tales of copper city

When one flies off, they all fly off...

Read Greg Mitchell's listing of the media's adoring response to the "Mission Accomplished!" episode. Nearly every famous American mainstream media personality is there, enraptured and captivated by the grinning "boy president," the man who is now the most unpopular president in American history.

Like birds on a wire, when one flies off, they all fly off. 

When we read it, and when we weep, we should ask ourselves: "Where was the judgment of the entire media establishment in this shameful episode in American history?" Who has done more damage to the American republic: George Bush or a compliant mainstream media that has been his enabler? 

Remember this war will cost us between $2 trillion and $3 trillion dollars. Think of how we could have spent that money otherwise.

Be sure and scroll down and read Maureen Dowd's fawning, over-the-top column. Given that column I dare any of us to take this woman seriously again.

I can't help but add a comment on President Bush's clownish performance before the National Press Club. He had them laughing. As a friend here in town said, "He missed his calling. He could be a stand-up comic"

Actually, I suspect that behind that swagger, that bravado, that gunslinger stance hides a little boy who is saying, "They bought it!  They bought all of it!  Who would have guessed?"

Obama and our hope against hope

No matter how the whole uproar over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright turns out, the candidacy of Senator Obama reassures me about the birth of genuine hope in our politics.

True hope is a kind of hope against hope, as Paul Tillich once argued. True hope is hope in the face of a seeming defeat or powerful setback. Hope is not the belief that ultimately everything will always turn out right, either for America or for ourselves. True hope is not a sunny, shallow optimism.

True hope, according to Tillich, is when we know, we feel, we sense that something new is being created or is unfolding, either in us or in our community---even when the news is bad. Especially when the news is bad.

Our hope in Senator Obama is genuine because in his candidacy we feel down deep the beginnings of something important.  We sense the birth of something new. We sense in Obama a genuine opening to the future and this is where true hope always begins---with an opening, a new possibility for our future.

Obama's judgment

I find the whole Jeremiah Wright-Obama episode dispiriting, to say the least. 

As I see it, as the story unfolded Obama responded to Wright in appropriate ways, expressing his disagreement and rejection of the extreme remarks of Reverend Wright early on but also acknowledging his long friendship and debt.

And then, when Reverend Wright threw Obama under the bus with his intemperate and angry remarks at the National Press Club press conference, the next day Obama severed the cord of friendship once and for all.

The fact that some lame reporter then asked why he didn't do this the day before, should tip us all off as to what's going on here. The reporter was asking, why didn't you respond on the day we demanded a response?  Why didn't you play the game by our rules?

The dumbing down of American politics

The real problem of the Reverend Wright story is not the narcissism of Jeremiah Wright, nor the Democrats' God problem as Walter Shapiro argues, but the narcissism of the American media that gleefully reduces every issue to a form of political gossip and guilt by association.

If you want to read a truly thoughtful discussion of religion and politics today go to John Nichols' piece in the Nation.

The media loves the shrinking of political reporting to political gossip because it makes the gossip columnist or pundit as much the center of the story as the intended victim. Everyone becomes a narcissist because everyone wants into the circle of celebrity.

"Is There Any Word From the Lord?"

(Revised, 4/23/08) On a recent evening, after a wonderful dinner with friends, all of us deeply interested in politics, we of course ended by talking about the presidential election. Although divided between the two strong Democratic candidates, we cheerfully could support either. But our fears that we might be disappointed again were not far from the surface. Just before leaving, I said, dejectedly, “I think it is possible that we may lose the election in the fall.” 

Ward Just's An Unfinished Season

Ward Just's An Unfinished Season is another, shorter novel that is really marvelous, a novel set in Chicago after WWII and during the Korean War.  I have read all of Ward Just that I can get my hands on.  He is one of the few American novelists of our time to treat politics with the seriousness it deserves. 

And of course Ron Carlson's Five Skies, a beautiful novel set in the West belongs on any list of superb, shorter novels of our time. I have already reviewed Five Skies here.

A commenter to my post on shorter novels mentions Waker Percy's The Moviegoer as a wonderful short novel. I agree and I should have mentioned it.  The Moviegoer is very important to me, for a lot of reasons.

The media and the war and everything else

Here's a book we should all read, by Greg Mitchell: So Wrong for So Long: How the Press and the Pundits---and the President---Failed on Iraq. Mitchell is Editor of Editor and Publisher the magazine of the newspaper business, and his book is a collection of his columns on Iraq.

Back in 2003, Mitchell was one of the few mainstream journalists to question the grounds for war.

The longer I study politics the more I see the mainstream media---the newspapers, television, and the pundits--- as the critical institutional failure in our democracy.

More on Spitzer

For a somewhat larger perspective on the Spitzer story, read this piece in Harper's by Scott Horton.

Reading short novels

I've recently started reading short fiction, books that I've either read before or want to read now. 

I started with Paula Fox's Desperate Characters, a terrific book written in 1970 about Brooklyn Heights during the 1960s.  Desperate Characters is one of the best-written pieces of fiction I have ever read. The thrill of the book lies with the precision of the language, each word and sentence sounding so perfect and true, as ta husband and wife move through a few days living in a neighborhood in transition. The wife had been bitten by a big, stray cat she tried to feed on the back steps.

I followed up with Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanial West and Seize the Day by Saul Bellow.  I had never read Miss Lonelyhearts, which is one very strange book.

Then,  Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, the book so different and so much better than the movie. Norman Mailer wrote that the sentences in this book are perfect.

I started reading again Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which I have read a couple of times before, and will finish it soon. 

The short novel is generally defined as a books that come in around 100 to 120 pages or so. The strength of the form is that usually the story takes place in a compressed period of time, usually days or a few months with a handful of characters.  Like the short story, the form allows the writing to shine through and the writing, when it is good, can be thrilling.

I don't know if critics classify Faulkner's startling novel, As I Lay Dying, as short fiction, but it seems so to me, and I find it among my favorite of his novels.

I have started Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, which is a little too long for the short novel, but still a powerful, haunting piece of writing.  And next on my list is The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain.

Inexperience as asset

David Ignatius of the Washington Post makes and interesting and important argument for why Senator Obama's inexperience may be a powerful asset in the years to come, as China, Russia, India (and I would add Europe) all have moved to new forms of competition, eschewing the models of military power forged in the Cold War.

Jesus and the gospel of life itself

John Cowan in Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians, says that culture is a way of defending ourselves against the fear of death and impermanence.

“He who wears a blue suit won’t die,” is a line from Cowan, a line I added to my short story, “The Blue Suit.”

Jesus says, “He who tries to hang onto life will forfeit it but whoever forfeits life will preserve it.”

Life itself in Generica

Generica is the term my Bisbee friend Dennis Nelson uses to describe a paved-over, malled-over America, where everything not only looks alike but is suffocating from sameness, a sameness that seeks to disguise the openness, the impermanence, and the fragility of existence, of our lives.

We humans shield ourselves from life itself, from the contingency and the vulnerability of life, with Generica. We buy the same computers, the same clothes, the same automobiles, the same perfect smiles, the same trim waistlines, the same perfect breasts, and all the while dying to the energies and the vitality of life itself.

"He who wears a blue suit won't die."

Life itself is what is exposed when our defenses and our schemes are breached, when the cracks appear, and when the light breaks in.

Life itself is the shared and common experience of life itself for all humans, the fears, the joys, the suffering, the change, the decline, all of it.

Life itself is what is awaiting us when we wake up.

More than anything else, I think Jesus was asking us to surrender ourselves to life itself, to awaken our hearts, to open ourselves to the world and to others, and that to live like this is what he meant by God’s Kingdom, God’s imperial reign, where we are reminded in every way and every turn of our common fate and our common joy and our common suffering.

Life itself as boddichitta

In listening to “The Love That Will Not Die,” from the audible book, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron discusses the awakened heart, pain that is felt as the pain of all beings, not the pain of our life but rather the pain of others, the pain of all life, of life itself.

This is a potent clue to what we mean by life itself.  It is the life we all share, the life of birth, growth, joy, suffering, struggle, sex, the form and cycle of all life that is common and not peculiar to just me or to someone else.

When I say that I am waiting for life itself, I am saying that I am waiting for a life that has a shared and common quality, an awareness of my bond with others in both joy and pain.

The awakened heart is the path to life itself: Bodichitta.

Another meaning of the silence of God and faith

From time to time I write about James Carse's book, The Silence of God, as a modern spiritual classic.  Carse offers a powerful argument that God's silence is a kind of presence that is waiting for us to speak and act.

Those who do no accept the idea of God will find this puzzling or wrong. Those who believe that God is constantly speaking will also find it simply wrong.

Thank you, John Edwards

Thank you, John Edwards. 

As Barack Obama eloquently said, “John has spent a lifetime fighting to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the struggling. At a time when our politics is too focused on who’s up and who’s down, he has consistently made us focus on who matters.”

It is beyond sad that we cannot face up to the fact that we have two Americas, rich and poor, and a middle class struggling.  Instead we spend all of our time on haircuts, houses, and whether Bill Clinton played the race card. 

The real politics of our country is not who's ahead, but the huge divides of race, class, religious moralism, militarism, and immigration. 

We spend all of our time in politics responding to the Republicans as they exploit, rather than narrow our divides. And the media holds their coats while they do it.

When I grew up, it was the Democrats, in the South, exploiting the divides.  Now it is the Republicans.

As the British political theorist Bernard Crick says, in In Defense of Politics,  democratic politics is rule in divided societies; politics should be about closing or narrowing divides, not exploiting them for political advantage.

That was what John Edwards is about, struggling to bring our attention to the nation's unfinished business, so that we can make a better life for all and not just for the few.

I remember Edwards from last summer, speaking at the lawn at University Inn out on Highway 54, relaxed,  eloquent, and happy.

Bless you, John Edwards, and your beautiful wife, Elizabeth.

Our bodies/our minds together

In 1960, I owned a VW Beetle. In 1965 I bought another one. When I bought the first one, in Austin, Texas, I asked the salesman, “Are these things safe?”

He smiled. “The great thing about these cars is that when you hit something, the doors fly open, and you fly out.”

“And you land on a haystack?” I asked.

The salesman just grinned.  He was sticking to his story.

The golf lesson

A friend of mine, an excellent golfer, invited me over a few weeks back to talk about learning golf. I am retired now and have no excuse for not finally tackling the game.  This was Bisbee, Arizona, a town we lived in for 10 years not so long ago. We were visiting from North Carolina for a couple of months.

So one afternoon around 4 PM, I show up at his house and we begin.

A holiday letter from Bisbee

People who read these scriblings know that it started out with stories about Bisbee, Arizona, a town on the U.S. Mexico border where we lived for almost 10 years.

Carole and I live now live in Durham, NC, but we are back  in Bisbee for a two months visit.

Yesterday was Christmas, and it was so wonderful a day that it deserves a letter.

And before I start, I want to start with recalling a story from one of my favorite authors, James Carse, that helps explain the gift that is Bisbee.

The man who knew too much

Darryl Royal, the legendary football coach at my alma mater, the University of Texas, in the late 1950s and the 1960s was famous for his cautious attitude to the forward pass. “When you put the ball into the air, three things can happen and two of them are bad.”

Royal’s team won a lot of games because he knew so much about the game, but soon his teams became predictable, boring and beatable.

What Royal knew was his undoing.

I’m beginning to feel the same way about knowledge generally. Knowing stuff is supposed to be the name of the game but I am beginning to think that the bad things about knowledge are gaining on the good things.

A prayer for health care

Claudia Ricci, a professor of English and Journalism at SUNY/Albany, and a dear friend, has published a piece of mine, "A Prayer for Health Care," in her blog: My Story Lives.

The blog has a wonderful design.  I hope you will check it out.

Claudia is a novelist and the author of the beautiful novel, Dreaming Maples. 

Her husband Richard Kirsch, is head of Citizen Action in New York and is playing an increasingly prominent role in the national movement to finally get comprehensive health care reform.

God's thumbs

Some years ago my wife Carole and I traveled from southern Arizona to Lake Powell, Glen Canyon, and the north rim of the Grand Canyon.

Our breath was taken away by the massive gorges and canyons formed by time and the Colorado River cutting through the desert floor.

I thought of how implacable a river's force is, given thousands of years, a deep fall, and enough silt to act as a cutting force.

Unaccountably, my mind flashed back to a time, years ago, when I served as a ward attendant at the Texas State Mental Hospital. We had a patient there named "Bear," a large, withdrawn and silent man who had been locked up for decades.

Health care reform and life itself

It seems to me, as we plunge deeper and deeper into our presidential election season, we never talk about issues with the seriousness they deserve. Instead we talk about haircuts, adultery in the Hamptons, or favorite Bible verses.

Then, after everything is over, we quail in the presence of the most recent winner.

Even when we do talk about important problems, the policy wonks drown us with technical details. 

Nothing important ever gets discussed in terms of the deep, invisible questions that need airing.

Take health care reform, for example.

I believe that one of the reasons we constantly drop the ball on health care reform is because we don’t see how profoundly this issue challenges our ideas of membership in a democratic community and the meaning of our life together, and, indeed, the meaning of life itself.

Yes, I am saying that I believe that at bottom health care reform is about how we view life---how we view life itself underneath it all and what this means for membership in the body politic.

Ultimately, this is a spiritual question, where 'spiritual' means our views on what we mean by life, life itself, to whom and what we belong, and what it is that we possess and own to dispose of as we choose.

Sullivan's Obama, Sullivan's America

Andrew Sullivan's essay "Goodbye to All That," in The Atlantic is by far the most interesting piece I've read on where we have arrived as a nation as we move toward the 2008 presidential lection . 

And it is about Obama.

Yet, the crucial element in the piece is Sullivan's analysis of where we are, today.  Edwards might just as well have been the subject of Sullivan's analysis, at least as I see it.

It's quite a read and it tends to summarize something I have been trying to put into words.  If we get the right candidate, we might just be further along in addressing our problems than we think.

Go read it and decide for yourself.

Give me a break!

I'm still an Edwards man but this doesn't mean that I mistrust Hillary Clinton.  So she voted for the Iraq War.  A lot of Democrats did.  John Edwards voted for the war, and he apologized but that still doesn't change his vote.

What is all this stuff about "mistrust" when it comes to Hillary?  Wasn't it the other Clinton that lost our trust?

And also, the constant comment that Hillary Clinton represents the "status quo."  She's only been in the Senate since 2000 and most people don't have a clue as to her record.

How in the world can anyone believe that any Democrat running will return us to the "status quo"?  The status quo is the disaster that is the Republican Party, and Democrats right down to the ground are sharply different.

I'm getting really sick of the way the press is driving us around on all these issues.  Far too many of us are buying into the general media bullshit about 'sound bites' and slogans as the decisive factor in elections.

That's what's wrong about our politics today.  We're letting the announcers, the news readers, run the show.

Finally, Mr. Broder!

Finally, David Broder of the Washington Post has written a column, "Following Bush Over a Cliff," that I can get behind.  It's worth a read.

New York State's children's health insurance initiative was one of the few concrete achievements of my work on universal health care in my Albany years.

The Bob Herbert flap

For those who don't read the NY Times, you ought to read Bob Herbert's column "The Ugly Side of the GOP," this morning.  Herbert touches on the Jena, Louisiana situation but moves on to the racial politics of the GOP, a centerpiece of their rise to power in recent decades.  The party of Lincoln has moved its headquarters to Dixie.

Herbert says that what he would like to see is a civil rights march against the Republican National Committee. 

I think that's one of the best ideas I've heard of in years.  If they have one, I will march also.  It's the GOP that has fomented a politics of race to keep themselves in power. 

Paul Krugman's article the day before, "Politics in Black and White," is equally potent.  Racism and racial politics are alive and well in the GOP.

There has been a recent flap about Herbert by one of my favorite journals, The Washington Monthly, with the column, "Why is Bob Herbert Boring?"  The dish among the bright young journalist and bloggers is that Herbert doesn't write for his audience, doesn't include enough 'hooks' in his columns.  He's not entertaining enough. 

Of course, Herbert consistently writes about topics like racism, the killing of black teenagers, the attempts in California by GOP operatives to change the electoral college vote there, and so on.  Boring stuff, technical stuff, awful stuff. 

Even Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly took up the question of why Herbert is so boring, as if it is something that everyone knows and agrees with. 

Drum quotes Herbert's column this morning but omits its key point: Herbert's call for a march against the racism of the GOP.  Instead, Drum highlights Herbert's story about Lee Atwater, one of the chief henchmen of the Southern Strategy for the GOP, as if the Atwater was somehow an outlier in the GOP.

Atwater is no longer on the face of the earth but the racial politics of the GOP is stronger than ever.

I think it's passing strange that the digs at Herbert coincide with the 50th Anniversary of Little Rock; just another way for a writer and a journal to catch a wave of public attention.

There's a word for that.

Everything today is judged by its entertainment value; if a film has a message it's boring. If a columnist can't write cute about racism, well perhaps he or she ought to take up another line of work.  In other words everyone should learn to write like Maureen Dowd.

I will still read Drum but I won't be renewing my subscription to the Washington Monthly.

I have this friend

I have this friend. He lives in California.  We have known each other forever, at least since 1955.  We were roommates in college in  Austin and fast friends ever since.  We know a lot about each other, too much maybe.

My friend is a little older than I am.  He's from west Texas, from oil fields west Texas. 

My friend taught school for 30 years, junior high school, social studies. He started out teaching in the valley of south Texas, Edinburgh as I remember, but mostly he taught all those years in the same school in southern California.

We have had years when we didn't keep up with each other and we haven't seen each other in person for almost a decade.  We keep in touch with the phone.  My friend has a quarrel with computers and emails and he is doing without both these days.

We're not the future anymore

In re-reading s short story I wrote over 10 years ago, The Private Sector, I came across this line: "We're not the future anymore."

The line is offered by May, Charlie Ballard's wife.  Ballard is a commissioner of health in a large Eastern state department of health who is ending a career and thinking about going into the private sector. The governor lost the election, the long run of successes is over.

But Charlie had sensed for a very long time that the end was coming, that the effort would be over. He didn't know how or precisely when, but it was coming.

He was thinking about a big change, going into the private sector, where he has never worked.

May's words, "We're not the future anymore," stay with him in the waning days of his career.

Waiting for life itself, one more time

I have written on the topic of waiting for life itself several times in the past, and I want to try this one more time, repeating some of what I've said before but going beyond it somewhat.

What is it to live spiritually?

The question usually implies mysticism and a search for ultimate reality. But increasingly, I am discovering a different kind of spirituality, one devoted to everyday reality and to the holiness of what is. It was this way of living that led us to Bisbee.

I call this new and secular spirituality waiting for life itself.

The most well-known version of this new secular spirituality I have enountered is Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell's Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life.

According to Katie and Mitchell, to live spiritually is to move away from the scripts that have run in our heads for decades and into the land of what is actually happening right in front of our eyes.

Loving what is means accepting and even loving the bumpy flow and transience of ordinary life, trading in a deadly familiarity for the grace and thrill of a constant newness.

Thomas Edsall on Rudy Guliani

I missed this very interesting piece by Thomas Edsall in the May issue of the New Republic on Rudy Guliani, a speculation on the possibly changing center of the Republican electorate away from social issues as definitive and more toward Iraq and the war on terrorism.  To this crowd, Guliani is a true American Hero. 

Of course, that honor can only be bestowed by someone who lives far away from New York City, someone say, who lives in Texas or South Carolina, someone who likes heroes uncomplicated by actual evidence of performance.

Edsall also has some interesting things to say about Guliani embracing the GOP's mantra of "You're on your own," when it comes to risk. 

Our politics are getting stranger and stranger.

Hope when it seems nowhere in sight

The thing that vanishes these days, that so easily goes up in smoke,  is hope.  This is especially so when you are finally 70 (!) and you have seen so much of our hopes dashed. 

When I was a young man in Washington, DC, starting with 1967 (and earlier, as my work took me there often, from 1965 on), hope was at every corner as the Great Society appeared before our eyes and changed so much. 

For a young man from Texas, one who grew up with Lyndon Johnson larger than life, campaigning over our heads in his helicopter, we were so proud of what was happening in the Capitol, and so worried that the Vietnam War would ruin things and ruin LBJ, which in so many ways the war did.

DC was where I met Carole and we were married in a time of great hope and possibilities, late in 1967.

Here is Christopher Lasch on hope, words that keep me from throwing in the towel and hiding out from it all:

Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life to those who lack it...The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope...[A] blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don’t.

I'm giving a small talk at the American Public Health Association this November before my old section on Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs, and I want to talk about how work in public health has always been for me an act of community and an act of hope. 

The talk is informally titled, "Witness to the Body Politic: Seven Things Alcohol Policy Can Teach Us about the American Democracy,"and it is my attempt to sum up how much I owe to the field of public health in fostering and nurturing a vision of life together, life in community and hope for our health and our life together. 

All that adds up to a sense of hope in the face of the odds against, in the face of this awful war.

Petition against the war

I read the United Church of Christ's (UCC) petition against the war in my congregation today, Pilgrim UCC  of Durham.  The petition statement is a strong one, and I'm proud to be associated with it. Carole and I signed the petition as did many in our congregation.

Anyone who chooses to sign the petition can do so on the UCC website.

One of the chief reasons for our continued involvement with church, with St. John's Episcopal Church in Bisbee, and with Pilgrim UCC here in Durham, is that progressive congregations and denominations like the UCC and the Episcopal Church, USA, provide a way to experience community as a resistance to our increasingly individualistic, "You're on your own" politics and culture.

Pilgrim Church in Durham was where we first participated in congregational life, beginning in 1974 up to 1988, when we moved to Albany, NY.  We returned to Pilgrim when we moved back to North Carolina.  It wasn't an easy decision because we both became very comfortable with the Episcopal Church in Bisbee, Arizona.

In our travels from place to place, we have always sought out the congregation that seemed closest to Pilgrim. St. Johns, in Bisbee was such a congregation, as was Trinity United Methodist Church in Albany, NY.

Pilgrim is our version here of the small town life that we found so enchanting and affirming in Bisbee.  Bisbee as a town pushes back against that individualism in so many ways and it's wonderful to have a much smaller version of that resistance here in Durham.

Talk about your snide

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank's cheap shot at Obama and other presidential hopefuls at the Patreus hearings is the epitome of snide and hypocrisy. 

Reporters dig up every detail of candidates personal life, trying to make the candidates look like self-serving fools and trying to turn their campaigns into a form of hell. Then, when the candidates actually try to  say something about what they would do about Iraq, if elected president, reporters like Milbank attack with an "It's all about me" slam.

The MSM is the principal problem of our national politics, and primarily because each major reporter and news outlet wants a piece of the celebrity spotlight.

They are so like sports commentators, each trying to tell us what we are looking at and how we should think about what's happening, as if we couldn't think for ourselves, all the while calling attention to themselves, leering into the cameras while we try to look around them to see what's going on, out on the playing field.

We are not fooled, Dana.  It's all about you.

Give me a break!

Meltdown after leaving Iraq?

Kevin Drum, responding to the Juan Cole piece, doubts there will be such a meltdown in Iraq. He also doubts whether President Ford suffered much because of the withdrawal from Vietnam.

I usually find Drum convincing.  Like Drum, I also doubt whether the Iranians will march into Iraq, once the Americans start to leave.  No American president would permit that, could permit that, politically. And I suspect that the Iranians know it.  The scare-mongering on this point from Ambassador Crocker was, to me,  a tip-off that Crocker's part of the propaganda push.

Also, no president can simply walk out of Iraq in a matter of weeks or a handful of months. Yet we must leave and not prolong this much longer than a year or 18 months.

What I fear is a horrific civil war, much worse than now, once we start pulling our troops back from direct engagement.  I suspect we can't do much about that and that staying longer will not make matters better.

So the planning will have to start now, to leave while trying to minimize the blowback.

This is the catastrophe that the Republicans and many Democrats have led us to, and now, the Republicans will try to reap political benefit from the subsequent disaster. 

No exit in Iraq

If you want a column that lays it out, that tells us what is in store for the U.S. and for the Democrats after Bush leaves office, read Juan Cole here.   He is one of our leading Middle Easter historians and experts. He's no friend of George Bush or the Republicans. 

Cole's has a chilling take on how Bush has us all in a corner, and how the Democrats, if they take office, will likely face the same kind of mess that Gerald Ford did in pulling out of Vietnam: a debacle that the fickle public will blame on the whoever is around when it happens.

To nail the coffin shut, Paul Richter of the Los Angeles Times argues that Bush has found his exit strategy. Bush is convinced he can keep the troop levels high enough so that the Democrats will be forced to either stay or take the heat for withdrawal and the resulting chaos.

Cole argues, correctly I think, that the Democrats will not be able to get the exit going before Bush leaves office. This because of Bush's veto power and the Senate's super majority rule with the filibuster.

Life isn't fair.

And the Democrats are caught in a terrible dilemma.

Here's the greatest tragedy of Iraq: it has stolen a good part of America's hope for a more progressive future.  Which was, I think, the whole idea.

 

Senator Craig and the sadness of American politics

I find the whole dust-up over Senator Craig another sign that our politics is in the toilet, pun intended.  It's sad that Senator Craig's family is being dragged through this and that the children they now have the image of their father's hand waving to the next stall, from under the toilet wall. 

The tape of the interview with Senator Craig is something I find totally sad and ridiculous.  The man is a hypocrite but even hypocrites can turn out to be vulnerable  in a way that makes us sad and feeling a  little foolish for enjoying another human being's exposure and pain.

Yes, the hypocrisy drives me nuts, but somehow a nation that can't turn loose of its own incredible denial of sexuality in all its forms is something that is truly sad.

From 1988 to 1992 I served as an official of the New York State Department of Health. On my first trip from Albany to New York City with some of my staff,  we got off the train in Grand Central Station. This was before the shift of Amtrak to Penn Station. 

At any rate, I asked for them to wait while I used the bathroom. They gave me a funny look but they directed me up to the next level where the main bathrooms were located. While standing at the urinal, I sensed some movement next to me. Looking around there was a man slowly masturbating into the urinal and smiling at me.  I cleared out pretty fast.

When I got back downstairs the staff members, two men and a woman, were grinning and I started laughing too and told them about the episode. 

Apparently, there's a lot of sexual activity in that particular bath, whether by gays exclusively, I don't know.

I find sex in public bathrooms more sad than a telltale sign of the last days of the Republic. But if you want to read one article that sheds some light on the allure of sex in public bathrooms between all sorts of people, read this.

More on the surge and the politics of attention

I watched the latest Bill Maher on HBO last night and caught one more example of why the war is the perfect machine for keeping the Republicans in power.  Tim Robbins was there and as usual was informed and furious about what the war's doing to us and to the Iraqi people, which to my lights is the crucial issue.

But two guests, one presumably liberal and the second, the neoconservative Stephen Hayes who has written a favorable book about Dick Cheney. Hayes spent the evening arguing about that Al Qaeda and Iraq actually did have a "relationship" before 9/11.

The other guest, whose name I didn't catch, was asking why  Robbins and the "left" had a fixation on proving that the Administration lied about the weapons of mass destruction when they might simply have been mistaken and also that we have a "moral obligation" to the Iraqis to clean up the chaos we have created.

The surge is not the point

Liberal Illinois Senator Richard Durbin is now saying the surge is working, at least to some extent. But he still thinks we need a timetable for withdrawal.

Representative Brian Baird, a Democrat from Vancouver, WA, caught hell from his constituents for saying that the surge is working, and he wants "to give it time," signaling his lack of support for a timetable for withdrawal.

I won't get into this debate; the surge is not the point and it has never been.  The point is that this ruinous war in Iraq is ruining us, not to mention Iraq, and the sooner we announce our leaving the better.

No guts Democrats

I have become almost desperate in my disappointment at the Dems and their response to George Bush.  In talking to an old friend in California, I said we need to learn to fight the Republicans like Virginia Senator Jim Webb.  And now I come to a piece in Salon, an interview with Drew Westen that says it all, here.

Westen says Democrats are wusses and they are being worked over by the Republicans and if they don't watch out, we are going to lose in 2008. 

Westen's right.  Westen's the author of Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, a book I haven't read but one that says that electoral politics is more about emotion and character than it is about issues.

I'm buying the book.

Fred Thompson, the media, and health care reform

Fred Thompson, who will soon announce for the GOP nomination, recently said, that the poorest American gets better treatment than the citizens in nations with a national health care plan, nations like Canada, England, France, Germany, and so forth.

In any reasonably well-reported campaign for the presidency that statement would be ruinous for any candidate aspiring to the highest office in the land. That's because any reporter worth his salt could easily demonstrate how incredibly off the wall the comment is, or how uniformed or mendacious the person who made it.

Either the person is deliberately distorting the truth or simply doesn't know or doesn't care what the truth is. Either way, statements like that reveal someone who simply should not be sitting in the Oval Office.

President Bush recently said much the same thing: that no one in America really goes without health care. Those without health insurance can simply go to the emergency room when they are sick.

We know about Bush. He says things like this all the time and we've gotten used to it. Reporters just look at their shoes and let him get away with it.  After all, he got us into Iraq while the press looked at their shoes. Why should they look up now?

Both statements reveal how out-of-touch the GOP is with reality in the United States, or, at the very least, how willing GOP leaders are to distort what's actually going on to protect powerful interests. After all, Harry Truman said that GOP stands for "Guardians of Privilege."

Even more important, in our dumbed-down media age, candidates today know they can get away with it. Haircuts and John Edwards will be a topic right up until the bitter end; outrageous statements about something truly important like the state of our health care system will be allowed to quickly sink from view, never to be heard from again.