Woodrow Wilson was tormented by Republican isolationists. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. of Massachusetts was a particular thorn in his side and is credited with successfully leading the charge against the U.S. joining the League of Nations that Wilson championed so valiantly. There are cynics who believe that Lodge and his cohort whipped poor Woody into the stroke that killed him. And, ultimately, that failure led to the calamity that was World War II.
Woody and Franklin Roosevelt were my childhood heroes. I must admit, however, that it wasn’t until I was much older that I came to know they didn’t really like each other. The civics teachers of my youth – you don’t know what civics is or was? – too bad! – placed Wilson on such a high pedestal that I thought he had been canonized. His fourteen points – it was fourteen wasn’t it? – were gospel for these molders of youthful minds in the nineteen forties. That every Balkan family could be its own nation if it wanted to be made sense to young idealists, and there was no other approach to American foreign policy that should be entertained, according to junior high school teachers of the day.
It was Wilsonian doctrine that shaped my views toward the United Nations in the years following W.W. II and, especially, when the North Koreans attacked their countrymen. Only as I aged and came to live through other eras did I begin to challenge the notions drilled into me during the most malleable years of my life.
I came to see the UN as a useful but flawed – even corrupt – institution but an absolutely necessary vehicle for airing world grievances and for developing coalitions for putting down actions by states acting outside international norms. Thus Korea, the Balkans, the invasion of Kuwait, and many other similar ventures could be argued – sometimes successfully – before major international unions like the UN and NATO.
However flawed the UN or other international alliances, they gave cover to the U.S. in foreign affairs - until the debacle that is Iraq today. We stepped out from behind the curtain and acted on our own – with a phony coalition designed to hide that fact. When the mission began to flounder, we had to cover our tracks. We needed a philosophical underpinning for our folly, and the neocons were at the ready with Woody’s idealism and his fourteen – it was fourteen, right? – points and democracy for everybody with the U.S. for delivering it.
Only now the real Republicans, moderates, independents, and everyone else, including me, who’d weaned themselves from Woody years ago and who’d moved on to the realpolitik of Tricky Dick, Dr. Strangelove, and Bret Scowcroft had bought into what old Lodge had tried to tell us.
It took a good while, but Woody sure is taking his revenge on the Republicans. Sadly, we’re all in the boat with them.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Sunday, November 27, 2005
It Might As Well Be Spring
It’s almost spring! I’m not really a scold by nature; I’d rather be gardening or drinking Bud and watching the Red Sox than chastising neocons. Yesterday’s fulmination against the president has again sated the beast of my syndrome, Blogus Bovinus Wastus, so I’m going to take another short sabbatical from raising your collective blood pressure.
Truly, I’m a very positive person and could pass for a Transcendentalist from Concord. Years ago, on one of my many visits to Ohio, I heard the lame joke that there were only two seasons in that wonderful state: winter and road repair. Sadly, I’ve heard that old wag’s tale repeated about many other locales and many times since.
But there really are only two seasons for optimists. The myth of a four season climate in many parts of the United States is simply hollow for those of us raised on Walden Pond. After pondering the problem for many years, I realized that everyone is out of step but me. There are only two seasons, spring and fall. The solstices are real but the equinoxes are but fiction.
But the solstices are mislabeled. There is no winter or summer for true optimists – other than those who label themselves farmers. Winter is cold and summer is hot, too hot and too cold. If we begin with the premise that the winter solstice is a new beginning – as almost all of our ancestors did all the way back to the times that they didn’t write this wastus down – we can eliminate the need for winter. Naturally, the same impeccable logic in reverse eliminates our need to recognize summer.
So join me in celebrating the new year (lower case) on December 21. We can cavort naked and proclaim the rites of spring, and – like true optimists – our new calendar can continue to recognize all of the primitive holidays eliminated in our hearts. In June, we can repeat the process and welcome the fall and its harvest.
Writing a blog that doesn’t criticize the Used Car Salesman in Chief in La casa Blanca makes me feel very cheerful. Obviously, spring is in the air.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Optimist in Chief
Truly, I’m a very positive person and could pass for a Transcendentalist from Concord. Years ago, on one of my many visits to Ohio, I heard the lame joke that there were only two seasons in that wonderful state: winter and road repair. Sadly, I’ve heard that old wag’s tale repeated about many other locales and many times since.
But there really are only two seasons for optimists. The myth of a four season climate in many parts of the United States is simply hollow for those of us raised on Walden Pond. After pondering the problem for many years, I realized that everyone is out of step but me. There are only two seasons, spring and fall. The solstices are real but the equinoxes are but fiction.
But the solstices are mislabeled. There is no winter or summer for true optimists – other than those who label themselves farmers. Winter is cold and summer is hot, too hot and too cold. If we begin with the premise that the winter solstice is a new beginning – as almost all of our ancestors did all the way back to the times that they didn’t write this wastus down – we can eliminate the need for winter. Naturally, the same impeccable logic in reverse eliminates our need to recognize summer.
So join me in celebrating the new year (lower case) on December 21. We can cavort naked and proclaim the rites of spring, and – like true optimists – our new calendar can continue to recognize all of the primitive holidays eliminated in our hearts. In June, we can repeat the process and welcome the fall and its harvest.
Writing a blog that doesn’t criticize the Used Car Salesman in Chief in La casa Blanca makes me feel very cheerful. Obviously, spring is in the air.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Optimist in Chief
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Of Course We Were Deceived
In the days prior to the invasion of Iraq, were we deceived by President George W. Bush? The answer is: YES! The president and his inner circle deliberately misled the American people into believing that the threat posed by Iraq to the United States and its allies was grave and imminent.
The president, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Advisor Rice and a small core of advisors in and out of government deliberately deceived us with the intent of taking us to war with Iraq. Each of them stated repeatedly that Saddam Hussein’s army had weapons of mass destruction and that he posed an imminent and grave threat to our nation and its allies.
Those same people are now deconstructing that argument and attempting to deceive us again by saying that because part of that argument has turned out to have been based on faulty intelligence that the entire argument falters because the CIA and the intelligence agencies of our allies were wrong so they did not deceive us. This is wrong!
It is very unsettling to think that our intelligence was as bad as it turned out to be, but that is an irrelevant part of the argument. The real question was – based on the intelligence available to the president – should he have taken the nation to war? Let us examine the question and, further, assume the CIA and our allies were correct in their estimates of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam had at his disposal chemical and biological weapons and he was seeking to reconstitute his nuclear capacity.
The real question at that point was did Iraq constitute a threat sufficient to get us into the quagmire that we face today? Giving Saddam the benefit of the doubt on these issues, there is no way that a decision to invade should have been made. First, chemical weapons are useful when attacking defenseless people such as the Kurds resident in Iraq. They are useless and counterproductive against any modern state such as the U.S., Israel or any Muslim state in the region friendly to the U.S. The Germans discovered this in World War I when the allies used the same weapons against them and when the wind turned and blew the gas on their own soldiers.
Without hesitation, Hitler would have used chemical weapons in World War II had he thought they would be effective. The Geneva Convention and other treaties notwithstanding, Germany didn’t use them because they are ineffective. Saddam knew that and our professional military leaders knew it. Using these weapons against our allies in the region would have been tantamount to suicide for Saddam and his nation. And Saddam, as we learned from his hiding in a rabbit hole, was certainly not intent on becoming a suicide victim.
Biological weapons, while potentially far more dangerous than chemical weapons, pose almost all of the same problems for nations that would use them. Its citizens are not immune to the effects, and certainly the U.S. and its allies would have been able to check any threat of use by Iraq with the greater threat of massive retaliation. President Bush and his advisors had access to military advisors who could have told them this.
Assuming that Saddam was attempting to buy yellow cake uranium in Africa was correct – which it was not – Saddam would have been years away from developing a nuclear weapon. President Bush should have known this. Certainly Defense Department and Energy Department officials would have been pleased to supply this information if the question had been asked.
That our intelligence on WMDs was wrong was irrelevant. Even had Saddam been armed with the weaponry he was charged with having, he posed no grave or imminent threat to us or our allies as a result of such possession.
On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists, and President Bush properly said we would go after them and hunt down and kill or capture every last one of them. The U.S. demanded that Taliban give up Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. They refused and we declared them to be the enemy. We assembled an in international coalition to fight the Taliban and chase down the leadership of al Qaeda. The American nation was behind the president almost to a person.
Shortly after that, the public relations campaign against Saddam began. It was not clear to many that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S. The false argument that there were WMDs and that everyone knew it was irrelevant. Again - was he an imminent threat was the real question?
Again, assuming he had these weapons, the United Nations and the first Bush and Clinton administrations were successfully containing Iraq with the sanctions and no-fly zone policies put in place after the Gulf War. Everything we have learned since the invasion has supported this conclusion.
Since our war leaders turned out not to be able to make their case on WMDs and in tying al Qaeda to Saddam’s government, the administration has dragged out the false argument that it is in our national security interests to promote democracy in Iraq as an appropriate reason fro the invasion and occupation. This has been an unmitigated disaster.
Muslims reject American interference even as many of them say they embrace some form of democracy. We are infidels and any government that comes out of our intervention will be viewed as illegitimate even if it meets the test of being democratic. Thus, the new government will be fair game for any rebels and jihadists so inclined.
All of the right wing pundits are slamming the Democrats in Congress for wanting to bring the troops home and are tarring them with the brush of Michael Moore and other left wing ideologues. The vast majority of those opposed to the war, including most Congressional Democrats, recognize the abject failure of the Bush Iraq War and occupation adventures but see that we simply can’t load up the boats tomorrow and bring them home.
Even Bush knows he’s totally lost his focus on the War on Terror and is looking for a way out of Iraq. The only question among mainstream people is the timing and condition of our withdrawal. The new Iraqi government must ultimately stand on its own, dependent on its own police and army. The way things are going now, the Shias and Kurds are running the show and are in no hurry to get us out of the fight with the Sunnis. The Kurds and Shias are going to inherit what they need from the war, relative autonomy and oil revenue. That the Sunnis, hated as they are by the other two major ethnic groups, are left with parched soil and no oil suits the other two’s interests almost perfectly.
We have created a power vacuum and are filling it ourselves; we must insist that it be filled by Iraqis sooner than later. Both Bush and the Democrats understand this. Bush wants to have a free hand in deciding when that is, and the Democrats want commitments as to when troop drawdown will begin in earnest – not just bringing home those added to the force during the election process.
The American people are beginning to fully comprehend the debacle that is happening in Iraq and no amount of right wing deception can restore the president’s sagging credibility. “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” It’s over.
Bush can save his presidency only by racing to the front in the direction that the American people are already marching. He better get at it soon; there are fewer followers every day.
Bush has created a calamity for the U.S. No one will deny that most Iraqis are personally better off – economically and politically – than under Saddam. But it is not clear that that the weakened state or states that will emerge from our folly will enhance our strategic position in the Middle East. It is likely that much greater instability from a bellicose Kurdish sector will enrage the Turks and others and a Shia tilt toward Iran - that is already evident - will weaken us greatly in the region.
All in all, this has been the greatest failure of any modern American presidency.
You bet we were deceived! You bet we are being deceived!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
The president, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Advisor Rice and a small core of advisors in and out of government deliberately deceived us with the intent of taking us to war with Iraq. Each of them stated repeatedly that Saddam Hussein’s army had weapons of mass destruction and that he posed an imminent and grave threat to our nation and its allies.
Those same people are now deconstructing that argument and attempting to deceive us again by saying that because part of that argument has turned out to have been based on faulty intelligence that the entire argument falters because the CIA and the intelligence agencies of our allies were wrong so they did not deceive us. This is wrong!
It is very unsettling to think that our intelligence was as bad as it turned out to be, but that is an irrelevant part of the argument. The real question was – based on the intelligence available to the president – should he have taken the nation to war? Let us examine the question and, further, assume the CIA and our allies were correct in their estimates of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam had at his disposal chemical and biological weapons and he was seeking to reconstitute his nuclear capacity.
The real question at that point was did Iraq constitute a threat sufficient to get us into the quagmire that we face today? Giving Saddam the benefit of the doubt on these issues, there is no way that a decision to invade should have been made. First, chemical weapons are useful when attacking defenseless people such as the Kurds resident in Iraq. They are useless and counterproductive against any modern state such as the U.S., Israel or any Muslim state in the region friendly to the U.S. The Germans discovered this in World War I when the allies used the same weapons against them and when the wind turned and blew the gas on their own soldiers.
Without hesitation, Hitler would have used chemical weapons in World War II had he thought they would be effective. The Geneva Convention and other treaties notwithstanding, Germany didn’t use them because they are ineffective. Saddam knew that and our professional military leaders knew it. Using these weapons against our allies in the region would have been tantamount to suicide for Saddam and his nation. And Saddam, as we learned from his hiding in a rabbit hole, was certainly not intent on becoming a suicide victim.
Biological weapons, while potentially far more dangerous than chemical weapons, pose almost all of the same problems for nations that would use them. Its citizens are not immune to the effects, and certainly the U.S. and its allies would have been able to check any threat of use by Iraq with the greater threat of massive retaliation. President Bush and his advisors had access to military advisors who could have told them this.
Assuming that Saddam was attempting to buy yellow cake uranium in Africa was correct – which it was not – Saddam would have been years away from developing a nuclear weapon. President Bush should have known this. Certainly Defense Department and Energy Department officials would have been pleased to supply this information if the question had been asked.
That our intelligence on WMDs was wrong was irrelevant. Even had Saddam been armed with the weaponry he was charged with having, he posed no grave or imminent threat to us or our allies as a result of such possession.
On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists, and President Bush properly said we would go after them and hunt down and kill or capture every last one of them. The U.S. demanded that Taliban give up Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. They refused and we declared them to be the enemy. We assembled an in international coalition to fight the Taliban and chase down the leadership of al Qaeda. The American nation was behind the president almost to a person.
Shortly after that, the public relations campaign against Saddam began. It was not clear to many that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S. The false argument that there were WMDs and that everyone knew it was irrelevant. Again - was he an imminent threat was the real question?
Again, assuming he had these weapons, the United Nations and the first Bush and Clinton administrations were successfully containing Iraq with the sanctions and no-fly zone policies put in place after the Gulf War. Everything we have learned since the invasion has supported this conclusion.
Since our war leaders turned out not to be able to make their case on WMDs and in tying al Qaeda to Saddam’s government, the administration has dragged out the false argument that it is in our national security interests to promote democracy in Iraq as an appropriate reason fro the invasion and occupation. This has been an unmitigated disaster.
Muslims reject American interference even as many of them say they embrace some form of democracy. We are infidels and any government that comes out of our intervention will be viewed as illegitimate even if it meets the test of being democratic. Thus, the new government will be fair game for any rebels and jihadists so inclined.
All of the right wing pundits are slamming the Democrats in Congress for wanting to bring the troops home and are tarring them with the brush of Michael Moore and other left wing ideologues. The vast majority of those opposed to the war, including most Congressional Democrats, recognize the abject failure of the Bush Iraq War and occupation adventures but see that we simply can’t load up the boats tomorrow and bring them home.
Even Bush knows he’s totally lost his focus on the War on Terror and is looking for a way out of Iraq. The only question among mainstream people is the timing and condition of our withdrawal. The new Iraqi government must ultimately stand on its own, dependent on its own police and army. The way things are going now, the Shias and Kurds are running the show and are in no hurry to get us out of the fight with the Sunnis. The Kurds and Shias are going to inherit what they need from the war, relative autonomy and oil revenue. That the Sunnis, hated as they are by the other two major ethnic groups, are left with parched soil and no oil suits the other two’s interests almost perfectly.
We have created a power vacuum and are filling it ourselves; we must insist that it be filled by Iraqis sooner than later. Both Bush and the Democrats understand this. Bush wants to have a free hand in deciding when that is, and the Democrats want commitments as to when troop drawdown will begin in earnest – not just bringing home those added to the force during the election process.
The American people are beginning to fully comprehend the debacle that is happening in Iraq and no amount of right wing deception can restore the president’s sagging credibility. “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” It’s over.
Bush can save his presidency only by racing to the front in the direction that the American people are already marching. He better get at it soon; there are fewer followers every day.
Bush has created a calamity for the U.S. No one will deny that most Iraqis are personally better off – economically and politically – than under Saddam. But it is not clear that that the weakened state or states that will emerge from our folly will enhance our strategic position in the Middle East. It is likely that much greater instability from a bellicose Kurdish sector will enrage the Turks and others and a Shia tilt toward Iran - that is already evident - will weaken us greatly in the region.
All in all, this has been the greatest failure of any modern American presidency.
You bet we were deceived! You bet we are being deceived!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Happy Thanksgiving
I am very thankful today and wish the same for all who read these words.
On a personal level, I’m blessed with a loving wife with whom I have shared a comfortable and occasionally exciting life, three fine sons all of whom are happily married and completely independent from us and who need no real help from the old folks, eight grandchildren who are making their way through decent suburban school systems, and many great and good friends. All of these fine folks are progressing through life with no life threatening diseases or disabilities. As I look on Thanksgivings past, I see myself in the role of the grandfather in Norman Rockwell’s great W.W. II illustration depicting Freedom from Want.
We live in a truly great country under a wondrous system of government. Ever since the buildup to the Iraq War, I have been slamming President Bush and those who surround and support him. Regularly, often more than once a day, I write public pieces on this Blog that slam his policies and that make him out to be an incompetent leader. Daily, I share media reports with my friends that show high government officials to be deceivers and mean spirited people intent on action that I think is detrimental to the interests of the nation. I publicly deplore policies that shift national resources away from the truly needy to those who already have more than their fair share of the goods of life. And regularly I blast captains of industry as heartless and blind to the plight of the truly unfortunate.
Yet very few residents of this great land, including millions of people from other countries - many of whom are here illegally, are truly starving on this holiday of bounty. Government money – federal, state and local – and private charitable donations of time, food and money assure that even the least among us are fed and protected from the elements on this day. Obviously, we could do better and we must do more and must castigate officials and institutions not doing enough, but we and they do much.
For all I do – not the positive work of the saints who actually feed the needy and succor the poor – in yapping at the heels of the mighty, what truly makes America great is that there is no knock on my door in the middle of the night. I sleep without fear of President Bush, of Vice President Cheney, of the CIA and the FBI. I and you can speak the truth as we see it and walk down our street without fear from commissars or brown shirts of any brand.
So today I’ll take time from the things I disagree with to wish all those for whom I usually have no kind words and hope that they too have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Back at them tomorrow!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
On a personal level, I’m blessed with a loving wife with whom I have shared a comfortable and occasionally exciting life, three fine sons all of whom are happily married and completely independent from us and who need no real help from the old folks, eight grandchildren who are making their way through decent suburban school systems, and many great and good friends. All of these fine folks are progressing through life with no life threatening diseases or disabilities. As I look on Thanksgivings past, I see myself in the role of the grandfather in Norman Rockwell’s great W.W. II illustration depicting Freedom from Want.
We live in a truly great country under a wondrous system of government. Ever since the buildup to the Iraq War, I have been slamming President Bush and those who surround and support him. Regularly, often more than once a day, I write public pieces on this Blog that slam his policies and that make him out to be an incompetent leader. Daily, I share media reports with my friends that show high government officials to be deceivers and mean spirited people intent on action that I think is detrimental to the interests of the nation. I publicly deplore policies that shift national resources away from the truly needy to those who already have more than their fair share of the goods of life. And regularly I blast captains of industry as heartless and blind to the plight of the truly unfortunate.
Yet very few residents of this great land, including millions of people from other countries - many of whom are here illegally, are truly starving on this holiday of bounty. Government money – federal, state and local – and private charitable donations of time, food and money assure that even the least among us are fed and protected from the elements on this day. Obviously, we could do better and we must do more and must castigate officials and institutions not doing enough, but we and they do much.
For all I do – not the positive work of the saints who actually feed the needy and succor the poor – in yapping at the heels of the mighty, what truly makes America great is that there is no knock on my door in the middle of the night. I sleep without fear of President Bush, of Vice President Cheney, of the CIA and the FBI. I and you can speak the truth as we see it and walk down our street without fear from commissars or brown shirts of any brand.
So today I’ll take time from the things I disagree with to wish all those for whom I usually have no kind words and hope that they too have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Back at them tomorrow!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
What Me Worry?
Dick Cheney is thrashing about and trashing everyone with contrary opinions to his own regarding the Iraq War. He loved it when he was perceived as the eminence grise behind the `what me worry’ Alfred E. Newman in the White House, but now he’s working overtime to slash opponents of the war and appearing to defend the president. In actuality, his language leaves the president holding the bag for the war. “How dare they say the President would manipulate intelligence, etc., etc., etc.” Isn’t the Veep great defending the President whose war this now is - in spades. Never did Dick stand behind and whisper in the ear; no siree, not our Dick.
Jack Murtha’s not a bad guy, misguided, but not a bad guy, but the rest of you even thinking that the president would manipulate intelligence in order to start the war in Iraq. That’s shameful and dishonest to even let that thought cross your rotten, corrupt, little minds.
The boys in the La Casa Blanca seem to be settling in on a strategy of words; a strategy that makes no sense whatever. It’s okay for Democrat Congressmen to criticize, providing they say George didn’t cook the books. But they can’t criticize unless they come with an alternative.
There are only three choices in Iraq. Stay the course; pull out immediately; or pull out over time. And clearly the Democrats are beating the drums for the last, phased withdrawal. Frick and Frack jump through the ceiling when the phased withdrawal is mentioned as that’s the course they want to follow but can’t bring themselves to say. Obviously, we can’t stay until every Iraqi civilian is dead; we have to plan on leaving. And no matter who says or does it, the insurgents are well aware of our options. The only thing in question is the timing. Alfred E. Newman says we have to wait until the Iraqis can take over. Obviously, the Shias and the Kurds are perfectly willing to have us fight till the last Sunni, and unless we tell them we’re bugging, they’ll be content to let us bleed to death.
By stressing time phased withdrawal the Dems have stolen the administration’s thunder, so Dick and A. E. Newman have to say that’s a terrible idea. But it’s the only idea, and at least Dick knows it. How to get from here to there? Lay the war and the retreat at Frick’s doorstep and blame the cowardly liberals for forcing Frick out before he could finish the job. Just how damn poor is that? Plenty! And clever, too.
So as Dick slashes and burns and blames George for starting the fire, we’ll get out while Dick does his best to walk away from any role in the calamity that he was once proud to bask in reflected glory for having started and won. Obviously, Dick’s the first person in the lifeboat.
Give me a break.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Jack Murtha’s not a bad guy, misguided, but not a bad guy, but the rest of you even thinking that the president would manipulate intelligence in order to start the war in Iraq. That’s shameful and dishonest to even let that thought cross your rotten, corrupt, little minds.
The boys in the La Casa Blanca seem to be settling in on a strategy of words; a strategy that makes no sense whatever. It’s okay for Democrat Congressmen to criticize, providing they say George didn’t cook the books. But they can’t criticize unless they come with an alternative.
There are only three choices in Iraq. Stay the course; pull out immediately; or pull out over time. And clearly the Democrats are beating the drums for the last, phased withdrawal. Frick and Frack jump through the ceiling when the phased withdrawal is mentioned as that’s the course they want to follow but can’t bring themselves to say. Obviously, we can’t stay until every Iraqi civilian is dead; we have to plan on leaving. And no matter who says or does it, the insurgents are well aware of our options. The only thing in question is the timing. Alfred E. Newman says we have to wait until the Iraqis can take over. Obviously, the Shias and the Kurds are perfectly willing to have us fight till the last Sunni, and unless we tell them we’re bugging, they’ll be content to let us bleed to death.
By stressing time phased withdrawal the Dems have stolen the administration’s thunder, so Dick and A. E. Newman have to say that’s a terrible idea. But it’s the only idea, and at least Dick knows it. How to get from here to there? Lay the war and the retreat at Frick’s doorstep and blame the cowardly liberals for forcing Frick out before he could finish the job. Just how damn poor is that? Plenty! And clever, too.
So as Dick slashes and burns and blames George for starting the fire, we’ll get out while Dick does his best to walk away from any role in the calamity that he was once proud to bask in reflected glory for having started and won. Obviously, Dick’s the first person in the lifeboat.
Give me a break.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Monday, November 21, 2005
Off with the SPLOGGERS
I can’t remember who said it or where I read it but someone mused that blogs are the nearest thing to what the founders intended when creating the first amendment to the Constitution. Sadly, over recent decades the mainstream media has failed the citizenry. The New York Times showed poor oversight of Judith Miller who was in the thrall of Washington insiders intent on attacking Iraq, and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post has been shown to have feet of clay by playing footsy with pretty much the same wrecking crew.
So blogs, fair and foul, fill the electronic ether with their frothing about George Bush, Michael Moore and a million and one other topics and readers have turned away from traditional media outlests - clearly under the control of special interests - and begun follow their favorite opinion makers. Right wing giants such as Drudge and Limbaugh are now seen as mere hacks for those who would turn us into a theocracy akin to Iran West, and poor Al Franken rails about the unfairness of it all while he throws equally foul bombs at Rush and Matt.
Quietly, small fry like Wild Bill, speaking only truth – as you well know – from the center of the political spectrum, are picking up readers one by one. Bill’s rants – actually calming oil on the water of nasty discourse – simply and gently labels them all idiots and calls for a new Enlightenment where reason rules once again. Sadly, Bill’s blog is being captured by the profit minded and evil SPLOGGERS intent on piggy backing on Bill’s pearls by showing how each of you, dear readers, can earn big bucks at home by merely licking closed envelopes to other suckers.
Bill has basked in the glow of your compliments and acknowledgement of his superior qualities and has chosen to ignore the very rare comments demonstrating the lack of analytical ability of a few, but that must all end. The SPLOGGERS are overwhelming the site, and I must restrict comments. I will know that you are virtually unanimous in your praise, so don’t feel badly about being unable to post it for all to see.
As long as Brennan’s Syndrome (Blogus Bovinus Wastus) forces me to grind out these gems, you’ll have them at your service and never have to comment. Of course you love Bill.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
So blogs, fair and foul, fill the electronic ether with their frothing about George Bush, Michael Moore and a million and one other topics and readers have turned away from traditional media outlests - clearly under the control of special interests - and begun follow their favorite opinion makers. Right wing giants such as Drudge and Limbaugh are now seen as mere hacks for those who would turn us into a theocracy akin to Iran West, and poor Al Franken rails about the unfairness of it all while he throws equally foul bombs at Rush and Matt.
Quietly, small fry like Wild Bill, speaking only truth – as you well know – from the center of the political spectrum, are picking up readers one by one. Bill’s rants – actually calming oil on the water of nasty discourse – simply and gently labels them all idiots and calls for a new Enlightenment where reason rules once again. Sadly, Bill’s blog is being captured by the profit minded and evil SPLOGGERS intent on piggy backing on Bill’s pearls by showing how each of you, dear readers, can earn big bucks at home by merely licking closed envelopes to other suckers.
Bill has basked in the glow of your compliments and acknowledgement of his superior qualities and has chosen to ignore the very rare comments demonstrating the lack of analytical ability of a few, but that must all end. The SPLOGGERS are overwhelming the site, and I must restrict comments. I will know that you are virtually unanimous in your praise, so don’t feel badly about being unable to post it for all to see.
As long as Brennan’s Syndrome (Blogus Bovinus Wastus) forces me to grind out these gems, you’ll have them at your service and never have to comment. Of course you love Bill.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Humpty Dumpty
Colin Powell, no longer a member of the team, was the first to point out The Crockery Barn rule of international affairs: “You break it; you bought it.”
We just had to break that Iraqi crockery and now we can’t get out of the store without paying the bill. Iraq – really Humpty Dumpty – is now cracked and divided into three big pieces, Kurd, Shia, and Sunni, and we have no clue as to how to put it back together again. The president simply says we have to stay the course of holding the three pieces together. Liberals scream that we have to let go and let the pieces fall where they may. And new voices from the Democratic side and even some moderate Republicans are saying we’ve got to turn the cracked China over to the irate customers – all of whom are, at best, wary of each other.
It wasn’t as if George Bush wasn’t told by his own Secretary of State. Opponents of the war seized on Powell’s analogy as did even the diffident Democrats who supported the effort.
There appears to be no right answer. Simply staying the course plays into the hands of the insurgents and al Qaeda; they know that we have to go home someday, and they have the wherewithal to outwait us. Meeting the liberal demand by pulling out of the war immediately looks like a recipe for certain and immediate chaos and anarchy. The best answer – of a very poor lot - as the president hints and as moderates demand - staged withdrawal - appears to offer the only rational way out, but that could be merely postponing civil war.
George Bush broke the crockery. He’s trying hard to drag in everybody in sight saying they went shopping with him, but – sad for him – they all claim quite rightly that they were only looking in the window. It’s his war; he must admit error and find a way to get us out.
The Senate has taken and passed a vote of no confidence in George’s war. The people now see him as untrustworthy and by their poll numbers endorse the Senate’s view.
While the nature of the Congress has changed in the last couple of decades as the incumbents have learned to insulate themselves from recall by the people, the Republican moderates have got to take charge if George won’t. The ’06 election looms and threatens to spread the crockery shards all over the GOP loyalists.
George, just pay the bill. You broke; you own it. Start bringing the troops home now. It may not be a good way, but it’s the only way. Oh, and stop attacking people it only solidifies your spot in history as a failed president.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
We just had to break that Iraqi crockery and now we can’t get out of the store without paying the bill. Iraq – really Humpty Dumpty – is now cracked and divided into three big pieces, Kurd, Shia, and Sunni, and we have no clue as to how to put it back together again. The president simply says we have to stay the course of holding the three pieces together. Liberals scream that we have to let go and let the pieces fall where they may. And new voices from the Democratic side and even some moderate Republicans are saying we’ve got to turn the cracked China over to the irate customers – all of whom are, at best, wary of each other.
It wasn’t as if George Bush wasn’t told by his own Secretary of State. Opponents of the war seized on Powell’s analogy as did even the diffident Democrats who supported the effort.
There appears to be no right answer. Simply staying the course plays into the hands of the insurgents and al Qaeda; they know that we have to go home someday, and they have the wherewithal to outwait us. Meeting the liberal demand by pulling out of the war immediately looks like a recipe for certain and immediate chaos and anarchy. The best answer – of a very poor lot - as the president hints and as moderates demand - staged withdrawal - appears to offer the only rational way out, but that could be merely postponing civil war.
George Bush broke the crockery. He’s trying hard to drag in everybody in sight saying they went shopping with him, but – sad for him – they all claim quite rightly that they were only looking in the window. It’s his war; he must admit error and find a way to get us out.
The Senate has taken and passed a vote of no confidence in George’s war. The people now see him as untrustworthy and by their poll numbers endorse the Senate’s view.
While the nature of the Congress has changed in the last couple of decades as the incumbents have learned to insulate themselves from recall by the people, the Republican moderates have got to take charge if George won’t. The ’06 election looms and threatens to spread the crockery shards all over the GOP loyalists.
George, just pay the bill. You broke; you own it. Start bringing the troops home now. It may not be a good way, but it’s the only way. Oh, and stop attacking people it only solidifies your spot in history as a failed president.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Friday, November 18, 2005
Charlie, We Hardly Knew You
Hands are being wrung everywhere; can nothing be done to stop the crazy right wing?
Can we do anything about confusing the teaching of evolution with the religiously inspired `intelligent design’? Can anything be done about the administration’s labeling of anyone not in agreement with its Iraq War policy as traitors? Is there hope in slowing our rush to reform the world in our image?
Of course there are things to be done to throw a monkey wrench into the vast right wing conspiracy. First and foremost, pop open a Bud and relax.
As post New Deal excesses in the sixties doomed the left, as rightist madness in Europe ended with a decades long discrediting of Fascism, as the obvious failures of Communism led to the implosion of the Soviet Union, as the take no prisoners actions of Joe McCarthy led inevitably to the end of the right in America in the 1950s, so it will be that the new Right will shoot itself in the foot in our time. In fact the first shots have already been fired.
The terribly sad Terri Schiavo affair awakened common sense in huge numbers of very conservative Evangelical Christians and undermined the credibility of President Bush and fallen House Majority Leader Tom DeLay with a wide swath of the right wing base.
The effort by zealots to discredit the science of Charles Darwin and to require that Creationism or its latest religiously inspired act all costumed in lab coats, Intelligent Design, which had most scientists everywhere going bonkers is now in full retreat in the face of the throw the bums out results of the Dover, PA School Board election. I can’t believe that the good common sense folks in the heart of the Heartland of Kansas are going to be far behind their brethren in Dover.
On that point, in today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer skewered his Intelligent Design buddies. Charles, as many of you know, is farther right than Atilla on most subjects, but even he cannot deny his own scientific education. The following link will allow you to enjoy one of the most direct assaults on moronic design I’ve ever seen. Way to go, Chuck!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701304.html?referrer=emailarticle
Yesterday, one of the true heavyweights from the national defense wing of the Democratic Party, Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, threw a wicked huge gob of crap into the right wing war machine fan by declaring the Iraq War a failure. As expected, the President and his draft dodging chicken hawk supporters went bananas, but, no longer surprisingly, the people haven’t budged from their course to find the war ill considered.
Oh, and then there was that attack on Social Security by the President. You remember that one, don’t you? Even the Pres acknowledged that he wasn’t trying to make it solvent but rather to privatize it. What happened to that bit of legerdemain? This is a sad one because we really do have to address the problems of long term funding of the program, but the obvious effort to kill the program cost Mr. Bush all of his election capital and the rest of us what was really needed.
Well it’s coming up on noon in the National Capital Area and Wild Bill hears the call of the lager in the fridge. So ya’all just kick back and relax; the neocons, libertarians and Evangelicals are all marching in different directions and fighting among themselves. It won’t be long now.
Whew, that was close; another few years and every street in the Country would have been renamed in honor of Ronald Reagan and we moderates couldn’t have found our way to the polling booths.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Can we do anything about confusing the teaching of evolution with the religiously inspired `intelligent design’? Can anything be done about the administration’s labeling of anyone not in agreement with its Iraq War policy as traitors? Is there hope in slowing our rush to reform the world in our image?
Of course there are things to be done to throw a monkey wrench into the vast right wing conspiracy. First and foremost, pop open a Bud and relax.
As post New Deal excesses in the sixties doomed the left, as rightist madness in Europe ended with a decades long discrediting of Fascism, as the obvious failures of Communism led to the implosion of the Soviet Union, as the take no prisoners actions of Joe McCarthy led inevitably to the end of the right in America in the 1950s, so it will be that the new Right will shoot itself in the foot in our time. In fact the first shots have already been fired.
The terribly sad Terri Schiavo affair awakened common sense in huge numbers of very conservative Evangelical Christians and undermined the credibility of President Bush and fallen House Majority Leader Tom DeLay with a wide swath of the right wing base.
The effort by zealots to discredit the science of Charles Darwin and to require that Creationism or its latest religiously inspired act all costumed in lab coats, Intelligent Design, which had most scientists everywhere going bonkers is now in full retreat in the face of the throw the bums out results of the Dover, PA School Board election. I can’t believe that the good common sense folks in the heart of the Heartland of Kansas are going to be far behind their brethren in Dover.
On that point, in today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer skewered his Intelligent Design buddies. Charles, as many of you know, is farther right than Atilla on most subjects, but even he cannot deny his own scientific education. The following link will allow you to enjoy one of the most direct assaults on moronic design I’ve ever seen. Way to go, Chuck!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701304.html?referrer=emailarticle
Yesterday, one of the true heavyweights from the national defense wing of the Democratic Party, Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, threw a wicked huge gob of crap into the right wing war machine fan by declaring the Iraq War a failure. As expected, the President and his draft dodging chicken hawk supporters went bananas, but, no longer surprisingly, the people haven’t budged from their course to find the war ill considered.
Oh, and then there was that attack on Social Security by the President. You remember that one, don’t you? Even the Pres acknowledged that he wasn’t trying to make it solvent but rather to privatize it. What happened to that bit of legerdemain? This is a sad one because we really do have to address the problems of long term funding of the program, but the obvious effort to kill the program cost Mr. Bush all of his election capital and the rest of us what was really needed.
Well it’s coming up on noon in the National Capital Area and Wild Bill hears the call of the lager in the fridge. So ya’all just kick back and relax; the neocons, libertarians and Evangelicals are all marching in different directions and fighting among themselves. It won’t be long now.
Whew, that was close; another few years and every street in the Country would have been renamed in honor of Ronald Reagan and we moderates couldn’t have found our way to the polling booths.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Huh?
If, as President Bush has stated repeatedly, the intelligence on Iraq was bad, why after recognizing this did he present the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, to CIA Director George Tenet? I have nothing against Tenet, but the award seems flaky if he goofed as badly as is now being trafficked about.
While the president is doing his damnedest to find his accessories before the fact and accomplices in his Iraq War, why wasn’t he looking for those same co-conspirators when he was taking his bows aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln when the mission was accomplished?
Even if we give him the point that the Congress had the same intelligence that he had when it authorized the war – which I definitely do not – and that President Bill Clinton declared Saddam a WMD owning menace, why should these officials be charged as accomplices? After all, Mr. Clinton used this intelligence to support his policy of containment and the Congress authorized Mr. Bush to use force, if he found it essential. They didn’t make a finding that we should attack.
The president keeps saying that the world’s intelligence agencies believed Saddam had chemical and biological agents. Why then did not France, Germany and so many other nations balk at attacking Iraq? Could it be that they thought containment was working? Facts on the ground support this position.
Instead of attacking Iraq, why did we not attack Iran or North Korea, two nations clearly more dangerous than Iraq? These countries had WMDs and were in search of nuclear capability – which North Korea has succeeded in developing. Could it be that Secretary Rumsfeld’s observation – reported by Bob Woodward in his book on the run up to the conflict – that Iraq had good targets have been the reason?
Is everyone aware that we’re approaching the number of American deaths in Iraq equal to those killed on 9/11?
There were twenty-some terrorists involved in 9/11. Are there more terrorists in the world today than on that date? I don’t know, but I suspect so.
These questions are not intended to be exhaustive but simply representative. I’m too busy to write extensively; just think up your own.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
While the president is doing his damnedest to find his accessories before the fact and accomplices in his Iraq War, why wasn’t he looking for those same co-conspirators when he was taking his bows aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln when the mission was accomplished?
Even if we give him the point that the Congress had the same intelligence that he had when it authorized the war – which I definitely do not – and that President Bill Clinton declared Saddam a WMD owning menace, why should these officials be charged as accomplices? After all, Mr. Clinton used this intelligence to support his policy of containment and the Congress authorized Mr. Bush to use force, if he found it essential. They didn’t make a finding that we should attack.
The president keeps saying that the world’s intelligence agencies believed Saddam had chemical and biological agents. Why then did not France, Germany and so many other nations balk at attacking Iraq? Could it be that they thought containment was working? Facts on the ground support this position.
Instead of attacking Iraq, why did we not attack Iran or North Korea, two nations clearly more dangerous than Iraq? These countries had WMDs and were in search of nuclear capability – which North Korea has succeeded in developing. Could it be that Secretary Rumsfeld’s observation – reported by Bob Woodward in his book on the run up to the conflict – that Iraq had good targets have been the reason?
Is everyone aware that we’re approaching the number of American deaths in Iraq equal to those killed on 9/11?
There were twenty-some terrorists involved in 9/11. Are there more terrorists in the world today than on that date? I don’t know, but I suspect so.
These questions are not intended to be exhaustive but simply representative. I’m too busy to write extensively; just think up your own.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, November 12, 2005
A Drowning Man
President George W. Bush yesterday corrupted one of the most sacred holidays of the United States by using it as an opportunity to attack the patriotism of the critics of his Iraq War policy.
That Mr. Bush has been floundering is beyond question, but by his low road attack on those who questioned his decision to invade Iraq he has announced that he is drowning. Iraq has turned out to be a disaster. Two thousand American deaths, many more thousand wounded and injured, twenty thousand innocent Iraqis dead and countless wounded, our armed forces stretched and floundering in an environment in which they are at great disadvantage, and, of course, our treasury bleeding dollars – all this and more are the fault of George W. Bush.
Now Mr. Bush is seeking company in the cold dark water and is attempting to drag in the Congress and especially the Democrats into the deep with him. They had the same intelligence and they voted for the resolution in favor of the attack. Sounds Good! But it won’t wash!
The Congress, including many Republicans, hardly wanted to invade Iraq. Anyone with half a memory and brain will recall the pressure being applied to the legislators by George Bush’s administration. The hysterical performance by Bush’s Secretary of State at the U.N. in New York was merely the most outstanding act among thousands describing the imminent danger posed by Saddam. If that wasn’t a cooked presentation there never has been one.
As he fell back from imminent the danger of weapons of mass destruction to the folly of bringing democracy into the heart of a civilization that rejects us and our values, George Bush has done everything in his power to spread the blame for his fiasco. But yesterday he reached a new low by invoking the casualties already suffered and the deaths yet to come and laying them at his critics’ doors.
Shame on you, President Bush!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
That Mr. Bush has been floundering is beyond question, but by his low road attack on those who questioned his decision to invade Iraq he has announced that he is drowning. Iraq has turned out to be a disaster. Two thousand American deaths, many more thousand wounded and injured, twenty thousand innocent Iraqis dead and countless wounded, our armed forces stretched and floundering in an environment in which they are at great disadvantage, and, of course, our treasury bleeding dollars – all this and more are the fault of George W. Bush.
Now Mr. Bush is seeking company in the cold dark water and is attempting to drag in the Congress and especially the Democrats into the deep with him. They had the same intelligence and they voted for the resolution in favor of the attack. Sounds Good! But it won’t wash!
The Congress, including many Republicans, hardly wanted to invade Iraq. Anyone with half a memory and brain will recall the pressure being applied to the legislators by George Bush’s administration. The hysterical performance by Bush’s Secretary of State at the U.N. in New York was merely the most outstanding act among thousands describing the imminent danger posed by Saddam. If that wasn’t a cooked presentation there never has been one.
As he fell back from imminent the danger of weapons of mass destruction to the folly of bringing democracy into the heart of a civilization that rejects us and our values, George Bush has done everything in his power to spread the blame for his fiasco. But yesterday he reached a new low by invoking the casualties already suffered and the deaths yet to come and laying them at his critics’ doors.
Shame on you, President Bush!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, November 05, 2005
I Plead Not Guilty
President Bush and his minion are doing everything in their power to involve others in their ill conceived decision to attack Iraq. I don’t blame them; who would want to claim parenthood of that poor orphan? Unfortunately, they’ve been partially successful in sharing the responsibility in this public paternity play.
Those opposed to the war, especially Democratic politicians, have done a poor job in keeping the finger of public opinion pointed squarely at the president, his closest advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, Bolton, et al) leading neoconservatives in the private sector (Pearle, Podhoritz, the Kristols, etc.) and on leaders in the Evangelical Christian movement who have willingly sold their poor flocks on the terrible notion that doing bad was a good thing in this war.
Opponents of the war are spending their energy trying to determine whether the pre war intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and programs was manufactured or manipulated by the administration in order to support the strike on Iraq. That’s a great question deserving close examination and an honest answer. But it permits the president and his merry band of clackers to fire the bovine waste into the fan and cover his critics with the result.
The Democrats and the rest of us opposed to the war have permitted ourselves to be herded by the administration onto its team of co-conspirators in the effort to topple the Baathist regime in Iraq. It’s really quite silly to blame Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, John Kerry, the Republicans and most of the Democrats in Congress, and poor little old Wild Bill for believing that Saddam had WMDs, the stated reason for the invasion. While most of the silly people in this list rail against inclusion on it, I ask why should this label us as co-conspirators with the president in the run up to the invasion?
That the CIA and the other world’s intelligence agencies believed Saddam had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and that he was seeking nuclear capacity and that those in Congress who supported the overthrow of the Iraqi regime had virtually the same information as the administration is a very handy debating tool of the president, but in reality it is merely a red herring to draw our attention away from the culpability of the small cabal of insiders that the public is finally zeroing in on which has brought death to more than 2,000 of our fighting men and women, killed 20,000 Iraqi civilian, and that is now approaching the quarter of a trillion dollars in wasted treasure.
The real question was and remains how much of a threat did Saddam’s Iraq pose to the United States? In retrospect, it is clear that the various inspection efforts by international bodies coupled with the degradation caused by American and allied activities in the no fly zones established in the wake of 1991 Gulf War were working very well in keeping the Iraqi government in check and in a weakened state. The real question should not be whether Saddam had WMDs but did he pose a threat to the U.S. sufficient for us to wage a preventive war against his government?
That last question is the one that must be examined and seems not to be on the radar screens of most opponents of the conflict and Congressional Committees looking it. Did the administration overstate the threat against us and our allies? If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the argument that virtually everyone thought he had WMDs and thus war was justified, we, along with George Bush and his inner circle, are doomed to be culpable for the resulting fiasco. The real question that must be answered by the Senate Intelligence Committee is whether the Administration manipulated intelligence to show an immediate threat against us, our forces, or our allies.
As long as the president can get away with saying the Congress was looking at the same information available to he when they voted to support the war, he has them where he wants them. The standard the opponents should be seeking is whether there was an imminent threat to our country or its allies.
Buying into the bovine waste that we are exporting Western style democracy as a fall back to failure to find WMDs or – most importantly – a direct and imminent threat to us or our friends is fatal to the real evil in this case – preventive rather preemptive war. It is in this that the conspirators – the president, his advisors on military and security matters, and his in the war supporters in and out of government, especially Evangelical Christian leaders - have done their greatest damage.
Even assuming that Saddam had his WMDs and that the war could be justified in religious terms, the failure to find these weapons and the threat to us these weapons represented clearly means that, in violation of international law, we executed a preventive attack on an innocent nation. No matter how reprehensible the leader and his administration was we attacked a nation that posed no real threat. If that is true – and I believe it is – we should be moving out as quickly as possible.
Evangelical Christians have been misled and they should be reassessing their position. They are supporting what has turned out to be an immoral and illegal attack on a nation that could do us no substantial harm. That the invaded nation was led by an immoral regime is no excuse for sending our men and women into harms way and to strain our armed forces to the point of danger to our country. And that says nothing abut the material cost that could have been used for any number of more worthy purposes.
Our goal should be to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and to get on with hunting down the jihadists who are pledging to kill us.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Those opposed to the war, especially Democratic politicians, have done a poor job in keeping the finger of public opinion pointed squarely at the president, his closest advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, Bolton, et al) leading neoconservatives in the private sector (Pearle, Podhoritz, the Kristols, etc.) and on leaders in the Evangelical Christian movement who have willingly sold their poor flocks on the terrible notion that doing bad was a good thing in this war.
Opponents of the war are spending their energy trying to determine whether the pre war intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and programs was manufactured or manipulated by the administration in order to support the strike on Iraq. That’s a great question deserving close examination and an honest answer. But it permits the president and his merry band of clackers to fire the bovine waste into the fan and cover his critics with the result.
The Democrats and the rest of us opposed to the war have permitted ourselves to be herded by the administration onto its team of co-conspirators in the effort to topple the Baathist regime in Iraq. It’s really quite silly to blame Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, John Kerry, the Republicans and most of the Democrats in Congress, and poor little old Wild Bill for believing that Saddam had WMDs, the stated reason for the invasion. While most of the silly people in this list rail against inclusion on it, I ask why should this label us as co-conspirators with the president in the run up to the invasion?
That the CIA and the other world’s intelligence agencies believed Saddam had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and that he was seeking nuclear capacity and that those in Congress who supported the overthrow of the Iraqi regime had virtually the same information as the administration is a very handy debating tool of the president, but in reality it is merely a red herring to draw our attention away from the culpability of the small cabal of insiders that the public is finally zeroing in on which has brought death to more than 2,000 of our fighting men and women, killed 20,000 Iraqi civilian, and that is now approaching the quarter of a trillion dollars in wasted treasure.
The real question was and remains how much of a threat did Saddam’s Iraq pose to the United States? In retrospect, it is clear that the various inspection efforts by international bodies coupled with the degradation caused by American and allied activities in the no fly zones established in the wake of 1991 Gulf War were working very well in keeping the Iraqi government in check and in a weakened state. The real question should not be whether Saddam had WMDs but did he pose a threat to the U.S. sufficient for us to wage a preventive war against his government?
That last question is the one that must be examined and seems not to be on the radar screens of most opponents of the conflict and Congressional Committees looking it. Did the administration overstate the threat against us and our allies? If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the argument that virtually everyone thought he had WMDs and thus war was justified, we, along with George Bush and his inner circle, are doomed to be culpable for the resulting fiasco. The real question that must be answered by the Senate Intelligence Committee is whether the Administration manipulated intelligence to show an immediate threat against us, our forces, or our allies.
As long as the president can get away with saying the Congress was looking at the same information available to he when they voted to support the war, he has them where he wants them. The standard the opponents should be seeking is whether there was an imminent threat to our country or its allies.
Buying into the bovine waste that we are exporting Western style democracy as a fall back to failure to find WMDs or – most importantly – a direct and imminent threat to us or our friends is fatal to the real evil in this case – preventive rather preemptive war. It is in this that the conspirators – the president, his advisors on military and security matters, and his in the war supporters in and out of government, especially Evangelical Christian leaders - have done their greatest damage.
Even assuming that Saddam had his WMDs and that the war could be justified in religious terms, the failure to find these weapons and the threat to us these weapons represented clearly means that, in violation of international law, we executed a preventive attack on an innocent nation. No matter how reprehensible the leader and his administration was we attacked a nation that posed no real threat. If that is true – and I believe it is – we should be moving out as quickly as possible.
Evangelical Christians have been misled and they should be reassessing their position. They are supporting what has turned out to be an immoral and illegal attack on a nation that could do us no substantial harm. That the invaded nation was led by an immoral regime is no excuse for sending our men and women into harms way and to strain our armed forces to the point of danger to our country. And that says nothing abut the material cost that could have been used for any number of more worthy purposes.
Our goal should be to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and to get on with hunting down the jihadists who are pledging to kill us.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Remission
My compulsion to blog (Brennan's Syndrome - Blogus Bovinus Wastus) has gone into remission. Enough whacks at George Bush, sufficient blasts at those who would return our schools to the Dark Ages, proper dosages of deploring the Democrat response to Republican hubris, and more than enough heartburn over the calamitous cancer of Iraq have sent the blog syndrome into temporary quiescence.
The syndrome returns with a vengeance from time to time, and I’ll alert my loyal readers when the symptoms become acute once more. For now, I’m working on other projects that demand my time.
I have no ideas how many readers I have, but more than four hundred individuals have taken the time to explore the site, and my counter registers almost three thousand hits since this electronic rag began publication. I appreciate the interest and even the occasional complaint.
It’s almost certain that no medicine on earth will be able to keep the disease at bay through the ’06 election cycle, so until then, “Goodnight and good luck!” Now that’s original!
Wild Bill
The syndrome returns with a vengeance from time to time, and I’ll alert my loyal readers when the symptoms become acute once more. For now, I’m working on other projects that demand my time.
I have no ideas how many readers I have, but more than four hundred individuals have taken the time to explore the site, and my counter registers almost three thousand hits since this electronic rag began publication. I appreciate the interest and even the occasional complaint.
It’s almost certain that no medicine on earth will be able to keep the disease at bay through the ’06 election cycle, so until then, “Goodnight and good luck!” Now that’s original!
Wild Bill
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Poor George
President Bush is down at the polls and at the mouth. Iraq, the hurricanes, Social Security and Harriet Miers have taken their toll; George has lost his Texas swagger and now bears the look of a deer in the headlights.
While he didn’t cause the hurricanes, saying that no one could have anticipated that the levees would fail in New Orleans when in fact the problem had been anticipated and studied for years certainly compounded his problems. But that was just an error.
But his greatest difficulty is with logic. From years of constantly rising in politics, he came to understand that his utterances didn’t have to make sense for him to be elected and to govern. Over the years he found that he could make the most outrageous assertions and that he wouldn’t be called on them by his base and others who supported him and that what was reported in the media and said by the opposition never slowed his quest for the top job.
He and his surrogates could spout bald faced falsities and it made little difference in his standing with the American public. Assertions that: Saddam’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; al Qaeda and Iraq were acting in concert; we won’t need more troops to occupy Iraq; the Iraq War is going well; we’re fighting the jihadists in Iraq so that we don’t have to face them here - yet we’ve foiled X number of plots against our cities; that private accounts would save Social Security; that Harriet Miers is the most qualified person in the country for a seat on the Supreme Court; and that Brownie is doing a heck of a job in the recovery from Rita just don’t play any longer.
How could George Bush say things that made no more sense prior to our attack on Iraq and not be penalized? But now that the sun is low in the sky on his presidency how is it that he is called for every wrong phrase? My guess is that it’s like a courtship. A fellow can croon his way into a willing heart at the beginning of a romance, but after several years of a rocky marriage, those explanations of how he came by those lipstick stains on his collar just no longer pan out.
Too many half truths and tall tales have done George in. He’s lost the trust of the people and is perceived by all but the most foolish of his true believing base to be a man whose word is not to be trusted. Can you imagine having to serve another thousand days under such a dark cloud?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
While he didn’t cause the hurricanes, saying that no one could have anticipated that the levees would fail in New Orleans when in fact the problem had been anticipated and studied for years certainly compounded his problems. But that was just an error.
But his greatest difficulty is with logic. From years of constantly rising in politics, he came to understand that his utterances didn’t have to make sense for him to be elected and to govern. Over the years he found that he could make the most outrageous assertions and that he wouldn’t be called on them by his base and others who supported him and that what was reported in the media and said by the opposition never slowed his quest for the top job.
He and his surrogates could spout bald faced falsities and it made little difference in his standing with the American public. Assertions that: Saddam’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; al Qaeda and Iraq were acting in concert; we won’t need more troops to occupy Iraq; the Iraq War is going well; we’re fighting the jihadists in Iraq so that we don’t have to face them here - yet we’ve foiled X number of plots against our cities; that private accounts would save Social Security; that Harriet Miers is the most qualified person in the country for a seat on the Supreme Court; and that Brownie is doing a heck of a job in the recovery from Rita just don’t play any longer.
How could George Bush say things that made no more sense prior to our attack on Iraq and not be penalized? But now that the sun is low in the sky on his presidency how is it that he is called for every wrong phrase? My guess is that it’s like a courtship. A fellow can croon his way into a willing heart at the beginning of a romance, but after several years of a rocky marriage, those explanations of how he came by those lipstick stains on his collar just no longer pan out.
Too many half truths and tall tales have done George in. He’s lost the trust of the people and is perceived by all but the most foolish of his true believing base to be a man whose word is not to be trusted. Can you imagine having to serve another thousand days under such a dark cloud?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Let George Do It!
Poor George - Iraq, Katrina, Rita, Harriet - when it rains it pours; he can’t seem to do anything right.
Iraq just won’t go away. Every couple of weeks George feels it essential to find some military unit he hasn’t spoken to about the war (finding that squad gets harder and harder) and proclaim that we’ll stay the course. The next day Democrats and even some Republicans beat him about the head and shoulders and polls are taken showing him still lower after each effort.
Katrina and Rita appear to be developing into multi-year drags and now we find out that Floridians still haven’t recovered from the hurricanes that roared through the Sunshine State last year.
Harriet, poor Harriet, she’s served George faithfully for a decade and when he decides that he’ll recommend her for an iddy biddy government job, his most loyal supporters jump on him like he’s a jackass. Why just days ago they were proclaiming that George should be able to name anybody he wants to that little sinecure. But when he does: GOTCHA!
While the Democrats are totally befuddled when it comes to any subject, at least they can count on George to stop them from self immolating. Where would they be without him?
Most of the Dems voted to support his adventure in Iraq, but he’s been a complete failure in pinning that tail on their donkey.
At least Harry Reid’s got it right about Harriet; he keeps saying nice things about her while George’s conservative base goes ballistic. It looks like the Dems are enjoying damning Harriet with faint praise which seems to set George’s buddies off again. By the time the Judiciary Committee Republicans get through beating up on Harriet, the minority members will simply join with a three or four on the other side and send her back to the White House on a platter with an apple in her mouth. “Gee whiz, if she ain’t good enough for the Republicans, who are we to support her?”
Gosh, wouldn’t it be great to be clearing brush on the ranch? How’d he ever let those boys talk him into running again? Lame duck? Golly, he can’t even waddle on one leg.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Iraq just won’t go away. Every couple of weeks George feels it essential to find some military unit he hasn’t spoken to about the war (finding that squad gets harder and harder) and proclaim that we’ll stay the course. The next day Democrats and even some Republicans beat him about the head and shoulders and polls are taken showing him still lower after each effort.
Katrina and Rita appear to be developing into multi-year drags and now we find out that Floridians still haven’t recovered from the hurricanes that roared through the Sunshine State last year.
Harriet, poor Harriet, she’s served George faithfully for a decade and when he decides that he’ll recommend her for an iddy biddy government job, his most loyal supporters jump on him like he’s a jackass. Why just days ago they were proclaiming that George should be able to name anybody he wants to that little sinecure. But when he does: GOTCHA!
While the Democrats are totally befuddled when it comes to any subject, at least they can count on George to stop them from self immolating. Where would they be without him?
Most of the Dems voted to support his adventure in Iraq, but he’s been a complete failure in pinning that tail on their donkey.
At least Harry Reid’s got it right about Harriet; he keeps saying nice things about her while George’s conservative base goes ballistic. It looks like the Dems are enjoying damning Harriet with faint praise which seems to set George’s buddies off again. By the time the Judiciary Committee Republicans get through beating up on Harriet, the minority members will simply join with a three or four on the other side and send her back to the White House on a platter with an apple in her mouth. “Gee whiz, if she ain’t good enough for the Republicans, who are we to support her?”
Gosh, wouldn’t it be great to be clearing brush on the ranch? How’d he ever let those boys talk him into running again? Lame duck? Golly, he can’t even waddle on one leg.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
The Evil Empire Strikes
Alright already, who’s ever heard of a baseball season ending in a tie and having the winner determined by an NFL type tiebreaker? Nobody, of course, and that includes the media, Boston Red Sox players and everyone in New England. Clearly, Red Sox Nation was shafted by Major League Baseball and its dominant franchise, the New York Yankees. America should have been treated to a game between the aged muscle-bound denizens of the Bronx and those wonderfully innocent home grown New Englanders from Fenway Park. But what kind of conspiracy would that have created?
While it will surely turn out well in the end, the clear intent of the secret rule was to assure that the Evil Empire would have every advantage in the post season. The juiced up Bronx Bombers need every edge that a $200 million dollar pumped up payroll can provide, and MLB has provided it in the form of rule obviously adopted to frustrate honest New Englanders at home and wherever the Diaspora has taken them.
While Wild Bill is confident that the Beantown locals will prevail, he finds it terribly sad that the owners of such small town franchises as Minnesota, Milwaukee and Kansas City would allow themselves to be intimidated and gulled by The Boss in picking on their fellow regional team and allowing the money boys from Wall Street to determine off the field which franchise would get all the breaks. That’s a sad commentary on Red States and honest conservatives everywhere.
While I have no doubts that my loyal readers from New York are clear eyed when it comes to the issues of Iraq, budget and trade deficits and such, it is demoralizingly sad to see their hubris when it comes to the Yankees. While the supporters of these juiced up monsters from the Bronx are able to be objective when it comes to politics and world affairs, it is awful to see their blind spots when it comes to the far more important issue of baseball and the place of their overpaid, over-muscled, slow thinking representatives from the Bronx.
It’s very sad, and I’m tempted to call for baseball to break up the Yankees but that might lead a player addicted to steroids being shipped to the Back Bay. I’ll just settle for saying it’s unfair and that it’s disappointing.
The paranoid among the Red Sox Nation are certainly reading much into the fact that the opening day pitcher for the Chicago White Sox – a team with its own post season scandal riddled past, Jose Contreras, might have been planted by The Boss to assure a less than stellar start to the BOSOX post season. Wild Bill will just say, “Noted.”
Fair Play Forever! Blog on!
Wild Bill
While it will surely turn out well in the end, the clear intent of the secret rule was to assure that the Evil Empire would have every advantage in the post season. The juiced up Bronx Bombers need every edge that a $200 million dollar pumped up payroll can provide, and MLB has provided it in the form of rule obviously adopted to frustrate honest New Englanders at home and wherever the Diaspora has taken them.
While Wild Bill is confident that the Beantown locals will prevail, he finds it terribly sad that the owners of such small town franchises as Minnesota, Milwaukee and Kansas City would allow themselves to be intimidated and gulled by The Boss in picking on their fellow regional team and allowing the money boys from Wall Street to determine off the field which franchise would get all the breaks. That’s a sad commentary on Red States and honest conservatives everywhere.
While I have no doubts that my loyal readers from New York are clear eyed when it comes to the issues of Iraq, budget and trade deficits and such, it is demoralizingly sad to see their hubris when it comes to the Yankees. While the supporters of these juiced up monsters from the Bronx are able to be objective when it comes to politics and world affairs, it is awful to see their blind spots when it comes to the far more important issue of baseball and the place of their overpaid, over-muscled, slow thinking representatives from the Bronx.
It’s very sad, and I’m tempted to call for baseball to break up the Yankees but that might lead a player addicted to steroids being shipped to the Back Bay. I’ll just settle for saying it’s unfair and that it’s disappointing.
The paranoid among the Red Sox Nation are certainly reading much into the fact that the opening day pitcher for the Chicago White Sox – a team with its own post season scandal riddled past, Jose Contreras, might have been planted by The Boss to assure a less than stellar start to the BOSOX post season. Wild Bill will just say, “Noted.”
Fair Play Forever! Blog on!
Wild Bill
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Meet Me in the Middle
E. J. Dionne, Jr., one of my favorite liberal columnists, describes the plight of his lefty Democrats as being unable to attract enough moderate votes to gain control of either the White House or either House on the Hill. On first blush, as a committed moderate this argument makes a lot of sense since I’m very upset by the actions of conservative Republicans in all branches of government.
Dionne cites an electorate with 45% of the voters describing themselves as moderates, 21% liberals, and 34 % conservatives, and he lays out a path a path for liberals to capture the votes of us centrists. To those of us in the middle disillusioned with the performance of President Bush who promised to be a uniter but has done so much to offend both liberals and moderates Dionne’s recipe looks attractive, but I’m afraid it will not pass the taste test.
Both liberals and conservatives treat us as a passive lot who must be won over to the side of truth – theirs, naturally. But that’s what got us into this sorry state. In the sixties we went along with Lyndon Johnson’s war and guns and butter economy, and beginning with Reagan we’ve bought into a national muscularity in foreign affairs that culminated with the shock and awe beginning of our pratfall in Iraq and the sorry attempt to destroy Social Security.
Do you want to know who was really responsible for Vietnam and Iraq? It wasn’t the aggressive Democrats of the sixties for the former nor was it the neocons of the new millennium in Iraq; it was us moderates who gently sidled up to Lyndon and Dubya. We are responsible because we just went along, as usual.
The moderates must lead the country out of the wilderness. Impossible you say. If that’s the case we’re doomed to lurch from left to right, forever tossed on the waves of bunk that are bashing the ship of state from left to right and back again. America was a land of moderation for much of its history, but the sensible center was not up to the political, economic and political turmoil of the last century. A president of the left center had to rise and save the nation in the thirties and one from the right moved center stage to move us back on course and govern through the Cold War.
These two aberrations, left and right, addicted us to government from the edges that led us too far, first one way then the other. The moderates have seen no other way but to pick one side or the other to move us back. My view is that we’re wrong in choosing the way we have; we’ve followed and not led. We must break the cycle of choosing between the left and the right and make them move to us. You don’t see the difference? Bear with me
The liberal Democrats are debating whether to remain true to their core beliefs or to move slightly to the center to attract more of us. Obviously, the conservatives are doing the opposite but secure in the knowledge that they have to entice fewer of us to their 34% base to maintain control of the levers of power.
The problem is that we sheep are simply waiting to be divided and led to slaughter. As I’ve written before in my essay on the gang of fourteen million, we must lead from the center and demand that the extremes bow to us rather than the other way around. Naturally, this isn’t going to be done by creating a third party or by recruiting our own candidates. It has to be done by individual voters rejecting the extremes and saying so loudly and clearly to those running the parties.
Right now we should be angry with the Republicans. Even if we’re members of that august group – which I was until the build up to the Iraq War – we must punish them for their adventurism in both foreign and domestic affairs. At the same time, we should make it abundantly clear that we are not buying into the liberal claptrap and that we will punish the Democrats for moves away from center, too.
Above all, we must be prepared to punish our own cherished congressional representatives of either party who bring home the bacon but who are ideologues in all things non-constituent oriented. Just because they fight for the local military base or for the multi-billion dollar bridge project, if we see that that their larger presence is taking us down the wrong road as a nation, we must vote against them. If they perceive that before the next election and move toward the center, we can forgive and vote for them – ONE LAST TIME.
Above all, if we’re lucky enough to be represented by a moderates such as members of `The Gang of Fourteen’ in the Senate or Blue Dog Democrats in the House, we must do our best to praise and publicize them to our neighbors. They’re rare but out there and they must be cherished and recognized.
Would this strategy work? Compared to what we’re used to it couldn’t hurt to try.
With the Red Sox and Yankees gearing up for a showdown in Fenway, I’m shifting my brain into gear for something really important for the next several days. Blogs are out until the middle of next week.
So Blog on without me!
Wild Bill
Dionne cites an electorate with 45% of the voters describing themselves as moderates, 21% liberals, and 34 % conservatives, and he lays out a path a path for liberals to capture the votes of us centrists. To those of us in the middle disillusioned with the performance of President Bush who promised to be a uniter but has done so much to offend both liberals and moderates Dionne’s recipe looks attractive, but I’m afraid it will not pass the taste test.
Both liberals and conservatives treat us as a passive lot who must be won over to the side of truth – theirs, naturally. But that’s what got us into this sorry state. In the sixties we went along with Lyndon Johnson’s war and guns and butter economy, and beginning with Reagan we’ve bought into a national muscularity in foreign affairs that culminated with the shock and awe beginning of our pratfall in Iraq and the sorry attempt to destroy Social Security.
Do you want to know who was really responsible for Vietnam and Iraq? It wasn’t the aggressive Democrats of the sixties for the former nor was it the neocons of the new millennium in Iraq; it was us moderates who gently sidled up to Lyndon and Dubya. We are responsible because we just went along, as usual.
The moderates must lead the country out of the wilderness. Impossible you say. If that’s the case we’re doomed to lurch from left to right, forever tossed on the waves of bunk that are bashing the ship of state from left to right and back again. America was a land of moderation for much of its history, but the sensible center was not up to the political, economic and political turmoil of the last century. A president of the left center had to rise and save the nation in the thirties and one from the right moved center stage to move us back on course and govern through the Cold War.
These two aberrations, left and right, addicted us to government from the edges that led us too far, first one way then the other. The moderates have seen no other way but to pick one side or the other to move us back. My view is that we’re wrong in choosing the way we have; we’ve followed and not led. We must break the cycle of choosing between the left and the right and make them move to us. You don’t see the difference? Bear with me
The liberal Democrats are debating whether to remain true to their core beliefs or to move slightly to the center to attract more of us. Obviously, the conservatives are doing the opposite but secure in the knowledge that they have to entice fewer of us to their 34% base to maintain control of the levers of power.
The problem is that we sheep are simply waiting to be divided and led to slaughter. As I’ve written before in my essay on the gang of fourteen million, we must lead from the center and demand that the extremes bow to us rather than the other way around. Naturally, this isn’t going to be done by creating a third party or by recruiting our own candidates. It has to be done by individual voters rejecting the extremes and saying so loudly and clearly to those running the parties.
Right now we should be angry with the Republicans. Even if we’re members of that august group – which I was until the build up to the Iraq War – we must punish them for their adventurism in both foreign and domestic affairs. At the same time, we should make it abundantly clear that we are not buying into the liberal claptrap and that we will punish the Democrats for moves away from center, too.
Above all, we must be prepared to punish our own cherished congressional representatives of either party who bring home the bacon but who are ideologues in all things non-constituent oriented. Just because they fight for the local military base or for the multi-billion dollar bridge project, if we see that that their larger presence is taking us down the wrong road as a nation, we must vote against them. If they perceive that before the next election and move toward the center, we can forgive and vote for them – ONE LAST TIME.
Above all, if we’re lucky enough to be represented by a moderates such as members of `The Gang of Fourteen’ in the Senate or Blue Dog Democrats in the House, we must do our best to praise and publicize them to our neighbors. They’re rare but out there and they must be cherished and recognized.
Would this strategy work? Compared to what we’re used to it couldn’t hurt to try.
With the Red Sox and Yankees gearing up for a showdown in Fenway, I’m shifting my brain into gear for something really important for the next several days. Blogs are out until the middle of next week.
So Blog on without me!
Wild Bill
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Lessons Learned
Before all the commissions and committees blow forth the final fog about how the governments performed or failed to perform in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and before we are so locked in on the scent trails pointed to by the Congress and its hired hands might it be possible for us draw a few preliminary lessons of our own?
It is quite clear that we haven’t done nearly so much in disaster planning and preparedness as most of us had assumed and inferred from official pronouncements and media interpretations. Judging from the actions of local, state and federal leaders and agencies, we weren’t nearly as prepared for a category 4 or 5 hurricane strike on the Gulf Coast as we should have been, let alone two such events in less than a month. That, of course, says nothing about preparedness for a terrorist attack on a major population center
It is clear that the City of New Orleans, other local entities, the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the federal government were far from ready for an event for which they’d been given as much notice as would ever be possible. The Hurricane Center in Miami clearly sounded the alarm in a timely and crystal clear manner. The potential physical damage of Hurricane Katrina was known to officials in all of the jurisdictions. None of the three levels of governments appear to have been nearly properly prepared or acted as well as we or they would have liked.
With the coming of Hurricane Rita on the heels of Katrina, however, it appears that the impacted governments drew many lessons from the earlier hurricane and did their level best to deal with the situation. Many things went right and quite a few did not. Clearly all three levels of government performed with far more energy, as we fully expected they would after the disaster that unfolded to the east of them.
The citizens took the warnings and the orders to evacuate far more seriously for Rita. That led to many new and unanticipated problems such as turning the highways out of Houston into endless parking lots. But with the newly exposed problems, I’m certain that all levels of government will respond even better in the next great storm. Obviously, everyone will work to find ways to stagger the exodus of refugees from the next hurricane. Governments can learn and have shown it in the month since Katrina.
Before we go too far in condemning President Bush, the governors, mayors, county judges, and their administrations for their failures in these two storms, we should note that many public officials performed competently, effectively, even admirably and obviously charitably. Then we should draw a deep breath and indicate much as the early colonist observed watching a condemned man ascend the gallows, “There but for the Grace of God, goes John Bradford.” I used to work on disasters for federal agencies and know full well how lucky I am not to have been in the chain of command in responding to Katrina.
From all that I can see, we’ve learned much and will deal with future natural disasters far better than we did with Katrina and Rita. But what about events caused by man – attacks by enemy states and terrorists? Those are very scary thoughts.
First, it’s unlikely that we’ll have any better intelligence than that provided by the Hurricane Center. Looking back on lessons of the Cold War, an attack by a prospective enemy state is likely to offer only a few hours or days warning and that is probably going to be general rather than target specific. Who will be advised to evacuate? Who will help the refugees? Who would obey the logical order of evacuation that we will surely learn from Rita? You know who, nobody!
In the case of terrorism, there will almost certainly be no warning. Obviously if the government becomes aware of an impending attack it will move heaven and earth to stop it, but there is unlikely to be time to advise residents of the target area to evacuate in an orderly fashion. Clearly if there is a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction, all the logic in the world regarding planned evacuation will be out the window. If Houston highways were snarled, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
To me, Secretary Chertoff’s program to plan for catastrophic events at the federal level is right on target. State and local officials must deal with smaller events – even up to the horror that was 9/11, and the federal government must use its resources to prevent such catastrophes and to respond to them in case its intelligence and intercession fails.
Katrina and Rita must be reminders that we must do more to develop intelligence on both natural and man induced calamities. In the case of hurricanes, it looks as though we have an excellent system in place. We must spend more money on earthquake identification and prediction and on the tsunamis that can result from those quakes under the sea. We’re doing research on bodies in space and that must continue.
But the most important lesson to be learned from the disasters of August and September 2005 is already receding from view. Pork is the enemy of public safety in these perilous times. Already defenders of one president, governor or another are proclaiming that they spent more on the Corps of Engineers (or the Bureau of reclamation, etc.) than their predecessor or successor. This is where the bunkum hits the fan. The legislators and their friends in the executive have classically played games with budget figures and they show every sign of continuing.
Spending money on the Corps does not mean they are spending money on projects required for public safety. Spending money on Homeland Security does not mean they are funding project essential to protecting us. The Defense budget has always been laden with pork, but these have almost always meant add ons to the budget not substitutions of Congressional views on defense policy for the leaders of the DOD. These redundancies have often been wasteful but not detrimental to our safety.
Homeland Security and Corps of Engineers pork, on the other hand, is not added onto the required funding. It is in lieu of projects needed for national security. Your Congressional representatives in both Houses are knowingly steering money into hometown boondoggles. This used to be a relatively harmless pastime designed to get them reelected and to assure that a little federal money fertilized the grass around city hall. That won’t do in this age.
Take your pick: global warming is creating more powerful hurricanes or we are entering a multi-decadal cycle of more frequent and powerful storms. From a homeland security perspective either option works as well as the other; giant storms are coming. More of our citizens live in danger zones, and we can’t afford to be penny wise on Corps projects and ignore the possibility of paying ten times as much to lock the barn door after Dobbin is gone.
We are living in an age of terror and the United States is the number one target. While we can’t ignore the possibility that a shopping mall in Lincoln, Nebraska will be the scene of a suicide bombing, we must know that New York, Washington, Chicago, the Port of New Orleans and other major metropolitan targets are what Osama bin Laden would like to take out. We can’t afford to have pork looted from the Homeland Security budget to satisfy the pipedreams and electability of craven politicians.
You’ve got to have some idea whether the project being pushed in your town really adds to the safety of all of us. If it doesn’t blow the whistle! The lives and safety of tens or hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens is in the balance.
Don’t stand idly by in this; the security of the nation is at stake.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
It is quite clear that we haven’t done nearly so much in disaster planning and preparedness as most of us had assumed and inferred from official pronouncements and media interpretations. Judging from the actions of local, state and federal leaders and agencies, we weren’t nearly as prepared for a category 4 or 5 hurricane strike on the Gulf Coast as we should have been, let alone two such events in less than a month. That, of course, says nothing about preparedness for a terrorist attack on a major population center
It is clear that the City of New Orleans, other local entities, the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the federal government were far from ready for an event for which they’d been given as much notice as would ever be possible. The Hurricane Center in Miami clearly sounded the alarm in a timely and crystal clear manner. The potential physical damage of Hurricane Katrina was known to officials in all of the jurisdictions. None of the three levels of governments appear to have been nearly properly prepared or acted as well as we or they would have liked.
With the coming of Hurricane Rita on the heels of Katrina, however, it appears that the impacted governments drew many lessons from the earlier hurricane and did their level best to deal with the situation. Many things went right and quite a few did not. Clearly all three levels of government performed with far more energy, as we fully expected they would after the disaster that unfolded to the east of them.
The citizens took the warnings and the orders to evacuate far more seriously for Rita. That led to many new and unanticipated problems such as turning the highways out of Houston into endless parking lots. But with the newly exposed problems, I’m certain that all levels of government will respond even better in the next great storm. Obviously, everyone will work to find ways to stagger the exodus of refugees from the next hurricane. Governments can learn and have shown it in the month since Katrina.
Before we go too far in condemning President Bush, the governors, mayors, county judges, and their administrations for their failures in these two storms, we should note that many public officials performed competently, effectively, even admirably and obviously charitably. Then we should draw a deep breath and indicate much as the early colonist observed watching a condemned man ascend the gallows, “There but for the Grace of God, goes John Bradford.” I used to work on disasters for federal agencies and know full well how lucky I am not to have been in the chain of command in responding to Katrina.
From all that I can see, we’ve learned much and will deal with future natural disasters far better than we did with Katrina and Rita. But what about events caused by man – attacks by enemy states and terrorists? Those are very scary thoughts.
First, it’s unlikely that we’ll have any better intelligence than that provided by the Hurricane Center. Looking back on lessons of the Cold War, an attack by a prospective enemy state is likely to offer only a few hours or days warning and that is probably going to be general rather than target specific. Who will be advised to evacuate? Who will help the refugees? Who would obey the logical order of evacuation that we will surely learn from Rita? You know who, nobody!
In the case of terrorism, there will almost certainly be no warning. Obviously if the government becomes aware of an impending attack it will move heaven and earth to stop it, but there is unlikely to be time to advise residents of the target area to evacuate in an orderly fashion. Clearly if there is a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction, all the logic in the world regarding planned evacuation will be out the window. If Houston highways were snarled, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
To me, Secretary Chertoff’s program to plan for catastrophic events at the federal level is right on target. State and local officials must deal with smaller events – even up to the horror that was 9/11, and the federal government must use its resources to prevent such catastrophes and to respond to them in case its intelligence and intercession fails.
Katrina and Rita must be reminders that we must do more to develop intelligence on both natural and man induced calamities. In the case of hurricanes, it looks as though we have an excellent system in place. We must spend more money on earthquake identification and prediction and on the tsunamis that can result from those quakes under the sea. We’re doing research on bodies in space and that must continue.
But the most important lesson to be learned from the disasters of August and September 2005 is already receding from view. Pork is the enemy of public safety in these perilous times. Already defenders of one president, governor or another are proclaiming that they spent more on the Corps of Engineers (or the Bureau of reclamation, etc.) than their predecessor or successor. This is where the bunkum hits the fan. The legislators and their friends in the executive have classically played games with budget figures and they show every sign of continuing.
Spending money on the Corps does not mean they are spending money on projects required for public safety. Spending money on Homeland Security does not mean they are funding project essential to protecting us. The Defense budget has always been laden with pork, but these have almost always meant add ons to the budget not substitutions of Congressional views on defense policy for the leaders of the DOD. These redundancies have often been wasteful but not detrimental to our safety.
Homeland Security and Corps of Engineers pork, on the other hand, is not added onto the required funding. It is in lieu of projects needed for national security. Your Congressional representatives in both Houses are knowingly steering money into hometown boondoggles. This used to be a relatively harmless pastime designed to get them reelected and to assure that a little federal money fertilized the grass around city hall. That won’t do in this age.
Take your pick: global warming is creating more powerful hurricanes or we are entering a multi-decadal cycle of more frequent and powerful storms. From a homeland security perspective either option works as well as the other; giant storms are coming. More of our citizens live in danger zones, and we can’t afford to be penny wise on Corps projects and ignore the possibility of paying ten times as much to lock the barn door after Dobbin is gone.
We are living in an age of terror and the United States is the number one target. While we can’t ignore the possibility that a shopping mall in Lincoln, Nebraska will be the scene of a suicide bombing, we must know that New York, Washington, Chicago, the Port of New Orleans and other major metropolitan targets are what Osama bin Laden would like to take out. We can’t afford to have pork looted from the Homeland Security budget to satisfy the pipedreams and electability of craven politicians.
You’ve got to have some idea whether the project being pushed in your town really adds to the safety of all of us. If it doesn’t blow the whistle! The lives and safety of tens or hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens is in the balance.
Don’t stand idly by in this; the security of the nation is at stake.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
The Bush administration is going to great lengths to assure that casualty counts from Iraq are accurate – and misleading.
American service men and women killed are reported in a straightforward fashion. Those killed by hostile action are identified and those killed in accidents are so reported and both are added together to provide the count used by the government and reported to the media.
Is there any other way counting could be done? Actually, yes!
Those Americans wounded in action are quiet properly listed but those injured in accidents are compiled separately and only the former are given regular reporting coverage by the Pentagon. Thousands of Americans badly injured – up to and including those permanently and totally disabled in the hostile environment that is Iraq are not classified as casualties unless they were wounded by enemy action.
During previous wars such as World War II and Korea the military provided many more of its own services. Proud units such as the famed transportation command `The Red Ball Express’ came under fire and suffered many casualties, including many from accidents that would not qualify under today’s counting methods. Today, in Iraq many jobs formerly performed by the army and other services such as kitchen duty and truck driving are performed by contractors. Drivers and support personnel killed, wounded or disabled by hostile action or accident are carefully kept off the casualty books.
All of these techniques and many other statistical feats show a far rosier picture in Iraq than if standard operating procedures used in reporting casualties in prior conflicts were used. Men and women are still being killed and injured; they just don’t count like their grand parents.
As long as you know!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
American service men and women killed are reported in a straightforward fashion. Those killed by hostile action are identified and those killed in accidents are so reported and both are added together to provide the count used by the government and reported to the media.
Is there any other way counting could be done? Actually, yes!
Those Americans wounded in action are quiet properly listed but those injured in accidents are compiled separately and only the former are given regular reporting coverage by the Pentagon. Thousands of Americans badly injured – up to and including those permanently and totally disabled in the hostile environment that is Iraq are not classified as casualties unless they were wounded by enemy action.
During previous wars such as World War II and Korea the military provided many more of its own services. Proud units such as the famed transportation command `The Red Ball Express’ came under fire and suffered many casualties, including many from accidents that would not qualify under today’s counting methods. Today, in Iraq many jobs formerly performed by the army and other services such as kitchen duty and truck driving are performed by contractors. Drivers and support personnel killed, wounded or disabled by hostile action or accident are carefully kept off the casualty books.
All of these techniques and many other statistical feats show a far rosier picture in Iraq than if standard operating procedures used in reporting casualties in prior conflicts were used. Men and women are still being killed and injured; they just don’t count like their grand parents.
As long as you know!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
No Money Down - No Payments Due - Ever
Where have all the cloth coats gone? Since when did Republicans become the party of easy credit cards and ostentatious display? When did the GOP decide to live on debt and pass the bill on to their grandchildren? Well that’s only technically that they’re stiffing their grandchildren; really it’s more like leaving the bill for the children and grandchildren of the middle class. How on earth did these neo-robber barons conceive of – no, pull off – hijacking the party of trust busting TR and Honest Abe and turn it once again into the tool of the successors to J. P. Morgan, the Astors and the old time pre-reform Rockefellers?
For all of the profligacy, the Democrats seemed at least partly committed to being the party of Robin Hood. Growing older, I’ve come to realize that the handling charges in such entities as non-profit organizations are more than enough to assure home addresses in Georgetown, Beacon Hill, and Palo Alto, but their hearts, bless their hearts, seemed always to be in the right place. So it was as they soaked the rich to help the lot of those most in need.
Dang, how did these boys from Texas and Wyoming gull the middle class into thinking they were guiding their party down the garden path of fiscal responsibility while in actuality they were lining their pockets and charging the bills to the grandchildren of the rubes buying the McMansions and Humvies? Some damn trick, eh?
Now as The Used car Salesman in Chief, aka, Dubya peddles the snake oil guaranteed to cure the ills of the Gulf Coast at no cost, really at less than no cost since taxes will continue to go down for all taxpayers – especially those of the neo robber barons. Does this not sound surprisingly like the line put forth by Professor Henry Hill? But this isn’t The Music Man with a formulaic happy ending; this is real life.
We’re going to have to restore the Gulf Coast of this there can be no doubt. And, regardless of your views on Iraq, we’re going to have to continue to pour lives and treasure into that unhappy land. But, `read his lips’, we’re not going to have to pay for either one. For the Used Car Salesman in Chief, it’s all one big Washington’s Birthday Sale; drive your Hummer off the lot with no payments due until your grandchildren grow up and take over the payment book.
It’s galling to me that the party of Robert Taft and all those `pay as you go’ Republicans are more than happy to avoid reality and spend, spend, spend far faster than the democrats they label as the party of big spenders, all the while institute policies undermining the middle class and creating budget and trade deficits that really don’t mean anything. “Now who’re you gonna believe – me or your lyin’ eyes?”
The Administration’s got economists lined up from Capitol Hill to Wall Street guaranteeing that these deficit numbers don’t mean a thing. “Buy now, no payments due until 2018!”
I know there are Cloth Coat Republicans out there. They’ve sent people to Congress from Maine, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, even from Arizona and Nebraska, so when are they going to wake up around the rest of the country? It better damn well be soon. It better be, those same law makers getting ready to max out our national credit card just recently passed Bankruptcy Reform. Our grandchildren just won’t be able to roll that debt over and continue to make minimum monthly payments.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
For all of the profligacy, the Democrats seemed at least partly committed to being the party of Robin Hood. Growing older, I’ve come to realize that the handling charges in such entities as non-profit organizations are more than enough to assure home addresses in Georgetown, Beacon Hill, and Palo Alto, but their hearts, bless their hearts, seemed always to be in the right place. So it was as they soaked the rich to help the lot of those most in need.
Dang, how did these boys from Texas and Wyoming gull the middle class into thinking they were guiding their party down the garden path of fiscal responsibility while in actuality they were lining their pockets and charging the bills to the grandchildren of the rubes buying the McMansions and Humvies? Some damn trick, eh?
Now as The Used car Salesman in Chief, aka, Dubya peddles the snake oil guaranteed to cure the ills of the Gulf Coast at no cost, really at less than no cost since taxes will continue to go down for all taxpayers – especially those of the neo robber barons. Does this not sound surprisingly like the line put forth by Professor Henry Hill? But this isn’t The Music Man with a formulaic happy ending; this is real life.
We’re going to have to restore the Gulf Coast of this there can be no doubt. And, regardless of your views on Iraq, we’re going to have to continue to pour lives and treasure into that unhappy land. But, `read his lips’, we’re not going to have to pay for either one. For the Used Car Salesman in Chief, it’s all one big Washington’s Birthday Sale; drive your Hummer off the lot with no payments due until your grandchildren grow up and take over the payment book.
It’s galling to me that the party of Robert Taft and all those `pay as you go’ Republicans are more than happy to avoid reality and spend, spend, spend far faster than the democrats they label as the party of big spenders, all the while institute policies undermining the middle class and creating budget and trade deficits that really don’t mean anything. “Now who’re you gonna believe – me or your lyin’ eyes?”
The Administration’s got economists lined up from Capitol Hill to Wall Street guaranteeing that these deficit numbers don’t mean a thing. “Buy now, no payments due until 2018!”
I know there are Cloth Coat Republicans out there. They’ve sent people to Congress from Maine, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, even from Arizona and Nebraska, so when are they going to wake up around the rest of the country? It better damn well be soon. It better be, those same law makers getting ready to max out our national credit card just recently passed Bankruptcy Reform. Our grandchildren just won’t be able to roll that debt over and continue to make minimum monthly payments.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
The Gang of Fourteen Million
Some months back, the U.S. Senate was in grave danger of completely breaking down. The Republicans were threatening to use the `Nuclear Option’ to overcome the Democrats use of filibusters to prevent votes on President Bush’s judicial nominees. The Democrats, in turn, were threatening to shut down the federal government if the rule change on filibusters was imposed.
This increasingly dire situation festered for months and only diminished when `The Gang of Fourteen’ stepped in and boxed ears on both sides of the aisle. Seven Republicans and seven Democrats – just fourteen percent of the body - stepped forward and made it clear that despite the clamoring of crazy conservatives on one side and loopy liberals on the other they would propose centrist ground rules that would determine how the Senate would deal with judicial nominees. At least for the time being, the senators on the fringes and the leaders had no choice but to abide by the will of `The Gang.’
Rarely has the country been so polarized. Corruption of the redistricting process has led to a situation in which the vast majority of seats in the House of Representatives are no longer competitive. Sophisticated analytic tools have made `safe’ redistricting of the Congressional districts and has led to great polarization within the legislative body. Instead of having to answer to relatively balanced groupings of citizens, most members of congress are forced to move hard right or left to satisfy the narrowed political spectrum that they now represent.
The legislative changes have driven most moderates out of the Congress and sent the level of discourse in Washington to new lows. This process has tended to highlight the relatively recent phenomenon of Red and Blue states. With the level of comity working its way toward little or none, what are moderates to do?
`The Gang of Fourteen’ has shown us the way. Those of us committed to the center must assert ourselves and become `The Gang of Fourteen Million.’ Surely, those of us not frothing at the mouth at the diatribes of el Rushbo, Sean, and Bill O’Reilly or Michael Moore and Al Franken must realize that to continue to entrust our government to representatives of either group without checks on their behavior from outside the loony bin is a recipe for certain disaster.
The excesses of the liberals during the run up to the darkest days of Vietnam is a perfect example of the left gone wild, and the culmination of the conservative era that we live in today has led to the disastrous situation in Iraq and to the inept response to Katrina that stares us in the face today.
The hubris of Lyndon Johnson whose guns and butter madness led to a massive failure in the welfare state, the horror that was Vietnam, and to the long term run of inflation that wiped out the savings of millions of Americans.
Now, the `starve the beast’ mentality of the right together with an overarching hubris among our leaders has led us into the trap of Iraq and to our inability to respond effectively to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
When I was young, I supported the policies and people that brought us the Johnson failures. I switched to the ideas being espoused by Ronald Reagan and actually voted for George W. Bush in his race against Al Gore. I was wrong. And despite admitting to errors that could disqualify me from pontificating – you know that’ll never happen - I’m convinced there is an answer.
`The Gang of Fourteen Million’ must be formed, and it begins with each of us. The policies of the hard right and extreme left are not the answers. That the left arose to save America during The Great Depression and it was answered by the messianic Reagan era means only one thing to me. While the rise of extreme politics, government, and economic policies may be needed in time of crisis, during normal, relatively prosperous times, only moderate leaders should have their hands on the levers of power.
As we consigned the wild eyed liberals to a life of wandering in the desert, we should now be purchasing one way tickets to the Sahara for those pushing us toward the brink of extreme right wing radicalism.
It is time for divided government. I will be supporting Democrats in 2006 not because I love them or believe in them but to punish the incumbents for their massive failures. If neither or either but not both Houses of Congress fall to the Democrats, I’ll support the Democratic nominee for president in’08, again as punishment for the failure of this administration. But I will vote for the Republican if both houses are controlled by the Democrats. I will never again give my votes to a single party in control of the two active branches of government, except in times of crisis such as The Great Depression.
Surely, out of 300 hundred million Americans there are fourteen million of us with a commitment to moderate government, and we must work to find one another and to proselytize from among thinking people who are disturbed by the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s not as if you or I must be the single founder; there are already fourteen of our kind in the Senate and literally millions who voted for them, most consciously. All we have to do during conversations – or rather shouting matches - in which our left and right wing brethren are foaming as others simply listen is to speak up and indicate that we don’t agree with extreme solutions or candidates and indicate how we intend to vote.
In many states, the shift of just a few percentage points would be enough to determine the winner of the presidency. Even in many `safe’ districts, just a few thousand votes could determine control of the House of representatives.
We can do it, and we better!
Whew! After this screed you must be tired. I am. I’m going on vacation for a week or so, and the blog and you will be the better for it.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
This increasingly dire situation festered for months and only diminished when `The Gang of Fourteen’ stepped in and boxed ears on both sides of the aisle. Seven Republicans and seven Democrats – just fourteen percent of the body - stepped forward and made it clear that despite the clamoring of crazy conservatives on one side and loopy liberals on the other they would propose centrist ground rules that would determine how the Senate would deal with judicial nominees. At least for the time being, the senators on the fringes and the leaders had no choice but to abide by the will of `The Gang.’
Rarely has the country been so polarized. Corruption of the redistricting process has led to a situation in which the vast majority of seats in the House of Representatives are no longer competitive. Sophisticated analytic tools have made `safe’ redistricting of the Congressional districts and has led to great polarization within the legislative body. Instead of having to answer to relatively balanced groupings of citizens, most members of congress are forced to move hard right or left to satisfy the narrowed political spectrum that they now represent.
The legislative changes have driven most moderates out of the Congress and sent the level of discourse in Washington to new lows. This process has tended to highlight the relatively recent phenomenon of Red and Blue states. With the level of comity working its way toward little or none, what are moderates to do?
`The Gang of Fourteen’ has shown us the way. Those of us committed to the center must assert ourselves and become `The Gang of Fourteen Million.’ Surely, those of us not frothing at the mouth at the diatribes of el Rushbo, Sean, and Bill O’Reilly or Michael Moore and Al Franken must realize that to continue to entrust our government to representatives of either group without checks on their behavior from outside the loony bin is a recipe for certain disaster.
The excesses of the liberals during the run up to the darkest days of Vietnam is a perfect example of the left gone wild, and the culmination of the conservative era that we live in today has led to the disastrous situation in Iraq and to the inept response to Katrina that stares us in the face today.
The hubris of Lyndon Johnson whose guns and butter madness led to a massive failure in the welfare state, the horror that was Vietnam, and to the long term run of inflation that wiped out the savings of millions of Americans.
Now, the `starve the beast’ mentality of the right together with an overarching hubris among our leaders has led us into the trap of Iraq and to our inability to respond effectively to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
When I was young, I supported the policies and people that brought us the Johnson failures. I switched to the ideas being espoused by Ronald Reagan and actually voted for George W. Bush in his race against Al Gore. I was wrong. And despite admitting to errors that could disqualify me from pontificating – you know that’ll never happen - I’m convinced there is an answer.
`The Gang of Fourteen Million’ must be formed, and it begins with each of us. The policies of the hard right and extreme left are not the answers. That the left arose to save America during The Great Depression and it was answered by the messianic Reagan era means only one thing to me. While the rise of extreme politics, government, and economic policies may be needed in time of crisis, during normal, relatively prosperous times, only moderate leaders should have their hands on the levers of power.
As we consigned the wild eyed liberals to a life of wandering in the desert, we should now be purchasing one way tickets to the Sahara for those pushing us toward the brink of extreme right wing radicalism.
It is time for divided government. I will be supporting Democrats in 2006 not because I love them or believe in them but to punish the incumbents for their massive failures. If neither or either but not both Houses of Congress fall to the Democrats, I’ll support the Democratic nominee for president in’08, again as punishment for the failure of this administration. But I will vote for the Republican if both houses are controlled by the Democrats. I will never again give my votes to a single party in control of the two active branches of government, except in times of crisis such as The Great Depression.
Surely, out of 300 hundred million Americans there are fourteen million of us with a commitment to moderate government, and we must work to find one another and to proselytize from among thinking people who are disturbed by the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s not as if you or I must be the single founder; there are already fourteen of our kind in the Senate and literally millions who voted for them, most consciously. All we have to do during conversations – or rather shouting matches - in which our left and right wing brethren are foaming as others simply listen is to speak up and indicate that we don’t agree with extreme solutions or candidates and indicate how we intend to vote.
In many states, the shift of just a few percentage points would be enough to determine the winner of the presidency. Even in many `safe’ districts, just a few thousand votes could determine control of the House of representatives.
We can do it, and we better!
Whew! After this screed you must be tired. I am. I’m going on vacation for a week or so, and the blog and you will be the better for it.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Monday, September 12, 2005
Heck
Heck, Ah don’t get it. Bubba gets away with anything with the lingo. Heck, he’s got a lot redder neck’n mine. Ah mean heck, Ah went to Yale – and Harvard too - and so’d ma Daddy and lots o’ other kin. Now Ah axe ya straight out, what the heck’s meanin’ o’ heck?
Ah mean Bubba says it depends on the meaning of `is.’ But me, no, the media just assumes that `heck’ means `heck’. Pardner, in freshman English at Yale, Ah learned all about irony and sarcasm and lots o’ other big words, but let me say `heck’ and they stick me with `heck’.
If you cain’t see that the mainstream media’s pickin’ on us good ol’ country folk and funnin’ us cause we’re bumpkins, you cain’t see nothin’.
Heck, Ah say somethin’ bout raisin’ a iddy biddy bit o’ `heck’ in Nahlins a long time ago, and the New York Times and the Washington Post are all over me as not bein’ sensitive. Heck, Bubba’s never stopped raisin’ heck and all they can say is, “Looky how smart that good ol’ boy is.”
A’right, let’s git raht to it. When Ah said “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job,” why’d the Times just jump at thinkin’ I meant`heck?’ Ah’ll tell ya why, cause they’re backin’ Hilary and give her all the breaks when it comes to the lingo. If she said `heck’, heck they’d be sayin’, how bout that red state sensitivity?
Why couldn’ Ah a' meant ya ain’t cuttin’ the mustard, Brownie? They don’ know fer sure. But no, how’d they know that wasn’t irony or sarcasm or some such b.s. meanin’? Ah’ll tell you why; they just got it in fer folks 'at say `heck’ an’ you know who you are.
You know’d Ah meant heck. Don’ you lissen to them pin heads from New York City an’ Washington. D’ya evr hear how funny they say nuculeer? Who you gonna believe us’n or them’n?
U Betcha!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Ah mean Bubba says it depends on the meaning of `is.’ But me, no, the media just assumes that `heck’ means `heck’. Pardner, in freshman English at Yale, Ah learned all about irony and sarcasm and lots o’ other big words, but let me say `heck’ and they stick me with `heck’.
If you cain’t see that the mainstream media’s pickin’ on us good ol’ country folk and funnin’ us cause we’re bumpkins, you cain’t see nothin’.
Heck, Ah say somethin’ bout raisin’ a iddy biddy bit o’ `heck’ in Nahlins a long time ago, and the New York Times and the Washington Post are all over me as not bein’ sensitive. Heck, Bubba’s never stopped raisin’ heck and all they can say is, “Looky how smart that good ol’ boy is.”
A’right, let’s git raht to it. When Ah said “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job,” why’d the Times just jump at thinkin’ I meant`heck?’ Ah’ll tell ya why, cause they’re backin’ Hilary and give her all the breaks when it comes to the lingo. If she said `heck’, heck they’d be sayin’, how bout that red state sensitivity?
Why couldn’ Ah a' meant ya ain’t cuttin’ the mustard, Brownie? They don’ know fer sure. But no, how’d they know that wasn’t irony or sarcasm or some such b.s. meanin’? Ah’ll tell you why; they just got it in fer folks 'at say `heck’ an’ you know who you are.
You know’d Ah meant heck. Don’ you lissen to them pin heads from New York City an’ Washington. D’ya evr hear how funny they say nuculeer? Who you gonna believe us’n or them’n?
U Betcha!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Denial is Dereliction
While Mark Twain’s warning that the women and children should be locked up and guarded when the legislature is in session is humorous and not without some merit, democracies need their legislatures.
Last week, even while the parties were fighting and feuding, it was a matter of life and death that the Congress perform effectively and it did. It passed two emergency appropriations that will permit the emergency response and rebuilding of New Orleans to proceed. The Congressional role was simple. The members saw it. The Congress succeeded.
While the role of the various levels of government in catastrophes is less clear today than in the happy summer days prior to Katrina, there was virtual unanimity on the view that the federal government had to open its wallet and cover the cost of cleanup and reconstruction. The President asked for the money and the Congress appropriated it. Without that approval, the calamity that faces the nation on the Gulf Coast could have unraveled our entire society.
Does anyone out there disagree to this point? Excellent, I’ll proceed.
Al Qaeda tried to behead the government of the United States. The mad scheme of Osama bin Laden to destroy major symbols of America – The World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and either the White House or the Capitol – failed at a certain level as the president and the Congress survived, and the government was able to respond to the attack.
In retrospect, however, part of that failure by al Qaeda was based on the heroic response of only a few individuals on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, the great good fortune that Mr. Bush was not in The White House, and the Congress was not gathered in one place at the moment of proposed impact.
When New Orleans was drowned, the Congress had to perform. What if a quorum of one or both Houses, due to terrorist or enemy nation attack, was not available to legislate? Fortunately, that was not the case with Katrina and those of us not working on the rescue and cleanup can continue to enjoy ourselves as the government lives.
But there are people, very bad people, dedicated to undermining the ability of the United States government to perform its duties, and September 11 should have been the ultimate wake up call, but it wasn’t.
In the four years since the attacks by al Qaeda, the federal government has made great strides in physical security of the Capital. Four years of construction assures that those attempting to destroy the Capitol, The White House, the Pentagon, and most other strategic and symbolic points in the Washington area will have a much more difficult time with their diabolical plans. Presidential succession is clear, and it appears that the Executive Branch takes its responsibilities seriously in this vital area.
The Congress, however, has not kept pace. While the buildings and grounds of the Legislative Branch have been hardened and a successful beheading of the government is far less likely, certainty can never be assured. The levees protecting New Orleans would stand up against a Category 3 storm, but there was no guarantee beyond that level and Katrina proved it to be the case. When the disaster occurred, the Congress was called upon to act, and it did.
But again in the case of one or both Houses not being able to legislate, what would happen if Washington or another city was laid as low as New Orleans and there was no way to constitute a working Congress? We just don’t know. And Congress has been derelict in not facing this question that was raised many times in the aftermath of 9/11.
So we had two disasters – 9/11 and Katrina – four years apart and an intact responsive government was required after both, and, by the grace of God, we had it.
Could there not be a category 5 attack on the government and the country? Of course, and we’ve been under warning for four years. But the Congress has diddled and failed to protect us. Denial of the possibility amounts to dereliction of duty. SHAME!
Congress must act to redress this failure!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Last week, even while the parties were fighting and feuding, it was a matter of life and death that the Congress perform effectively and it did. It passed two emergency appropriations that will permit the emergency response and rebuilding of New Orleans to proceed. The Congressional role was simple. The members saw it. The Congress succeeded.
While the role of the various levels of government in catastrophes is less clear today than in the happy summer days prior to Katrina, there was virtual unanimity on the view that the federal government had to open its wallet and cover the cost of cleanup and reconstruction. The President asked for the money and the Congress appropriated it. Without that approval, the calamity that faces the nation on the Gulf Coast could have unraveled our entire society.
Does anyone out there disagree to this point? Excellent, I’ll proceed.
Al Qaeda tried to behead the government of the United States. The mad scheme of Osama bin Laden to destroy major symbols of America – The World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and either the White House or the Capitol – failed at a certain level as the president and the Congress survived, and the government was able to respond to the attack.
In retrospect, however, part of that failure by al Qaeda was based on the heroic response of only a few individuals on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, the great good fortune that Mr. Bush was not in The White House, and the Congress was not gathered in one place at the moment of proposed impact.
When New Orleans was drowned, the Congress had to perform. What if a quorum of one or both Houses, due to terrorist or enemy nation attack, was not available to legislate? Fortunately, that was not the case with Katrina and those of us not working on the rescue and cleanup can continue to enjoy ourselves as the government lives.
But there are people, very bad people, dedicated to undermining the ability of the United States government to perform its duties, and September 11 should have been the ultimate wake up call, but it wasn’t.
In the four years since the attacks by al Qaeda, the federal government has made great strides in physical security of the Capital. Four years of construction assures that those attempting to destroy the Capitol, The White House, the Pentagon, and most other strategic and symbolic points in the Washington area will have a much more difficult time with their diabolical plans. Presidential succession is clear, and it appears that the Executive Branch takes its responsibilities seriously in this vital area.
The Congress, however, has not kept pace. While the buildings and grounds of the Legislative Branch have been hardened and a successful beheading of the government is far less likely, certainty can never be assured. The levees protecting New Orleans would stand up against a Category 3 storm, but there was no guarantee beyond that level and Katrina proved it to be the case. When the disaster occurred, the Congress was called upon to act, and it did.
But again in the case of one or both Houses not being able to legislate, what would happen if Washington or another city was laid as low as New Orleans and there was no way to constitute a working Congress? We just don’t know. And Congress has been derelict in not facing this question that was raised many times in the aftermath of 9/11.
So we had two disasters – 9/11 and Katrina – four years apart and an intact responsive government was required after both, and, by the grace of God, we had it.
Could there not be a category 5 attack on the government and the country? Of course, and we’ve been under warning for four years. But the Congress has diddled and failed to protect us. Denial of the possibility amounts to dereliction of duty. SHAME!
Congress must act to redress this failure!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Friday, September 09, 2005
Losers!
Americans hate losing and love winning! I’ve had experience with both. In 1980, I lost a round robbin ping pong match with my sons – as I recall I wasn’t wearing proper foot wear, and, recently, I was nosed out in a golf match with my buddy, Lewis, in which I was suffering greatly from an injury that I didn’t claim because of my strength of character.
I ran for public office three times in the town to which I retired and won each time. I won’t say I was scared even a little in those races, but I have stopped shaking now that decade has passed since that first race.
This morning, I read with interest Richard Holbrooke’s expansive op-ed piece in the Washington Post. Mr. Holbrooke tears apart – effectively, in my judgment – the failure of the Bush Administration in the War on Terror. (I’ve linked the article so you can decide.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090801857.html
But Mr. Holbrooke is a fortunate man this morning. He is not – as Wolf Blitzer of CNN would echo, “NOT” – the United States Secretary of State. Had John F. Kerry won the White House, Mr. Holbrooke would have been the leading candidate to occupy the biggest office in Foggy Bottom.
So, regardless of how effectively President Kerry and Secretary Holbrooke were managing the debacle in Iraq and the War on Terror in their still new administration, the Secretary would not be penning long thoughtful articles on how to deal with Osama bin Laden; he’d been back filling on the government response to Katrina much as the real incumbent in State is doing.
Messrs. K & H can take some solace in having been found wanting at the polls. They’re not in charge of anything this morning.
My shoes really were the problem and I was a sport not to talk about my injury. But losing isn’t all bad; just ask John and Richard this morning. Whew!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
I ran for public office three times in the town to which I retired and won each time. I won’t say I was scared even a little in those races, but I have stopped shaking now that decade has passed since that first race.
This morning, I read with interest Richard Holbrooke’s expansive op-ed piece in the Washington Post. Mr. Holbrooke tears apart – effectively, in my judgment – the failure of the Bush Administration in the War on Terror. (I’ve linked the article so you can decide.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090801857.html
But Mr. Holbrooke is a fortunate man this morning. He is not – as Wolf Blitzer of CNN would echo, “NOT” – the United States Secretary of State. Had John F. Kerry won the White House, Mr. Holbrooke would have been the leading candidate to occupy the biggest office in Foggy Bottom.
So, regardless of how effectively President Kerry and Secretary Holbrooke were managing the debacle in Iraq and the War on Terror in their still new administration, the Secretary would not be penning long thoughtful articles on how to deal with Osama bin Laden; he’d been back filling on the government response to Katrina much as the real incumbent in State is doing.
Messrs. K & H can take some solace in having been found wanting at the polls. They’re not in charge of anything this morning.
My shoes really were the problem and I was a sport not to talk about my injury. But losing isn’t all bad; just ask John and Richard this morning. Whew!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Steady! Clear Eyes!
Bill’s crew is now being buffeted by spin machines bearing category 5 winds. From the left, we learn that a heartless president and his market based buddies simply don’t care about the poor, especially poor Blacks, and that they dithered as New Orleans went down for the third time.
From the right, we learn – I heard it myself on Rush Limbaugh and read several incoming screeds from right wing acquaintances – that it (I guess the whole disaster) is the fault of the liberals and the dependency they created on the welfare state. One Evangelical preacher claimed the whole thing was God’s retribution on New Orleans for being a place of sin and evil. The inference I drew was that the good folks who spent their money on the sin got away.
Whew! With spin gusts of this magnitude it is difficult to sort out what those of us rational liberals (as my buddy Frank Lewis labels us) ought to be seeing as the debris flies past.
For openers, no matter how much fog is pumped in from the right, the federal response was a day late and a dollar short. While George was cutting brush and ducking Cindy Sheehan and while Dick was fishing or ranching, their underlings in charge of emergency response were trying to figure out what to do when a storm that every man woman and child with cable TV knew was going to be a monster. Message to Dubya: you were in charge; your boys goofed; it was your watch; you better chop off some heads and pray that that will stanch your bleeding.
To the left: taking advantage of this will get you elected, but if you simply revert to form and don’t spend money on infrastructure – mega-billions - you’ll wind up where you’ve been for that last generation – in the electoral wilderness; another killer storm will come on your watch, guaranteed.
The human tragedy being played out before us is wrenching. But if we elect people to deal with that alone, we will repeat this scene again and again. Our heartland supplies the world through the Mississippi and in turn is resupplied from sources around the world via that great way.
We must spend the money to correct the bad policies of two generations to make the river viable and the ports along it, especially the facilities around New Orleans, must be part of this process.
We cannot ignore our national infrastructure. Our ports, bridges, and airports must be updated constantly.
Our emergency preparedness organizations cannot be used as places to dump political hacks.
We must do these things with a minimum of recrimination. For openers, let’s name the reconstructed levees in New Orleans for Ronald Reagan. This will serve two purposes: returning irony to government and establishing the end of such foolishness.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
.
From the right, we learn – I heard it myself on Rush Limbaugh and read several incoming screeds from right wing acquaintances – that it (I guess the whole disaster) is the fault of the liberals and the dependency they created on the welfare state. One Evangelical preacher claimed the whole thing was God’s retribution on New Orleans for being a place of sin and evil. The inference I drew was that the good folks who spent their money on the sin got away.
Whew! With spin gusts of this magnitude it is difficult to sort out what those of us rational liberals (as my buddy Frank Lewis labels us) ought to be seeing as the debris flies past.
For openers, no matter how much fog is pumped in from the right, the federal response was a day late and a dollar short. While George was cutting brush and ducking Cindy Sheehan and while Dick was fishing or ranching, their underlings in charge of emergency response were trying to figure out what to do when a storm that every man woman and child with cable TV knew was going to be a monster. Message to Dubya: you were in charge; your boys goofed; it was your watch; you better chop off some heads and pray that that will stanch your bleeding.
To the left: taking advantage of this will get you elected, but if you simply revert to form and don’t spend money on infrastructure – mega-billions - you’ll wind up where you’ve been for that last generation – in the electoral wilderness; another killer storm will come on your watch, guaranteed.
The human tragedy being played out before us is wrenching. But if we elect people to deal with that alone, we will repeat this scene again and again. Our heartland supplies the world through the Mississippi and in turn is resupplied from sources around the world via that great way.
We must spend the money to correct the bad policies of two generations to make the river viable and the ports along it, especially the facilities around New Orleans, must be part of this process.
We cannot ignore our national infrastructure. Our ports, bridges, and airports must be updated constantly.
Our emergency preparedness organizations cannot be used as places to dump political hacks.
We must do these things with a minimum of recrimination. For openers, let’s name the reconstructed levees in New Orleans for Ronald Reagan. This will serve two purposes: returning irony to government and establishing the end of such foolishness.
Blog on!
Wild Bill
.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Starve the Beast - Continued
I have been blaming the conservative movement for starving the beast, for robbing Peter to pay Paul – but not really paying Paul at all, and I believe that I’m right in that assessment. But the major complaint must be reserved for those pandering – that’s the politicians who took the campaign contributions. By starving the beast, Wild Bill and all the rest of us had more money to spend, or to paraphrase our great leader, `Who knows how to better spend your money, you or bunch of bureaucrats in Washington?”
The conservatives have sung this siren song of cutting our taxes and getting the `deadbeats' back to work for so long that it is second nature for many to believe it. I’m not going to argue for carrying deadbeats – if I could really identify them other than by resorting to stereotypes – and that’s where they get us. Cutting taxes and spending in almost all areas are the culprits, and the vast majority of us are culpable with the panderers.
Your government – and mine, our presidents and congress have known that New Orleans faced the fate that befell it last week for well over a generation and they chose to put off the need to fundamentally address the issue, praying that the calamity would not occur on their watch. For once, I won’t lay even the lion’s share of the blame on George W. Bush. For a century, federal action, inaction, and policy initiatives in the Mississippi Valley, including the Missouri and Ohio extensions, have been directed in ways that made Katrina’s wrath inevitable.
But it is far more than that. It is in underfunding meat inspection, and border security, and national parks, and veterans care, and a thousand and one other programs not even associated with those `deadbeats’ that we postpone crises in many areas to a day of reckoning – none nearly so dramatic as Katrina, however.
The conservative mantra is that if you cut taxes and spending, the economy will grow and make us rich. Until Katrina made it obvious that that is not necessarily true, it was difficult to point to a real example that even Wild Bill could understand as a counter. But by not investing a reasonable amount in correcting what man has done to the Mississippi all that our so called leaders could do was pray that the inevitable would be postponed until they qualified for their pensions and Medals of Freedom. For more than a generation, the problems in the Mississippi had become obvious to more and more observers, and yet the conservative movement demanded cuts in taxes and spending. The economy will grow us out of our problems.
A reasonable investment in river management made under Saint Ronald Reagan and carried through under Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 might well have mitigated the disaster that we face, but now we must invest an unknown multiplier of those sums to correct a generation of neglect. Thousands of lives and untold billions of dollars in lost gross national product and federal tax receipts will result from Katrina.
But it was up to a single storm to make obvious that we were living on the cheap, and there are more shocks to come. Gasoline prices spiked. The produce of the heartland from Montana to Pennsylvania must be transported but there is no easy method besides the river. The products destined for up river from New Orleans lays stalled out to sea. Will the loss in federal revenue from all these transactions ever be made up?
`Pay me now or pay me later.’ We have starved the beast, and now we must pay. I plead guilty for my share in the debacle.
Hold your president, your senators and you representative in Congress accountable!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
The conservatives have sung this siren song of cutting our taxes and getting the `deadbeats' back to work for so long that it is second nature for many to believe it. I’m not going to argue for carrying deadbeats – if I could really identify them other than by resorting to stereotypes – and that’s where they get us. Cutting taxes and spending in almost all areas are the culprits, and the vast majority of us are culpable with the panderers.
Your government – and mine, our presidents and congress have known that New Orleans faced the fate that befell it last week for well over a generation and they chose to put off the need to fundamentally address the issue, praying that the calamity would not occur on their watch. For once, I won’t lay even the lion’s share of the blame on George W. Bush. For a century, federal action, inaction, and policy initiatives in the Mississippi Valley, including the Missouri and Ohio extensions, have been directed in ways that made Katrina’s wrath inevitable.
But it is far more than that. It is in underfunding meat inspection, and border security, and national parks, and veterans care, and a thousand and one other programs not even associated with those `deadbeats’ that we postpone crises in many areas to a day of reckoning – none nearly so dramatic as Katrina, however.
The conservative mantra is that if you cut taxes and spending, the economy will grow and make us rich. Until Katrina made it obvious that that is not necessarily true, it was difficult to point to a real example that even Wild Bill could understand as a counter. But by not investing a reasonable amount in correcting what man has done to the Mississippi all that our so called leaders could do was pray that the inevitable would be postponed until they qualified for their pensions and Medals of Freedom. For more than a generation, the problems in the Mississippi had become obvious to more and more observers, and yet the conservative movement demanded cuts in taxes and spending. The economy will grow us out of our problems.
A reasonable investment in river management made under Saint Ronald Reagan and carried through under Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 might well have mitigated the disaster that we face, but now we must invest an unknown multiplier of those sums to correct a generation of neglect. Thousands of lives and untold billions of dollars in lost gross national product and federal tax receipts will result from Katrina.
But it was up to a single storm to make obvious that we were living on the cheap, and there are more shocks to come. Gasoline prices spiked. The produce of the heartland from Montana to Pennsylvania must be transported but there is no easy method besides the river. The products destined for up river from New Orleans lays stalled out to sea. Will the loss in federal revenue from all these transactions ever be made up?
`Pay me now or pay me later.’ We have starved the beast, and now we must pay. I plead guilty for my share in the debacle.
Hold your president, your senators and you representative in Congress accountable!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Monday, September 05, 2005
Buck? What Buck?
Two generations ago, one man was forced to make vital decisions greater than any person in his position had ever faced. He decided that the atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan, and he decided that the U.S. would lead a coalition of armed forces to defend South Korea against an attack from its neighbor. He decided the latter as part of a drive to assert the power of The United Nations.
Harry Truman made those decisions and stood by them. Every day, those two decisions are dissected in a hundred coffee shops, a thousand college classrooms and in numberless bars. Boldly, on President Truman’s desk, a small plaque proclaimed, “The Buck Stops Here.” Every day he is damned to Hell and praised to high Heaven for those choices.
Today, newspapers all over the world are reporting on the great lengths that the White House of George W. Bush is going to churn out disinformation describing how the failure of government to respond to the calamity that faces us in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is the primary responsibility of the three states and the many local governments most impacted by Hurricane Katrina and not that of the federal government. How low can we go? Pretty damned far down I’d say. “Can you hear me down there?”
Why do we have a federal emergency management function? To me it’s simple; in the first instance to bolster the state and local response to crises that are too large for them to effectively manage without additional resources from outside and in the second to stand in when a calamity completely overwhelms the states and local entities.
Katrina was known to be a dangerous storm many days before it struck the Gulf Coast; it killed eleven people in Florida. It was known to be developing into a killer storm several days before it struck. That it would strike the Gulf Coast at about its point of attack was clear. The states and local governments warned their citizens to evacuate. (We know now that evacuation of New Orleans was a physical impossibility.)
The states (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) and the localities most impacted mobilized and threw all of their resources into the breach – minus those National Guard troops and equipment in Iraq. The federal government was monitoring and preparing during this phase of the situation.
The storm struck. The rest is history. The states and locals were overwhelmed. The federal response was late and insufficient.
The states and locals are saying they were completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the storm. It is self evident that they are correct in this assessment.
The White House is moving Heaven and Earth to shift blame from George W. Bush to the States and locals.
Buck? What Buck?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Harry Truman made those decisions and stood by them. Every day, those two decisions are dissected in a hundred coffee shops, a thousand college classrooms and in numberless bars. Boldly, on President Truman’s desk, a small plaque proclaimed, “The Buck Stops Here.” Every day he is damned to Hell and praised to high Heaven for those choices.
Today, newspapers all over the world are reporting on the great lengths that the White House of George W. Bush is going to churn out disinformation describing how the failure of government to respond to the calamity that faces us in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is the primary responsibility of the three states and the many local governments most impacted by Hurricane Katrina and not that of the federal government. How low can we go? Pretty damned far down I’d say. “Can you hear me down there?”
Why do we have a federal emergency management function? To me it’s simple; in the first instance to bolster the state and local response to crises that are too large for them to effectively manage without additional resources from outside and in the second to stand in when a calamity completely overwhelms the states and local entities.
Katrina was known to be a dangerous storm many days before it struck the Gulf Coast; it killed eleven people in Florida. It was known to be developing into a killer storm several days before it struck. That it would strike the Gulf Coast at about its point of attack was clear. The states and local governments warned their citizens to evacuate. (We know now that evacuation of New Orleans was a physical impossibility.)
The states (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) and the localities most impacted mobilized and threw all of their resources into the breach – minus those National Guard troops and equipment in Iraq. The federal government was monitoring and preparing during this phase of the situation.
The storm struck. The rest is history. The states and locals were overwhelmed. The federal response was late and insufficient.
The states and locals are saying they were completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the storm. It is self evident that they are correct in this assessment.
The White House is moving Heaven and Earth to shift blame from George W. Bush to the States and locals.
Buck? What Buck?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Starve the Beast
For several decades, it has been the conservative mantra to “starve the beast.” Cutting taxes and entitlement programs are, according to the believers, the basis for America’s prosperity and power.
But for old feds who dealt with disasters of the past, it’s sad to see the sorry state of governmental response to Katrina. I will not slam the leaders of Homeland Security or FEMA; their day on the griddle will come soon enough.
My complaint today is with the conservative movement that consciously moved to “starve the beast.” It is very difficult to say this is how we used to do it when we never faced a calamity of anywhere near the magnitude of Katrina. But I’ll try.
The conservatives want to remove the feed bag from the old ox and let private charity deal with as much of the problem facing us as possible. I don’t find that an unworthy goal, but let’s look at recent situations. Based on a visit to the website of the Red Cross, it appears that about $558 million was donated to that institution for the Tsunami last year - a lot of money. The Salvation Army’s site indicates that Americans have already donated more than $32 million to aid the victims of Katrina as of this morning (Sunday, September 4, 2005.) This too is a great outpouring.
Let’s just assume that private donations from around the world to all of the charities committed to helping the victims of Katrina quadruple those for the tsunami and that Salvation Army collections for Katrina increase tenfold from those now in the coffers. With all wild speculation, we might assume that $5 billion in private charity will be collected and expended on this disaster. That would be an amazing outpouring of money and empathy.
But let’s step back and note that insurance losses are expected to exceed $25 billion, and that the total losses are likely to exceed $100 billion. The catastrophe makes all these payments pale in comparison with the need. The federal government passed an emergency appropriation of $10.5 billion yesterday. Based on my reading of some of the provisions, it will be some time before much of that aid buys food and blankets for individuals.
When FEMA was set up in the 1970s, it was able to tap the entitlement monies of the grant making federal agencies to deal with the disaster facing the nation. Thus, HUD, HHS (then HEW), Labor, and the rest were dunned and expected to come up with money – right now - from their unexpended and uncommitted grant program monies.
Today, the emaciated beast has almost no money in any of these pockets and FEMA and Homeland Security look like a bunch of incompetent braying jackasses.
Thank goodness, the emergency appropriation is but a down payment on the great loss. Unfortunately, the money must still trickle down to state and local governments and ultimately to individual victims through the elaborate grant making process. This will be short circuited to the greatest extent possible, but relief and recovery will take time – much time.
My points are that intentionally “starving the beast” has made response far slower than it would have been and, far more important, that private donations, however great, can never displace government as the principal mitigator of true calamities.
The starved beast of government is shown for all its shortcomings as it responds to Katrina. Citizens who see a role for government in the life of the nation must demand that irresponsible tax cuts CEASE! Government by pork – as in the recent highway bill – may get men and women reelected to Congress but ultimately undermines the government’s ability to perform in emergency situations.
The people must demand more of their government than tax cuts for the rich and no joint sacrifice in the face of war and disaster. Your president, your two senators, and your representative are dancing. Will you demand that they stand and deliver?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
But for old feds who dealt with disasters of the past, it’s sad to see the sorry state of governmental response to Katrina. I will not slam the leaders of Homeland Security or FEMA; their day on the griddle will come soon enough.
My complaint today is with the conservative movement that consciously moved to “starve the beast.” It is very difficult to say this is how we used to do it when we never faced a calamity of anywhere near the magnitude of Katrina. But I’ll try.
The conservatives want to remove the feed bag from the old ox and let private charity deal with as much of the problem facing us as possible. I don’t find that an unworthy goal, but let’s look at recent situations. Based on a visit to the website of the Red Cross, it appears that about $558 million was donated to that institution for the Tsunami last year - a lot of money. The Salvation Army’s site indicates that Americans have already donated more than $32 million to aid the victims of Katrina as of this morning (Sunday, September 4, 2005.) This too is a great outpouring.
Let’s just assume that private donations from around the world to all of the charities committed to helping the victims of Katrina quadruple those for the tsunami and that Salvation Army collections for Katrina increase tenfold from those now in the coffers. With all wild speculation, we might assume that $5 billion in private charity will be collected and expended on this disaster. That would be an amazing outpouring of money and empathy.
But let’s step back and note that insurance losses are expected to exceed $25 billion, and that the total losses are likely to exceed $100 billion. The catastrophe makes all these payments pale in comparison with the need. The federal government passed an emergency appropriation of $10.5 billion yesterday. Based on my reading of some of the provisions, it will be some time before much of that aid buys food and blankets for individuals.
When FEMA was set up in the 1970s, it was able to tap the entitlement monies of the grant making federal agencies to deal with the disaster facing the nation. Thus, HUD, HHS (then HEW), Labor, and the rest were dunned and expected to come up with money – right now - from their unexpended and uncommitted grant program monies.
Today, the emaciated beast has almost no money in any of these pockets and FEMA and Homeland Security look like a bunch of incompetent braying jackasses.
Thank goodness, the emergency appropriation is but a down payment on the great loss. Unfortunately, the money must still trickle down to state and local governments and ultimately to individual victims through the elaborate grant making process. This will be short circuited to the greatest extent possible, but relief and recovery will take time – much time.
My points are that intentionally “starving the beast” has made response far slower than it would have been and, far more important, that private donations, however great, can never displace government as the principal mitigator of true calamities.
The starved beast of government is shown for all its shortcomings as it responds to Katrina. Citizens who see a role for government in the life of the nation must demand that irresponsible tax cuts CEASE! Government by pork – as in the recent highway bill – may get men and women reelected to Congress but ultimately undermines the government’s ability to perform in emergency situations.
The people must demand more of their government than tax cuts for the rich and no joint sacrifice in the face of war and disaster. Your president, your two senators, and your representative are dancing. Will you demand that they stand and deliver?
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Saturday, September 03, 2005
The Party's Over
Today's blog posting is the most important of Wild Bill's career. It is not written by him but by the editors of the New York Times. As my pal El Rushbo proclaims daily, the Republicans are the party of ideas and the Democrats are bankrupt. Sadly for Rush, the bubble burst when the levees failed. Attached is today's lead editorial in The Times. It states the case perfectly. The excesses of the party of ideas are exposed nakedly before us. "Starve the beast" will no longer do. When you undermine government's ability to respond, you undermine the security of the nation.
I quoted a Republican yesterday: "Government's the enemy until you need a friend." Our emaciated friend wasn't up to the task and the society is suffering.
Government's ability to protect us must be restored. Be gone George! Crawl back into your hole Rush!
Here it is in a nutshell: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03sat1.html
Blog on!
Wild Bill
I quoted a Republican yesterday: "Government's the enemy until you need a friend." Our emaciated friend wasn't up to the task and the society is suffering.
Government's ability to protect us must be restored. Be gone George! Crawl back into your hole Rush!
Here it is in a nutshell: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03sat1.html
Blog on!
Wild Bill
Friday, September 02, 2005
Give Him an Extra Buck
In an early scene in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, the brilliant doctor demonstrates for adoring medical students his wizardry in pain suppression by describing his sure fire methods and then kicking his subject in the testicles. As they cart the writhing old man off on a gurney, Frankenstein, in a muttered aside, orders, “Give him and extra buck.”
America has not suffered pain for a long time. The Great Depression is but the subject of anecdotes of semi-senile seniors like Wild Bill. World War II has been made glamorous by those glorifying the `Greatest Generation’ and who have transformed the pain and fear of the times into glory. Vietnam is invoked but never analyzed.
But America is in pain today, and it is a phenomenon that we are ill equipped to face. Far away, our sons and daughters are facing deadly danger from an almost invisible enemy. Here at home, Louisiana and Mississippi are confronting a natural disaster greater than any in living memory, probably greater than any in our history as a nation.
It is our great misfortune that these two events are more than a little related. Thousands of members of the National Guard from the states most impacted by Hurricane Katrina who would ordinarily be part of the cleanup and solution are, instead, victims of the natural disaster. Not only are they unable to lend their muscle and expertise to mitigating the problems, their families are less able to cope the situation with their loved ones being in harms way on the other side of the globe.
The human catastrophe on the American Gulf Coast is of epic proportions with hundreds if not thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. The closing of the Port of Southern Louisiana, the largest port in the U.S. and the fifth largest in the world was quickly felt around the country when gasoline prices jumped off the charts. All of these possibilities have been studied for years. THIS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SURPISE TO THE ADMINISTRATION!
It appears that the oil producing facilities and port infrastructure in the Gulf region are not beyond repair and that the port will be ale to be saved and put back in operation – after heroic effort and the passage of much time. Sadly, the process will be slowed by the absence of those who make the system work and who find themselves disbursed to the four winds by the flooding and destruction.
America’s great heartland production is stuck waiting for the port to reopen, and the supplies necessary to run the states above the Delta sit offshore.
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presided over a government and country that has worked overtime to undue the structures put in place by administrations from the early nineteen thirties until the late seventies that gave government a great role in solving the calamities that had marred these earlier periods.
The politics of `me’ based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand where everyman is an island has come to reign. Government is just a boatload of bureaucrats looking to pick the pockets of honest folks and to bask in luxury while the genius of the market languishes.
In today’s Washington Post there were two columns that inspired this posting. E.J. Dionne, Jr. quotes former Maine Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen who pithily put his finger on the problem. “Government is the enemy until you need a friend.” David Ignatius invokes the late Eric Sevareid view that civilization is only about seven meals away from anarchy. (Dionne’s column is linked at the end of this posting. I couldn’t attach Ignatius’s column but recommend that you read it on line. It is entitled: Time to Mend the Safety Net.)
For a generation, America has drifted away from Europe in its ideas of what a government should be doing. Our leaders have smiled knowingly that our course toward the selfishness of bigger houses and more wasteful engines was far superior to the cozy dwellings and motor bikes of “Old Europe.” We know that materialism is better than the semi-socialist schemes of Denmark and Holland.
But now we are facing joint calamities made worse by starving government budgets. Ignatius points out that it is not the `thousand points of light’ of Bush 41 that the man standing on the roof of the house surrounded by flood water is looking for to save him. It is the Coast Guard, the police, or the National Guard soldier at the helm of a rescue boat that he is seeking.
It is government – federal, state and local – that must put the Mississippi River and the lives of our dispirited citizens back together. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army can provide hot meals and shelter in the short term. But it is government – fueled by us all – that must restore lives and guide the restoration of the heartland. These governments have been emasculated and laughed at by a generation of me firsters, and it is not nearly well enough equipped to do the job as it should be.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090102032.html
Blog on!
Wild Bill
America has not suffered pain for a long time. The Great Depression is but the subject of anecdotes of semi-senile seniors like Wild Bill. World War II has been made glamorous by those glorifying the `Greatest Generation’ and who have transformed the pain and fear of the times into glory. Vietnam is invoked but never analyzed.
But America is in pain today, and it is a phenomenon that we are ill equipped to face. Far away, our sons and daughters are facing deadly danger from an almost invisible enemy. Here at home, Louisiana and Mississippi are confronting a natural disaster greater than any in living memory, probably greater than any in our history as a nation.
It is our great misfortune that these two events are more than a little related. Thousands of members of the National Guard from the states most impacted by Hurricane Katrina who would ordinarily be part of the cleanup and solution are, instead, victims of the natural disaster. Not only are they unable to lend their muscle and expertise to mitigating the problems, their families are less able to cope the situation with their loved ones being in harms way on the other side of the globe.
The human catastrophe on the American Gulf Coast is of epic proportions with hundreds if not thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. The closing of the Port of Southern Louisiana, the largest port in the U.S. and the fifth largest in the world was quickly felt around the country when gasoline prices jumped off the charts. All of these possibilities have been studied for years. THIS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SURPISE TO THE ADMINISTRATION!
It appears that the oil producing facilities and port infrastructure in the Gulf region are not beyond repair and that the port will be ale to be saved and put back in operation – after heroic effort and the passage of much time. Sadly, the process will be slowed by the absence of those who make the system work and who find themselves disbursed to the four winds by the flooding and destruction.
America’s great heartland production is stuck waiting for the port to reopen, and the supplies necessary to run the states above the Delta sit offshore.
Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presided over a government and country that has worked overtime to undue the structures put in place by administrations from the early nineteen thirties until the late seventies that gave government a great role in solving the calamities that had marred these earlier periods.
The politics of `me’ based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand where everyman is an island has come to reign. Government is just a boatload of bureaucrats looking to pick the pockets of honest folks and to bask in luxury while the genius of the market languishes.
In today’s Washington Post there were two columns that inspired this posting. E.J. Dionne, Jr. quotes former Maine Senator and Defense Secretary William Cohen who pithily put his finger on the problem. “Government is the enemy until you need a friend.” David Ignatius invokes the late Eric Sevareid view that civilization is only about seven meals away from anarchy. (Dionne’s column is linked at the end of this posting. I couldn’t attach Ignatius’s column but recommend that you read it on line. It is entitled: Time to Mend the Safety Net.)
For a generation, America has drifted away from Europe in its ideas of what a government should be doing. Our leaders have smiled knowingly that our course toward the selfishness of bigger houses and more wasteful engines was far superior to the cozy dwellings and motor bikes of “Old Europe.” We know that materialism is better than the semi-socialist schemes of Denmark and Holland.
But now we are facing joint calamities made worse by starving government budgets. Ignatius points out that it is not the `thousand points of light’ of Bush 41 that the man standing on the roof of the house surrounded by flood water is looking for to save him. It is the Coast Guard, the police, or the National Guard soldier at the helm of a rescue boat that he is seeking.
It is government – federal, state and local – that must put the Mississippi River and the lives of our dispirited citizens back together. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army can provide hot meals and shelter in the short term. But it is government – fueled by us all – that must restore lives and guide the restoration of the heartland. These governments have been emasculated and laughed at by a generation of me firsters, and it is not nearly well enough equipped to do the job as it should be.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090102032.html
Blog on!
Wild Bill
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