Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

U.S. Domestic Policy

Roger Clemens’ Theater of the Absurd

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If anyone needs performance enhancing drugs, it is the Republican members of the U.S. Congress. In an exhibition befitting Little Leaguers, the House Oversight & Govt. Reform Committee managed to turn a hearing on illegal use of steroids by baseball players into theater of the absurd.

Steroid use is a serious issue at least partly because of its effects on those young athletes – high school age and younger – trying to gain an edge by using drugs that ultimately can seriously damage their health. By focusing on one player’s presumed guilt the Committee managed to create an opportunity for Republicans to rush to the protection of Clemens, a Bush family friend, and turn a potentially serious discussion into one more GOP generated partisan flackshow.

As for the Hearings – Mike Wise in the Washington Post cut quickly to the chase:

“As the contradictions kept coming yesterday in the Rayburn House Office Building, Clemens came across as a megalomaniac, a habitual liar and a barrel-chested fraud. The people who believe him now seem to be either paid by Clemens, married to him or in worse denial than the Rocket himself.

He came to Capitol Hill not to swear, under oath, his innocence of being a drug cheat; Clemens came here to show America that the arrogance of the elite athlete has moved beyond our ball fields, universities and clubhouses straight into a witness chair at a congressional hearing.”

Those Republican Committee members that attempted to portray Clemens as a hero rather than an egotistical liar were on something but it was decidedly not performance enhancing. They accepted Clemens’ nonsensical testimony without blinking an eye and proved once again that most of a generation of Republican politicians have become T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”

DEATH BY FIRE: POLITICS AND TAXES

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A fire in Gloucester, Massachusetts last night destroyed an apartment building and a synagogue and killed a 70-year-old disabled man. The fire broke out across the street from the city’s fire station and the initial response was only one fireman at least partially because the department has been understaffed since the city’s voters refused to vote for a tax increase in 2004. Another Gloucester resident died in a fire a year ago when it took 11 minutes to respond because the nearest fire station had been closed for budgetary reasons.

This is not an isolated incident – throughout America voters have opted to reduce the quality of basic services in order to reduce their tax bills. At the same time the federal government has provided huge tax breaks to the wealthy thereby reducing funding for local and statewide services. As governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney consistently bragged about reducing the cost of services in the state by simply reducing their quality. This allows him to take credit for holding the line on taxes but also the blame for deteriorating services throughout the state.

We are a country of bridges that collapse, schools that don’t provide arts education, libraries with reduced hours, lousy train service, spotty public transportation services, deteriorating medical services, etc. According to the United Nations World population Prospects Report the U.S. ranks 32nd in infant mortality behind virtually all Western democracies as well as Cuba, S. Korea, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Japan and Singapore. The country ranks 38th in life expectancy behind such countries as Cuba, Chile, Costa Rica, Malta, Martinique and Japan.

For years politicians have promised lower taxes without mentioning the corresponding guarantee of reduced quality of life for the vast majority of Americans. And the American people have been willingly seduced by the promise of lower taxes while ignoring the ugly reality of what shortsighted policies have produced for coming generations. We are literally scared into spending trillions on a senseless war in Iraq yet cannot find the resources to fight fires, repair bridges, provide well rounded education to our young and improve health care for all at home. Shame on us.

What ever happened to the US election system?

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It’s not so long ago that the US caucus system designed to choose nominees for the presidential candidates of the only two parties that count came up with figures like Eisenhower, Stevenson, Kennedy, Reagan, McGovern, Nixon. Now it is certainly true that not all of these chaps proved to be such worthy leaders, but all of them were at least experienced politicians or, in the case of Eisenhower, an important historical personality and father figure. You could despair of Reagan and Nixon’s California view of the world or McGovern’s innocence, but their campaigns were veritable Socratic dialogues compared to the reports reaching foreign ears of the level of discussion in the current round of presidential candidate debates.

Recently on what many thought were satirical comedies, European and Canadian television has been running selections from Youtube or CNN debates in which grown men striving to lead a very powerful nation struggled over who was the best Christian or indeed if one of them was a Christian at all. This takes place in a country that is supposed to separate church and state. The Scopes trial was revisited and nobody seemed willing to really defend the idea of evolution. Questions were thrown at the man who was once the leading candidate about whether he wore secret underwear, and the beast that raised questions about real Roman Catholic beliefs, who seemed to have left the stage forever with the Kennedy election, once again raised its weird head. Fortunately Joe Liebermann isn’t in the mix.

What is going on? It is impossible to imagine any of these debaters would be taken seriously as a contender for any important position in any other leading western country with arguments like these. Certainly it is true that at least a couple of these people might have something to offer on some important topics, like health care for the US society or the Middle East for the global one. But they don’t seem to be able to find a forum or get much of a chance to discuss anything of consequence when the only topic that wins you votes is whether your Christianity is better than the next guy’s. Isn’t anybody down there working on a way of changing the electoral system?

America Takes on Mother Nature

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Bob and Doug Mackenzie have reported on the successful – but huge – investment of the Dutch in controlling Mother Nature – or at least adapting to Her powers. But in doing so they cast aspersions on the United States’ ability to do the same, unpleasantly referring to Katrina.

Well, as it turns out Bob and Doug have missed the big story developing in the Southeastern United States.  After a year long drought that has led to dangerous lows in drinking water supplies in Georgia and Alabama as well as major, long-burning fires, the governors of those two states have taken action. And you better believe that they are not going to waste a whole baggage car full of taxpayers’ money to do so.

An AP story in today’s NY Times reported that:

“…Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue stepped up to a podium outside the state Capitol on Tuesday and led a solemn crowd of several hundred people in a prayer for rain on his drought-stricken state.

”We’ve come together here simply for one reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm,” Perdue said after a choir provided a hymn. …”It’s time to appeal to Him who can and will make a difference,” Perdue told the crowd….

Alas the AP report continued:

Meteorologists said earlier this week there was a slight possibility of rain Tuesday, but less of a chance of precipitation was predicted for the rest of the week.

That Governor Perdue persisted in his prayer strategy showed special faith since Alabama Gov. Bob Riley had issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as ”Days of Prayer for Rain” to ”humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty.”  Alas, those prayers remain unanswered.

In a related story, President Bush announced that special presidential advisor Pat Robertson would be leading the nation in a day of prayer aimed at reducing the price of oil.

Intelligence Services???

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As Congress rushed toward its August vacation it took the time to pass a far-reaching bill which allows the intelligence services to wiretap at will with no credible oversight. This is disturbing on a number of levels: it effectively ignores our constitutional rights to privacy; it eliminates effective judicial oversight of such operations; and assigns review to Alberto Gonzales, of all people. It is one more step on a slippery slope made dangerously so by the fear mongering of Bush.

But what is simply appalling is the bill’s provision of this kind of power to intelligence organizations that have consistently failed – in almost comic and cosmic ways – to fulfill their mission. Movies and books manage to suggest that our safety as a nation has depended on the brave, smart men and women who have run our agents, tortured enemy agents, analyzed secret messages, etc. Simply not true. The United States intelligence services have a record of almost blinding incompetence. With thanks to Tim Weiner’s book, “Legacy of Ashes” and reviews of same book by Evan Thomas and David Wise of the Washington Post, here is a list of some of the major (and sometimes entertaining) screw-ups of the CIA:

Failed to predict Soviet Union’s atomic bomb in 1949

In the 1950’s the CIA and British intelligence collaboration on Operation Gold, a tunnel into East Berlin that allowed listening to the Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin. It was a terrific coup except that the Soviets knew about the tunnel before it was completed via George Blake, a British intelligence officer working for the Soviets.

Also in the fifties, the CIA arranged for the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected government (named “Operation Success”) to protect the interests of United Fruit. Dictators’ death squads executed an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans in following years.

In 1953 the CIA and he British worked to remove the Prime Minister of Iran from Office to protect the interests of British and American oil companies. The Shah became the ruler, instituted a new secret police (the SAVAK) and pissed off enough of his countrymen to help produce the Islamic Revolution.

The CIA failed to predict the Islamic Revolution.

The CIA did not predict popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950’s

The CIA did not predict the invasion of S. Korea in 1953

The CIA-run1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was a classic example of incompetence.

The CIA’s ridiculous attempts at executing Castro with the help of the mafia in the early 60’s.

The CIA did not predict installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962

The CIA’s support of a coup by the Baath party in Iraq in 1963, which led to Saddam Hussein coming to power.

The large-scale American escalation in Vietnam facilitated by the intelligence community’s manufacture of evidence of the so-called Gulf of Tonkin attack in 1964.

Richard Helms doing the bidding of Richard Nixon and subsequent presidents in exaggerating the capabilities of the Soviet Union to further the presidents’ political needs.

The CIA did not predict the Arab-Israeli War in 1973

The CIA did not predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979

The CIA did not predict the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, largely because it had no credible Russian spies after the CIA mole Aldrich Ames had betrayed them all

In 1994, the Guatemalan military worked with the CIA to bug the bedroom of Marilyn McAfee, U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala. She was recorded cooing endearments to “Murphy” and subsequently accused by the CIA station chief of having a lesbian affair with her secretary. Alas, “Murphy” was her pet poodle.

The CIA did not predict India’s explosion of atomic bomb in 1998

The CIA did not predict the attack of 9/11.

George Tenet’s 2003 “slam dunk” on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

These are the people for whom we are giving away our constitutional rights. Where is George Smiley when we need him?

Socialism, U.S. Style

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Bill, a friend of this Blog, writes the following after mistakenly turning on the “O’Reilly Factor”:

My Economics Professor at Rutgers once commented that in America, it was “socialism for the rich and the corporations but capitalism for the rest of us”. Nothing has changed; recently Bill O’Reilly was bashing universal healthcare as socialism. Yet when we socialize the cost to general electric for polluting a river, or Halliburton for delivering shoddy work in Iraq, or farmers for not growing crops, or Big Pharma for taking drug designs from the NIH – not a word is spoken. But the Bill O’Reillys of the world continue to pull out the same tired, cheap and shallow arguments. Just amazing that they do it and that people continue to tune them in.

The War on Drugs: Nonsense and Insensibilities

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A short item in the NY Times today tells of a Canadian psychotherapist who was stopped at the border by U.S. immigration officials who searched his name on the Internet and learned that he had written in an academic journal about his experiences with psychedelic drugs in the  1960’s. The article continues:

He was asked by a border guard whether he was the author of the article and whether it was true. Yes, he replied. And yes.

Mr. Feldmar was held for four hours, fingerprinted and, after signing a statement conceding the long-ago drug use, sent home.

Mike Milne, a spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection agency in Seattle, said he could not discuss individual cases for reasons of privacy. But the law is clear, Mr. Milne said. People who have used drugs are not welcome here.

“If you are or have been a drug user,” he said, “that’s one of the many things that can make you inadmissible to the United States.”

Since the psychotherapist gave up drugs in 1974 he could hardly be deemed any more of a threat than – oh let’s say, the border guard who did a random and arbitrary internet search and added one more nail in the twin coffins of a sane immigration policy and an effective war on terror.

The good news is that this raises the possibility of extraditing known cocaine user George W. Bush to whoever would take him – maybe Iraq? Not Canada certainly.

Lieberman’s War Tax

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It has been easy to resist writing about AIPAC’s favorite senator, but Joe Lieberman’s suggestion for a war tax to pay for the Iraq War is kind of interesting.  Not that anyone on either side of the aisle is likely to seriously consider it, but rather for the entertainment opportunity it could provide for watching the Congress discuss and debate the Iraq War in terms of its impact on American domestic policy.

The Bush-Cheney budget proposal presents a case for reducing health, education and environmental programs to reduce a deficit that results at least partly through the enormous costs of the Bush-Cheney Iraq Thing. The Washington Times gloats that Lieberman’s proposal would force the Democrats to raise taxes in order to maintain those  non-defense programs, but of course, it could also be an opportunity for Americans to hear a substantive debate on the cost of the war and the trade-offs it has allowed Bush-Cheney to make.

Improve education for Americans or bomb some towns in Iraq? Distribute $12billion in cash to unaccountable Iraqis or help shore up Social Security? Pay billions to Halliburton to construct crappy facilities in Iraq or provide food to poor American school children? Spend some money on developing alternative energy sources or spend billions to prop up Iraq’s corrupt oil industry?

The Congress would not treat this seriously because it would force both parties to face reality and address it publicly and maybe even courageously. And of course Lieberman knows that, but his suggestion allows him to play both ends of the debate – support the war and maintain social programs but pay for it with a tax that no member of Congress would have the courage to support.