Don't Bother Me with the Facts

No one likes to hear bad news, but the Bush Administration has raised the shielding of the President from unpleasant truths to something of an art form. It is already well known that President Bush eschews open discussion in favor of sycophantic approval and so all public encounters are carefully staged, from pre-rehearsed chats with the troops to scripted Cabinet meetings. What is now coming out is that the President regularly refuses to listen to anything, even from his closest advisers, with which he disagrees.

In an unnerving New Yorker article, Seymour Hersh writes that "the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq... He disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding." It's a classic example of a "don't bother me with the facts, my mind is made up" reaction.

Perhaps more disturbing, Hersh reports that Bush claims a divine mandate to fight terrorism, saying that "God put me here." When it comes to feeling that one has God on his side, there is a considerable difference between being a private citizen and being the most powerful man in the world. Bush has repeatedly claimed to have been divinely chosen to be President, and even saw the 2002 midterm election results as a heavenly endorsement.

It was reported back in June 2003 that Bush told Palestinian leaders, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam [Hussein], which I did." The White House hotly denied the report, but given Bush's frequent expressions of religious fervor, it's not very farfetched at all.

One former Administration official who left after Bush's first term told Hersh that upon returning from a visit to Iraq he reported his findings to Bush at the White House, telling him "we're not winning the war."

Bush asked, "Are we losing?"

"Not yet" was the reply. Bush was visibly displeased with the answer.

"I tried to tell him," the official said. "And he couldn't hear it."

Even military generals, who of all people should be able to give the President honest if unpalatable assessments of the situation on the ground, are afraid to speak up. They remember all too well the example of Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff. Shinseki testified before Congress that the Administration's desired troop requirements for an invasion and occupation of Iraq were considerably smaller than what was actually needed. In retaliation, Shinseki's replacement was announced more than a year early, instantly transforming him into a lame duck and undercutting his authority.

So rather than commit professional suicide, no one at the Pentagon wants to tell Bush or even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld what they have to hear but don't want to hear. Meanwhile, military officials at all levels are all too happy to talk off the record about what is really happening: Iraq is a mess, nothing is working right, the Iraqi people hate us, nobody really believes in the war anymore, the troops are furious at having been deceived, and everyone just wants to get out and go home.

The President of the United States, ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, is delegating more and more authority to Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, preferring to exist "in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway."

And that, more than anything else, bodes ill for the Iraq War and for the nation as a whole. As long as top officials insist on living in a pleasant dream world, hearing only good news and punishing anyone who tells them differently, no improvement is possible. That is seriously scary.

Merry Christmas, Dammit!

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us and we're deciding what to do with all those leftovers, it is once again time for the religious right's Save Christmas campaign. Once again proving H.L. Mencken's wry observation that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, this annual exercise in fear and loathing tries to convince millions of people that they are being persecuted for being Christian.

And they're pulling out all the stops. Following the standard technique of treating isolated and extreme incidents as the norm, Fox News (motto: "We Distort, You Deride") echoes with uber-pundits Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson bloviating about how the ACLU or some other bugaboo is trying to destroy Christmas. Indeed, Gibson uses his TV show ad nauseam to plug his book The War on Christmas. Meanwhile, having already defended America from the insidious menace of gay Teletubbies, Jerry Falwell has also gotten into the act, announcing his "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign" to sue the bejeezus out of anyone who spreads "misinformation" on Christmas (translation: doesn't share his view of what Christmas should be).

All like to talk about how America is a "Christian nation" and should publicly worship as such, regardless of that little thing called separation of church and state. In their world, it is imperative that December 25 be an officially revered holy day, strictly regulated to ensure the proper Christmas spirit. And anyone who is grinchy enough to believe that religious worship is best done at home and church instead of being splashed all over our civic life is a terrible, anti-Christian evildoer.

Once again, we see how no issue is too tiny, manufactured or just plain silly for the right wing to blow up to insane proportions. All you have to do is turn on the TV or radio to be deluged with Christmas music, Christmas specials, Christmas carols, et cetera, et cetera. Christmas trees and Nativity scenes are everywhere. Yes, Virginia, Christmas is alive and well in America, despite all this "Save Christmas" nonsense.

But I sincerely doubt that O'Reilly, Gibson, Falwell and company really give a rat's patoot as to whether the greeters at Wal-Mart say "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays." What they're really after is publicity and money. O'Reilly wants more people to watch his show, which is suffering from declining ratings as more and more people get turned off by his ranting and bullying. Gibson wants to sell a lot of copies of his book. And Falwell wants all those tax-free donations sent in by people who are easily frightened. The common denominator of all this is money. You've got it. They want it. And if they have to scare you with a fake "crisis" to get you to part with it, so much the better.

Never Mind

More than three years have passed since Jose Padilla stepped off an airplane in Chicago and into limbo. Announcing Padilla's arrest by federal agents, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft declared (in Moscow, of all places) that he had conspired with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" and was being held as an enemy combatant. In the upside-down world of the Bush Administration, that simple designation enabled the government, solely on the President's say-so, to hold Padilla incommunicado, unable to communicate with his family or even a lawyer. Forever. More than two years after Padilla's disappearance, then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey blithely told a press conference that yes, they had evidence that Padilla was a bad person who planned to blow up apartment buildings by stopping up gas pipes and he would go to trial - eventually.

Now, in a move worthy of Saturday Night Live's Emily Litella, the government last week looked into the camera, smiled, and said "Never mind."

Padilla was finally indicted on vague charges of conspiring to "murder, maim and kidnap" Americans overseas, with no mention whatsoever of all those sensational accusations. All that stuff about dirty bombs, apartment buildings, and even al Qaeda was now, in the words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "irrelevant."

Irrelevant? Padilla was locked up for three and a half years with no charges. The only "trial" he received was a pair of splashy news conferences at which wild allegations were tossed around. Padilla was demonized in the public eye with exactly zero opportunity to defend himself. And now all that is deemed merely "irrelevant?"

The Padilla case has rankled a lot of people for a long time. It's just plain wrong that anyone, particularly an American citizen, can be just plucked off the street and made to disappear into an American prison without charges, without a trial, and without end. Indeed, it cannot be a coincidence that the indictment comes as the Supreme Court was about to take up the case, with the likelihood that the Court would order the government to either try Padilla or release him.

And yet this is only a microcosm of the much larger and more frightening practices of holding unilaterally-declared "enemy combatants" without any trial or charges at all. Add to that the recent revelations of secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe (Poland, Romania and Hungary, to be exact) the winking export of prisoners to torture-friendly countries, and the obscene White House drive to stop a bill banning American torture. Indeed, there are rumblings that the earlier hysterical charges were left out of the Padilla indictment because the information was reportedly tortured out of two al Qaeda operatives.

What is happening in our country? Has America really been perverted from the land of liberty into the land of don't-get-on-our-bad-side-or-else-we'll-make-you-disappear-and-pull-out-your-fingernails-just-for-good-measure? Even if we do eventually manage to destroy al Qaeda and other terrorist groups by using such tactics, we will have effectively sold our national soul to the devil.

Shut Up and Salute

The White House has been having more than its share of problems lately. After yet another "milestone" has come and gone in Iraq, the anti-American insurgency war has not miraculously gone away. One can almost hear the head-scratching in the White House Situation Room - these ungrateful Iraqis don't appreciate all we've done for them, like, um, not being able to get the lights back on. Why don't they just sit back and let us take all their oil?

And so as the American death toll in Iraq rockets past 2,000 with no end in sight, the Administration has unveiled its new plan for winning the war. It does not, of course, have anything to do with strategy or goals in Iraq. Heaven forbid. No, this new plan involves attacking war critics at home as unpatriotic, America-hating whiners.

On Veterans Day, President Bush did his bit to unite the nation by claiming that it's "deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." That's a good one - the Administration has rewritten history on an almost daily basis by constantly changing the rationale for invading Iraq ever since it became apparent that Saddam Hussein did not in fact have massive WMD stockpiles. Oh yes, and it's all Bill Clinton's fault for also believing that Saddam possessed all those terrible weapons. Never mind the fact that Clinton - unlike Bush - did not use this belief to scare Americans into supporting a full-on invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Not to be outdone, Vice President Cheney, looking more and more every day like someone who desperately needs a laxative, did his part for the cause by smearing all those troublemakers who take democracy seriously and insist on (gasp!) questioning our nation's leaders. "Nobody is saying we should not be [debating the drive to attack Iraq] or that you cannot reexamine a decision made by the President and the Congress some years ago," Cheney said to the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

But just in case people might actually take his advice, he went on to say, "What is not legitimate, and what I will again say is dishonest and reprehensible, is the suggestion...that the President of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence."

And just to be sure that nobody missed the point, he added that "untruthful charges against the Commander-in-Chief have an insidious effect on the war effort itself."

Really? Actually demanding accountability and alleging deliberate deception is dishonest? Reprehensible, even? With the recent avalanche of revelations that intelligence was cherry-picked and knowingly false reports were embraced to support an already-approved invasion, one would think that Cheney and others who were hot to attack would be just a tiny bit bashful at being found out. Nope, the official line is that anything short of unquestioning obedience and mindless belief is sabotaging America.

Fortunately, after years of being told to shut up and salute, the American public ain't buying it. With solid majorities in poll after poll reporting that the public feels deceived into war and demanding a pullout from Iraq, the usual White House approach of wrapping themselves in the flag just isn't working this time. Congressional Republicans, facing an angry electorate in next year's elections, are starting to buck the White House and, however timidly, are asking for anything to show the folks back home that they don't support an endless war. Even the Democrats are starting to show some spine.

With a normal Administration, one could say they should be ashamed at such blatant attempts at getting off the hook. Of course, with this Administration, shame is a four-letter word.

Unintelligent Design

Every once in a while, the holier-than-thou wing of American Christianity makes another attempt at taking our schools and perverting them from bastions of learning and intelligence into halls of indoctrination. Such it is with "intelligent design," the latest version of creationism.

At least creationism is honest enough to admit that it's rooted in the Biblical story of the creation of the Universe as told in Genesis. ID, called "creationism in a cheap tuxedo," depends on sleight-of-hand tricks in selling its claim that some form of higher intelligence - but not God - created the world and everything in it. ID advocates claim that it deserves to be respected as a scientific theory alongside those of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Indeed, they usually bend over backwards to insist that what they offer is not religion, but merely an "alternative" to Darwinian evolution which should be taught as such in science classes. "Teach the controversy!" they cry.

Now while it's not as poetic as its Genesis-based counterpart, ID is an interesting way of looking at how the world began. But it's not science. It's many things - philosophy, religion, metaphysics, culture - but not science.

Science looks at how the world is, and in order for something to be scientific, it has to be testable, provable, disprovable and repeatable. Darwin's theory of evolution has proven to be the most durable theory in the history of human scientific knowledge. Every time new medicines are created to combat bacteria or viruses that have become resistent to a drug, you're seeing evolution in action.

But how can one prove that God (or, in the world of ID, Not-God) created the world? One can't; it's quite literally a matter of faith.

Indeed, ID's reputation as a non-religious scientific theory took some hits after voters in Dover, Pennsylvania voted out all eight school board members who tried to compel local schools to teach ID as science. TV preacher Pat Robertson, last heard distinguishing himself in the world of foreign affairs by calling for the assassination of the President of Venezuela, declared that the people of Dover "rejected [God] from your city" and "If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God." Other comments made it abundantly clear what ID advocates are trying to hide - that intelligent design is a religious doctrine.

That's why when they refer to an "intelligent designer," ID advocates really mean God, and the Christian version of God at that. They'll just never admit it. So if we're going to shoehorn the Biblical version of creation into America's classrooms via ID, we should include alternative versions of ID as well. Native American versions (one per tribe, of course) of how the world began, perhaps, or the African tale of how the world was literally vomited into being by Bumba. Or my personal favorite, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

When you get right down to it, the fight over ID really has nothing to do with science. Rather, it has everything to do with the efforts of the Christian right to force their own religious beliefs on the rest of us. The framers of the Constitution were quite right when they mandated a separation of church and state in the fledgling nation called the United States. Looking back on centuries of religiously-motivated persecution, oppression and massacres in Europe, they were determined never to let America emulate what had failed so disastrously in Europe.

Mixing religion and government is always a bad move. If you're going to teach ID, do it in a philosophy or comparative-religion class. But keep it out of science classes.

Musical Life Beyond Corporate Radio

It used to be that commercial radio stations provided listeners with a wide variety of music. Local bands could get on local stations to build a following. Anyone driving on a cross-country trip could count on being able to listen to one station after another, creating a national mosaic of local and regional music. No more.

Corporate control of the music industry has inexorably taken its toll. The Buggles famously sang that "video killed the radio star," but BMI, Sony, Clear Channel and others did the job far better than MTV ever could. These days, it seems like every radio station in America is owned by a super-conglomerate, and they all play the very same thing.

Whether you're in a big city or a small town, it doesn't matter how much you spin the dial, you hear the same playlists interrupted by the same inane banter and the same endless commercials, all piped in from somewhere else. The corporate-radio version of "variety" means rotating between one prefabricated, focus-group-tested, guaranteed-to-sell "pop" group and another. Anything outside this safe, marketable formula is barred from the airwaves, leading to music which sounds like it was all written by the same five people all working out of the same corporate boardroom.

So what can you do besides throw your radio out the window? Fortunately, like the last spark that keeps a flame alive, there are still a few excellent independent stations out there. Going days or even weeks at a time without repeating a single song, they play music by people you've never heard of and which makes the stuff aired by your local Clear Channel affiliate sound like rancid crap. And even if you don't live locally, they broadcast on the Internet.

While there are other good ones, here are the top five stations I listen to when the boredom of corporate radio starts killing off too many brain cells:

• Broadcasting out of a 12-by-12 shack in Talkeetna, Alaska, the Internet-only Whole Wheat Radio features a eclectic playlist with classical, jazz, folk and everything in between. You almost never hear commercial artists, but they do have the occasional cover song.
• The NPR-affiliated station The Current broadcasts from the Twin Cities of Minnesota with a heavy emphasis on local bands.
• With harder music than WWR or The Current, KEXP comes from Seattle, the home of grunge rock, bringing a mix of established music and up-and-comers.
• WUMB, an all-folk station in Boston, features mostly established folk artists from Pete Seeger to Tracy Chapman, but has new artists as well.
• Another NPR station, this one in Philadelphia, WXPN mostly plays the sort of classic rock overlooked by corporate "classic rock" stations, but also gives significant airplay to local musicians.

So switch off that Top 40 station and tune in, and rediscover what really good music radio is like. Happy listening!

Sense and Nonsensibility

"The war in Iraq is not going as advertised. It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The American public is way ahead of us. The United States and coalition troops have done all they can in Iraq, but it is time for a change in direction. Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region... Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home."

Formerly pro-war Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) introducing his resolution calling for an immediate pullout from Iraq

"Congressman Murtha is a respected veteran and politician who has a record of supporting a strong America. So it is baffling that he is endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party. The eve of an historic democratic election in Iraq is not the time to surrender to the terrorists. After seeing his statement, we remain baffled -- nowhere does he explain how retreating from Iraq makes America safer."

The complete White House response to Rep. Murtha's statement

We're baaaaaaack...

Following a bad car accident, a long recovery, and a return to health, the Progressive Perspective is back on the air!