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!

All the President's IOUs

President Bush's campaign to destroy – oops, I mean "rescue" – Social Security is in big trouble. Nobody, not even Bush, genuinely believes that privatizing the system will do anything to solve its eventual financial problems. Economists cringe at the thought of piling on trillions of dollars in additional debt to achieve the transition. It is widely recognized that the campaign and its associated scare tactics are based not on economics but on an ideological loathing of Social Security's very existence.

Even Congressional Republicans, getting an earful in their home districts, are telling the Bush Administration that this just isn't flying. Of course, Senators and Congressmen do not have the advantage of living in the President's dissent-free bubble; they actually have to interact with their constituents and listen to what they have to say. They do not have the luxury of speaking only with people who have been pre-screened to weed out anyone who might be so rude as to express anything other than utter and slavish devotion.

So it is a measure of how desperate things must be getting that Bush was sent to visit the Bureau of the Public Debt in Parkersburg, West Virginia on Tuesday. There, he struck a dramatic pose next to a filing cabinet containing the records of the $1.7 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds in which the Social Security trust fund is invested. Bush, of course, put it rather differently.

"There is no 'trust fund,'" Bush proclaimed, "just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay for either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs. The office here in Parkersburg stores those IOUs. They're stacked in a filing cabinet." Playing to his usual audience of handpicked sycophants, he smirked, "Imagine: the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet." (What did he expect – Scrooge McDuck's money bin, perhaps?)

In other words, Treasury bonds, widely regarded as the gold standard in safe and secure investments, are just worthless slips of paper.

For someone who brags about being the first MBA President, it's pretty obvious that Bush doesn't know squat about economics. A Treasury bond is not an "IOU." It's still money, just like a share of stock, a privately issued bond, or the totals printed on a bank statement. Everyone who has ever had a checking account knows that a paper check is money, too. Does the President of the United States really believe that money in any form other than bills and coins is worthless?

Bush's financial ignorance aside, casually dismissing Treasury bonds as IOUs is particularly reckless. He seems to have forgotten that thanks to his obsession with tax cuts über alles combined with huge hikes in federal military and homeland-security spending, the government is running a $400 billion annual budget deficit with no end in sight.

To understand why this is so irresponsible, all you have to do is realize that the deficit is financed by selling Treasury bonds – the very same bonds in which the Social Security trust fund is invested. Those bonds are increasingly being bought by foreign investors, who are already spooked by the Bush Administration's utter disregard for any notion of financial restraint. And if bondholders listen to Bush's statement and decide that the bonds really are worthless, that the government can't or won't make good on its debts, they may either (a) refuse to buy any more bonds or (b) demand higher interest rates on bonds they do buy. With the White House hopelessly addicted to endless borrowing, either one would send the economy into a tailspin.

And the icing on the cake is that since Bush refuses to raise taxes to pay for his privatization plan, it would be financed by selling – you guessed it: Treasury bonds!

Bush's bizarre ramblings aside, the Social Security trust fund exists. It is real. It is kept in the same bonds which we buy as birthday presents and safe investments. They even earn six percent interest. They may not be sexy, but they're secure, backed up by the "full faith and credit" of the federal government, just like the money in your wallet.

Besides, if Bush's uncontrolled deficit spending really does cause a financial crisis severe enough to put that faith and credit in doubt, Social Security will be the least of our worries.

We sincerely hope that the governments, institutions and individuals who finance the national debt know better than to take Bush's increasingly frenzied theatrics as signs of actual policy decisions. But it doesn't make his wild statements any more comforting.

Science Museums Without Science

Molly Ivins once said that reading the morning paper is sometimes like finding Fidel Castro in your refrigerator. You don’t really know what to think.

There was one such article in the New York Times recently about how a number of IMAX theaters, many located in southern states, are refusing to show a handful of films. It appears that the films deemed inappropriate, including Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, Cosmic Voyage and Galapagos, all have one thing in common – they all mention evolution. As such, they have become targets for the Christian-right jihad against anything which does not fall into line with their theology.

While such idiotic bloviating against the world at large is not surprising coming from this crowd, the truly stunning part of the story is that most of the spineless theaters are located in science museums, including ones in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.

One museum in Fort Worth pulled Volcanoes after “some people said it was blasphemous,” according to marketing director Carol Murray. One viewer even called it “anti-creationist propaganda.” (In a victory for common sense, the museum quickly reversed itself in the face of public outrage and announced it would show Volcanoes after all.)

Not surprisingly, the museums all publicly deny that fundamentalist Christian reaction was any factor in their decisions. But Richard Lutz, a Rutgers University oceanographer who was chief scientist for Volcanoes, said he was privately told by a number of theaters that they would refuse to show the film “literally for fear of the reaction of the audience.”

Call me naïve, but I was always under the impression that museums, especially science museums, are supposed to educate the public, not kowtow to ignorance and willful blindness. What’s next? Will museums remove exhibits on dinosaur fossils or Cro-Magnons because they don’t jibe with Genesis? What about models showing the Sun instead of the Earth at the center of the solar system? And let’s not even get started on that whole “Big Bang" sacrilege.

This is the 21st century, eight decades after John Scopes was thrown in jail for teaching evolution to his high-school science class, but you’d never know it. I never thought we’d see American science museums rejecting proven science when it offends the religious right. No wonder American students routinely score way behind students from other countries on math and science subjects. We’re teaching them that facts are facts only if they don’t upset the pious fools among us. It would be a great joke were it not so infuriating.

Where's a Bolt of Lightning When You Need One?

"One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America... This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others."

House Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay (R-TX) in a speech to the Family Research Council, not only exploiting the Schiavo family's agony for purely political gain, but actually insinuating that Terri's vegetative state was divinely caused to save his career

Of Death and Life

I have been doing a great deal of thinking lately about Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who for fifteen years has hovered somewhere between life and death in what is called a persistent vegetative state. Her body lives, her heart beats and her lungs breathe, but her brain is dead, asphyxiated by a 1990 heart attack that cut off the blood flow. After years of attempts at therapy and rehabilitation, it became painfully apparent that no recovery was possible. Since then, her husband Michael has fought tenaciously to remove her feeding tube and allow her to die, claiming she told him she would not want to live like this. Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, have fought just as tenaciously to keep her feeding tube in place, insisting that their daughter is still alive in there somewhere.

Her doctors beg to differ, pointing out that the part of her brain that made her an individual person, with loves and dreams, is not only dead but atrophied, replaced with spinal fluid. With the issue being fought in Florida state courts for years, judge after judge has consistently ruled that Terri is in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of improvement. With no medical evidence to the contrary nor proof of spousal abuse or neglect, Michael has the right to determine his wife’s medical treatment in accordance with Florida state law.

The dispute is loud and rancorous. The Schindlers accuse their son-in-law of wanting his wife out of the way so he can marry his girlfriend, and indeed recently filed divorce papers on her behalf. Michael in turn accuses his in-laws of ignoring their daughter’s wishes and refuses to divorce his wife, saying that doing so would be abandoning her to a fate worse than death.

The truly disgusting part of this whole sorry saga is how every sanctimonious holier-than-thou from Tallahassee to Washington is taking advantage of the family’s agony as an excuse to grandstand under the cover of keeping Terri alive. A House subcommittee even issued a subpoena to get her testimony on the issue. It just so happens that she cannot speak or even reliably respond to external stimuli, but that’s irrelevant. Florida state law puts the spouse in charge of medical decisions when the patient cannot make them for him or herself, but that’s irrelevant too. There are political points to be scored, and scored they must be, regardless of the consequences.

The absolute nadir of this political hijacking (so far) is a memo from a Republican apparatchik which can be described only as grotesque. Leaked over the weekend, the memo not only crows that “the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue,” but actually salivates over the prospect of using the family’s torment as “a great political issue” to bludgeon Democrats in the next election.

Meanwhile, religious and “pro-life” groups around the nation have taken up the cause, circulating carefully selected four-year-old pictures of Terri seemingly responding to her mother. (Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is a physician but not a neurologist, used these edited highlights to declare that she is not in fact in a vegetative state. Of course, if he were to issue an actual diagnosis based solely on watching a video clip, he would rightly lose his medical license.) The far more numerous and tragic images of her simply lying there insensate are ignored, as is her doctors’ nearly-unanimous diagnosis that no improvement is possible. Instead, such groups hurl the epithet of “Nazi” at Michael and his supporters, and claim that if Terri is allowed to die, anyone who is brain-damaged would be marked for death and should instead be kept artificially alive ad infinitum.

Putting aside the revolting and deliberately inflammatory comparison, consider for a moment what could happen if the laws envisioned by such people become reality. What if by some unimaginable tragedy your spouse or parent or child winds up in a hospital bed, just lying there, unresponsive to all entreaties of love or anguish? Let’s suppose you know that they would not have wanted to be kept alive in this way and would instead want to die with dignity and grace, but they never wrote it down in a living will.

And then someone you have never met and who doesn’t know your situation walks in and orders you to keep your loved one suspended in a permanent living death. Not a very pleasant scenario, is it?

(Fortunately, you can help prevent this from happening to you by filling out a living will, directing whether or not you want to be kept alive artificially. Living will forms for your state can be accessed for free at http://www.uslivingwillregistry.com/forms.shtm.)

Even more than the political and legal questions, this single-minded pursuit of keeping Terri alive leads one to ask: what does it mean for a human being to be alive? Does it mean only that the heart has to beat, the lungs have to breathe? Does it mean that the person has to be able to speak or respond to questions? Or is it something in between, or indeed totally different? And finally the biggest question of all: is it cruel to keep someone biologically alive long after all that made them a person has died?

Good men and women have been wrestling with these questions for a very long time, and I cannot pretend to have the answers. But I do know that everyone who has forced his or her way into this agonizing family decision, from politicos to pundits to simple pests, needs to bug off.

Terri Schaivo’s situation is a truly dreadful one, and there can be no winners, even if one side or the other eventually wins a definitive court judgment. But, sadly and reluctantly, I have to agree with her husband. After so many years in limbo, she deserves a dignified death, not the circus to which she has been subjected. Fifteen years is enough. It’s time to let her go.

Round Two

On the day after George W. Bush's inauguration, his super-rich backers, who ponied up $40 million to cover the cost of the entertainment, wake up and congratulate themselves on having bought a place at the table. The rest of us, who could not afford to put up hundreds of thousands of dollars, wake up to a $17 million bill for inaugural security. After all, the best kind of party is one where someone else gets stuck with the check.

Looking back on four years and ahead to four more, President Bush gave a speech in which he promised the same thing, only more so. Amid the festivities ostensibly dedicated to the military, he paid lip service to the 1,366 (and counting) American soldiers who gave their lives in pursuit of his obsession with "getting" Saddam Hussein. He exhorted more young men and women to fill the ranks of a military which can't meet recruiting quotas and is forcing retiring soldiers back into uniform en route to Iraq.

"Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants," he said, referring, of course, to his wants.

He declared in almost messianic vocabulary that his second-term mission is nothing less than to export democracy to "every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Sounds good on the surface -- but from this President, and given the post-speech spin, he seems determined to take the very same policy which failed so disastrously in Iraq and apply it to the rest of the world.

Become democratic, Bush implied, or face the consequences. Don’t do it because it's better for everyone involved. Do it because we'll destroy you if you don't.

Having purged his top ranks of all but the most sycophantic of yes-men, the most powerful man in the world has no one nearby to tell him this is a recipe not for a golden age of world peace, but rather for endless and permanent war. And with his resolve to ignore those who don't agree with him 200%, he's not going to listen to anyone who says so.

He called on the Almighty so many times one would be forgiven for thinking he was speaking from a pulpit instead of a podium. He called the spread of democracy a divine mission, all but saying that we know better than everyone else, and that with God is on our side we can't lose. Then again, since he has said numerous times that God speaks to him and that he carries out the heavenly will, one wonders if Bush sees himself as a latter-day Moses, bringing the carrot of freedom and the stick of plagues.

With all this onwarding of Christian soldiers, one wonders if Bush reassured longtime family friend Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan (a.k.a. "Bandar Bush") that Riyadh will once again receive a free ride thanks to longstanding business ties between the Bush family and the Saudi royals. In any event, Saudi Arabia, home to Osama bin Laden, most of the 9/11 hijackers and a royal family with a long and sordid history of supporting Islamic extremists, will likely be exempt from Bush's crusade just as it was exempt from the War on Terror™.

Afterwards, much luxury was on display at the capital's nine inaugural balls, where Republicans and their well-heeled financiers danced and schmoozed the night away to the theme of "Celebrating Freedom and Honoring Service." Mere citizens weren't allowed anywhere near the merriment, not with $1,000 ticket prices, 400 pounds of lobster, and a very exclusive guest list.

Slightly smarting from news reports of fat-cat gluttony, organizers gave free tickets to the "Commander in Chief Ball" to 2,000 military personnel and their families. Of course, the attendees were all handpicked by the Pentagon to ensure an appreciative crowd and to weed out anyone who might say anything uncomfortable. You know, those subversive party-poopers who just have to ask why their friends and relatives continue to be killed fighting in a country which was no threat to America.

Meanwhile, over in free Iraq, our men and women in uniform continue to fight and die defending themselves against the happily liberated Iraqi people. Being told to stop whining and accept "the army we have," they continue to scrounge junkyards for makeshift armor plating for their vehicles and ask their families to pass the collection plate at home in the hopes of getting enough money to buy bulletproof vests.

Some people along the parade route in Washington, and at other locations around the country, did not feel at one with the cheering crowds and made their feelings plain with protest and dissent. Demonstrating that they have taken the inaugural message of freedom to heart, a number of Bush supporters along the route and on talk radio promptly attacked the protesters as "traitors."

Ahead, we see four more years of doubletalk and doublethink, of propagandistic calls to war and calls to spend, of projecting happy illusions while hiding from reality, of cloaking real intentions in soothing language. Hold on tight.

No Weapons, No Regrets, No Shame

Well, it's official. The White House quietly announced last week that Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group has packed it in, giving up the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Remember them? They were the huge pile of terrible weapons which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and others assured us repeatedly and apocalyptically just had to exist and were doubtlessly going to be used against us.

You may recall Duelfer's preliminary report back in October that Iraq's WMD arsenal was actually destroyed more than a decade ago. As this was not what the White House wanted to hear, the report was buried and the ISG sent back into the field. Of course, now that the election is safely in the past, it doesn't really matter what they report -- from the Administration's standpoint, anyway. From the standpoint of the people whose loved ones have been killed in this splendid little war, it matters a whole lot.

Almost two years have passed since we invaded Iraq, and while we've managed to kill an awful lot of people, turn the rest of the world against us and bog ourselves down in a desert quagmire, no weapons have ever been found. The last-ditch hope from invasion supporters is that Saddam smuggled his WND stockpiles to other countries before the war, but there is no evidence of such a move.

Other justifications for the invasion have likewise disintegrated, from Saddam Hussein's alleged al Qaeda connections to those unmanned poison-spraying drones which didn't work and couldn't do what they were alleged to even if they did work. The sole remaining excuse is the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyranny, but the Iraqi people themselves don't seem terribly pleased to be the hosts of an indefinite American occupation force, especially one which promised the moon and then didn't even deliver green cheese.

For his part, Bush told ABC that he has "no regrets" over his invasion obsession, still insisting that the Iraq War is on track and has made the world a safer place. This shows a denial of reality of such staggering proportions that one has to wonder whether he is living in a dream world.

Perhaps he is. It was recently reported that Bush ordered his aides not to bring him any "bad news" on Iraq and only tell him the good stuff. Combine this with his infamous remark that he never bothers to get the news by himself and you have a perfect example of a child monarch, kept blissfully ignorant by his scheming advisers.

He also told the Washington Post that he sees his re-election squeaker as a complete vindication of his disastrous Iraq policies, therefore no one will be held accountable for anything Iraq-related, from the twisting of pre-war intelligence to justify an already-made decision, to the rejection of any sort of post-war planning beyond flowers-in-the-streets wishful thinking.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who overruled his military generals on required force levels and only last month told front-line troops to stop whining about chronic armor shortages, will keep his job. So will Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who cherry-picked raw intelligence data to manufacture a nonexistent Iraq-al Qaeda link. Ditto for Vice President Dick Cheney, who kept on referring to fictional Iraqi nuclear programs and imaginary Prague meetings long after both were firmly disproved. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who invoked images of phantom mushroom clouds and tried covering up the pre-9/11 intelligence briefing warning of an al Qaeda plot, is actually getting a promotion to Secretary of State. (Colin Powell, the current holder of that job, was pushed aside and finally pushed out entirely for insufficient cheerleading.) And White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who perverted law and morality to justify torturing prisoners in Cuba and Iraq, is likewise being advanced to Attorney General.

Tom Lehrer once famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger, one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War, won the Nobel Peace Prize. That thin scream you hear is satire dying another death. How on Earth can one satirize a President so firmly convinced that up is down and black is white? Where is the humor in an Administration which rewards pleasant lies while punishing unpleasant truths?

The only thing preventing total despair is one bright spot: the imminent-disaster fear campaign used so successfully in manipulating us into supporting the Iraq War doesn't seem to be working so well in scaring up support for gutting Social Security. A leaked memo written by one of Karl Rove's aides, bragging about how the neoconservatives who have hated the program since the day it was created finally have a chance to destroy it, provides a window into the inner workings of the White House's thought processes. Numerical analyses showing how such privatization would make the national debt skyrocket beyond all control didn't help, and even some Republicans are backing away from the plan.

The ISG has now officially admitted to reality. But it seems President Bush and his inner circle never will. And the more they try to hide their heads in the sands, the longer this stupid and pointless war will continue, and the more American soldiers will come home in body bags.

Political Payola

Back in the 1950s, the world of rock-'n-roll radio was all aflutter over disclosures that disk jockeys routinely took secret payments from record companies to guarantee air time for their songs. The practice, which became known as payola, sparked a big scandal and heartfelt industry promises never to do it again.

As the French would say, plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Armstrong Williams is a highly conservative black commentator who opines on the issues of the day in his syndicated newspaper column and TV show, not to mention the various television pundit shows on which he is a frequent guest. Over the last year or two, he has spoken out strongly in favor of the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind Act, the education-reform law which is supposed to increase student performance. He made it a constant theme, often inviting Education Secretary Rod Paige on his show to expound on the law's benefits.

Now it turns out he had motives other than mere punditry. USA Today revealed last week that via the Department of Education, the White House secretly gave Williams payola -- $241,000, to be exact -- to provide an Administration-friendly forum for NCLB on his own show, to support it when he went on other shows, and to lobby other black journalists to get in line with the cause.

Not only did Williams never bother mentioning to anyone that his pro-NCLB comments in various media outlets were actually paid political announcements, it took a Freedom of Information Act request to pry the information out of the White House. Somewhat to his credit, he admitted that what he did was wrong, which is putting it mildly. Tribune Media Services has already dropped his column and one TV network has suspended his show. Other newspapers are announcing that they will no longer run his Op-Ed submissions because they'll never know for sure if he's trying to pull the same scam.

Williams will face the music, as well he should. Secretly taking money to promote a partisan political agenda while hiding that minor fact from readers and viewers, not to mention the networks on which he appeared, is way out of line.

What remains to be seen is whether the White House will face any consequences over this. You see, it is extremely illegal for the government to engage in domestic propaganda. And it's not like they haven't gotten caught at this before. Last year, it was revealed that the Administration had produced fake news videos with actors posing as reporters touting the then-pending Medicare prescription-drug benefit. Proving that some people never learn, it was revealed only last week that the same swindle was pulled to sell the White House's illegal-drug policies. In both cases, more than one station was deceived into running the videos as actual news items before the fraud was unmasked.

Disturbingly, the White House says this latest flap is not a big deal and blamed it on Education. They in turn shrugged it off as "a permissible use of taxpayer funds." Permissible to use our tax dollars to pay off so-called journalists into regurgitating government propaganda? Um...no, it isn't. Not by a long shot. And by the way, how wonderful can this law possibly be if the Administration has to resort to flat-out bribery to get it some good press? (Answer: it isn't. The White House has failed to fund it adequately, it's not getting the results it's supposed to get, and even some conservatives are backing away from it.)

Even more disturbingly, Williams admitted that "this happens all the time" and that "there are others" who take White House payola while pretending to be independent. Which leads us to wonder: how many other paid shills are out there masquerading as real journalists? How many other TV appearances are actually Administration-approved infomercials? When we turn on pundit shows and see Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity praising the White House's political agenda, are we seeing actual independent commentary or are we seeing Ministry of Truth propaganda?

The White House claims the Williams payola was an isolated incident, that there are no other journalists on the government payroll parroting what they're paid to say.

Putting it bluntly, I don't believe them. The Administration has been caught too many times telling blatant lies and using anything-goes ad campaigns to sell policy to be trusted on anything they say.

The Bush Administration should end this practice now. But since the White House doesn't seem to realize it did anything wrong (and not for the first time, either) it is up to journalists to uphold ethical standards and refuse such political payola. It sure isn't happening on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Torture, Ordered

Ever since the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal broke earlier this year, the standard line coming out of the White House is that it was all the soldiers' fault, that it was all because of a few "bad apples." In keeping with the Bush Administration's stay-on-message-no-matter-what motif, they kept on saying the exact same thing even when it was revealed that military higher-ups not only knew about the abuses, at the very least they tacitly approved because they didn't order them to stop. While the story has mostly died down thanks to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and others in the conservative media who insisted it was much ado about nothing, a few more intrepid souls have kept on following the trail.

Now that trail may very well have led right onto George W. Bush's desk.

Thanks to persistent Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU managed to pry out of the Administration a treasure trove of angry memos from FBI agents stationed in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

The memos complain how Department of Defense ("DOD") interrogators, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approval, passed themselves off as FBI agents while using what the writer called "torture techniques" against prisoners. "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way," one memo says, "DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [be] left holding the bag before the public."

Other memos relay agents' disgust at the use of "strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings, and unauthorized interrogations" in Iraq and Guantanamo, and that Pentagon officials "were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses." In revulsion, FBI supervisors ordered their agents not to take part in such questionings: "We have instructed our personnel not to participate in interrogations by military personnel which might include techniques [allowed] by the Executive Order but beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice."

Yes, it now seems there was an explicit order from President Bush allowing the abuse of captured prisoners, an order the FBI refused to follow. (Astoundingly, the American media has largely glossed over this revelation, preferring instead to dwell on the titillating details of just which tortures were committed.)

One of the released memos, dated May 22, 2004, says that "an Executive Order signed by President Bush authorized the following interrogation techniques, among others: sleep 'management,' use of MWDs (military working dogs), 'stress positions' such as half squats, 'environmental manipulation' such as the use of loud music, sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The letter goes on to say that the week before, after the Abu Ghraib scandal had broken, the order was slightly revised so that "all interrogation techniques previously authorized by the Executive Order are still on the table but that certain techniques can only be used if very high-level authority is granted."

All of this violates the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. Some months after 9/11, then-White House counsel (and now Attorney General-designate) Alberto Gonzales wrote a much-publicized memo claiming that mistreatment counted as torture only if the prisoner was killed or permanently injured. He also wrote that the Conventions did not apply to al Qaeda prisoners and that the Government could do pretty much whatever it wanted. The memo sparked a furor when it was leaked, and the White House appeared to back down.

But the FBI memos reveal that abuse and torture continued not just long after the policy was supposedly changed, but it went on even months after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. For all we know, it continues even now. And by the way -- given the memo's reference to the order revision allowing such "techniques" only on "very high-level authority," who signed off on the continued abuses?

It appears nobody in the White House realized that the Conventions are there for a reason: to prevent torture and mistreatment of prisoners of war. This is a very slippery slope, if the United States claims it can unilaterally ignore international law and do whatever it likes with captured fighters, what will prevent our enemies from doing the same thing with our soldiers?

Big kudos to the FBI, which is capable of recognizing an illegal order even if the Pentagon is not.

If the FBI E-mails are correct and Bush did indeed issue an Executive Order approving the use of human-rights abuses against prisoners, then ultimate responsibility for Abu Ghraib and numerous other examples of abuse, torture and even summary executions extends all the way into the Oval Office. It doesn't matter how much the Administration tries to make the little guys, who actually carried out their orders, take the fall. They were ordered to do so by their superiors, who must also be held accountable.

The very notion that the President of the United States secretly signed off on the use of torture, no matter how it was defined, is appalling. It's even more appalling to realize they really thought they could get away with it. The moral high ground in the War on Terror is getting further and further away.

Adoption for Your Amusement, Again

Back in April, ABC raised hackles with a stunningly ill-conceived promo for a 20/20 episode about open adoption. “Barbara [Walters] will bring you what might be called the ultimate reality show,” co-anchor John Stossel proclaimed as he plugged the upcoming show. “As you watch, a pregnant teenager will decide which of five couples gets her baby." Disgusted by the prospect of adoption's very personal and emotional nature being perverted into some loathsome sort of grand prize, viewers showered the network with complaints and ABC quickly backed down.

Just to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, the usual suspect has picked up where ABC left off. And then some. For on January 3, 2005, Fox, the network behind such highlights of cultural programming as The Swan and The Littlest Groom, pollutes the airwaves with the first episode of a new reality series about adoption.

The premise is, to put it mildly, repulsive. A young woman who was adopted at birth faces eight men, one of whom is her actual biological father while each of the other seven tries to deceive her into thinking he's the real deal. She has to decide which one is genuine. If she picks correctly she gets $100,000; if not, the misidentified fake gets the cash.

This exercise in degradation is called, of course, Who's Your Daddy?

Even for a network unafraid to get down into the slime of shameless human exploitation, this is a new and very offensive low. The decision by an adoptee to find one's biological parents is fraught with questions about identity and who one really is. Taking that most personal of quests and turning it into a game show laced with deception and greed is truly repugnant. The fact that Fox actually found people stupid and desperate enough to prostitute themselves in this manner says volumes about the sorry state of American television and the lengths to which people will go to get their fifteen minutes of fame.

"I can understand the reservations," executive producer Kevin Healey said in an interview, "but the people came to it with great excitement and a willingness to play the game. It's a fun and healthy way to get to know this person that they've never met."

Fun and healthy? Where's the fun in seeing someone's hope to learn who she is and where she came from dashed to the merry laughter of millions? Perhaps someone out there will see the show, think back on their own adoption, and see it not as an expression of love and family but rather as a way to make a quick buck. Doesn't sound healthy to me.

"The daughters feel bad when they pick wrong," co-executive producer Scott Hallock added, "because they're like, 'I let my dad down.'"

Yeah, we're all crying with you. If you're dumb enough to think the path to self-discovery involves humiliation on a national (international, really, once you count global syndication) scale and comes with a cash prize, you deserve what you get. This hearkens back to the sort of entertainment seen in the Roman Coliseum, where condemned criminals and slaves were forced to hack each other to death for the amusement of the emperor. What fun!

Fox has once again hit bottom with this despicable excuse for entertainment. Until the next time, that is.

An editable form letter with contact list is online at http://simpleasthat.com/actionletter/index.php.

Social Insecurity

Remember the fear campaign with which President Bush and his neoconservative cadre scared us into supporting his invasion of Iraq? All those tales of horrible (nonexistent) weapons which could turn Main Street, USA into a smoking hole in the ground? Well, he's at it again, and this time his target is much closer to home. Mistaking his close election win for an actual mandate, Bush has set his "shock and awe" sights on Social Security.

Yes, that Social Security; the program which has provided America's senior citizens, disabled workers and the children of workers who die young with a financial safety cushion for well over half a century. According to Bush, the system is in active crisis because while Social Security currently takes in $1.25 for each dollar paid out and is thus very much in the black, it will be paying out more than it takes in by 2018. The Social Security Administration, the group that actually runs the program, begs to differ, saying that given current economic trends this won't happen until 2042; the Congressional Budget Office says 2052. (The same CBO report says that that extending Social Security's solvency by another century while maintaining benefits would require additional revenues equal to less than three percent of federal spending. This happens to be less than that we're currently spending in Iraq.) Even given the fickleness of the economy, this is hardly an active crisis.

Bush claims it is, however, and his solution is...partial privatization! Yes, his answer to a fiscal problem which may occur a few decades down the road is to allow individuals to some of their payroll taxes into the stock market right now, the theory being that people will make more than enough money from their investments to offset smaller Social Security benefits. It's really just a variation on the old the-market-knows-everything mantra that gave us the Great Depression, the S&L scandal, Enron, etc. This solution has three tiny little problems.

First, every penny taken out of the system has to be made up in order for current benefits to be paid and the trust fund maintained. And Bush is determined to get the money by borrowing it, with total ten-year estimates as high as $2 trillion added to our already $7.5 trillion national debt. This may well make foreign and domestic investors wary about continuing to finance our exploding debt when the Bush Administration itself clearly doesn't care. This makes the dollar and stock market fall, interest rates and unemployment rise, and so on.

Second, privatizing Social Security would be putting the program in the hands of the ilk who gave us such financial triumphs as the seemingly endless stock-market and mutual-fund scandals, not to mention the up-and-down vagaries of the market as is. Who will have to explain the magic of the markets to angry seniors whose entire retirement benefits were stolen by the likes of Ken Lay or went down the drain with a company's bankruptcy?

And third, administrative overhead costs, which currently take up less than one percent of the annual Social Security budget, would multiply more than ten-fold under a privatized system. That's as much as $75 billion a year gone from retirement benefits to line the pockets of Wall Street. Not surprisingly, Wall Street is the one sector of the American economy actively pushing for such "reform." And also not surprisingly, the financial industry gave big bucks to Bush, more than $30 million in the 2004 campaign alone.

That works out to a 250,000% return on their investment. Not too shabby. Better than the S&P 500 and loads better than Hillary Clinton did with her much-maligned cattle futures.

The eventual fiscal problem with Social Security can be almost or entirely solved with one single change. As it stands now, only the first $87,900 of a person's income is subject to Social Security payroll taxes. Meaning that someone earning a bit under ninety grand pays exactly the same amount into Social Security as someone like Bill Gates. Or Tom Cruise. Or, for that matter, George W. Bush. Raising or removing the cap would do away with this inequity and maintain the system's integrity for decades to come.

Of course, the whole notion of Social Security's guaranteed benefits is heresy to Bush's well-heeled friends, who have never hid their desire to blow up the "socialist" system and replace it with a super-capitalist free-for-all in which individuals sink or swim. If you invest in the right stocks, you get to live in a nice comfy house and have all your needs met. If you don't, or if your stock turns out to be run by crooks -- well, those are the breaks, kid. Hope that refrigerator box is warm in winter.

Dismantling Social Security and endangering the livelihood of senior citizens just to satisfy the ideological fantasies of government-hating Republicans and to further enrich the financial industry is a terrible idea. Congress should block it at the first opportunity.

To Tell the Truth

Remember the old TV game show To Tell the Truth? A group of panelists all claimed to be a single specific person, and the contestant who figured out which one was being honest and not lying through his or her teeth would win prizes.

It's back, sort of.

Three years ago, the Pentagon's proposed Office of Strategic Influence went down in flames after its true purpose became known -- the dissemination of false articles in foreign media publications with the intent of fooling the enemy. What the OSI never figured out was that in this age of global communication, anything published anywhere quickly becomes known everywhere else, so fake news planted abroad could quite easily blow back into the American press.

A more direct example occurred only last month, when the Pentagon admitted planting a CNN story that the attack on Fallujah was underway even though it wouldn't start for another three weeks, with the supposed aim of "smoking out" insurgents in the city. The revelation was greeted by yawns from most of the media, instead of outrage at being turned into an unwitting propaganda tool.

Here we go again. According to The New York Times, the Pentagon is considering "planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and web sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American principles."

Like they don't hate us enough already. American credibility across much of the world, but particularly in the Arab world, is already in the toilet. Recent polls show that solid majorities in most Arab countries now see America as the greatest threat to world peace, and this latest revelation is not about to help matters.

Besides, now that the Pentagon -- and, let's face it, the Bush Administration in general -- has shown they are willing to lie to further American interests, the American people now face a dilemma: every time we hear an official pronouncement, we have to wonder if it's true. Lots of people already disbelieve anything they hear from Washington, and that number can only increase if lying becomes official policy, no matter what the justification.

On the other hand, disseminating propaganda lies instead of real facts to the media does have its upside: no one will ever have to know about such unpleasantries as insufficiently armored vehicles or botched planning. Everything will be perfect. Well, except on the actual ground in Iraq, but as most people wouldn't go there in a million years, who's going to know the difference?

Here's a bright idea: why not try telling the truth for a change? Rather than mount a crude propaganda effort to fake out the purveyors of hatred, we should broadcast and publicize messages of tolerance and inclusivity, so the people who now hear only the voices of jihad get another source of information. The best disinfectant for hatred is always sunlight, and lots of it.

Besides, if we have to lie to people to get them to like us, what does that say about us to begin with?

This was a bad idea three years ago, and it's still a bad idea. The Pentagon should jettison this half-baked plan, and fast.

Shut Up and Die

Comparing the Bush Administration's everything-is-just-peachy comments on Iraq to the daily mayhem we see from that war-torn country, one can come to the conclusion that there are apparently two Iraqs.

One exists in a world where American soldiers hand out candy to smiling and photogenic children, where the Iraqi people eagerly embrace a perpetual American occupation backing up a puppet government, where people look forward to standing in line as sitting ducks while waiting to vote for a candidate approved by Washington, where people are happy to forget all about their bombed-out homes and their relatives being scooped off the street and the risk of getting killed while going to the store.

The other exists in the real world, where American soldiers trying to secure an entire country cannot even secure a ten-mile stretch of roadway between the Green Zone and the Baghdad airport, where a homegrown insurgency grows more every day, where two fighters are recruited for every one killed, and where an estimated one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed since the American invasion began almost two years ago.

The myopia of President Bush and his inner circle gets more and more pronounced every day. Their method of dealing with bad news from Iraq may be a simple one -- just wish it all away -- but it does not exactly help the situation. Instead, they hide behind meaningless slogans ("Freedom is on the march!" "We're making progress!" and so on) whose only apparent purpose is to trick people who don't bother reading beyond the headlines into thinking everything is fine. One wonders if Bush et al believe their own nonsense.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the few first-term Cabinet secretaries not shown the door after the election, showed off his management style while visiting American soldiers in Kuwait yesterday. (Rumsfeld evidently does not believe his own propaganda, as he didn't go anywhere near the Iraqi border, leaving that for the suckers -- oops, soldiers -- who are fighting his war for him.) He asked for questions from the troops, getting the usual collection of softballs and sound bites.

But just once, he got an actual question, from a soldier who put him on the spot by asking, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?" As the mass of soldiers erupted in applause, Rumsfeld shot back, "You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

In other words, shut up, go back to the front lines, and get blown up for the greater glory of -- well, we're still figuring that part out. Anyway, we decided to fight this war on the cheap and we'll do it to the last drop of your blood.

If he said it during a war that was thrust upon us, where we were required to rush into the field or else, it would be one thing. But considering that this was very much a war of choice, and that Rumsfeld et al sneeringly rejected cautions from military professionals about the troops and resources needed, it was absolutely outrageous. And does anyone remember Bush's now forgotten campaign promise that the troops would have all the armor they needed?

It's like the old Groucho Marx line when he was caught with another woman and tried to deny the incredibly obvious: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"

Bush, Rumsfeld and their band of merry men are determined to take us through the looking-glass, where black is white, where up is down, and where an endless desert quagmire is a fabulous success. They're entitled to their delusions, but they can't make the rest of us go along with it.

Second Verse, Worse Than the First

Three weeks after the presidential election, many progressives are emerging from shock-induced comas, muttering about persistent reports of voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio and studying maps of highways north to Canada. In our absence, many things have happened:

Attorney General John Ashcroft resigned, and on his way out the door attacked federal judges who reminded the Bush Administration that it is not above the law when it comes to the War on Terror™. He called the rulings "intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing," apparently preferring that we all simply accept Our Leader's judgments without question or dissent. He was much more pleasant when all he did was protect the public morality by covering up nude statues.

His designated replacement, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, may not be the Bible-thumper his predecessor was, but he is hardly an improvement. As President Bush's chief counsel when he was Governor of Texas, Gonzales was notorious for providing Bush with pre-execution clemency memos so brief, they routinely omitted any extenuating circumstances, proof of innocence, and so on. Thus rendered blissfully ignorant, Bush rejected every single memo without a second thought (or a first one, for that matter) and in doing so very possibly condemned innocent people to death. But Gonzales is even more notorious for his 2002 memo justifying the use of torture of al Qaeda prisoners on the grounds that unless someone is killed or permanently injured, it's not really torture and is thus OK. (This doctrine was, of course, extended for use in Iraq and led to the Abu Ghraib abuses which were exposed earlier this year.)

The last voice of moderation in the Bush Administration also resigned. Long after he was humiliatingly pushed aside in terms of policy, Colin Powell quietly stepped down as Secretary of State. He leaves behind a legacy of failure, of which only the loudest was his UN Security Council briefing on Iraq -- which even he now admits was based on phony data. Let us not forget the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 report, which loudly proclaimed that terrorist attacks had declined significantly on Bush's watch, only to be quietly withdrawn and republished with the real information -- that terrorist attacks had significantly increased. But then again, sabotaged from Day One by the resident neoconservative hawks, he never really had a chance.

His replacement is none other than Condoleezza Rice, who distinguished herself in the first term by reducing the role of National Security Adviser to little more than a PR cheerleader for the White House, being forced to admit that Bush had been briefed on the al Qaeda plot weeks before 9/11, and managing to stabilize precisely nothing as head of the Iraq Stabilization Group. But she's a reliable yes-woman, and therefore she stays.

Porter Goss took over as head of the CIA, and one of his first actions set the tone for what will likely be a long and dispiriting term as head of the nation's intelligence agency. In a memo circulated to all staffers and promptly leaked to the press, Goss ordered CIA analysts to "support the Administration and its policies in our work," reducing them to parroting yes-men. In other words, if the facts don't agree with the party line, it's the facts that have to go. It's the same loyalty-above-all-else mindset that gave us the Iraq quagmire, only now it's official policy.

Add to all this Bush's plans for the partial privatization of Social Security (which will enormously enrich GOP backers on Wall Street while endangering the livelihood of millions of senior citizens) and no planning in Iraq other than more of the same, and it looks like we're in for a rough ride.

Fasten your seat-belts; it's going to be a bumpy four years.

Vote

With two days left to go until the election, there is nothing left to be said.

Well, maybe a little.

We have seen how the Bush Administration's inner circle keeps President Bush isolated from the real world, to keep him blissfully ignorant in a bubble of sycophancy.

We have seen how the Bush Administration constructs an alternate reality of Orwellian proportions to avoid facing the real world, to deny or explain away any inconsistency, any failure, any setback.

We have seen how the Bush Administration ignored its own counter-terrorism czar's pre-9/11 pleads for action to be taken against al Qaeda, and even ignored an intelligence briefing barely a month before the attacks, warning of al Qaeda's plans. Afterwards, the Administration politically milked the attack for all it was worth, fought an independent investigation of the attacks every step of the away, and even stonewalled the victims' families in an attempt to cover up their own incompetence.

We have seen how the Bush Administration came into power itching for the opportunity to invade Iraq and "get" Saddam Hussein, then used the 9/11 attacks to play to our fears. We were shamelessly and callously manipulated with lies and distortions about Saddam's phantom weapons arsenal, about his nonexistent role in 9/11 and his barely-there connection with al Qaeda, which those in power still parrot (albeit slightly modified) even today.

We have seen how the Bush Administration pushed aside anything which countered the official ideology. Military officers who said we needed more troops, intelligence analysts who said there was no real evidence of Iraqi WMDs, professional diplomats who warned of the harsh realities of occupying Iraq -- all were ignored and sometimes retaliated against by a neoconservative cadre who listened only to people who agreed with them.

We have seen how the Bush Administration exploited our post-9/11 fears to ram the Patriot Act through Congress, to draft a truly draconian Patriot Act II and to make a good college try at stamping all dissent into the ground.

We have seen how the Bush Administration deliberately lied to Congress and the public about the cost of the Medicare bill, putting forward knowingly false numbers and keeping the true price secret until after it was safely enacted into law.

We have seen how the Bush Administration took the first federal budget surplus in decades and exploded it in an orgy of tax cuts, the overwhelming majority of which went to the wealthiest Americans while giving chump change to most everyone else. We now have half-trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, flushing anything even resembling fiscal responsibility down the toilet.

We have seen how the Bush Administration went out of its way to offend, bully and push around everyone else in the world in the drive to attack Iraq, vaporizing all our post-9/11 goodwill and setting back the cause of good international relations by years if not decades.

We have seen how the Bush Administration hides everything behind an obsessive wall of secrecy, fighting to keep anything and everything hidden from the public even after everyone knows what is being concealed. For exhibit A, one need look no further than Vice President Cheney's Energy Task Force, which everyone knows allowed energy industry lobbyists literally to write energy policy.

We have seen how the Bush Administration directs no-bid secret sweetheart deals to politically connected companies such as Halliburton and Bechtel.

We have seen how the Bush Administration pushed its "No Child Left Behind" law through Congress, then simply and repeatedly refused to spend the money to make the law a going concern.

We have seen how the Bush Administration relentlessly demonizes gay and lesbian Americans, weaving ghost stories of homosexual hordes somehow "destroying" marriage for the rest of us and backing a Constitutional amendment relegating them to second-class citizenship.

We have seen how the Bush Administration insists loudly and without fail that black is white, that up is down, that the ongoing disaster in Iraq is a great triumph, and that we have al Qaeda on the run when the terrorist network is gaining new recruits every day, and that it's all the media's fault for pointing out their lies.

We have seen how the Bush Administration uses terrorism alerts for political means, to keep the American public good and scared, and thus susceptible to official propaganda.

We have seen how the Bush Administration cuts domestic spending to the bone and beyond to pay for the continuing adventure in Iraq. Homeland security, education, health care, even military pay and veterans' medical benefits are sacrificed.

I could go on and on and on with reasons why we should vote the Bush Administration out of office on Tuesday. (For a fuller list, see One Thousand Reasons and 525 Reasons to Dump Bush. But now it's all up to you.

On Tuesday, get out and vote.

If you believe that George W. Bush is the savior of Christian civilization and will beat back any threat to America, whether or not it's actually real, vote.

If you believe that John Kerry will do a better job at protecting America and at repairing the frayed fabric of our nation, vote.

If you believe that both Bush and Kerry are tools of the same power interests and a real outsider is needed, vote.

Whether you vote Democratic, Republican, Independent, Green, Communist, Socialist, American Tradition, United Fascist Union, United Christian, Prohibition -- heck, even if you vote for the National Barking Spider Resurgence Party, get out and vote.

Remember, if you don't vote, someone else will vote for you. And their interests may not be the same as yours.

Vote!

Um...What?

"A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your Commander-in-Chief."

-- President Bush at a Pennsylvania rally, referring to Democratic criticism over American troops failing to secure hundreds of tons of high explosives in Iraq -- evidently hoping no one will notice that jumping to conclusions is standard operating procedure in his Administration

Curse of the Bambino, R.I.P.

Eighty-six years.

Eighty-six years.

EIGHTY-SIX YEARS!

Eighty-six years ago in 1918, American soldiers were marching across Europe in World War I. A Ford Model T pickup truck cost $600. And the Boston Red Sox won the World Series.

Four times since that season, in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986, the Sox made it to the Series only to lose it all. True fans blamed not the team, but the long-dead Babe Ruth, whom legend says put a curse on the team after he was sold to the New York Yankees in 1919. The Curse of the Bambino was rolled out every time the Sox lost another heartbreaker.

Well, tonight that curse is history. Eighty-six years after they last won the World Series, the Boston Red Sox are back on top of baseball. They won the American League pennant in a wild come-from-behind playoff series against their hated rivals, the Yankees, then dealt with the St. Louis Cardinals in four straight games.

As the party to end all parties fills the streets of New England, victory on the diamond has rarely been sweeter.

Here's to you, Boston. May we not have to wait eighty-six years for the next one.

Shocked, Shocked

During Wednesday night's debate, when asked if "homosexuality is a choice," President Bush replied by once again supporting a constitutional amendment preventing gays from marrying and somehow threatening the marriages of everyone else.

When it was his turn, John Kerry mentioned that Dick Cheney's daughter is gay: "We're all God's children...and I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as. I think if you talk to anybody, it's not choice."

Now, everyone knows Mary Cheney is gay. Not only is this not a secret, but it's been quite openly discussed this year, by her father among others. But you'd never guess it from Republican reaction. The White House and the Bush campaign (which are, let's face it, one and the same), acted like Kerry had "outed" her. Either that, or he had said he wanted to see her doing the Midnight Lesbo Show at a local strip joint.

"Now, I did have a chance to assess John Kerry once more," Lynne Cheney said after the debate, "and the only thing I could conclude is this is not a good man. This is not a good man. And of course, I am speaking as a mom and a pretty indignant mom. This is not a good man -- what a cheap and tawdry political trick." The sense of outrage was finely tuned, and was flogged by the GOP's media allies from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News as a "smear."

Unfortunately for the Republicans, their outrage was as false as it was palpable. I don't recall hearing any such flatulence from the right when GOP pundit and Illinois senatorial candidate Alan Keyes said a few weeks back that the VP's daughter was a sinner who practiced "selfish hedonism." Nor were the Cheneys up in arms when Congressional Republicans took to the House and Senate floor earlier this year to flog the anti-gay-marriage amendment, trying to deny gay and lesbian Americans first-class citizenship by denying them the same marriage rights the rest of us take for granted. Or when Republican candidates even now use the issue as a political wedge to bash their Democratic opponents. They even remained silent when the Bush Administration announced it would ignore the Clinton Administration's addition of sexual orientation to the federal government's anti-discrimination rules.

John Kerry said Dick Cheney's daughter is gay. Horrors! Doesn't he realize that Mary Cheney is solely the Republicans' to exploit, and he is not allowed to horn in on their act? Another interpretation is that the Bush campaign was playing to its evangelical Christian base by pretending that being gay is terrible and shameful, and referring to an openly gay person as being gay is a horrible insult, one which must be repudiated loudly and repeatedly.

The GOP's outrage over this fake "smear" is so blatantly phony as to make P.T. Barnum cringe. Then again, since they have no real accomplishments to tout, they've got to run on something. After all, a manufactured incident is better than nothing at all.

Death of a Superman

Christopher Reeve, who died yesterday at 52, refused to accept what fate dealt him. After becoming synonymous in the public mind with the Man of Steel, having played the last son of Krypton in the four Superman films of the late 1970s and 1980s, Reeve appeared in a number of Hollywood and TV films. But he generally never outflew his caped character.

Until, that is, he fell from a horse in May 1995, snapping his spinal cord. Paralyzed from the neck down, he seemed condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

But Reeve did not see it as a condemnation, rather as a challenge. While he never walked again, he put himself through years of physical therapy and saw it as a major triumph when he was able to move a finger five years after the accident.

Nor did he let his condition stunt his creative life. He returned to acting, appearing in a number of TV films and series, including "The Practice," the super-teen "Smallville" and a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. He even took the director's (wheel)chair to helm several TV productions, including 1997's "In the Gloaming."

He and his wife opened the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center in New Jersey, dedicated to helping other paralytics realize their potential and go on living rather than seeing their condition as a sort of living death. When the issue of stem cell research took the spotlight, with its potential for therapy and possibly even cure for paralysis and other conditions, Reeve publicly criticized President Bush for blocking all but a trickle of federally-funded research.

He served as a source of inspiration and hope for people around the world living with paralysis and other medical conditions, teaching them that being unable to move does not mean they are unable to live. Christopher Reeve might not have actually soared through the clouds as he did on the silver screen, but he was a Man of Steel nonetheless. He will be sorely missed.

We Told You So

Just in time for "The Progressive Perspective" to come back on the air from our new world headquarters on the East Coast, comes the final crumbling of President Bush's excuses for invading and occupying Iraq without provocation.

Way back in 2002 and early 2003, Hans Blix, the United Nations’ head weapons inspector, said Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

After the fall of Baghdad, David Kay, the White House’s handpicked weapons-hunter, reported that “we were all wrong” and said there were no weapons.

And now Charles Duelfer, Kay’s replacement, has made his report to Congress. In it, he reports that -- guess what? -- Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Specifically, that were no such weapons when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, having all been destroyed after the first Gulf War in 1991. That while Saddam did retain the capacity to rebuild a WMD arsenal, it was never maintained. That any remaining programs were at best dormant. And that no attempts to restart weapons programs were conducted after the UN inspectors left in 1998.

When President Bush and his White House cadre of neoconservatives launched their propaganda campaign back in 2002 to scare the American people into backing an invasion, Reason #1 was Saddam's supposed WMD arsenal. We were terrified with tales of unmanned aerial drones spraying anthrax over our cities. We were horrified by scenarios of Saddam gift-wrapping a nuclear weapon and presenting it to Osama bin Laden. And we were cowed into silence by the constant drumbeat of statements telling us we were either with the President or we were with "the evildoers."

We were so frightened by the what-ifs, the coulds, the possiblies, that we stampeded to wave the flag and to tell the Administration, "Yes! Get him before he can get us!"

Of course, he couldn't "get us." It became apparent within days of Baghdad's fall, when people started to realize that no WMD had been found or even used. And as the weeks and months rolled on, when nothing at all was found, the true believers began to panic. "You obviously want Saddam back in power!" they said when the straightforward was pointed out to them, evidently forgetting that the ends do not justify the means.

With this final debunking of the prime invasion rationale, one might expect President Bush to acknowledge it, if only by a little bit.

Of course not.

"There was a risk -- a real risk -- that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said at a Pennsylvania rally. "In the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."

We now know what was said all along -- that these weapons did not exist.

Indeed, there is a far greater risk that such weapons would be given to terrorist groups by Iran or North Korea, or built with nuclear material smuggled out of Russia. But we see no moves whatsoever to confront Tehran or Pyongyang with the same ferocity that was used against Baghdad. And in a truly idiotic move, the Bush Administration has actually cut spending on helping Russia secure nuclear material and keeping it out of the wrong hands.

In his debate with John Kerry last week, Bush came off as confused and defensive when asked why he did not subject Iran or North Korea to the same "shock and awe" treatment he lavished on Iraq. "The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] is involved," he said. "There's a special protocol recently been passed that allows for instant inspections."

This after publicly sneering at the IAEA and whole concept of inspections when it pointed out before the Iraq invasion that Saddam did not possess nuclear weapons.

But it was never really about 9/11 at all. Months ago, it was revealed by various Administration insiders that Bush had demanded the invasion of Iraq long before 9/11, that he had used the terrorist attacks to scare us into supporting his plans no matter what.

George W. Bush and his inner circle wanted to invade Iraq. They had a variety of reasons, from getting the oil to "finishing the job" to revenge against the man who "tried to kill [Bush's] daddy." They didn't care whether their reasons were good or even rational.

We now see the price we have paid. Our national credibility is shattered. We have rapidly gone from being the most respected nation in the world to being one of the most hated and feared. We have poured well over $100 billion into the Iraq quagmire, and more than 1,000 Americans have given their lives to -- what?

Did they die defending America from a raving madman? No, because according to Duelfer, Saddam had no intention of taking on the United States and had nothing to do it with anyway.

Did they die to spread democracy in the Middle East? Not likely, with handpicked Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi saying that elections, if held at all, will be held in only part of the country, and with Washington backing him up.

Did they die to liberate the Iraqi people from a dictator? Yes, but our welcome was rapidly worn out and this was never realized back at the White House.

Bush has finally been reduced to saying that Saddam was an "evildoer," a bad man. Sorry, but that just isn't a good reason for throwing away lives, money and our national reputation.

At this point, with less than a month before the election and the Bush campaign still unable to come up with a compelling reason, I guess we'll never hear one.