War And Reason

Nice words, from a guy who, according to the RWS™, hates the troops. Actions, though, are more important.

To those who consider the president's absence from Arlington this Monday a figurative middle finger raised to veterans (and I know they are many who see it exactly that way), I'd only ask, in relation to Barack Obama's words above, how they think his actions compare to those of our previous president, in terms of providing for the needs of vets and families.

And if I were predisposed to ranting, I'd also ask: how much better might their care be -- how much better off would our county be in countless ways -- had we all, including those teabaggers professing love of country while demanding an end to "outrageous" taxation (at its lowest point in decades), agreed to a war tax (a gas tax would have been perfect, in several ways, especially if there were a way to moderate it for low income people), starting when it all began and ending when it was over?

But that would have been, you know, reasonable and proper. And it would have required a bit of sacrifice. Not exactly their cup of tea, don't you know.

He Is Their Leader

Maybe the reason we don't see comments defending Glenn Beck around here any more is that even SomeSympathizers have a toe tethered to reality; the balloon of hot air to which they cling occasionally dips close enough to the ground that they touch it, if only very lightly. Which is not to say that full-throated empty-headed teabaggers are in the same category. Hateful hypocrisy is who they are. But one might wonder if, even among those true believers, there might be one or two who'd be offended by this.

BECK: (imitating Malia) Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, did you plug the hole yet? Daddy?

PAT GRAY (co-host): (imitating Obama) No I didn't, honey.

BECK: (imitating Malia) Daddy, I know you're better than [unintelligible]

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Mm-hmm, big country.

BECK: (imitating Malia) And I was wondering if you've plugged that hole yet.

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Honey, not yet.

BECK: (imitating Malia) Why not, daddy? But daddy--

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Not time yet, honey. Hasn't done enough damage.

BECK: (imitating Malia) Daddy?

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Not enough damage yet, honey.

BECK: (imitating Malia) Daddy?

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Yeah?

BECK: (imitating Malia) Why do you hate black people so much?

GRAY: (imitating Obama) I'm part white, honey.

BECK: (imitating Malia) What?

GRAY: (imitating Obama) What?

BECK: (imitating Malia) What'd you say?

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Excuse me?

BECK: (laughing) This is such a ridiculous -- this is such a ridiculous thing that his daughter-- (imitating Malia) Daddy?

GRAY: It's so stupid.

BECK: How old is his daughter? Like, thirteen?

GRAY: Well, one of them's, I think, thirteen, one's eleven, or something.

BECK: "Did you plug the hole yet, daddy?" Is that's their -- that's the level of their education, that they're coming to -- they're coming to daddy and saying 'Daddy, did you plug the hole yet?' " Plug the hole!

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Yes, I was doing some deep-sea diving yesterday, and--

BECK: (imitating Malia) Daddy?

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Yeah, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I was doing--

BECK: (imitating Malia) Why--

GRAY: (imitating Obama) Yeah, honey, I'm--

BECK (imitating Malia) Why, why, why, why, do you still let the polar bears die? Daddy, why do you still let Sarah Palin destroy the environment? Why are -- Daddy, why don't you just put her in some sort of a camp?

Especially because it comes on the heels -- within hours, in fact -- of saying (rightfully, if you can believe it) that kids of politicians should be off limits. Of course, that was in the context of his creation, Sarah Palin.

So not only is Glenn Beck a liar and a paranoid lunatic, he doesn't even make a pretense of consistency. He has no grounding, no morals, no principles. And yet, to teabaggers, he's the soul of their movement.

Sickening. Unsurprising. Depressing. And really, really sickening.

[Update: He has apologized, and I give him credit for that. However, the relish with which he engaged in that banter, and the ease with which he did it having just let the air dry on protestations about the evil people who attack Sarah Palin's kids (whom she egregiously and aggressively used as campaign props and still does) tell me he'll say anything at any time with no regard for truth or principles. I wonder if his apology was spontaneous, or arose from the blowback he got. And I wonder if he got any blowback from his flock.]

The Enemy

So, I wonder, how do you fight this with armies, and drones, and with the deaths of our soldiers?

Press Release

OBAMA TO SPEAK AT ABRAHAM LINCOLN NATIONAL CEMETERY

Like Presidents Reagan and Bush before him, President Barack Obama will not attend ceremonies, on this one occasion, at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. Rather, he will give honors at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, near Chicago.

"Abraham Lincoln presided over the most divisive time in our history," President Obama said. "In a time when our country's very existence was gravely threatened, he managed to overcome divisions of American against American, and to begin the healing process. I can only aspire to the greatness of President Lincoln, for few if any will achieve it. But in many ways, these are nearly equally perilous times. In attending events this Memorial Day at the national cemetery that bears his name, I honor his memory, the memory of those who fought so bravely in the Civil War, and that of all who have served our country, in all wars, in all times."

There was no such release, of course; no such statement. Had there been, I wonder if it would have made a difference to those who have risen to such anger over President Obama's impending absence from Arlington while ignoring those of our recent Republican (and therefore, by definition, patriotic) presidents.

No.

K-nowledge

I've been a mild to moderate baseball fan most of my life, starting with watching the Portland Beavers at Vaughn Street Stadium. A team in the Pacific Coast league, which at that time included the San Francisco Seals, the Oakland Oaks, the Los Angeles Angels, the San Diego Padres, Seattle Rainiers, and probably a couple more, and which was pretty much separate from if not quite equal to the "major leagues," the Beavers had players several of whose names I still remember: Frankie Austin, Eddie Basinski, Henry Arft, and Clyde Someone-or-other. Or maybe it wasn't Clyde. Royce Lint, Dino Restelli. Managed by Clay Hopper. Year after year, the same players, the same manager. Unlike today's Triple-A, the PCL was sort of a destination, not a way-station.

Anyhow, I remember going there with my dad, who used to go there with his dad; and in that third generation back, my dad told me, they had buckets of water all over the wooden stadium to throw on fires that regularly started from tossed away cigars and cigarettes. Money changed hands constantly among the baseball-crazy immigrants like my grandfather and his pals, who bet on everything: the next pitch, hit or miss, score. Runs were enumerated at the end of each inning by the clang of a hand-pulled bell, like at "prize fights" in those days, sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I'm no expert, and never kept a scorecard; it's not until fairly recently, mostly from listening to Joe Morgan on Sunday nights, and maybe a little back when my son was good enough to play in a Mickey Mantle League World Series in Dublin, Ohio, that I began to understand at least the first layer or two of strategy. Pitch locations, doing what on which count, stuff like that. Only a little.

So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I just learned something I'd never known. Until, like, maybe yesterday, I always thought that when fans hung out those "K" signs after strikeouts that they were too drunk or just weren't paying enough attention to know when they sometimes had one backwards.

After all these years, I should have known.

Those Damned Facts

Among the commenters who used to troll here but seem, mostly, to have left when they found the stuff they spout doesn't float in deep waters, a favorite comment is that I should stop blaming Bush for our problems. Forget facts, they would have us. Rely on simple and wrong, they prefer to. Ignore information such as the above chart, they do.

Which, of course, is exactly what Congressional Rs and their mouth organ are assuming the public will do as well. That they're probably right doesn't change the central truth; it just reinforces the reality of our collective stupidity and preference for easy answers, misplaced blame, and magical thinking. In times such as these, which demand our best, teabaggers and those of similar disposition toward angry but devoid certitude are the unfortunate -- yet apparently inevitable, given the milieu -- response.

In my practice I was called upon on a (mercifully) few occasions to try to undo the damage done to a patient by a previous surgeon. Picking up the pieces left by another (especially when the patient had had the opportunity to come to me in the first place and have things done right) is by far the most unpleasant and undesirable situation I -- or any surgeon, or any physician at all -- ever encountered. Depending on the extremity of the situation, it can be deeply and irreparably no-win. And yet, there the patient is, in need; and there you are, needed. Among other unpleasantries, it's nearly certain that, no matter the outcome (because it's likely the patient will never be as well-off as if the first operation(s) had been done properly), you know you'll be among those to whom blame is assigned: sued, in other words.

Since an operation is never as easy or more likely to go well than when it's done the first time, there will almost certainly be technically daunting challenges. There may be no good choices; your options might be only among those least likely to be disastrous. Faced -- as I have been -- with distorted anatomy, pockets of pus everywhere, unrecognizable structures, all in a patient depleted of physical and psychological reserve, you may have no other course but to embark on something very hazardous, with countless opportunities for complications, or outright failure. To use the proper medical phrase, from the time of Hippocrates: it really really really sucks.

I don't see much difference, except in orders of magnitude, between those professional experiences, and the assuming of office after George Bush screwed up a (possibly necessary) war; took us into and screwed up a clearly unnecessary and ill-advised (in several meanings of the term) second war; set the economy toward ruin with his tax cuts and steadfast refusal to pay for his wars; ignored our energy crisis and, in fact, made it worse by reversing the meager steps that had been taken before him; increased the Republican assault on science and reason; it goes on and on. It was not without an easily recalled sense of my own fears and trepidation in context of my care of previously-damaged humans that I wondered, during the recent election process, why ANYONE would want to assume the presidency. Anyone with serious ideas and a sense of the magnitude of the problems, that is, which excludes most of the R candidates and, most certainly, their eventual nominees.

It's in this same context that I'm inclined to temper my disappointments with Barack Obama. He's been far from perfect, in my view: not enough focus on jobs; health care possibly ill-timed and too complex, too much based on insurance companies; too slow on DADT; too quick to compromise with or cave to disingenuous criticism from the right. But at least he's trying, with serious intent, facing unprecedented challenges. FDR, after all, faced The Great Depression and WWII more or less single file, and it was only one war, with a couple identifiable and locatable enemies; there was no energy crisis, no oil polluting from a mile under the ocean; no coordinated 24/7 disinformation network annealed with talk radio and the length and breadth of the opposition party to poison the well with deliberate lies; and there wasn't a public unable to face adversity and unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good; a public willfully misinformed and actively engaged in remaining that way.

Which still doesn't explain why the hell Barack Hussein Obama wanted to take it on. I wouldn't have. He's a much better man than I, and he still can't do it.

Which tells you something.

Idealism

Viktor Frankl: holocaust survivor and shrink.

I find the clip both inspiring and depressing. Inspiring, because I think he might be right, and I should snap out of it. Depressing, because of how low the bar has been set in America, by such people as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, teabaggers, and the rest of the screeching right-wingers, who appeal only to our basest selves.

Successfully.

Very, very successfully.

Document Dump

Below this one are several posts I've written in the last week or two, not all of them finished. I'll line 'em up and leave 'em while I consider whether it's worth doing any more. Looking around the country and the planet, the most consistent feeling is "Why bother?"

Insecurity

Many of the security initiatives put in place by George Bush have been flops.

A high-tech "virtual fence" to catch illegal border crossers. Next-generation nuclear detectors at ports. Tamper-proof driver's licenses in every state. These were signature Bush administration initiatives to protect the country against terrorism and secure its borders. All have been proven to be flops, according to government and outside experts, and expensive ones at that.

The Department of Homeland Security paid defense contractor Boeing Co. $1.1 billion to build what is sometimes called the virtual border fence. But the system of radars and cameras can't consistently tell terrorists from tumbleweed, according to the Government Accountability Office. In March, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano froze funding on the project.

[...]

Napolitano aides say they don't blame their predecessors, who were under intense pressure to prevent another terrorist attack, for attempting fixes that ultimately didn't pan out. But outside analysts say the failures were the predictable result of an agency with too little experience at making major purchases and of contractors peddling untested products.

I come here to praise George Bush, not to bury him. That is, I agree with the above that he was under pressure and had to do whatever he thought might help; it isn't necessarily his fault these initiatives were failures. Could be. Might be. Probably is. But not necessarily. Yet there is an important lesson: in saying George Bush "kept us safe" after 9/11, and, in pointing to Times Square and saying Barack Obama hasn't, the lunatic mainstream is ignoring reality.

Clearly, it's NOT that George Bush "kept us safe." Dumb luck outweighed the short-term effects of useless systems and counterproductive acts, such as invading Iraq, Abu Ghraib, leaving Afghanistan... all that stuff. Not to mention that the trillions spent fruitlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, yes, Obama has continued it), combined with the deficits that began with the Bush tax cuts and unfunded wars, along with the catastrophic economic ruin he oversaw, have left us unable to spend the sort of money required to secure our ports, and our industries.

I went to bed last night and the sun didn't come up until morning. Pressed with truth, I'll have to admit: the one isn't responsible for the other. But I'd still like to think so, and you should, too. Similarly, Republican legislators, the RWS™, Fox "news," and teabaggers would have us believe cause and effect with respect to Bush/safe/fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here.

Ain't buying it.

What He Said

Conor Friedersdorf is a conservative thinker with whom I don't often agree, but I'd love to talk with him. He's among those rare conservatives nowadays who thinks the power of his ideas is such that they don't require lying to convince people. Like me, he points out the disrespect the RWS™, in their constant lying, show for their audience and, for that matter, the very ideas they promote. He's also been involved in the "epistemic closure" debate, for which he's earned the wrath of the epistemically closed. His talk partner, above, is the guy who first used the term.

If our political debate were on the level he tries to provide, and if the teabaggers would recognize the low esteem in which they're implicitly held by those shining them on, educate themselves (a lot of catching up to do), and think of ways to join a useful dialogue, well, maybe we'd be closer to pulling it off. By "it" I mean surviving.

Whereas it's refreshing to see at least a few conservatives call out the deceptions of the radio clowns and, by inference, the talking heads on Fox "news," and whereas it's nice to hear repeated the very things I've been saying about the disregard for truth, for their audience, for the process of democracy that the aforementioned screamers evince every day, it's also depressing. Because, on the right anyway, such voices are so rare as to round off to zero. And, pretty much by definition, such reasonableness is to teabagging as magnets are to credit cards.

Just For The Heck Of It

It Goes On And On

Here's another of countless examples of the right wing adopting totalitarianism even as they claim to hate it. Only recently I've mentioned the big lie and extralegal removal of citizenship. Dumbing down of education, in order to achieve a malleable, fact-averse electorate, is a common theme here. Texas is the most obvious example. Now it's demanding the promulgation of a hard-right political point of view. State-sponsored propaganda.

Totalitarianism.

Dumb And Deaf

Can these guy hear themselves? I mean, if I were to say something one day, and then the complete opposite the next, I think I'd feel compelled to acknowledge it in some way. "Well, yeah, yesterday I said the earth revolves around the sun. Today, when I point out that it's the sun that revolves around the earth, what I mean is that what I meant yesterday was that I don't mean it and never did. Yesterday's gone. Never happened. So don't be bringing it up." Or maybe, "Okay, let's just be frank (or Frank?): I'll say whatever I damn please to oppose this president, and if it's a one-eighty from what I said when there was another president, who cares? It's politics, okay? I have no beliefs. I only have power plays. Okay? Okay."

For those with shorter memories, or even less consistency than John Cornyn, it was mere months ago that Rs were claiming that understanding the law's effect on people (something we might call "empathy") was irrelevant. Bad, in fact. Not to mention, of course, that a couple of years ago they (this guy, in fact) were also proclaiming Harriet Myers' lack of judicial experience was a good thing. Funny how that works, huh?

Now, I've always proposed a pox on both their houses; Congressional Ds most certainly aren't above switching when the winds change. But has it ever been so pervasive and reflexive? Have we ever seen a party, virtually in unison, disclaim every single principle (using the word extremely loosely) the minute their party lost power? Without so much as blinking? Seriously. When Nancy Pelosi is on shaky ground she flaps like a flag. To me, it means she has the remnants of a conscience. Not these guys. They must have been born lying. Not the flicker of a flinch. For them, hypocrisy, like glycolysis, is chemical.

Our federal legislators are not a generally impressive group. But these Rs? Beyond pathetic, beyond respect. And way far beyond interested in actual governance.

Help Wanted

As some of us have been saying since the dawn of the Obama era, here's why it matters that he's been trying to improve our image among Muslims and in Muslim countries.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have made an urgent appeal to Pakistani-American groups and Muslim leaders for help in determining whether the man who planted a car bomb in Times Square had accomplices elsewhere in the Pakistani-American community.

The request, made in a barrage of phone calls and email messages from the FBI since the bombing attempt Saturday, comes in the wake of several cases in which Americans of Pakistani origin have been implicated in terrorism. The list includes a Chicago man who pleaded guilty in March to involvement in the deadly 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.

Stop The Presses!

One more time: Fox "news" is fair and balanced.

The real power of brainwashing is that the victims don't recognize in what they've been bathed. A couple of them come here and prove it, with regularity.