Heroes

If the word "hero" could sue for defamation of character, it would. If it walked into a lawyer's office and said, "that's it, I've had enough!" I wouldn't blame it. Have you seen how people are defining heroism these days? A trash-mouthed idiot in the NFL whose fame and skill in selling overpriced sneakers are the only things keeping him out of jail will be called a "hero" for scoring the winning touchdown. A has-been ex-actor selling his new sitcom will blubber to Oprah about his "heroism" in surviving three bad marriages, a drug overdose and a weekend spent in jail. Eat a big, steaming bowl of bugs on “Survivor” and your mother will call you "heroic". Hell, I heard the H-word more than once when President Bush borrowed Tom Cruise’s costume from Top Gun and smirked, “Mission Accomplished.” With so much slander going on is it any wonder people are confused? It's a good thing there are people like Jessica Lynch to show us what real heroes are. Testifying during a congressional hearing investigating the death of Pat Tillman by “friendly fire”, Lynch became a real hero because she refused to go along with the bullshit. “They made me out to be this little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting,” the former POW told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “It was just not true.” Joined by Pat Tillman’s mother and brother, she urged Congress to hold the government accountable for its “deliberate and calculated lies.” That's what heroism is. In this celebrity-obsessed culture, singers, athletes and movie stars are elevated to the status of heroes for simply doing their jobs. But entertaining us doesn't mean they're making a difference in our lives. All they're doing is taking our minds away from the problems that are still there after the song or game or movie is over. Jessica Lynch is a hero. A gutless punk like George Tenet getting rich pimping his book At the Center of the Storm isn’t. I remember seeing a poster that read, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” So, to paraphrase one of my favorite songs, Tenet’s bullshit is so bright, I got to wear shades.

Frankenstein's New Monster

Thomas Friedman: We're In Iraq For Oil

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers' Alliance. In an unusually lucid column, former Iraq War enthusiast Thomas Friedman makes a plea for a responsible policy for military disengagement from Iraq. I'll go straight to the punch line: You can’t be serious about getting out of Iraq if you’re not serious about getting off oil. In other words, it's the oil stupid. Friedman has a long history of talking out of both sides of his mouth on Iraq. (On many things actually.) And this is not the first time he's let the well-oiled cat slip out of the bag. In the face of the failure of the government/media campaign to build mass support for a US invasion of Iraq, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has felt obliged to come to the aid of the Bush war cabal by proposing a shift in its propaganda. Hence Friedman’s January 5 column headlined “A War for Oil?” In this thoroughly cynical piece, Friedman concedes what is obvious to anyone who has followed the US military buildup against Iraq with any objectivity: Bush’s plan to invade the country is driven, above all, by a determination to seize control of Iraqi oil.... He continues: “Let’s cut the nonsense. The primary reason the Bush team is more focused on Saddam [than on North Korea] is because if he were to acquire weapons of mass destruction, it might give him the leverage he has long sought—not to attack us, but to extend his influence over the world’s largest source of oil, the Persian Gulf.” Thus, having acknowledged that the US government is lying to the American people and the world, Friedman seeks to fashion a new justification for war against Iraq. It is not a matter of self-defense, or even countering something Iraq has done. Rather, the country must be attacked and occupied because the regime might—in the future—extend its influence over the world’s largest oil reserves. Yet, in his relentless cheer-leading for the war he has since soured on, he offered up gems like this one: The war in Iraq is the most important liberal, revolutionary US democracy- building project since the Marshall Plan. It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad. Friedman is one of those mind-meltingly wrong pundits who has managed to fail spectacularly upward. In "The Iraq Gamble," Jebediah Reed gets to the heart of his infuriating duplicity. Re-reading Friedman's columns from the six months or so prior to the invasion of Iraq can induce vertigo. Unlike many of his hawkish colleagues, he grokked all the vital details of the situation.... So even a Webelo-grade logician knows where to go from here, right? You connect the dots and conclude that while it would be very nice to get rid of Saddam, it would also be stupid and dangerous. But somehow he still managed to come out in favor of the war. And if the whole thing weren't so tragically misguided, his reasoning would be worth a chuckle. Says Friedman: "something in Mr. Bush's audacious shake of the dice appeals to me." A nice ballsy gamble of a war. Sure, it could throw the region into chaos, bankrupt this country, and dye the fertile crescent red with the blood of civilians; yet an audacious war is like a red lollipop—who isn't powerless to resist it? Red lollipop's aside, Friedman's pitch was always a sucker's bet. The author of "The Lexus and the Olive Branch," has always known full well what this war was really about and why his imperialistic self supported it. He has known from the beginning that it comes down that unctuous substance which drives the economic engine of the world. As Alien Abductee reported a few days ago, the Bush Administration's naked oil grab is reaching a crucial moment. As discussed here everything rides on getting the Iraqi Parliament to pass legislation which will open Iraq's oil reserves for exploitation by Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell. But the Iraqi's have been infuriating Bushco by dragging their heels on selling their souls. Their recalcitrance has been serious enough that Cheney was flown to the Mideast -- I'm assuming in some sort of portable hyperbaric chamber -- so that he could scold those shiftless Iraqis for threatening to take a summer break. For all the wrangling and veto threats, our own congress looks to be safely on board with a bid to railroad the Iraqis into giving over the bulk of their oil wealth to the conglomerates. The supplemental appropriation package requires the Iraqi government to meet a series of “benchmarks” President Bush established in his speech to the nation on January 10 (in which he made his case for the “surge”). Most of Mr. Bush’s benchmarks are designed to blame the victim, forcing the Iraqis to solve the problems George Bush himself created. One of the President’s benchmarks, however, stands apart. This is how the President described it: “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” A seemingly decent, even noble concession. That’s all Mr. Bush said about that benchmark, but his brevity was gravely misleading, and it had to be intentional. The Iraqi Parliament has before it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only “benchmark” that truly matters to his Administration. Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex, it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry. If passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration, and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it. "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," (Keyser Soze) and the Bush Administration has as cleverly sustained the illusion that oil is not the underlying reason for pouring the American blood and treasure into the Iraqi sand. With prestidigitators like Thomas Friedman acting as front men, it wasn't too hard to pull off.

Can Rudolph Giuliani Inspire A Secular Awakening In the GOP?

The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal. I don’t like Rudolph Giuliani. In 1993, I was 24 and living in the East Village when Giuliani defeated incumbent David Dinkins to become mayor of New York City. I vividly recall watching the police intimidate black voters that day and telling my roommate about it in horrified wonder. I didn’t like Dinkins either primarily because of how he handled racial tensions in Crown Heights. I thought New Yorkers were ill served with both men that year and cast my vote for a protest candidate instead. In my opinion, Giuliani was the consummate charlatan as mayor. He ran a corrupt patronage mill, dismissed his first police commissioner, William Bratton because he received too much positive press and governed incompetently. Prior to 9/11, Giuliani’s fiscal mismanagement was exposed and New Yorkers were fed up with his volatile immaturity. And his last police commissioner, Bernie Kerik knowingly benefitted from a relationship with a mobbed up construction firm. Giuliani received too much credit for crime reduction and exploited the tragedy of 9/11 to accumulate wealth. I think The Onion put it best when they noted Giuliani was running to be President of 9/11. As a Yankee fan it sickened me whenever Giuliani joined broadcasters John Sterling and Michael Kay in their radio booth while they heaped gratuitous praise upon him. That said, I applaud these words from Giuliani’s recent speech at the Houston Baptist College: "Here are the two strong beliefs that I have, here are the two pillars of my thinking, that always inform my judgments about this. One is, I believe abortion is wrong. I think it is morally wrong, and if I were asked my advice by someone who was considering abortion, I would tell them not to have the abortion, have the child. And if nothing else, the adoption option exists, and it’s one that I would hope personally, if I knew you, if you were a friend or relative. That’s pillar No. 1. That will always remain the same. I can’t imagine ever changing my mind about that. I’ve believed it since I can remember, I’m going to believe it until I die. The second principle, the second pillar that guides my thinking on it is that in a country like ours, where people of good faith, people who are equally decent, equally moral and equally religious, when they come to different conclusions about this, about something so very very personal, I believe you have to respect their viewpoint. You give them a level of choice here. Because I think ultimately even if you disagree, you have to respect the fact that their conscience is as strong as yours is about this, and they’re the ones that are most affected by it. So therefore I would grant women the right to make that choice. I’ve always believed both of those things. I will always believe them. And that will inform my decision-making about abortion. ...” Yes, I know Giuliani’s speech is largely the result of political calculation. His dismissive mealy-mouthed views about abortion during the GOP presidential debate at Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Library were widely ridiculed. The Christian Right will never embrace him so Giuliani’s campaign has decided to stop pretending. He’s hoping to appear authentic and courageous while still appealing to Republican corporatists and security hawks. I get that. Furthermore, I have no doubt Giuliani would embrace the Christian Right’s positions on abortion and other social issues if he could do so without appearing phony. This man would sell his soul to become president. And given the former mayor’s temperament, cronyism, incompetence and distorted worldview, if he’s the GOP nominee I’ll work my butt off to defeat him. For damn sure I don’t trust this man’s judgment about what civil liberties to compromise in the name of national security. Putting my distaste for Giuliani aside however, I hope his candidacy awakens secular minded Republicans to take back their party for the good of the country. The scandal regarding the hiring and firing of Justice Department prosecutors powerfully illustrates that religious fanatics have infiltrated decision making in the corridors of power. Former Justice Department official, Monica Goodling, was allegedly involved in the dismissal of as many as ten federal prosecutors. Ms. Goodling is a 1999 graduate of Regents University founded by Pat Robertson “to produce Christian leaders who will make a difference, who will change the world.” In 1988, when Pat Robertson finished second in the Iowa caucuses I considered him cartoonish. Ms. Goodling’s influence however, demonstrates how pervasive Robertson’s reach has become. On May 12th, the New York Times reported that, “Deeply religious and politically conservative, Ms. Goodling seemed to believe that part of her job was to bring people with similar values into the Justice Department, several former colleagues said.” Ms. Goodling was inexperienced and thirty-one when she joined the Bush Administration’s Justice Department. During the 2000 election she worked as an opposition researcher at the Republican National Committee. Yet this young political operative was interviewing applicants for civil service positions at the Justice Department. Ms. Goodling elevated her values above qualifications and professional competence when reviewing whom to hire or fire. The New York Times quotes one department official as saying Ms. Goodling even asked one applicant if he had ever cheated on his wife. Specifically, the New York Times also reported David C. Woll Jr., a young lawyer hired to a prestigious post in the Justice Department was asked this question. Mr. Woll had no comment for the New York Times. I have no problem with people of faith or spiritually minded individuals entering public life. Many of us need to believe there is something bigger than ourselves. And people motivated to feed the hungry or promote social justice because of their faith are admirable. Martin Luther King and Ghandi were both people of faith for example. Alarmingly however, virulent cadres of religious fanatics who believe their rigid interpretation of scriptures is above the civil laws and customs of American society are ascending. We see the repercussions in their ascent whenever a woman is denied her right to purchase morning after pills at a pharmacy or the half-baked theory of intelligent design is proclaimed legitimate science. Whether one is liberal, conservative, libertarian, pro-business, pro-labor, hawk, dove, or everything in between, the imposition of religious values above our freedoms, science and recruiting the most qualified personnel in government is un-American. If Giuliani can mobilize a secular constituency within the Republican Party that becomes a counterweight to radical Christian evangelicals, I say halleluiah. We saw how timid Democrats were during the Terry Shiavo controversy. I don’t trust the Democratic Party to provide a counterweight to religious extremism by itself. That doesn’t mean Giuliani can or will prevail with a candidacy that promotes tolerance for differing social viewpoints. The man is as flawed and imperfect a messenger as one can be. Someone with impeccable family values credentials without Giuliani’s personal baggage would make for a far better messenger. But he can have a positive impact in spite of himself that outlasts the 2008 campaign. Howard Dean didn’t win in 2004 but the Democratic Party has adopted more of Dean’s posture. Next month Giuliani will address the Executive Series Luncheon at Regents University. Pat Robertson will be in the audience. I hope Giuliani stands tall and preaches the same message of social tolerance there that he did at Houston Baptist College. This country needs a strong secular counterweight in both major political parties. We’ll know progressives are getting somewhere when the center of political gravity pulls even the Republican Party in a more secular direction to remain competitive. Giuliani was a poor mayor and would make a horrible president. Hopefully, his candidacy can at least awaken secular conservatives and restore a semblance of balance and sanity to our culture.

Boxed Out

Bill Simmons ( ESPN columnist and author of Now I Can Die In Piece) had a few words to say about the growing decline of boxing, and why more young African-American athletes don’t want to be prizefighters anymore: “Sure, it’s a completely corrupt sport that lacks any semblance of organization, but that’s been the case since, well, forever. The bigger issue? Lack of star power. American kids don’t grow up hoping to become the next Ali or Sugar Ray anymore; they’re hoping to become the next LeBron, Griffey, Brady or Tiger. The thought of getting smacked in the head for 20 years, soaked by the Don Kings of the world, then ending up with slurred speech and a constant tremor doesn’t sound too enticing. Fifty years ago, before anyone knew better, Allen Iverson might have been the deadliest middleweight alive and ended up broke and incoherent. In 2007, he’s worth tens of millions and there’s a chance he’ll be able to hold an articulate conversation when he’s 70. “Which scenario sounds more appealing to an inner-city kid with serious athletic chops? Take a guess. It’s ironic that Muhammad Ali–once upon a time our most popular athlete and a boxing ambassador–damaged the credibility of the sport more than anyone else by turning into a quivering mess. Maybe he is a great man, maybe he had a great career, maybe he was the warrior of warriors, but nobody wants to end up like him.” Even as brutal as football is, at least the NFL doesn't make the players wear leather helmets anymore. Yeah, I used to be a fan, but I can't stand to see any more ex-boxers turned into zombies. Poor white and African-American men who want an athletic career can find easier--and more profitable--ways to make money. Oh, Bill? There ain't no "maybes". Ali did have a great career, and he is a great man. Now more than ever. It'd be easy for Ali to stay out of sight so he won't make people like you uncomfortable. If going out in public in spite of his debilitating condition isn't bravery, what is?