouldn’t the Baltic States be free? Why, why, why?

But over a lifetime of watching American statesmen operate from the perspective of American self interest, my views became more like those of Dr. Strangelove – excuse me – Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft rather than old Woodrow and of European statesmen of old such as Bismark. I also realized that my political hero, Franklin Roosevelt, while committed to internationalism was so only inclined in the long term best interests of the U.S.

But as so aptly described by Andrew Bacevich in his fine book The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War after Vietnam the loss of prestige of the U.S. military and the seeming drift away from American and Christian values drove two groups, the neoconservatives and Evangelical Christians, into a strange alliance for control of America’s destiny. Both groups, idealistic to the core, fought tooth and nail for a return of values that peaked with the coming of Ronald Reagan. American foreign policy turned away from the realpolitik of presidents like John Kennedy and Richard Nixon and brought the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and his intellectual offspring, the neocons, back into vogue in the presidency of George W. Bush.

The neocon view that America at the head of a coalition of the willing had the power and prestige to remake the world in its own image became our new paradigm. Democracy would replace tyranny and the obvious dangers of dictators and terrorist organizations would be displaced by free peoples everywhere, especially in the chosen laboratory of Iraq.

The war drums began their heavy beat and quick as a wink, Saddam fell like an overripe tomato. Sadly, as I read the papers this morning, none of the idealism propounded to get us into this mess seems present. The holy proclamations of those spreading the word of American democracy ring hollow on this warm summer morning.

Today, the world is divided over the war raging in Lebanon. Frankly, the Israelis were absolutely correct to respond aggressively to the Hezbollah provocation. The question arises when is enough enough? Every player sees the conflict through its prism. The U.S. and its partner Israel view the situation through the eyes of the neocon philosophy of applying power to the struggle to the point of annihilating the Hezbollah fighters massed against them. Others, including Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, and most European governments call for an immediate end, and now most Arab states call for a cease fire in place. But the power resides with Bush and the Israelis and they appear to be going to continue with an aggressive incursion.

I’m a moderate conservative and, as indicated, much closer in view to the Scowcroft/Bush 41 view. But more important I’m of a the view of pursuing the view of enlightened self interest as proclaimed so long ago by Edmund Burke of England. Angry letters to editors from American Jews demanding explanations of proportionality in the current conflict when compared to the actions taken in the past by many asking them to halt their attack, are very difficult to answer. For example, how could anyone who supported the dropping of the a-bombs or the firebombings of WW II ever preach to the Israelis when there is no balance of proportion given that innocent deaths in Lebanon are in the hundreds and not in the hundreds of thousands?

To me the only answer lies in the concept of enlightened self interest. There are 400 million Arabs and each day significant numbers of them grow more sympathetic to the plight of the innocent Lebanese caught in the crossfire. Even if the Israeli/American vision of cleaning out the nest of terrorists is completely fulfilled, do the Israelis gain total victory over those wishing the end of their state?

American neoconservatism has pushed Arab Shiites – even beyond Iraq - into an alliance with Iran. That nation has gained great sway over many Arabs by being even more bellicose in its talk of annihilating Israel. Even Arab leaders from mostly Sunni nations are growing more uncomfortable with the heat being placed on them as innocents die.

Were I an Israeli, I’d be as outraged as they are over the terrorist attacks and the failure of outsiders to see their plight. But I’d also try to see my enlightened self interest and to attempt to balance my rage with my long term need to continue to live in a largely hostile environment in which current actions are not winning the war for hearts and minds of my neighbors.

Where’s Ed Burke when you most need him?

Blog on!

Mild Bill

MORE POWER!!!

2006-07-23T07:29:00.000-07:00

Tim Allen’s old comedy sitcom Home Improvement provides the inspiration for the neoconservatives advising the President. When things go awry the answer is - More Power!

Last year’s bad guy, Assad of Syria – out of Lebanon with him – How? More Power!

Today’s good guy, Assad of Syria – back into Lebanon with him – How? More Power!

Under Reagan – Saddam good – Iran bad – help him - How? More Power!

Under Bush 43 – Saddam bad – topple - How? More Power!

Congress/courts/citizens – pains – listen in – How? More Power!

Flip flops? Hell no! More Power!

Wild Bill – sober – answer – More Busch!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Hole - How Deep?

2006-07-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

In a recent posting, How Lame, I mistakenly indicated that the President had shown the door to the neoconservatives. He hasn’t. Everything that is playing out in the Middle East smacks of their tender touch. If the disaster in Iraq wasn’t enough to demonstrate to the President the folly of listening to these so-called `idealists’, nothing will, and we are doomed to another two years of nail biting.

Let’s get this straight; there is a civilization out there, Islam, with 1.2 billion members. The vast majority of its adherents want nothing more than peace for themselves and the opportunity to pursue happiness for themselves and their offspring. Many of them live in nations governed by despots and while they’d like it to be otherwise, they – like others so burdened - just keep getting up in the morning to seek their daily bread.

There is no doubt that a small but significant and growing minority of Islam is outraged at the West, the United States, and, most especially, at the governments of many Islamic countries for selling out to foreigners and for suppressing the true faith. These people are extremely dangerous and are the sworn enemies of us all. Assuming the argument that these jihadists are hopeless cases, we must do our best to stop them by all means fair and foul.

But the policies of George Bush that are clearly those inspired by the neocons have got us further from a solution to terrorism than when we began to react against the horror that was 9/11. The mad dream of the neocons for us to go it alone and by force of American arms to deal with this militant cancer on Islam has got us into far greater difficulties than we could have possibly imagined three years ago.

True Republican conservatives and moderates of all stripes have to react in a manner that’s in the best long term interests of the country. Our support and encouragement of the overwhelming response to the incursions of Hamas and Hezbollah into Israel while completely justified at one level plays right into the hands of the jihadists and the leaders of Syria and Iran.

The very idea of an axis between Syria and Iran should give us pause. That a mostly secular Arab state could find common cause with a Shiite inspired religious state populated by an ethnic group that is classically its antagonist is shocking. By our war on Iraq we’ve made the strangest bedfellows imaginable.

Hezbollah bit us on our backside. They will pay a great price for this point, but, in the process, they have destroyed the last vestiges of our role as an honest broker in the region. The neocons with their purity of vision and purpose have us and Israel in the position of being right but this isn’t a world of black and white. The larger grays of the Islamic world see us as supporting the destruction of Lebanon and the oppression of innocent Arabs.

The longer and harsher the neocon inspired response to the immediate Hezbollah attack, the worse off Israel and we become. This neocon vision that we must demonstrate no weakness – or even moderation – to bellicosity from our enemies inspires little confidence in the long term.

Bush has got to stop listening to these people. Since the idea of attacking Iraq first surfaced, each day we’ve been drawn deeper and deeper into the quagmire of the Middle East and gotten further away from our proper goal of pursuing those who planned and executed 9/11.

That’s a deep hole we’re in; we better stop digging pretty soon.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Wringing Hands in Annandale

2006-07-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

Alright, I don’t know my butt from my elbow, but I’m a citizen and still must indicate to my governmental leaders that they have my consent – or not - for what’s going on. That’s how governments derive their just powers, right? At least that’s what those boys in Philly said in 1776.

This much I know; Hezbollah and Hamas started this fight and Israel is more than happy to take it to them.

This much I’ve been told and agree that Hezbollah is being armed and encouraged by Iran and Syria as a means to further occupy America by diverting U.S. pressure from them.

This much I think; the U.S. has a plan. We’re quite content to have Israel demolish the ability of Hezbollah to make organized war against Israel. Most of the rest of the world’s nations are concerned that the fighting could spread beyond Lebanon and Gaza; I doubt that.

In wars, innocents in the way of the warriors suffer horribly. In Israel and especially Lebanon, civilian casualties are high and climbing, and the Lebanese infrastructure is taking a terrible beating. Neither we nor Israel seem to care at all about this. Israel uses the consent of the governed that I used earlier on the Lebanese as the basis for its aggressive action.

Right wingers in the U.S. are screaming for the Israelis to destroy Hezbollah and liberals and most of the world’s governments are calling for restraint. It is my view that President Bush is in the former camp and wants to degrade Hezbollah and send a strong message to Syria and Iran that they’ve made a horrible mistake. I’m for that!

But I’m in both camps. Where to? I want to see Hezbollah – and Hamas – tamed, even destroyed. But I don’t want to see innocent Israelis and, again, especially Lebanese suffer. I kind of agree with the president in this fight, but he has a credibility problem with me: Iraq and all that we’ve done to that country.

I also see the possibility of a Pyrrhic victory for Israel. Its army appears fully capable of smashing Hezbollah to a point that it will take years for it to recover. While they will never be loved, there comes a point with the disproportionate Israeli response that the horrible rhetoric of the Iranian president vowing to destroy Israel becomes acceptable to the vast majority of moderate Muslims who see the suffering of the innocent in Lebanon.

Disclaimer: the oldest one in the world – some of my best friends are Lebanese and Jews. I was raised in a neighborhood in Brockton, MA that was about half Irish and half Lebanese. They are Arabs who are Maronite Christians and I keep in friendly contact with them to this day. And, of course, many of my closest friends in adult life have been and are Jews.

I want no dog in this fight.

I think the Israelis are right to take on Hezbollah, but I think they’ve gone too far in destroying the Lebanese economy and infrastructure and in not caring about innocent civilians.

I’m for an early halt to this incursion, and I think the U.S. president has been slow to call them on it.

Blog on!

Not nearly as wild as usual, Wild Bill

How Lame?

2006-07-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

Gulliver entwined or the king of beasts being snapped at from behind by hyenas? Take your pick of these or any other images you can conjure of the powerful being harassed by the weak. Poor George, the lamest of the lame ducks since Herby Hoover, can’t catch a break. His war is increasingly viewed by his (former) supporters as having the aspect and smell of leprosy. In a front page story in today’s Washington Post, the (formerly) faithful now point to (his) incompetence for the ever more obvious failure.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071901787.html?referrer=emailarticle

The president broke ranks with Tom Jefferson yesterday and vetoed his first bill. Seventy percent of the American people see stem cell research as worthy with great potential to heal the sick and to make the lame walk. But George with his usual ability to redefine inflexibility cannot break with his hard core supporters and is abandoned by many of his (formerly) most ardent Hill admirers. If stem cell research ever does find the cures for some of the horrible afflictions that torment humanity, will those who oppose it on moral grounds refuse treatment based on its immoral genesis? Just a question.

Our lion roared at Syria and Iran and their lackeys snapped at his rump. His most personal frustrations were caught on tape in St. Petersburg when he bellowed his sad lament to the soon to be former Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

And of course, the drive by media – defined thus by my pal el Rushbo – never forgets anything and has everything the high and mighty have ever uttered in secure tape files in nuclear bomb shelters. Today’s turd is about Katrina, you remember her: the bitch of the bayou, when George was doing his darndest to appear sympathetic to the down and out he said some things that would lead one to believe that he gave a crap about the poor. With the passage of time, however, George kind of forgot these remarks. But no, the drive byes never forget anything and poor Uncurious George gets slammed for not giving a rat’s patooty about the down and out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071901735.html?referrer=emailarticle

Sad, this lame duck business!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Anxious in Annandale

2006-07-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

The only thing I’m sure of this morning is that Congress is composed of idiots and charlatans who can’t be trusted. Last week’s Washington Post Magazine article that asked if the Israeli lobby was too powerful was simply prologue to the dance by members of both parties that no matter what Israel is doing today is fine with them. Were I an Israeli, I’d be damned worried by that vote of confidence. Clearly, both parties are courting American Jewish votes and campaign contributions and not worrying whether that might be good for America, Israel, the war of terror, or anything else.

If you agree with the Israeli response to the Hamas/Hezbollah attacks, killings and kidnappings, there are about a gazillion media articles in favor. If you think Israel has overreacted there are an equal number of pieces supporting this position. I have no idea why – perhaps its one of my Alfred E. Newman “What me worry?” moments – but I think this horrible situation between the Israelis and Hamas and Hezbollah is going to end without turning into WWIII. But there are even columns in major outlets by writers I greatly respect who are fearful that this could be a pivotal moment in world history much like Sarajevo in 1914.

But there is joy in Mudville; the mighty neocons have struck out. Those idealistic movers and shakers who browbeat poor George W. Bush to the point that he lost focus on the war on terror in Afghanistan and decided that delivering democracy to Iraq was more important than applying the coup de grace to the Taliban and the tattered shreds of al Qaeda that were holed up on the border with Pakistan no longer have the President’s ear.

Today’s Post has a front page story on how unhappy the neocons are and how they’re saying George has lost his nerve. Sadly, George has shown them the door several years too late. Because of them we’re almost 3,000 deaths, 20,000 wounded, and committed for up to $2 trillion wasted in a war that never should have been fought in Iraq and which says nothing about the tens of thousands of poor Iraqis dead and wounded that we were attempting to help.

The neocons are trying to turn the tables on the President and blame him because we didn’t send enough troops to do the job in Iraq. But that doesn’t wash and it’s becoming clearer by the day that sending twice as many soldiers and marines would have merely postponed the bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. But read the article and their lamentations for yourselves:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801373.html?referrer=emailarticle

Lost in the explosions, real and polemic, is a column by Richard Cohen – I’m sure there are many others of this kind but they’re also buried in the back pages of papers – that attempts to put Israel’s plight in historical perspective. As many of you know, I admire Richard and have extolled his virtues many times in previous postings and this is one of his most thoughtful offerings. But let me digress, in the Post Magazine article on the Israeli lobby that I linked last week, one of the questions raised was whether speaking out constructively against any Israeli policy could result in anything much beyond the questioner’s being labeled anti-Semitic? I don’t really know the answer to that, but I feel confident that only a prominent American Jew like Richard could have written a column such as the one I’m linking and not suffered an immediate attack by the lobby and its supporters.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/17/AR2006071701154.html?referrer=emailarticle

There’s not much dispute that the attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah were encouraged and supplied by Iran and Syria. America is in this mess to its eyeballs, and our unwise Iraq War has damaged us and is hurting Israel. The only thing good that I see coming out of it is the loss of prestige by the neocons within the administration and in the public mind. Israel and the U.S. will ultimately get out of these corners but with plenty of wounds to lick. The Post article labels the neocons `conservative,’ but the real conservatives of the Republican Party are finally asserting themselves and there’s hope rising even as the bombs rain down on the innocent everywhere in the Middle East.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

The Israeli Lobby

2006-07-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

Does the Israeli lobby wield too much power? That’s the question posed by a Washington Post Sunday Magazine article (July 16, 2006) that I cannot link for you but recommend that you read by going to the paper’s website when it is posted. The article that was clearly in development for a long time and appeared at a particularly dynamic time since Israel is engaged in ferocious military actions in Gaza and Lebanon even as this is being written.

There can be no doubt that these actions were provoked by Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon when militants of both groups crossed into Israel, attacked outposts, killed and wounded the guards, and kidnapped soldiers from both outposts. It is the avowed policy of Israel to do all that is necessary to safely retrieve its kidnapped troops; a policy that I support without reservation.

The entire world is focused on these actions as the combatants on both sides utilize extraordinary means to make their points and as other powers are fingered for egging them on in a larger war for regional control. Iran and Syria stand accused of siccing Hamas and Hezbollah onto the Israelis to back door the U.S. which has had them both under great pressure, and the United States, in turn, stands accused of not restraining the response by Israel, its alleged dog in the fight.

All of this plays out as the parties behind the combatants are accused of using this series of events to provide leverage in both the Iraq War and the larger war on terror. World petroleum and stock markets shudder as buyers question the ability of Middle East suppliers of the world’s great commodity, oil, to guarantee deliveries. Spectators in the Arab and larger Muslim world and greater powers, including some members of the European Union, Russia, and China shed crocodile tears as the world’s remaining super power gets further bogged down in the region.

This brings us back to the article in the Post Magazine which attempts to lay out a balanced picture for readers to make up their own minds. It also points out how difficult it is for anyone to criticize the lobby or Israel without becoming labeled an anti-Semite.

Frankly, I think the lobby is too powerful. Until these attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah, I have been under the impression that many Israelis – in and out of government - have been far more forward looking in dealing with the settlements than have those leading the American lobbying effort. Being an inveterate reader of letters to the editors of major newspapers, I believe also that many American Jews – but certainly don’t mean to quantify them or try to determine polling numbers – have come to embrace the recent withdrawal from Gaza and the movement in the West Bank as being in the best interests of Israel, but the current situation may well set this policy back, at least in the short term.

The Sharon settlement policy has caused problems for Israel with its Evangelical Christian supporters, and this to me is one of the great problems for the Israeli lobby. Both the settlers and their supporters in the Christian right do not approach this issue in the manner of the governments of Israel and the U.S. and causes these governments great problems. The governments see the settlements problem in terms of their geo-political interests while the settlers and their American Christian supporters see it in Biblical terms and these views presently conflict.

I’ve been of the opinion that the Israeli lobby is too powerful because its American Christian backers push it well past what the government of Israel finds useful. If that’s anti-Semitic, I’m sorry.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Webb for Senate - II

2006-07-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday’s posting on Jim Webb’s candidacy for the U.S. senate from Virginia included a link to a Washington Post story that described his opponent’s major thrust in attempting to hold off the Democrat. Basically, the Republican intends to pooh-pooh Jim Webb’s initial opposition to the Iraq War as a mere “I told you so,” that will turn off conservative Virginians, particularly its many military residents. Here’s that link again:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=admin/registration/login&destination=logout&nextstep=confirm

I think Webb should hammer his initial and continued opposition to the war and to demonstrate how Bush’s folly has damaged our military. This fiasco has wounded our military forces more than any other segment of our society. Today, I’m posting a news article from the New York Times that has to make all thoughtful military folks consider the adverse impacts of the war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/14/us/14private.html?ex=1153540800&en=b19eb45a4c0bee62&ei=5070&emc=eta1

In listening to el Rushbo when running my errands, I find that he occasionally has military officers with hard right wing leanings rant about how they should be given license to really run amok in Iraq. But most of the uniformed people I’ve known over the years have been very even handed in their politics and most realize the down side of what is happening to our forces.

Today’s posting makes mincemeat of the Pentagon’s propaganda on how well recruiting is going. Obviously, age, intellect, physical and moral standards have been compromised in order to hit the numbers. I do not for an instant believe that the standards have been lowered to the point that the subject of the article, the soldier alleged to have raped and murdered a young Iraqi woman and to have killed her family, is anything but an isolated case, but clearly the officers and non-coms have their hands full in dealing with the less qualified people now coming into the force.

I’m convinced that military residents of Virginia will embrace Jim Webb’s candidacy and compare him favorably with the chicken hawks who so aggressively rush our troops into harm’s way but who were themselves too tied up with important things to serve. Webb is a true American hero who put his life on the line in Vietnam. President Bush and many others in the lead in Iraq understand military service from a merely theoretical position. But they’re always ready to stand by as those who really fought are slimed and Swift Boated.

Had Enough? Vote Democrat!

Blog on!

Wild Bill.

Webb for Senate

2006-07-13T10:29:00.000-07:00

While it is still not clear how George Bush’s Congressional apologists for the Iraq War will defend their seats in November, two trial balloons have been loosed. The first, prominently represented by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, is to spit into the wind and continue the mindless chant that it was a great idea when we attacked and remains one now. And the second, championed by Virginia Senator George Allen in his constantly tightening race with Democrat James Webb, is to pooh-pooh Webb’s pre-war warnings against attacking Iraq as placing him in an “I-told-you-so-caucus” that will turn off The Old Dominion’s middle of the road and conservative voters.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/11/AR2006071101555_2.html?referrer=emailarticle

Republicans in anything resembling contested seats will obviously see Lieberman’s growing difficulties with the head on attack and are likely to opt for the Allen approach. The question is will the sloughing off of this national tragedy have traction with voters already not committed? Clearly, Bush’s base, of which no one is baser than Allen who is regularly and correctly labeled a Bush lap dog, will buy the proposition but how will it play with independents and moderates who along with liberals are now firmly in the camp of those who see the war as a horrible blunder and an endless quagmire?

Webb – and the other Democrats (except Lieberman) – should counterattack opponents who propose to cavalierly toss off the endless war as something that we must just slog on with despite limitless casualties and wasted treasure. Allen offers no way out of Iraq; only Jim Webb and the Democrats can find an honorable way out in some reasonable time frame.

Allen and other defenders of the war must be challenged when they claim the Democrats are divided and have no plan on how to end the war with the administration’s policy of standing down only when the Iraqis a ready no matter how long it takes. Clearly that day is far off and may well be receding further into the distant future with each passing day. Not only that, but office holders who persist in calamitous policies must see that failure to change course in the face of overwhelming evidence of error must end in defeat and banishment from Congress.

We must have Congressional oversight of this administration and divided government in 2008.

Had enough? Vote Democrat! Virginians – vote for Jim Webb!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

IRAQ REVISITED

2006-07-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

President George W. Bush took us to war with Iraq more than three years ago. The Saddam regime has been gone for all but a few weeks of that period yet we are unable to see an end to our participation. What are we to make of these years and our predicament?

The most obvious is that the rationales for the preventive attack on Iraq were wrong. It is clear to all but the lunatic fringe that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s arsenal, and no policy cooperation connection has been proven between the government of Iraq and al Qaeda. Nor is it believed, except by the aforesaid morons, that despite Saddam’s constant hullabaloney toward Israel and his occasional call for the restoration of the Caliphate of all Arabs under his well tattered banner that any of this science fiction had any real basis.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, DOD Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the neocons who persistently pushed the president’s buttons, and the claque of Senators – Warner, McCain, Lieberman, and Bayh - who can all proudly claim credit for leading us to Baghdad were wrong on all counts.

Far less important in hindsight as far as I’m concerned, we did not enter the fray with enough troops to occupy Iraq when the Saddam government fell. That this was called to the attention of the policy makers by the Army Chief of Staff is merely a sad footnote. Had we sent the number recommended, we’d still be in the extraordinarily difficult position of trying dismount from this terrible tiger, a mere postponement of the day of reckoning when old tribal and religious enemies could settle ancient scores.

For months now extending into years, the Republicans who cheered madly as the president prepared for the conflict and baited their weakling brethren across the aisle as wimps and flip-floppers now call to the attention of American voters that the negativist Democrats are badly split on how to get us out of Iraq, offer nothing but negativity on the war, and want to cut and run – a breach of trust with those who have fought and died.

That leaves the Grand Old Party as the happy warriors going about the business of securing the battered nation while the Dems wring their hands. The president has never said how the Shock and Awe disposal of Saddam in weeks would translate into getting American military men and women out of harm’s way. The only pledge is that when the Iraqi government can defend itself, we’ll stand down. Frankly, the news – obviously cooked by the mainstream media – leads ignorant Americans to believe that things aren’t going well in Baghdad when indeed everything is perfectly swell. Those pictures of people getting blown up each day are simply for consumption by the media.

When the President labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the Axis of Evil, it became incumbent upon him and America to deal with that axis. It is quite clear from books by Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and others and from Congressional testimony from people like Richard Clark that we would take action against the member least likely to be able to respond effectively; so long, Saddam.

Saddam’s fall would clearly demonstrate to the Mullahs and the mad midget of Pyongyang that we weren’t kidding and that they better start talking or the same fate might be in the cards for them. I guess we showed them. Iran is working feverishly to attain nuclear weapons and Kim is believed to already have them. These nations are far more dangerous than they were three years ago, and we’re badly bogged down in a terrible quagmire.

All the fancy dancing to change the rationales for toppling Saddam – democracy for all Muslim nation’s governed by tyrants is a little ragged these days – which seem to be settling on his being a really bad guy who was really, really cruel to his own people can’t paper over what we’ve done to our military. All of the lost and broken lives and hundreds of billions of dollars down the drain with no end in sight and now our difficulty in funding weapons programs that we need against far more important long range competitors such as China leave us in far greater difficulties than when we attacked Iraq.

What we’ve done to our armed forces and to ourselves says nothing about the people we’ve rescued. While life under Saddam was clearly awful, I can’t for the life of me say that the human cost to Iraqis since our attack has been anything but terrible as well. America and Iraq are now in a terrible embrace with no clear way to break free.

In recent months it has become apparent that the fully justifiable war against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan has take a turn for the worse. The government on Kabul has less control over the outlying provinces than it had – with us as its surrogate – when the slide became noticeable. When we turned our focus from this war that we should have been fighting to take on a nation that was – while loudly rattling its rusty sabers – little threat to us or our allies.

Most Americans have turned against the Iraq War not because they don’t have staying power but because they’ve come to understand that it was the wrong war whose basis was phony, a classic fool’s errand.

Yes, the Democrats are divided – unlike the lemmings on their right. Yes, the Democrats are unhappy – unlike their deliriously smitten Republican friends. Well damn it, anyone who isn’t gravely concerned should be locked up in the booby hatch. It’s too bad this Happy Warrior B.S. seems to be selling among the yahoos. If we don’t get at least one House of Congress intent on providing oversight to this administration, we’ll remain in serious trouble

I don’t fault those who supported the Iraq War when the spoon feeding of faulty intelligence could not be challenged. But now there is no doubt, we were misled into this mess. It’s George Bush’s war and he’s unlikely to ever say he was wrong. But people like Joe Lieberman should be ashamed of themselves; all of the reasons he gave for encouraging the President to attack Saddam were wrong. The Democrats in Connecticut have figured him out, and he’s willing to bring the house down rather than admit error.

Had enough? Vote Democrat – except for Joe!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Score One for the Good Guys

2006-07-08T10:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from readers concerning the break up of the recent terrorist plots in Miami and New York. Folks have been concerned that the actions by the FBI, police and prosecutors prior to the alleged culprits showing that they were true threats somehow undermined the seriousness of the plots. Initially, I had some of the same questions about breaking up conspiracies before they showed any real danger to the Sears Tower and to the tunnels under the Hudson.

Yesterday, I listened to Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff babble on about it saying that it is sometimes only a short time between planning and execution. Frankly, that wasn’t too convincing either.

But in thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that there might well be another even more important reason for jumping on these conspiracies very early rather than waiting until the terrorists actually planted their bombs. If potential terrorists – international or domestic – come to understand that the government has sophisticated means of learning about and listening in on their conspiracies and planning they’re much less likely to begin their murderous conniving.

Seeding paranoia in the minds of potentially bad people isn’t the worst thing in the world when you’re dealing with potential killers preparing to take their initial steps toward terrorist conspiracies. While the government isn’t likely to announce this as a salutary benefit from the breakup of those two groups of bumbling plotters, it is just that. While this may do little good in dealing with hard core enemies of the U.S. and the West, it doesn’t hurt to scare the stupid wannabes – who can be mortally dangerous.

Score one for the good guys of the Department of Justice, FBI, local and state police, and Homeland Security Department. Their lot hasn’t been pleasant, so let’s put these cases on the positive side of the ledger. I feel a little safer and hope you do too.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

JOE MUST GO

2006-07-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

On October 2, 2002, Senator Joe Lieberman (D. Conn.) was the co-sponsor of Joint Senate Resolution #46, Use of U.S. Armed Forces Against Iraq, along with Senators Warner, McCain and Bayh. Senator Lieberman’s speech in support of the resolution indicated no doubt that Iraq was a threat to the region, that he was intent on making Iraq the dominant Arab power, and that he was developing WMD and the means to deliver them against U.S. interests and his neighboring states.

http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/US/Letters,%20reports%20and%20statements/senate-liebermanwarnermccainbayh-100202.htm

This hawkish stance predates the March 2003 attack on Iraq which the senator continues to support to this day. While Joe Lieberman was not alone in believing that Iraq was a threat to American interests and its neighbors, he has never backed down from the benefits of and the need for war against Iraq despite the fact that the WMD were never found and almost certainly did not exist at the time of the resolution or the attack.

The senator continues to say that the overthrow of Saddam was a good thing and worth going to war for. Since the basis for his original position was the danger posed by Saddam against his neighbors based on his weapons capability and since that balloon has been punctured, he is left with the argument that Saddam was a very bad person who did horrible things to his internal enemies; no one has disputed this but it was not the basis of the threat against our interests or Iraq’s neighbors.

Since Iraq clearly did not pose the threat that was the basis for the attack, Joe Lieberman and George Bush are stuck with bringing democracy to Iraq and overthrowing a very bad tyrant who threatened no one but his own internal enemies. For this and not the attacks against New York and Washington we have lost more than 2,500 lives, 20,000 wounded – many severely, and $4 billion every week of the year with no end in sight. And, of course, Iraq has become the center of the war on terror.

It is one thing for Senator Lieberman to oppose pulling out of Iraq saying that in his view it would be bad for the U.S. and its interests, but he cannot bring himself to say that going in was based on erroneous intelligence and that he was wrong. He has accused his primary opponent of not understanding the geo-political situation. As all his support for the attack was based on his estimates of Iraqi power that has turned out to be completely wrong, he should be more specific about what his opponent doesn’t get.

Iraq has proven to be one of the worst American geo-political blunders of all time. Joe Lieberman was one of the principal instigators of this blunder. The people of Connecticut have seen through the calamity and are calling him on it. Their fear is that through his political trickery going against Joe will be hurtful to their goal of electing a Congress that will provide real oversight to an administration that has lost its way and has no idea how to get us out this mess. Joe Lieberman is out for no one but himself at this point.

Please forward my two postings on Senator Lieberman to any Connecticut voters you may know. Thanks!

Joe must go!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

We Feel Good

2006-07-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

In the Washington Post on July 4, 2006, columnist Abigail Trafford waxed eloquently about the tragedy of suicide, particularly among older men among whom it is becoming quite common. Basically, Trafford linked most such suicides to depression, mental illness and the impact of ageism. I’ll link this posting with her column so that you may make your own judgments about these views.

Today at lunch, three of my friends and I discussed the subject and came to a rather different conclusion from Trafford. All of us are in our early to mid-seventies and all suffer from a smorgasbord of the maladies associated with aging, including cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and mild to serious vision and hearing impairments, among other things. We are retired federal managers who worked together and have been friends for more than a third of a century. The event that inspired the column and the luncheon topic was the highly publicized apparent suicide of a prominent Maryland publisher who was reportedly depressed because of heart disease. The columnist found that this duality matched her profile of the suicide prone quite well.

At least three of us indicated that we had contemplated suicide as a possible end to our lives many times since middle age. The discussion quickly cut to the heart of the matter: talk is cheap and such thoughts are purely hypothetical until acted upon – and none of us has attempted it. We discussed the Maryland case as well as the death of George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak who committed suicide at the height of his corporate power. In both of these cases, the perpetrator/victims were men of wealth who did not match the profiles of those at our table.

Trying not to be snappy, the consensus at the light hearted luncheon discussion was that ending one’s own life might well be based on far different circumstances from those who were the prime subjects of the article. Economics did not come into play in the column, but we felt that this was a very important element in the decision. Sticking strictly with the older men subset of suicides, we thought that poor men had less of a financial stake in the decision. A poor older fellow intent on going on living despite a determination that his quality of life was poor could do so much longer than subjects of middle or higher income and resources but who were still not wealthy. The death of the former was considered to have less economic impact on his survivors than the latter who would have to use resources initially intended for his survivors to continue on.

Leaving money behind – no pun intended – the question arises: is it normal to feel the loss of quality of life without being depressed? Speaking for myself and – I’m guessing for my companions – we have all lost some physical abilities, but this, in itself, has not caused us great difficulties or undue depression. Since all of us had worked in highly charged atmospheres using our mental faculties and long experience in complex bureaucratic situations, it is the loss of mental acuity that we fear most.

It was at this juncture that we agreed that if we sensed significant drop in our intellectual abilities that there would be in a very real sense a loss of our personhood. With no great sense of depression would it not be reasonable to attempt to end it all before a total loss of ourselves and our esteem set in? Obviously, we, like most, wish to cling a little longer and at some point, the danger would be that we would no longer have the physical, mental or emotional capacity to commit suicide.

Before we skipped to lighter topics such as world peace, we toasted our health, such as it is, and the very high quality of each of our lives. While the statistics used by Trafford are very interesting, we felt strongly that her conclusions were far from the mark when it came to men like ourselves.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/03/AR2006070300764.html

World peace is good and worthy of serious contemplation, and we drank to it.

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Joe Lieberman for Senate

2006-07-04T08:27:00.000-07:00

Should Joe Lieberman be turned out of the United States Senate?

Democrats in Connecticut must choose whether to keep Lieberman who has been acceptable to them for eighteen years or to elect his primary opponent based on his position on a single issue, the Iraq War. This is the nature of republican form of government. We elect people to represent us, to study the issues and to make decisions based on balancing the short term desires of the voters and the long term needs of the constituents and the nation.

Democratic voters in Connecticut are incensed by Lieberman’s stand on the war. It was one thing to be in favor of the conflict based on the yarns that the Bush administration wove into a fabric alleging that Saddam posed a security threat to the U.S. But the lame defenses of the attack put up by the President after his WMD rationale tripped over itself have completely turned off Nutmeg voters – and the vast majority of other Americans. But Joe hops from clambake to clambake happily spouting that getting rid of Saddam was a great thing despite the facts about WMD and the unmade connection between al Qaeda and Saddam’s government and his seemingly obliviousness to the great cost in blood and treasure and the bogging down of our military even as the world grows evermore dangerous.

Suffice it to say, Joe’s apologies for the Bush war are convincing almost none of the Democratic faithful in his state. He still appears to be in the lead in the primary, but that is clearly based on the balancing that the voters in a republic are forced to stagger under. Almost no Democrats facing the choice agree with the baloney Joe is spewing on the war, and seeing the he’s in trouble in, the Senator is preparing to run in the general election as an Independent and has signaled his intent to vote in the Senate Democratic Caucus if he’s returned to office.

Obviously, we expect our representatives to use their independent judgment in voting on issues and only when they fail us too many times or too badly should we turn them out. That is exactly the equation the Democrats in Connecticut are figuring, and the decision of each voter hinges on the answer to: does the Senator’s unrelenting support of the President on the Iraq War when balanced against the possibility, however remote, that their decision could sustain the Republican majority in the Senate that is viewed by these same voters as damaging to the national interest warrant the defeat of Joe Lieberman?

Each voter must balance eighteen years of relative happiness with one grave failure. To me this is a watershed decision. Lieberman’s unrepentant stance in favor of the Bush administration’s policy on the war on terror, highlighted by the attack on Iraq, is so great that were I a voter in this primary, I’d turn him out in a heartbeat. If we don’t show our politicians that they are being judged and that we’re willing to send them packing in a case of grievous departure from our wishes then we have in effect created a permanent class of office holders.

Thumbs Down! Off with his head!

Blog on!

Wild Bill

Energy Independence

2006-07-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, this posting was begun in anger, and I’m glad that I didn’t place it before you without sleeping on it.

In listening to President Bush and Republican presidents since Richard Nixon you could easily surmise that America doesn’t have a real energy crisis and that all we have to do is apply the principals of supply side economics to our fuel needs. We can simply produce our way to energy independence. Oh, sure, we might have to make some minor adjustments at the fringes but nothing really hurtful to our life style.

For openers, presidents of both parties from Nixon to the incumbent pooh-pooh naysayers and pessimists who they charge with being wrong on energy and all other spheres and have no future in America. Looking back at the darkest moments in living memory, politicos remember the ostrich approach championed by presidents from Harding to Hoover whose `chicken in every pot’ held sway until the whole house nearly collapsed. The Democrats had no chance until Franklin Roosevelt came forward and promised to do something – anything. Damned if he didn’t, and the right has been railing about the high taxes on the rich ever since.

Democrats, on the other hand, have led on the energy crunch using the Chicken Little approach of pointing out that the sky is falling. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election almost as much for his views on energy and the negativity permeating America as for his appearance of helplessness in the face of Iran’s kidnapping of the American Embassy personnel in Tehran. In government things sometimes have to get worse before they get better. Clearly Carter was too far out in front of his countrymen on energy. Democrats have sought conservation through regulation, and they ought to look at their position in the electoral process before reaffirming their usual direction.

Since the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, it’s been government by musical chairs in dealing with the long term crises. Presidents and Congress approach the energy crisis as they did hurricanes: develop disaster plans, file reports, issue press releases, create agencies, and hope the damn thing holds off until they’re in Hawaii happily collecting their annuities. Sadly, along came Katrina and, like Hoover, the incumbent – Bush – had no one but Brownie to blame.

Similarly, Bush was the odd man out on gasoline prices. Being an expert on deflection, he had to turn the fan on the Saudis, Chinese, and even his pals in big oil when the excrement started to fly. Instead of recognizing that it might actually be time to level with the public and begin an adult approach to energy a full generation after Carter tried, Bush opened the classic Republican playbook and offered us supply side energy policy.

Energy is much like Katrina: pols make plans for energy independence, fund lots of pork on alternative sources, pay for some exotic R&D, give tax breaks for technologies that might be viable in twenty years and pray that their pensions kick in before reality of the situation becomes obvious. Oh, and most important, they make fun of serious scientists and intellectually bent members of their own class who say we’re in trouble. Cassandras like Al Gore, James Hansen, and lots of environmentalists are negativists who see nothing but bad things. Ronald Reagan wiped the floor with Jimmy Carter by pointing out that America remains the city on the hill with no need for gloom and doom. America is the land of opportunity, and we’ll be damned if we’ll change our ways in the face of temporary bad news.

Hovering, however, is that a major goal of al Qaeda is to kick us – America and our Western allies - out of Muslim lands and to overthrow the governments of some of the richest oil states such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and now Iraq which are perceived to be propped up by us simply to get at their oil without so much as a by your leave for the poor citizens. For sixty years we’ve built our society on cheap oil, and we’ve approached the Middle East commodity owners with the single minded idea of keeping the supply flowing. We’ve ridden this tiger for so long we don’t have a clue on how to dismount and neither political party has uttered a word on how to deal with this problem. Don’t expect one before November.

Every Republican policy statement is based on supply. We’ll increase the use of ethanol, drill offshore on the continental shelf, open up the Arctic wildlife refuge, build more nuclear plants, fund clean coal technologies, encourage alternate forms of energy such as wind and solar; the list goes on and on. Frankly, some of these approaches do make sense given the pains we’re beginning to suffer and that will increase exponentially in the years ahead. But we can’t just go cold turkey on Middle Eastern oil. We will have to increase supply and disappoint some liberals, but we’re going to have to come to grips with a future with expensive – very expensive - energy.

But today’s approach is all happiness and there will be little pain in the future. There will be no increase in the federal gasoline tax. Conservation will be mandated by the market, but that is mentioned only in passing, if at all. But the market will weigh most heavily on the poor and middle classes. Filling up Jaguars or BMWs at $5.00 a gallon will never be a problem for the well to do but that price will drown the exurban poor driving ten year old Chevys thirty miles to low wage jobs.

We’ve built the society on cheap energy: huge houses, gas guzzling SUVs, and roads to the horizon. The cars will be dealt with over a decade or so as we trade for smaller more efficient vehicles, but the last to get the appropriate vehicles will be those most in need. The McMansions will be with us for several generations and as their values go down the nature of their residents will change. Oil and gas will continue to be the energy sources of need, if not choice.

How are we to deal with these painful adjustments? The supply siders are wrong, and the liberals are too draconian, and we must find a middle way. We must do what is reasonable to ease the economy and our people through what is bound to be a very agonizing process of conservation. We’ve got to be realistic on domestic oil. Can we pass up the chance to provide up to six percent of the daily petroleum needs of the country at a price that is likely to dampen the world cost and be developed with very reasonable safety risks by passing up the Arctic Wildlife Refuge? Many say yes; I say no – we must proceed. The same goes for the continental shelf. It’s easy for environmentalists to say no, but they condemn the poor and middle classes to ever greater pain in the market.

On the other hand, no matter how much bunkum is spread about clean coal, it’s filthy stuff. Even the low sulfur coal of the Powder River basin will spew thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. New nuclear plants will almost certainly have to be built to provide the electric power for our ever more conservation conscious society.

The article that prompted this gusher of words about oil was in yesterday’s Washington Post. Two energy scientists exploded the myth of ethanol. Sad to say, all of the alternatives to oil have plenty of minuses. I’m linking the op-ed article. It makes all the sense in the world and destroys the dreams of farmers and politicians for a painless yet profitable transition from Middle Eastern oil.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/30/AR2006063001480.html?referrer=emailarticle

None of this makes for joyful reading, but we are in the beginning stages of our recovery from the addiction to oil. As we move into the new era, the withdrawal symptoms will lessen, so don’t fret. Remember, even if we can’t make cost effective energy from crops, beer, wine and spirits come from our green friends, and it’s four o’clock somewhere.

Blog on!

Wild Bill