What Did They Expect?

For this week’s Democratic National Convention, the media descended on Boston. TV networks, newspapers, wire services, bloggers – you name it, they were there. Many hired people to provide political color commentary to the speeches and events there. Some hired wisely. Some did not. USA Today, the national newspaper whose often comically shallow coverage earned it the nickname “McPaper,” hired none other than Ann Coulter.

Yes, that Ann Coulter. The woman who proclaims that Democrats hate America, that liberals hate America, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with her is plotting to hand America over to the Communists/Muslims/gays/Rotarians/etc.

When she filed her first column from the convention, her editors saw this:

My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call “women” at the Democratic National Convention.

(The full column and others like it are online at Coulter’s site.)

The paper balked, rejected the column, and fired her. Coulter pitched a fit and ran straight to Matt Drudge of the infamous Drudge Report website. Drudge, who can never resist an opportunity to bash anyone who disagrees with him about anything, promptly posted it. From Drudge, the story was splashed across the right-wing media, which blared about how once again, the Liberal Media had silenced a bastion of Americanism. To their credit, USA Today refused to back down, saying that the column had “basic weaknesses in clarity and readability that we found unacceptable."

While I applaud the paper’s decision to stand by their principles and not publish what was little more than a session of primal scream therapy, I have to wonder what they expected when they tapped Coulter in the first place. After all, it’s not like she’s not well known for stuff like this.

Apparently unable to make rational and logical arguments to prove her point, she depends on epithets, personal attacks, sneers, and name-calling. She makes Rush Limbaugh and even Michael Savage look calm and respectful. After the 9/11 attacks, National Review fired her for writing in their magazine that the United States should “invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Were they actually hoping she would magically turn into Ann Landers and comment on the convention with wit and verve? No, it seems more likely that USA Today fully expected fireworks, but it also seems that they were not quite prepared for the fireworks blowing up in their faces.

Ann Coulter has every right to write her column, just like I have every right to write mine. The fact that her columns are filled with invective and anger is irrelevant, she still has the right. And USA Today has every right to reject her columns for publication in their newspaper if they determine them to be counter to the publication’s standards. Coulter, it seems, has yet to realize this.

Um...

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"

Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt, on American workers being unhappy with chronically low-pay and dead-end jobs

Whitewash at Abu Ghraib

While the public’s attention was diverted by the release of the 9/11 Commission’s long-awaited final report on Thursday, the Army sneaked the results of its internal investigation of the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal out the door. The report can be summed up succinctly: everything that happened at Abu Ghraib can be blamed solely on a few bad apples.

Or, as the report said, the abuses were “unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate monitoring, supervision, and leadership over those Soldiers.” And just to be perfectly clear, the investigation “could not identify a systemic cause for the abuse incidents.”

It seems they did not look very hard.

There was no mention of the Pentagon policy to expand the use of “physical distress,” nor of the White House policy to get around American and international anti-torture laws. The congressional testimony from numerous military figures, that the top brass knew what was happening but at best tacitly approved it, was similarly ignored.

When the scandal originally broke three months ago, I wrote that the only way to recover from the body blow was to “punish those responsible for these outrages, not just the individuals who committed them but their superiors who allowed them to happen. The accountability should lead as far up the chain of command as needed; nobody should be immune due to their rank or position.”

This has not happened. Quite the opposite: the word from the Army has come down, and that word is whitewash. Let the little guys take the blame, and the fact that they were told “anything goes” is irrelevant. Sweep it under the rug. The top brass must be protected no matter what.

The Bush Administration came to office on a platform of integrity and responsibility. One would think that such a boneheaded policy, guaranteed to go wrong at some point and provoke a massive international scandal to further demolish our shredded national credibility, would have consequences. Someone should be held accountable; someone should have to take responsibility.

Apparently not. At least, not for the people who made the policy. It has been decided that only the bottom-level soldiers who carried out the policy while grinning into the camera, clearly unconcerned that they would be answerable for their actions, are to blame in this case.

Now, this should not be read as meaning the soldiers who actually committed the abuses should go free: they should absolutely be punished for what they did, and the “I was just following orders” defense is no excuse. But the people who gave them those orders should be punished as well, and the Army’s report clearly says that this will not happen.

The Army has demonstrated that they cannot and will not police themselves. It’s time for a truly independent investigation.

One Giant Leap

It was thirty-five years ago today that millions of people around the world sat riveted in front of television sets and radios, experiencing a live broadcast from the Moon. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of their gangly ship Eagle onto the Sea of Tranquility to become the first humans to set foot on another world. And all our achievements in space since then, while astounding, just haven’t been the same.

We have sent probes to the furthest planets. We have sent robotic ambassadors careening out of our Solar System, hopefully to be found someday by other sentient beings in the Galaxy. We have sent landers into the crushing heat and pressure of Venus to collapse after a few minutes, and we have sent mobile rovers to Mars to explore the surface of the Red Planet. We have gazed up close at the volcanoes of Io and the rings of Saturn. We have sent vast laboratories into Earth orbit to study physics, chemistry and biology outside our gravity. We have launched powerful telescopes into space to peer into the furthest reaches of the Universe.

It seems astounding now, but more than four times as much time has passed since Eagle settled onto the Moon’s surface as did between President John Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to be the first to the Moon and the day it actually happened. In that time, six additional Moon landings were launched, five of them successful. But in the thirty-two years since Apollo 17 blasted off the Moon’s surface on its way home, people have never gone into space further than a low orbit.

Why not?

Even from a purely material standpoint, the Solar System is a potential gold mine of minerals and ores, particularly in the asteroid belt. The winds of Jupiter hold massive amounts of hydrogen for fuel and energy needs here on Earth as part of a hydrogen-based energy system, far more than we could use in a thousand lifetimes. And what has happened to the spirit of exploration? It’s not for nothing that Star Trek is one of the most successful franchises in entertainment history.

The push into space has run into two brick walls: budgetary constraints and a supposed lack of interest. As for the former, we can easily free up money by canceling some of the more useless weapons programs. (Item One on the chopping block: National Missile Defense, which has never passed a truly objective test, was designed to defend against a danger which no longer exists, and will cost $50-75 billion, pre-cost overruns.)

As for the latter – well, the next time you go to a museum or a stargazing event, look at children peering through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter or the Andromeda Galaxy. Watch them gasp in amazement and wonder – and then ask yourself if we truly no longer care.

And think of the roads not taken if we turn our backs on the Universe. As Jim Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) said in the film Apollo 13, “Imagine if Christopher Columbus had come back from the New World and no one returned in his footsteps.”

The exploration of space holds far too much promise to turn back now. Let us continue the journey begun at the Sea of Tranquility.

Hope vs. Fear

The Bush campaign has an especially tough sell this election season. The standard sales pitch of pointing to the incumbent’s accomplishments just isn’t working.
 
President Bush cannot point to great successes in Iraq. None of the public rationales given for the invasion (huge WMD arsenals, an al Qaeda connection, an implied 9/11 connection, etc) have turned out to be true, we have earned the hatred of the world, and American soldiers are dying daily for no apparent purpose.
 
He cannot point to great successes in the war against al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, the group is still planning and carrying out terrorist attacks, it’s still active in Afghanistan because Bush pulled American troops away from the hunt to go fight in Iraq, and new recruits are signing up because of the Iraq invasion.
 
He cannot point to great successes with the economy. The nation is still millions of jobs down from 2000, newly-created jobs pay so little that workers can barely afford life’s necessities (if they’re lucky), bankruptcies and foreclosures are at an all-time high, and a sizable budget surplus has been frittered away, leaving us with a gigantic deficit.
 
With no real accomplishments to tout, the Republicans have no choice but to fall back on that time-tested standby, fear. If you can’t convince someone to vote for your guy because he’s genuinely the better choice for the job, then you’ve got to scare the pants off them. Tell people that if they don’t vote for your candidate, evil monsters will come in the middle of the night and eat their children.
 
While that is not exactly the revised Bush sales pitch, there is little doubt that the Republicans have turned to the politics of fear to win this election. All you have to do is listen to the rhetoric that dominates a typical Bush stump speech: 

“Certain regimes, often with ties to terrorist groups, seek the ultimate weapons as a shortcut to influence... They seek weapons of mass destruction to kill Americans on an even greater scale... It’s not possible to guarantee perfect security in our vast, free nation... We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder, and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take... Terrorists planned attacks, with little fear of discovery or reckoning... We remain a nation at risk, directly threatened by an enemy that plots in secret to cause terrible harm and grief...”

Not to be outdone, Vice President Cheney turns up the fear volume in his speeches: 

“Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness... The leader who sits in the Oval Office will set the course for the war on terror... Today’s enemies send trained killers to live among us and attack civilians from within our own borders. They strike us not with tanks, but by taking the tools of everyday life – aircraft, trucks and cars – and turning them into weapons to kill innocent men, women and children... We face a threat today unlike any our nation has ever known... Thousands of terrorists remain at large, and they are intent on gaining access to increasingly powerful weapons... We cannot allow men like those who recently beheaded American and Korean hostages to acquire the tools that will allow them to kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in a few minutes... Terrorists remain determined and dangerous... More violence can be expected in the days and weeks ahead... Nearly three years now have passed without another attack on our soil, yet the terrorist threat to America remains...”

The implication is clear: vote Republican and stay safe, or vote for the other guy and – well, it’s been nice knowing you. And yet Bush and Cheney look positively restrained next to some other Republicans. An outfit called the Authentic GOP sells buttons and T-shirts proclaiming, “10 Out of 10 Terrorists Agree: Anybody But Bush.”
 
The reality, as much as the GOP may hate to admit it, is that the Bush Administration has bungled the War on Terror. By abandoning the hunt for bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, by bogging our military down in the Iraq quagmire and by handing al Qaeda a gold-plated recruiting poster, Bush has ensured that anti-American terrorism is not going anywhere. (The comic strip Doonesbury did a satirical but scarily insightful take on this.)
 
By now, you’re probably at the window waiting for a bomb-laden jetliner to crash into your house, and you can’t wait until your absentee ballot arrives so you can vote for Bush. But let us now take a look at what the Democratic candidates are saying. To nobody’s surprise, they have a very different take on the world situation. In his speeches, Senator John Kerry says: 

“I will be a president who truly is a uniter, not one who seeks to divide our nation by race, riches or any other label... Making life better for the working poor is part of my vision for a stronger America... We have the means to give all our children a first-rate education... We can do better, and we will... Values mean creating opportunity and fighting for good paying jobs that let American families actually get ahead... Health care is a right for all Americans... In our Administration, we’ll never go to war because we want to; we’ll only go to war because we have to... What we are fighting for is an America where all of us truly are in the same boat...”

 
Senator John Edwards is equally upbeat:

“I am speaking to you today for one simple reason: I love my country... I believe that every American deserves the same chance that I had no matter where they live, who their family is or what the color of their skin... Middle-class families will be able to rest assured that [we] will look out for their interests, restore corporate responsibility, and put our economy back in line with our values... [We] will keep [America] safe and build a strong military, and lead strong alliances, so that young Americans are never put in harm’s way because we needlessly decided to go it alone... As president, [Kerry] will lead this world, not bully it... These are the kind of values we need in a President – somebody who has strength, courage and determination and will never leave any American behind...”

But wait a minute! Does that mean the Democratic ticket is made up of America-hating terrorist-lovers who want us to get rid of our military and watch helplessly as terrorists blow up Disney World and throw a burqa over the Statue of Liberty? Of course not. Nobody is seriously saying that we should not defend ourselves, nor that we should not be vigilant.
 
But there is a very large difference between seeing the world as one big threat requiring us to attack recklessly anyone who might become a problem someday, and seeing it as a possibility for a brighter future in which nations band together to defeat a common enemy.
 
One campaign is appealing to your hopes.
 
The other is playing to your fears.

The choice is yours.

Amend This!

It’s an election year, so it’s time for the wedge issues to be dragged out and plopped onto the national stage. You know, the supposed “issues” that sound good when bludgeoning your opponent, but in the long run don’t mean a thing, not even if you’ve got that swing. In 1988, the first George Bush smacked the hapless Michael Dukakis around with Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. He tried the same thing in 1992 with “family values” and a “culture war,” but that time it didn’t work. In 1996, Bob Dole asked “where’s the outrage?” when the American people failed to rise up over the GOP-manufactured “Clinton scandals.” The second George Bush gave us a campaign in 2000 based on “integrity,” then went on to preside over one of the most unethical Administrations in American history, one that made the Bill and Monica Show look like Howdy Doody.

And now we have yet another threat to Civilization As We Know It, and this time it’s called gay marriage. Or, as the Washington Times and other hard-right media outlets call it, “homosexual ‘marriage.’” But whatever you call it, it’s gotten the Republicans in a full-blown, frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy, to the point where the GOP introduced a constitutional amendment to chisel prejudice into the Constitution by barring gays and lesbians from marrying in America, now and forever. (Yes, these are the same Republicans who scream about how the Constitution is sacrosanct and can never be interpreted or amended in any way other than ways that would fit right into the 18th century.) The amendment was solidly defeated, not even getting a majority vote, much less the two-thirds needed to advance in the process.

I’m not sure what President Bush and the Republicans were thinking when they put so much political capital into pushing the amendment for a floor vote in the Senate. Perhaps they thought they could tap into that supposedly vast undercurrent in American society which still fears gays as “queers” and “faggots.” This only goes to prove that they have yet to discover that this is in fact the 21st century, and that many Americans have come to realize that gays and lesbians are actual human beings, not so different from the rest of us.

Meanwhile, our allegedly secular President has apparently taken on the role of Defender of the Faith as well, judging from his radio address last week. “If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract,” he said, apparently unaware that when you get right down to it, marriage in a civil society is a legal contract, “and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, then the meaning of marriage is lost, and the institution is weakened.” He also lashed out at the Massachusetts Supreme Court for calling marriage an “evolving paradigm.”

What nonsense. Of course marriage has evolved over the years and centuries. The original Christian Church wanted no part of marriage at all, seeing it as purely a secular and even anti-religious institution. Wives were seen as literally their husbands’ property, with no rights of their own at all. Indeed, it was only recently that a husband could be held legally accountable for raping his wife. And let us not forget the numerous laws preventing marriages between black slaves, and between people of different races and religions.

But all this has changed. Why? Because marriage and our concept of marriage have evolved.

President Bush and the GOP see marriage as “a union of a man and a woman.” Nothing more, nothing less. But if that were the case, Britney Spears would not have annulled her Las Vegas marriage two days after traipsing down the aisle. Anyone who takes their marriage seriously knows that it’s based on a whole lot more than just gender. It’s based on love and affection, trust and support. And it’s based on two people who are dedicated to sharing their lives together.

If two men or two women find that all-too-rare special someone in each other, then I say bravo; true love and happiness don’t happen enough in this day and age. But Bush and the GOP have bent over backwards to make gay marriage into a cultural Waterloo, that “traditional families” (whatever they are) will somehow be damaged if two men or two women are allowed to get married.

Now, I can’t pretend to know how strong Bush’s marriage is, or the marriages of any of the GOPers leading this particular charge, but I have to wonder how strong they can possibly be if they can be threatened by two people of whom they’ve never heard getting married. It brings to mind a scenario of a Grant Wood-ish farm couple, looking sadly at each other over the kitchen table. “Maw,” the husband says gloomily, “them queers is gettin’ married over at the town hall. Looks like this is it for us. You keep the cow, I’ll keep the pig.”

This is, of course, complete twaddle. No one’s marriage will be affected in the slightest if two men or two women get hitched, and from the widespread public yawning over the Republicans’ latest attempt to turn Americans against each other, quite a lot of people already know that.

And when you think about it, after months of bloviating, nobody has really explained just how gay marriage would “undermine” or otherwise harm marriage as a whole. It seems the Republicans are simply exploiting people’s tendencies to fear anything unfamiliar.

The only votes the GOP will get out of trying to demonize gays and lesbians will be the ones they had in the first place. After all, does anyone really believe that someone who says that “sodomites” will burn in hell would vote Democratic? To the rest of us, such blatant pandering to intolerance and hatred reveals an ideology firmly rooted in the politics of fear. The Republicans really should quit while they still can.

The Speech That Should Be

When Vice President Cheney takes to the campaign trail to lash out at the all-but-official Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry, one of his favorite points is that Kerry voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq and then voted against the $87 billion appropriation to pay for the continuing occupation. How, Cheney asks, could Kerry oppose a war after he supported it?

Determined to “play nice,” Kerry has largely ducked the issue, but he should meet it forcefully and head-on. After all, the GOP campaign is operating in full gloves-off mode, so why should the Democrats handicap themselves?

Kerry should say something like this:

My fellow Americans,

When I voted to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq, like my colleagues in the Senate and the House I depended on information from the White House and our intelligence services, particularly the CIA. We were told over and over again that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that he had a lot of them, and that he was an imminent threat to the security of our nation.

We now know that information was false. We now know that months before 9/11, the Bush Administration had already decided in secret to invade Iraq. In pursuit of that goal they pressured CIA analysts, professionals who have dedicated their careers to keeping us safe, to tell them only what they wanted to hear. Whenever the analysts told the truth – that Iraq was not armed to the teeth, that Saddam was not a threat, and Iraq was not in league with al Qaeda – they were ignored.

And the ideologues in the Administration took everything else – every unsubstantiated rumor, every outdated tidbit, every damaging morsel – and passed it on to the American people as if it were verified fact.

You see, it is standard practice in this Administration that if the facts don’t fit the ideology, it’s the facts that have to go.

So when the CIA released its National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 telling the American people that Iraq without a doubt had all these terrible weapons, they actually had two versions: a public version and a classified version, which reserved for senior Administration officials only. And it just so happened that the classified version was far more doubtful, far more equivocal, than the version given to the rest of us. The Administration knew the truth. The rest of us were told nothing but lies.

But we didn’t know that what we were getting from the CIA was what the White House told them to say. We didn’t know about the professional analysts who were outraged over this blatantly political interference with their work.

And when that information proved to be false, when more than a year of searching Iraq, interviewing weapons scientists, and interrogating the Iraqi leadership, failed to find any of the mass arsenals or al Qaeda connections we were told existed – well, the President just blamed it all on the CIA.

Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee backed up the President, reporting that there were no demands to deliver only the “right” kind of analysis and that all the responsibility for the inaccurate intelligence rests with the CIA. But the committee’s dissenting report said there was plenty of evidence of political pressure and that it was pushed aside to whitewash the President and the Republican Party in this election year.

Some people say, “Well, we got rid of Saddam, and that’s a good thing.” Yes, that is a good thing. But since when do the ends justify the means? Doing so many wrong things to accomplish an otherwise worthy goal does not magically transform them into right things.

Did I vote for this war? Yes, and it is a vote I deeply regret, because we now know this war was based on false pretenses. And the Bush Administration knew it was false, because they had accurate information which they did not share with the rest of us. They preferred to let us believe the other version, the scarier version. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have voted for war.

And afterwards, when the White House presented Congress with a bill for $87 billion for an occupation we had been told over and over again would pay for itself, and when they finally said there was no end in sight for our occupation of Iraq, I saw many things in such a shameless request.

I saw utter arrogance from people secure in the knowledge that having put our armed forces in harm’s way, they could make Congress do whatever they wanted in the guise of “supporting the troops.” I saw complete fiscal irresponsibility from people who squandered a record budget surplus and turned it into a record deficit, and then adding even more to it. And I saw sheer desperation from people who thought that the reality of post-invasion Iraq could easily be brought into line with their pre-invasion propaganda.

I voted against the appropriation, and I am proud of having done so. Having gone to war under such disgraceful circumstances, we should not have prolonged it into an endless occupation, draining our nation in terms of money and blood. We have too many needs at home to throw so much money into this foolhardy adventure, and I will continue to vote against wasting any more of our tax dollars on it.

And as your President, at the first opportunity I will turn Iraq over to a truly multinational force, and bring our men and women home.

So who do you hold accountable in such a situation? Do you blame the person who was manipulated into doing what you want, or do you blame the person who did the manipulating in the first place?

One of my opponent’s bumper stickers features the slogan, “Leadership, Integrity, Morality.” Considering the choices this Administration has made in the War on Terror, it’s an ironic slogan at best.

When you all but abandon the fight against the enemy which attacked us on 9/11 to pursue a vendetta against someone who did not pose a threat to us, and when you pressure people into telling you only want you want to hear and then use them as scapegoats, that’s poor leadership.

When you use phony data and exploit people’s fears to scare them into supporting your already-made decision to go to war, and when you unleash your political hatchet men to smear as unpatriotic anyone who expresses any doubts, that’s the very opposite of integrity.

And when that war, which did not have to happen, kills hundreds of American men and women, and untold thousands of Iraqi civilians – well, there is no word for it other than “immoral.”

I stand before you here today to tell you that I will never send your sons and daughters into harm’s way unless it is absolutely necessary and all other options have been exhausted. I will never send our troops into danger for the sake of a grudge. I will never discard facts and viewpoints provided by our dedicated public servants because they do not fit a politically mandated ideology. And I will never deliberately frighten you into supporting my policies.

To do anything else is unethical, dishonorable, and unworthy of a President of the United States.

America deserves better. You deserve better. And on November 2nd, you can do something about it.

Thank you all, and God bless America.

Now that would be a good response.

No Self-Defense Allowed

When the United Nations’ International Court of Justice in The Hague agreed to provide a nonbinding advisory opinion on Israel’s security fence, being built roughly along the Green Line separating Israel proper from the West Bank, everyone knew the ruling would go against Israel. The ICJ is stacked with judges from countries hostile to the Jewish state, and because Israel is barred from full membership in all regional UN groups, no Israeli judges are allowed to serve. The Israeli government, fully aware they would not receive anything even resembling a fair hearing, announced in advance that construction would continue anyway.

Now the Court has made its ruling, and to nobody’s surprise, the Jews got all the blame. In its blunt language, the ICJ said that “construction of the wall and its associated régime cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order.” (Presumably, the corpses of hundreds of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism just aren’t enough.) And in what can only be called chutzpah, the judges blithely added that “construction of the wall [is] not the only means to safeguard Israel’s interests against the peril invoked.” This after the UN condemns Israel with dreary regularity for taking any action at all against terrorism.

So let me get this straight: Not only is Israel not allowed to defend itself by going on the offensive against terrorists with armed force, it is not allowed to defend itself nonviolently by preventing attackers from slaughtering its citizens in the first place.

This is so absurd it would be right at home in the works of Dr. Seuss:

You cannot do it with a wall,
You cannot do it big or small,
You cannot do it post-close call,
You cannot defend yourselves at all!

The ruling was a legal and political farce, plain and simple. The ICJ never made any secret of its political leanings in the case, and made it very clear from the outset which way they would rule. The opinion completely ignored the daily threat of terror under which all Israelis live, relegating it to the footnotes, and took the Palestinian position on every point. It would all be great material for late-night comics were it not so scornfully tragic.

It would be hard to come up with a harsher indictment of the contempt with which the world sees Israel and the Jews. In the eyes of the rest of the world, Israel’s defined role is to be the global whipping boy, the scapegoat for everyone else’s problems. Israel’s only permissible response to bus bombings and restaurant massacres is to do nothing at all. And the only permissible solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is for Israel to destroy itself.

The Palestinians have shown over and over again that they are not interested in a genuine peace with Israel no matter what. Like it or not, the only realistic response to such an intolerable situation is to pull out and let the Palestinians run their own affairs while protecting Israeli citizens against relentless terrorist attacks. That requires a way to block terrorists from entering Israel and wreaking havoc.

And that requires a strong, defensible barrier.

Israel is doing the right thing. If the rest of the world doesn’t like the idea of Jews actually defending themselves instead of meekly letting themselves be slaughtered, too bad.

So Much for Voting Rights

After three and a half years, it’s pretty obvious that the Bush Administration is not a wellspring of brilliant, well-thought-out ideas. But this latest one takes the cake. Newsweek says that the White House is looking into ways of postponing the November presidential election if an al Qaeda attack occurs.

Such consideration was doubtlessly triggered by the Spanish elections earlier this year in which, three days after a believed al Qaeda attack, the government which backed the American invasion of Iraq was voted out of office and replaced by one which promptly pulled out. Afterwards, comments flew about how al Qaeda had supposedly influenced the election and how the spineless Spaniards had played right into their hands.

Even if such a take is accurate, it doesn’t take a raving paranoid to see the potential for abuse here. For how long would elections be postponed? A day? A week? A year? For that matter, who says the elections only have to be postponed? Why not just cancel them outright until the security situation becomes more settled? If that isn’t for five or ten years, well, we were told this is a new kind of war. And why wait for an attack to actually happen? Why not postpone or even cancel the elections preemptively, just in case they’re thinking of trying something? (That’ll show ’em!) Besides, you don’t want the terrorists to win – or do you?

This is quite possibly one of the dumbest ideas ever to come out of the Bush Administration, and that’s really saying something. The very cornerstone of American democracy is regular elections to choose the people who (at least theoretically) represent our interests in government. As Senator Dianne Feinstein pointed out, “We hold elections in the middle of war, in the middle of earthquakes, in the middle of whatever it takes.” Our democracy is strong enough to withstand whatever al Qaeda and their ilk can throw at us, despite what some in the White House seem to believe.

George & Me

Michael Moore is many things. He is outspoken, unafraid of taking on the powers that be, and willing to do anything to get his point across. Roger & Me documented the economic collapse of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed all its assembly plants there. Bowling for Columbine examined America’s culture of weaponry against the backdrop of continual gun violence. And now, Fahrenheit 9/11 is nothing less than an indictment of the White House of George W. Bush.

The film has triggered reactions all the way from “Michael Moore is a genius and he hit the nail right on the head” to “Michael Moore is a traitor who hates America and who is only helping our enemies.” As is usually the case, the truth lies somewhere in between. (Personally, I believe that Moore loves America but hates what the Bush Administration is doing in America’s name.)

In a little over two hours of film time, Moore makes too many accusations against Bush and the War on Terror to cover individually, but they basically boil down to these:

1. The Republicans stole the 2000 election with the help of Bush's brother (the Governor of Florida) and Bush's cousin (the head of Fox News' election desk).
2. The Bush family’s commitment to putting America first is doubtful because they are in business cahoots with the bin Laden family.
3. The Bush family’s commitment to putting America first is doubtful because they are in business cahoots with the Saudi royal family.
4. Bush ignored pre-9/11 warnings because he was lazy and never thought al Qaeda would attack the United States (see point 2 above).
5. Bush whitewashed possible Saudi involvement in 9/11 to protect his friends in the royal family (see point 3 above).
6. Bush ordered a purely-for-show war against al Qaeda and the Taliban to secure space in Afghanistan for a natural-gas pipeline.
7. The Bush Administration uses vague and hazy warnings of possible terrorist attacks to keep the American people in a permanent state of fear and thus politically acquiescent.
8. The Bush Administration exploited Americans’ post-9/11 fears to (literally) scare up public support for the invasion of Iraq.
9. The war in Iraq is a bloody quagmire and its sole accomplishment is making the rest of the world hate us.

Some of Moore’s points, particularly those about the Bush family’s business connections and hence their loyalties, are a stretch at best, and bring to mind the endless accusations against Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. You know, the ones that said because Clinton knew someone who knew someone else who knew someone else who was once busted for something shady, he was a murdering, dope-smoking, Chinese-loving sleazeball. And Moore doesn’t help his case by making the Afghan gas-pipeline claim; that threatens to make him look like some conspiracy-theory wacko.

But most of Moore’s other points are dead-on. Bush did sit quietly in a Florida classroom and do absolutely nothing for seven agonizing minutes after he was told of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. (A pro-Bush friend of mine once asked what I would do in such a situation. I replied that as President, it was Bush's duty to respond to the crisis immediately rather than continue with a feel-good photo op.) He did fight the congressional and independent 9/11 investigations tooth and nail until he was publicly shamed into allowing them. He did order 28 pages of the congressional 9/11 report, reportedly examining official Saudi connections with al Qaeda, blacked out. He did allow the Saudi government to fly dozens of Saudi nationals, including many of Osama bin Laden’s relatives, out of the country with only perfunctory examination while the rest of America was grounded. And he most definitely did play to our fears of another 9/11-type attack to manipulate public opinion into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

And speaking of playing to our fears, am I the only one who finds it just a tad suspicious that scary terrorist warnings tend to be announced whenever the White House gets into trouble over a particularly odious revelation or threatens to get upstaged? Has anyone else noticed that these “warnings” are almost always so ridiculously vague as to be useless? Personally, I think most of it is that they’re going overboard trying to keep their butts covered and not look as inattentive as they did before 9/11. But from Moore’s standpoint, however, the warnings are anything but useless if their real purpose is to keep the public in a constant state of fear and thus more likely to go along with whatever the Administration says.

The film is not, however, perfect. Disturbingly, there is no mention at all of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial cruelties, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, or the struggle over United Nations weapons inspections – all of which are essential to understanding the present conflict and putting it in context. The only footage of pre-war Iraq shows smiling families flying kites and enjoying themselves, giving the impression that Iraq was a happy paradise before we got involved. But this was hardly the case, and while Moore has never claimed the film to be a "fair and balanced" examination of the war, these troubling omissions only undermine the film and give ammunition to his critics.

Most of the aid-and-comfort criticisms of Moore derive from his use of unflinchingly graphic footage of the war and his showing soldiers asking why they are fighting in Iraq. Here is war in all its gory glory, with amputated limbs, children screaming in pain, bloated corpses, and everything else we never see on the network news. Anyone who has ever been in combat will testify that war, in the words of William T. Sherman, is hell. The closest the rest of us will ever come to the horror of war is probably the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan. But does that mean that the home front should be protected with sanitized coverage?

Will bringing the realities of war into America’s living rooms result in an evaporation of public support for the war? Will showing American soldiers as people who can question their leaders instead of just supporting the war blindly and without a second thought really embolden America’s enemies? Moore leaves us to ponder these questions for ourselves.

Fahrenheit 9/11 has generated a lot of heat from all points of the political spectrum, from Michael Moore’s most devoted fans to his most ferocious detractors. But whatever your opinion of the war, of Bush, and of Moore himself, one undeniable fact about the film is that he makes us think for ourselves about what America is doing and forces us to consider the possibility that our leaders might not always do what’s right. And whether you agree with him or not, thinking for ourselves is always a good thing.

Desperate Times

These are truly desperate times for the Bush Administration. After saying over and over again that the “handover of sovereignty” in Iraq would magically solve all our problems, the handover came and went – and everything pretty much stayed the same. It was business as usual with more bombings, more fighting, and more deaths. I can just imagine President Bush sitting in the Oval Office, scratching his head at how all these Iraqis could be so ungrateful, even after we handed token power over to some handpicked figureheads, and wondering what the next step could possibly be.

With their one and only plan (actually, it was more of a wish) for getting us out of the Iraq mess not working, the White House is starting to show real anxiety. Bush’s blatantly made-for-public-consumption “let freedom reign” scribble went over like a lead balloon. (Note to Karl Rove and other Administration image-meisters: Doing something that obvious is guaranteed to backfire and make you look stupid as well as reckless. Next time, think subtle.)

Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney is still insisting that Iraq and al Qaeda were partners in crime despite all the evidence to the contrary. In a speech he gave yesterday in New Orleans, Cheney said that “in the early 1990s, Saddam [Hussein] had sent a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan to train al Qaeda in bomb-making and document forgery.” There is, however, one minor problem with this: intelligence services say such an event never happened, it was just a rumor.

Cheney also insisted that Iraq and al Qaeda were pals because alleged al Qaeda deputy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived in Baghdad. Not only is there no evidence of any collaboration between the Iraqi government and Zarqawi, but by that logic, the United States and al Qaeda are pals because the 9/11 hijackers lived in America before the 2001 attack. He also accuses Baghdad of having refused to turn over Zarqawi to the US, conveniently forgetting to mention that with a constant pattern of threats, bombings and accusations going back to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq would be loath to do anything Washington asked.

And once again he dragged out the matter of the allegedly al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Islam group in northern Iraq, once again neglecting to point out that (a) it was located outside Saddam’s control in the northern no-fly zone, and that (b) far from being allied with Saddam, Ansar was dedicated to overthrowing him.

(In response to Cheney’s speech, a 9/11 commission spokesman stood by the report issued two weeks ago, which said there was no operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and said they have seen no information since then to make them change their findings.)

Cheney then took a new and different tack: it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. Apparently, Clinton did not “respond very forcefully” to such attacks as the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy attacks in 1998, and so on. “Our enemies took lessons from this experience,” Cheney went on to say. “They concluded that our country was soft... Terrorists were emboldened by years of being able to strike us with impunity.”

This, of course, turns history on its ear. Saudi intelligence dragged its feet and refused to aggressively investigate the Khobar Towers attack, much to Clinton’s disgust. He ordered attacks on al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan after the embassy bombings, and Congressional Republicans pounced on him – not for using too little force but for using too much. They also accused him of launching the attacks solely to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky ruckus. To claim that Clinton did nothing to strike against al Qaeda, as the GOP is now doing, is a gross distortion of history. And to explain away Bush’s failures by putting all the blame on the previous occupant of the White House is not only wrong politically, it insults the memory of the Americans who have died because of this Administration’s incompetence.

By now, this is to be expected from the Bush Administration; it’s standard procedure to present rumors as facts, to keep on with the same sales pitch even after it’s discredited, and to ignore anything which doesn’t fit into the official ideological matrix.

Each time Cheney opens his mouth and proclaims the existence of a phantom Iraq-al Qaeda connection, he makes himself look more and more like a fool who is so blinded by his own ideology that he simply cannot see anything else. And each time Bush lets himself be part of a ham-handed scheme to put a happy face on a crumbling situation, he reveals himself to be either hopelessly naïve or just plain hopeless.