Alright, Dubby and political mayhem be damned — this is a smackdown!
I WILL enjoy this Holiday, I WILL keep a vision of Peace and Goodwill for all humankind, I WILL play my Christmas songs even if some of them make me sad, I WILL wrap my little gifts even if they’re all in the “it’s-the-thought-that-counts” category, I WILL celebrate ALL the holidays including the Solstice with symbols and chants and prayers and appreciation — in short, I WILL put the Sacred Season smack-dab in my Heart … because it is not to be found anywhere ELSE. It certainly isn’t driven by the circumstance of the day … or by the dim-witted Grinch in WaDC.
It’s kind of like the Dorothy message in Wizard of Oz … it’s all in us. Looking for it elsewhere may be an interesting adventure, but it’s the Long Way Home.
Tomorrow I will make my traditional trays of Gingerbread Persons — I will fill the house with their incense and memories of flusher years, family together and dear faces long-gone attending [because time is not linear, it's a loop -- I can recapture those joys if I wish ... and I do.] I will decorate the little cookie faces with smiles … because to do less would be to give in to the darkness, and these days are all about Light. I will play my holiday music and sing loudly, like the Who’s in Whoville, because it isn’t about what is brought to me this season — it’s about what I BRING to it. And then I will pass out those little ginger-messengers of peace and kindness to the neighbors and the mailman and the friends that have blessed me this year in the Pea Patch.
Then, taking a deep breath, I will continue the count-down to the weekend as I refuse to be daunted. I WILL break out the good china and silver, even if I have to stay up til the wee small’s spiffing it up from lack of use. I WILL cook two separate “feasts” and bask in the diverse company of very different groups … separated for their own comfort levels. I WILL keep conversation light and pleasant because … we could all use the rest. I WILL spread as much love as I find myself capable, promote as much frolic as is welcome and be as tender with those I meet as I am able.
The old astrology books used to say “Will” was the key-word for Sagittarius. I WILL. Pluto’s influence on the new moon in Sag could send us spinning off into the echo’s of Christmas Past, the shadows and the regrets … the downward spiral of squashed expectations or lost opportunity.
WILL it differently, my dears … harness the Jovian power you’re being lent. Click your heels — sing like the Who’s in Whoville, post-Grinch. Fill up your space, and the space of those you meet along the way, with moments of kindness and care and remembrance of Light.
It’s in your capable hands … to heal your heart, enter into it. To receive, give. To embody the Light, shine. Inhabit your holiday tradition … and in all ways, Be Love.
Jude
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
J. Terry Edmonds, HuffPo
12.12.2006
“What’s Love Got to do With it?” Tina Turner snapped the question in a hit record more than a decade ago. Today, that song could serve as the national anthem for the culture of cynicism that seems to be rampant in America and around the world. And that cynicism seems to be working overtime as another holiday season is upon us.
From fistfights over under-stocked and over-priced toys at the mall to escalating violence in the Holy Land, the grinches of greed and separation seem closer than ever to turning the dream of “peace on earth, goodwill to men” into just another bumper-sticker slogan. And just because you are not actively trading blows with someone, doesn’t mean you are not directly or unconsciously part of the problem.
While we may absolve ourselves from responsibility for much of the hateful and violent conflict we see around us, this frenzied season creates the kind of inner tension that keeps many of us on short fuses and gives some of us the proverbial holiday blues. In short, this sacred season has come to be about everything other than its original purpose - peace on earth and love.
The hectic pursuit of things…the fear of loss, the need for more…is ripping the heart and soul not only out of the holidays, but out of humanity itself. Add to that the worldwide enmity and violence spawned by divisions of religion, ideology, lifestyle, culture and race and you have the perfect recipe for the inevitable fall from within.
I am not advocating the end of ambition, competition or achievement, but rather a heightened awareness of the fact that though we may live in a material world, we are ultimately spiritual beings having a human experience. That is all well and good as the topic for a Sunday sermon, but what does it have to do with day-to-day living? Plenty.
First of all it means that we are one. In the world of spirit, as we are also beginning to see in the world of quantum physics, there is no separation between us and them, nature and mankind, you and me. As Jimmy Carter puts it in his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, “The blood of Abraham, God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew and Christian.” We are all brothers and sisters in flesh and in spirit. The very real differences between us are simply examples of the inexhaustible variety and beauty within oneness. They should be cause for celebration and joy rather than fear and conflict. And to those who think that oneness means blandness, one look at the dynamic spectacles of nature should remind us that there is great latitude in oneness - for individuality, creativity and harmony.
The second practical reality of oneness is that its power rests in each and all. That means we don’t have to sit around and wait for governments and institutions or the next Messiah to save us. Each of us has the power to change the world right now. Or, as Deepak Chopra puts it, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way….We must not bring one war to an end, or thirty, but the idea of war itself.”
Until we abandon the belief in violence and war as viable options for settling human disputes, we will continue to perpetuate death and destruction even as we call ourselves a peace loving people.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Some may call you naïve or weak. But an attitude of peace is the ultimate sign of strength. It takes a great deal of empowerment and courage to look your brother or sister in the eye and say, I hear you…I know you…I care about you…I forgive you…I love you. The fractured state of the American family and relationships in general is evidence that we have not yet fully unleashed this power in our personal lives, let alone in the public, political or global arenas. My holiday wish for mankind is simply that we begin to do so. In the words of the song by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson: Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me…
What’s love got to do with it? Everything.
Happy Holidays!
Terry Edmonds is former chief speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a New York corporate speechwriter.
Love, Actually
Joyce Marcel
Thursday, December 14, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Is love the last social taboo?
Looking at our popular television shows, you would think our society revels in failure. People are always being voted off the island or thrown out of the group house or rejected by an Italian price or insulted by a celebrity chef or fashion designer. Then there are the people who feed on human misery, like sob-sister deluxe Oprah Winfrey and her evil spawn, Dr. Phil.
And we have multiple magazines and tabloids doing nothing but chronicling the mistakes and excesses of our celebrities.
When I wonder why so many people enjoy watching other people fall on their faces, I think that maybe, just maybe, it’s because it fills some kind of vacuum left by our taboo on love and happiness.
By love I don’t mean movie-star love, which is often a toxic cross of lust and the need for publicity. I mean regular, every day, old-fashioned heterosexual and homosexual marriage and family love.
Why would there a general prohibition on talking about love? Maybe love and happiness are considered boring - no tension, no drama, we know how it’s going to come out. Lightweight, empty-headed, chick-lit compared to Russian tragedy. After all, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is how Tolstoy opened “Anna Karenina.”
Maybe we don’t want to look shallow. We don’t want to look smug. And we certainly don’t want to incite envy and resentment.
Film director Peter Bogdanovich tells about the time in 1971 when he was in love with his leading lady, the young and gorgeous Cybill Shepherd. He went around telling everyone - including the newspapers - how happy he was.
Then he got a phone call from his friend, Cary Grant. “Don’t tell people that you’re happy and in love,” Grant warned him. “Because they’re not.”
Grant may have had a point, but my favorite page in the Saturday paper is the one carrying wedding announcements. The pictures of the younger folks getting married with stars in their eyes are fine, but I enjoy best the pictures of couples celebrating 50 or 60 years of marriage.
I want to interview them all. I want to sit down and ask personal questions about how they pulled it off - 50 years with the same person! How did they meet? What were the bad times like? Why did they stick it out? How do they deal with the terrifying fear of losing their partner? What can they teach us? What can we learn?
Maybe it’s superstition that keeps us from talking about our own personal happiness. My parents believed in a custom brought over by my grandparents from the old country. It’s called kine hora, and it warns that when you describe something as good - “Oh, what a pretty baby!” - you can attract the evil eye.
Maybe we think love and happiness can’t exist on a personal level when the world is going to hell?
How can we talk about love when Americans and Iraqis are exposed to violence and death every day? When genocide is an on-going reality in Darfur? When our country is torturing people? When people are hungry and living out on the street?
Or how can we be anything but cynical about love when our culture makes it appear to be about a glittering diamond necklace or an expensive car with a fancy red bow on the top?
Or how can we talk about love and happiness without seeming insensitive when so many people are old, alone, lonely and afraid?
Or how can we talk about love when our government’s values are so misguided that our president, vice president and Congress think only of money, macho and military might while they protect even the child molesters among them?
Or how can we talk about love when so many are being persecuted for their gender or religion?
The truth is, the world is always going to hell. It’s never going to be without hatred, wars, greed and lust. So why wait to openly celebrate love?
In his 2003 film “Love, Actually” - which has become the “It’s a Wonderful Life” for our century - writer and director Richard Curtis put it this way:
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.”
Our government may be trapped in a pale cage of crazy, and the world may be filled with anger, pain, despair and rage.
But as we head into the holiday season, most of the people I know are into love, actually.
Bless All The Dear Children In Thy Tender Care
Christopher Cooper
Thursday, December 14, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
“You have already delivered,” my dear wife said to me several weeks past, “your first tirade of the year against Christmas.” It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I had, or to argue against her perception that this has been a recurring event in our lives together, or to claim that most persons do not find such utterances appalling. (Perhaps I’d beg for a slightly less unrelievedly unpleasant description of my remarks than tirade if I were to quibble or object at all, which I shall not.)
What I will say is that I am aware of my propensity for blurting out the odd objection, for rendering finely-wrought sarcasms that good and decent persons going about their preparations for the birth of their blessed Holy Savior or camping on the sidewalk outside the Maine Mall Thanksgiving evening do surely find annoying. I know I say these things; I see the looks of horror and disgust I draw. I am not lately so bold, nor do I declaim so forcefully or as long as in my impetuous youth, but if I am now tempered, restrained, self-regulated to a degree, I am still nobody you’d want to have along for a day of shopping.
And one may understand one’s faults but be unable or unwilling to change. But I do come before you here tonight to see if I can claw my way back some distance toward common ground, that we may in some measure agree that we have something worthy of celebration and decoration and maybe even a degree of blessed, blight-blotting drunkenness, that we might in our mutual inebriation hug and kiss and tell each other what grand fellows and lovely ladies we are and enjoy the pretty lights (those that don’t blink) and the warm fire, and wish each other a harmless, generic “Happy Holidays.”
Not everyone faults the Christmas season the same. Some object to its secular excess; fewer, but some, (more Muslims and Jews and atheists than Christians in this camp, of course) think the religious aspects should be purged from any public appreciation of the day. I loathe it all: faith and folly alike creep me out. I consider the Christ-centered Christmas to be the greater humbug, but it is Santa Claus and all that follows from him that is the unavoidable, inescapable flood of Christmas as the free market has defined it in our time.
Jesus was born on December the twenty-fifth because early Christian myth-makers and spin-doctors needed to co-opt the solstice revelries of hard-partying pagans. It was necessary to get Jesus born (and born without the stain of his mom and dad having had any joy in his engendering—just a long donkey trip through the desert). He must be born so he could be flogged and nailed and tortured to death, by which effort each of us who would buy into the whole of the church doctrine might gain life everlasting. And if Jesus didn’t suffer enough to get that job done, you can add to it the millions of hours of anguish loosed unto the heavens by those of us alive after 1958 who have been subjected to a hundred (all bad) renditions of the thoroughly execrable “Little Drummer Boy.”
But all that can be done privately. Mammon, however, lays his blanket of excess over all of North America from “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving until the frenzy of gift-returning burns out a few days after Christmas. Of course some pulsating displays of lawn decoration (often co-mingling Christ, camels, snowmen, Santa Claus and a great green Grinch without seeming favor or prejudice) do remain a drain on the power grid until almost the equinox.
I spent an hour walking through a large toy store a few weeks ago. It was a saddening experience; it left me shaken. All was plastic; much required batteries; virtually every product had been manufactured in a country where waste is dumped in streams, workers are abused, and children younger than the likely recipients of these amusements work for pennies an hour so that we may have our humming light sabres, our motorized toddler Jeeps and Hummers, and mind-deadening video games. Yes, my friends, it is precisely the complaint of the paragraph you even now struggle toward a desperately-hoped-for end to that Mrs. Cooper has had to endure, many times over each season, for over thirty years.
Great SUVs choke the parking lots, not a few with lighted wreaths over their radiator grilles. Have you ever been poor at Christmas time? Have you ever spent a cold December day swapping batteries or mending hoses or desperately trouble-shooting a fuel or electrical system, or hitch-hiking to a junk yard for a starter solenoid?
You’ve heard the story of how President Bush asked James Webb, the recently elected Senator from Virginia, “How’s your boy?” Mr. Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.” Bush rejoined, “That’s not what I asked you; how’s your boy?” “That,” said Webb, “is between me and my boy.”
And there’s as revealing a vignette of a modern American appreciation of the “Spirit of Christmas” as you’ll find. Thousands of our boys and girls, men and women, sons and daughters are standing under the gun in the made-up nation of Iraq, each one at great risk of getting shot, burned, dismembered, killed between now and some vague future moment when President Bush shall have picked “a way forward” from among various suggestions filtering in to his small consciousness from Bush family fixer James Baker and his cohorts, from the Pentagon and its new “I’m Not Rumsfeld” Secretary of Defense, from whatever crew of neocon theorists has the upper hand just now at the State Department, from Dick Cheney and the American oil companies, surely phoning in daily from his Undisclosed Location.
Maybe sometime in 2008 the survivors of them may come home. Then what little is left of the fictitious nation of Iraq will be allowed to disintegrate and we will have “finished the task”, “achieved victory”, certainly not “cut and run” prematurely. What do you think, Dick? Does it feel like “Peace With Honor” as you look down on us from Heaven?
If you don’t believe every one of the almost three thousand Americans killed so far in Iraq in pursuit of invisible weapons, elusive Democracy, vengeance or vainglory has died for no good purpose, you surely must see that every mother’s son still quick above the sand but doomed to be bagged or boxed and flown home (what of him they can find) tomorrow or next week or when the lilacs bloom again or as another year turns toward Christmas, or yet another, will have been wasted while politicians pandered, pundits pondered, and several pathetic “ways forward” were parsed as Americans slept and shopped and sipped eggnog or iced tea as the season suggested.
See how we love our brave soldiers. We put their video Christmas cards on the local news shows. They say hello and we love you to their fiancees and families, to their unborn babies, to their mothers and fathers. Fade to commercial. Send them cards. Send them candy. Donate money to buy them body armor. Ship Don Rumsfeld over to give ‘em a speech about getting the job done.
“We’re so proud of our soldiers, and they’re in our hearts so far away at this special time” say the pretty plastic ladies paid to look sad about trailer fires in Buxton and giggle over the sparkle of the lighted spruce in Monument Square. And now, here’s a message from Discount Bob about his unbelievable leather sectional sofa deal.
Of course, they’re in our hearts, you stupid corporate caricature of a human being. They should be in our homes! Two Maine sons were slaughtered pointlessly last week. Watch their funerals at six o’clock and eleven. “It’s especially hard to lose someone at this special season.” Bullshit. Sorrow knows no season. Death and loss and grief are always and ever, unrelenting and unyielding. From the moment you learn your child is dead, he or she dies again every morning you wake, every evening you lie in bed bereft, every instant of every day a memory surfaces. When you blow up a twenty-two year old you kill the baby, the toddler, the youth, the man, the memory, and you blight every day his mother or father may yet live.
We will continue to play out this pointless, violent video game for months, for years. Bush is in disgrace. Baker says we can’t “win”, but he wants to prop up some fiction for the benefit of the oil business. The Democrats are playing it close and cautious. Hillary Clinton is raising money and Barack Obama is speaking modulated platitudes. Nancy Pelosi says impeachment of our war criminal president is “off the table.” America shops.
This might be the worst Christmas yet, and it’s my fifty-seventh. I’ve been interrogating myself and my former and alternative selves, looking into my own heart and soul and intentions, answering an array of questions designed to tell if I am fit to adopt my just-turned-two grandson, Karter. On balance, I think it’ll come out ok. I only gave the adoption caseworker a few essays where I think I could pass for reasonable, and I don’t think she has a source to supply the more revealing ones. So he and I will find our own “way forward” (God, I hope that fades the way of “down the road” and “at the end of the day” soon!).
But what will I get him for Christmas? I think a cardboard box, which will have more play value, a longer life and a smaller price tag than any toy I’ve seen. And a promise. A promise that, however much my audience recoils from its repetition, I shall subvert the space I am allowed before my small public to say as often as I can, as forcefully as I must, that so very much has gone wrong in our country that it will require everything each of us can give to bring us back to decency, to humanity, to rationality.
I am more sorry than she may believe that I hammered my Mrs. Every year with my dark holiday invective. I do decry the excess, but I am not unmoved by bright colored lights and small kindnesses and allusions to peace and love.
I’m not sorry for displaying my distaste and disgust on this page because that is my job and my duty.
I hope my grandson, my friend, my future, Karter Austin Shaw, two years and six days old, smart and funny and the joy of my aging days, grows up strong and brave and skeptical. I hope he seeks and speaks truth. If he does not succumb to religion, if he does not bow down to the state, if he understands that ideas, not things, engage the open mind and fill the hungry heart, our time together will have come to good end. How’s the boy, Mr. President? The boy is all right! And I mean to keep him that way.
Good night. Good luck. Peace on Earth to men of goodwill. To all men. All women. Of all religious persuasions, not one having more to recommend itself than another, and none worth destroying a single life for. Don’t buy so much. Kiss your babies, and keep them safe from the recruiting officers.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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December 20th, 2006
OK, I’ll admit frustration — I came back from my break, albeit apprehensive considering the tell-tale signs of the administrations post-election grunt and spin, prepared to detail a slow, solid push back into the realms of reality, and ran into the same wall that the rest of the world has flattened itself against in the last days — the Dubby.
I would like to stop talking about the little weasel — I’d like him to take his proper place in the political dialogue … but it ain’t gonna happen soon. For whatever reason the Universe conspired to give us George and his Cabal as a catalyst to growth, it gave us a guy who sticks like gum to the bottom of your shoe … as hard to control as an undiagnosed rash … and as virulent as an e-coli epidemic.
Today he has announced that we are NOT winning in Iraq … but we aren’t LOSING either. I’d guess that’s his version of — I’m not wrong, dammit! A kind of quasi-nod to facts because 98% of the free world demands it of him … and we should not be surprised that that does NOT change his course — because he’s barking mad and drunk with power and egoism. [Link to someone as frustrated as I am with this rhetoric, here.]
Ya know, if I were to crawl into Dubbys brain [heaven help!] and look at the crap-shoot he’s decided upon, I’d feel pretty comfortable — Pappy showed him how to keep the cover on, and he’s done a dandy job of burying even those facts that aren’t secrets, as the ACLU discovered recently — he’s usurped so much power that he feels patently untouchable, even issuing signing statements in matters of foreign policy, as India should nervously note — he’s salted the judiciary with folks that think like he does, so he’s confident in their support — and when was the last time you saw a United States president wearing an orange jump suit and marched away to prison? The corruption at the top is a very soft cushion for this war criminal — want to take odds that Dub pardons Libby before Uncle Dick has to testify?
Harry Reid made an unfortunate statement on Sunday television when he seemed to go along with the Dub’s “double down.” He’s posting at Huffy today, sending a rather different message — and that’s good — he’s not going to win Lefty friends with that earlier position. The ONLY defense we have against the rogue regime of George Bush is the Democrats that have the floor in the coming year — they are still part of the broken system but at least they will NOTICE public outcry and figure it into their position. United for Peace and Justice has info on contacting Reid, snipped below — read his blog post first, before you respond. Remind the man he’s the MAJORITY leader, now — and that you support his firm support for withdrawal [which is why he finds himself in leadership today.] You’ll find those two bits at the bottom, along with the e-mail I sent this morning — feel free to borrow, if you’d like.
Frustrated, yes — I’d like to talk about other things, like to look at some of the new ideas out there, like to reflect on the season … but we are, again, in a state of emergency. Bush declared today that we need to “expand the overall size of the “stressed” U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.” Now what the hell does THAT mean? Is it getting drafty in here??
Marty Kaplan writes a piece below about one of my favorite 60’s movies, Seven Days in May — I’ve mentioned it before. Turn the plot on it’s head, and we’re there … with the president gone rogue instead of the military. The military analysts are looking on in disapproval, noting the decline of General’s Abizaid and Casey as the voice of reason … and we know the Joint Chief’s want no part of this. George has scouted out the few remaining voices who will tell him what he wants to hear — and dug down deeper into his psychosis as he herds us all toward the cliff.
Frustrated. Emergency. PISSED.
An important collection today.
Jude
While we celebrate the birth of Jesus, mass murder is being planned
Dennis Rahkonen
Dec 19 2006
Incredibly, the Bush administration is using a holiday season devoted to the Prince of Peace to prepare a bloodbath in Iraq.
Rather than comply with the American and Iraqi people’s clear, polled desire for a swift end to the U.S. occupation, just the opposite will likely transpire.
According to widely reported accounts, the initial stage of a new American troop “surge” in Iraq will probably entail Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s ouster, followed by a fierce attack on militant Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia, some 60,000 fighters strong.
That militia, located mainly in Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum, would be engaged not only with infantry, but by artillery fire and air attacks as well.
Ensuing civilian casualties would consequently be horrendously high.
Arab populaces have endured awful mass murder in the past, most infamously the Jenin massacre on the Palestinian West Bank, the U.S. assault on Fallujah in November 2004, and last summer’s merciless Israeli pummeling of Southern Lebanon.
Full-scale urban warfare raging in Sadr City, however, would surely set a grisly record. The Muslim world, and all of humankind, would have bloody basis for comparing the carnage there to that of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.
Such unnecessary barbarism — undertaken solely to further American energy-interest avarice — would be unequivocally criminal.
And yet it’s apparently about to happen, plus something even worse.
Confronted with escalating Shiite vs. Suuni sectarian violence, which has made the Iraq occupation totally unpalatable to the American domestic populace, an obscene proposal is gaining currency.
Reportedly favored by Vice President Cheney is the sinister idea that, because the Shiites are more numerous and much stronger within Iraq than the Suunis, the U.S. should no longer try to broker rapprochement between the two.
Instead, after more extreme Shiites have been eliminated, Washington would throw its support to relative moderates within the faith, freely allowing them to wipe out the Suunis, responsible for the Iraqi insurgency’s most frequent killings of U.S. troops.
But what about victorious Shiites possibly aligning themselves with their brethren in Iran?
Even given that scenario, the operative belief among proponents of this cruelly calculated outcome is that the resulting situation would, nevertheless, be more conducive to American corporatists’ profiteering ambitions than the present situation in Iraq allows.
There’s also an accompanying, depraved expectation that vengeful Suunis in surrounding countries would ultimately unite to defeat Shiite Iran, the main obstacle to U.S. hegemony in the region.
The horrific details and insanity of this profoundly unsettling plan have been presented online, by several sources, reflecting an original New York Times article. Perhaps the best synopsis is available at the World Socialist Web Site, in its December 18 news and analysis section.
Despite almost everyone else on the planet wanting a prompt, total halt to America’s occupation, Bush and his imperial-minded enablers are hell bent on staying in Iraq, for the selfish reason that there’s so much money to be made by controlling „their‰ oil lying under Iraqi sand.
Never mind how many weeping mothers’ precious children get blown to bits.
That their diabolical scheme couldn’t possibly succeed is obvious.
It’s only in animated cartoons that painting an exit door on a cul-de-sac’s rock wall will allow a trapped character to escape impending doom.
We’re not dealing with the Roadrunner, but George W. Bush, and he’s completely delusional.
His fate can’t be avoided. He’s about to suffer a crushing defeat.
That’s what happens when facts are ignored and a wayward President attempts to revive neo-colonial policy more than fifty years after the age of imperialism was ended by rebellious Third World people unwilling to remain forever oppressed.
Nothing can pull America’s chestnuts out of burning Iraq’s fire. History simply won’t allow it.
That’s why cutting our losses and withdrawing fully while we still can is the only option.
We, the people, must make our peace sentiments absolutely and powerfully clear. That means street demonstrations on a massive scale. They need to be tied to Dennis Kucinich’s call for a Congressional de-funding of the war.
Fortunately, such protests are already being organized, for Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, on January 27. Google United for Peace and Justice for information.
In the meantime, flood your elected officials with calls for withdrawal. Write letters to the editor. Stand on overpass walkways with pertinent placards. Get your places of worship to take a truly moral position regarding this unjust war. Do anything you can think of that’s productive and nonviolent.
Just don’t do nothing at all. ++
Bush Can’t Kick the Habit
Robert Scheer, TruthDig
Dec 19, 2006
Here we go again: A new secretary of defense and yet another call for ending the war in Iraq by escalating it. What are they smoking in the Bush White House?
Even as government statistics now show marijuana is America’s No. 1 cash crop, it is important to remember that militarism is the most dangerous drug threatening our sanity. Yet even formerly sober folks—first Colin Powell and now new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates—get a contact high from cozying up to the walking hallucinogen that is our president.
Succumbing to the Bush fantasy that freedom is fertilized by firepower, a vision that has mucked up Iraq beyond recognition, Gates told CBS that “as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for generations to come.”
This from a man who recently made sense, during his confirmation hearings, when he told members of Congress that we are not winning this war, despite having committed, proportionally, as many troops as we did in Vietnam. But now, as a rising chorus of obsessed hawks calls for a “surge” in U.S. troop deployment in Iraq—a call echoed even by some prominent Democrats—Gates endorses the staying-the-course strategy for compounding the Iraq failure rejected by the voters. A member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG) who had apparently supported its unanimous findings that the military strategy was bankrupt is suddenly blinded by Bush’s Iraq victory myopia.
In a sign of just how out there Bush is on Iraq, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff are in “unanimous disagreement” with “White House officials aggressively promoting the concept … . [T]he Joint Chiefs think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission [in Iraq].”
All this despite the fact that the ISG report correctly underscored that the real failures in the Mideast have clearly been political, not military. The accurate subtext of the report is that the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq is the key source of chaos in the region—inflaming religious fanaticism from Beirut to Baghdad and leaving the United States dependent on the tyrants in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to now bail us out.
So with Bush rejecting the sage advice of a commission headed by his father’s secretary of state to cut our losses is there any hope the Democrats who now control Congress will stop playing the role of enabler to these war junkies? After all, it was the Democratic congressional leadership that provided Bush with bipartisan cover for his irrational “anti-terrorism” invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Some, like John Kerry, now recognize that folly, and even Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, in her appearance on NBC’s “Today” show Monday, finally expressed her regrets for supporting the war and opposed a “surge” in U.S. troops for Iraq.
But other Democrats continue to play the dangerous game of supporting Bush’s escalation. Particularly alarming were the remarks on Sunday of incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid endorsing a buildup as long as it aims at getting the troops home by 2008: “If the commanders on the ground said this is just for a short period of time, we’ll go along with that.”
Reid’s strategy is as obvious as it is opportunistic: This is a Republican war, goes the thinking, and the Dems will give the Republicans all the rope they need to hang themselves in ‘08. This seems a deeply cynical position, when you consider that the Pentagon just announced that attacks on American and Iraqi targets are at their highest levels, with a 22 percent leap from just this summer. The difference between taking a position and positioning oneself is what determines leadership; if the Dems fail to provide real leadership on ending this war, they will deservedly lose the next election.
The convenient lie behind all of this is that U.S. military occupation is the indispensable agent of Mideast enlightenment. No, we have become the enablers of Iraqi madness, be it in the form of torture or the ascendancy of religious tyranny in Iraq, where daily life has been reduced to an unmitigated horror.
Yet, like a junkie who needs one more hit to get his life in order, Bush is hooked on the drug of military might. If the Democrats continue to feed his dangerous habit they will only help Bush visit greater mayhem upon Iraq while undermining the core values of our own country. ++
Bush Madness Becomes Apparent
Bill Gallagher, Niagara Falls Reporter
Dec 19 2006
DETROIT — George W. Bush is bloody nuts. There’s no other way to describe this dangerous madman. A chorus of experts and the Iraq Study Group have concluded that the present course is not working. Diplomatic initiatives are required to prevent Iraq from exploding into a regional maelstrom and humanitarian catastrophe. The Army chief of staff says his branch of the military “will break” without a fresh infusion of thousands of new active duty troops.
The White House has ordered Pentagon planners to come up with an option for a major troop surge. Bush and his puppeteer Dick Cheney’s fingerprints are all over this madness. Last Friday, they attended the farewell ceremonies for ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Bush offered effusive praise for the man he sacked the day after the midterm elections, not for incompetence, but for political expediency. “This man knows how to lead and he did,” Bush gushed, “and the country is better off for it.”
Bush suggested the myth that Rummy should be considered a liberator, a master nation-builder: “On his watch, the United States military helped the Iraqi people establish a constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice skipped Rummy’s send-off. But neocon nuts and former Rumsfeld aides Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were on hand, along with Gen. Peter Pace, the apple-polishing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. America would be more secure if everyone who attended the Rumsfeld ceremony were permanently banned from making any military and national security decisions.
The Busheviks’ dependence on the military to protect us from terrorists is a failure as we continue to fail to commit the resources to intelligence and border security measures that could make a difference in preventing another 9/11 nightmare. While we squander billions of dollars in Iraq, a system to track whether foreign visitors leave the country when their visas expire is stalled because the Busheviks say it’s too expensive. The exit-monitoring system known as U.S. Visit was to be in operation at the 50 biggest land border crossings by next December.
Congress actually authorized the creation of the system in 1996.
But The New York Times reports it could take five to 10 years to get the system operational.
“Domestic security officials, who have allocated $1.7 billion since the 2003 fiscal year to track arrivals and departures, argue that creating the program with the existing technology would be prohibitively expensive,” according to the Times story.
In an interview with the Times, Stewart A. Baker, the assistant secretary for Homeland Security, said the exit system would cost “tens of billions of dollars,” and the report notes, “the department had concluded that such a program was not feasible, at least for the time being.”
Jonathan Alter of “Newsweek” magazine reminds us that that a section of the Iraq Study Group Report explains our diplomatic efforts have a serious handicap because, as the study notes, “our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are the level of fluency. In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communications with Iraqis, we are often at a disadvantage.”
That language gap is deliberate and negligent, and the State Department is not alone. The FBI’s record with Arabic-speaking agents should cause us all sleepless nights. Bassem Youssef, the FBI’s highest-ranking Arab-American agent, infiltrated the terrorist cell of the “blind sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center.
Youssef has been cut out of any significant role in the war on terror. He claims his exclusion is the result of discrimination and he’s sued the FBI. The lawsuit has revealed a stunning lack of knowledge among top FBI counter-terrorism officials about the basic tenets of Islam.
FBI Director Robert Mueller was in Detroit last week, and the local bureau flak promised he would deign to give the media 20 minutes of his precious time. We were ordered to be assembled at 10:30 a.m. Half an hour later, Mueller appeared and made a brief statement about how well the Detroit FBI is doing with a local joint terrorism task force and then turned to questions.
I raised the issue of the scant number of agents with advanced Arabic language skills and the abysmal ignorance of Islam the FBI brass showed in sworn depositions, including the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.
“I’m not sure your facts are all accurate,” Mueller said dismissively. He went on to claim he was “always interested in recruiting more individuals with those language skills in the bureau,” and added, “So to put it in context, it’s not as dire as you purport to believe it is.”
Did Mueller mean his underlings had not given sworn depositions on the Sunni-Shiite distinction, I asked.
“I have not read their depositions,” he now said. “I did not understand that was an issue in their depositions. It may have been.”
Using videotaped excerpts, NBC reported on their testimony on Dec. 4. Several other news organizations picked up on the explosive story. So the FBI director who claims he has not looked at the depositions presumes that my reliability, having read them, is suspect. You decide.
Dale Watson, the FBI’s top counter-terrorism official before and after 9/11, now retired, was asked by Bassem Youssef’s lawyer, “Do you know who Osama bin Laden’s spiritual leader was?”
Watson: “Can’t recall.”
Lawyer: “And do you know the difference in the religion between Shiite and Sunni Muslims?”
Watson: “Not technically, no.”
The same question was posed to John Lewis, who until recently was the FBI’s assistant director of counter-terrorism.
Lewis: “You know generally. Not very well.”
Lawyer: “Was there any relationship between the first World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks?”
Lewis: “I’m aware of no immediate relationship other than all emanates out of the Middle East, al-Qaeda linkage, I believe. Not something I’ve studied recently that I’m conversant with.”
Don’t bother studying anything important. Be like Bush — run with your gut, lump everything in the Middle East together and brand it as terror. The FBI director is tolerating this inexcusable ignorance and he should be held accountable for it.
Lawmakers responsible for overseeing U.S. intelligence are not much better. “Congressional Quarterly’s” National Security Editor Jeff Stein asked the man incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tapped to chair the Intelligence Committee what branch of Islam al-Qaeda is linked to.
Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, answered, “They are probably both.” Then he said, “Predominantly probably Shiite.” Nice try. He had a 50-50 chance and was flat wrong.
Stein was amazed and told CNN, “If you’re the baseball commissioner and you don’t know the difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox, you don’t know baseball. You’re not going to have the respect of the people you work with.”
But Reyes is safe. He only has to watch over George W. Bush, another early retiree. Recall, when Bush was part owner of the Texas Rangers, he aspired to become baseball commissioner. The other owners rejected him as someone with a famous name but weak on ability and experience. Baseball’s break is the world’s tragedy. ++
It Can’t Be Won Militarily; So, Send More Troops?
W. Patrick Lang and Ray McGovern, t r u t h o u t
Wednesday 20 December 2006
As Robert Gates takes the helm at the Pentagon this week, he can be in no doubt that Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush remain determined to stay the course in Iraq (without using those words) for the next two years. What Gates probably does not realize is that the US military is about to commit hara-kiri.
The media are abuzz with trial balloons leaking word that President George W. Bush is about to approve a “surge” in US troop strength in Iraq by tens of thousands. At the same time, surge advocate Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC), just back from a brief visit to the Green Zone with fellow surgers John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), has warned that “the amount of troops will make no difference” if Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki avoids taking “bold” moves. The three pretend to be unaware that the most important move for which they pressed - breaking with radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr - would amount to political suicide for Maliki.
Incoming Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who owes his position to the popular revolt in November against the war, has said he can “go along” with a surge, but only for two to three months and only as part of a broader strategy to bring combat forces home by early 2008. Meanwhile, says Reid, Democrats will “give the military anything they want.”
Is it conceivable that Reid doesn’t know that this is about the next two years - not months? Former Army vice chief of staff General Jack Keane, one of the anointed retired generals who have Bush’s ear, is urging him to send 30,000 to 40,000 more troops and has already dismissed the possibility of a time-frame shorter than one and a half years. Egged on by “full-speed-ahead” Cheney, Bush is determined that the war not be lost while he is president. But events are fast overtaking White House preferences and moving toward denouement well before two more years are up.
Perhaps it was not quite the way he meant it, but Bush has gotten one thing right; there will indeed be no “graceful exit.” And that goes in spades, if he sends still more troops to the quagmire.
Oxymoron
Let’s send more troops to Iraq so we can pull our troops out of Iraq. A generation from now, our grandchildren will have difficulty writing history papers on this oxymoronic debate on how to surge/withdraw our troops into/from the quagmire in Iraq. Historians will have just as much trouble, especially those given to Tolstoy’s theory that history is ruled by an inexorable determinism in which the free choice of major historical figures plays a minimal role. Tolstoy died before events put into perspective the legacy of Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat [Decider] of All the Russias, and his Vice President/Èminence grise, Rasputin.
Judging from President Bush’s behavior in recent weeks, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that he may be no more stable than Nicholas II. And if retired colonel Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s top aide at the State Department, is right in saying that Bush still has the “vice president whispering in his ear every moment,” we have an unhappy but apt historical analogy.
But, you protest, the generals most intimately involved in Iraq - John Abizaid and George Casey - and Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker have made no secret of their strong reservations about sending large numbers of additional troops. And, if the Washington Post is to be believed, so have the Joint Chiefs. That may be correct; it is also irrelevant. As was the case in the Vietnam War, our top generals have long since morphed into careerists and politicians. Sadly, they have become accustomed to looking up for the next reward - and not down at the troops who bear the brunt of their acquiescence in political/military decisions that make no sense.
But what about Senators Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy - and Colin Powell, and even Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom have spoken out in recent days against a sizable surge in troop strength in Iraq? Not a problem. The Cheney/Bush team is the sole “decider.”
This does not mean that Defense Secretary Robert Gates should renege on his promise to visit the troops in Iraq and hear the generals out. It does mean that by the time he gets there, the generals probably will already be “with the program,” as they say. Just as they “never asked for more troops” at earlier stages of the war, they are likely to be instant devotees of a surge, once they smell the breezes coming from the White House. As for Gates, whatever input he has will almost certainly be dwarfed by Cheney’s. And taking issue with “deciders” has never been Gates’s strong suit.
Stalingrad on the Tigris
Whether Robert Gates realizes it or not (but the generals should), once an “all or nothing” offensive like the “surge” contemplated has begun, there is no turning back. It will be “victory” over the insurgents and the Shia militias or palpable defeat, recognizable by all in Iraq and across the world.
Any conceivable surge would not turn the tide - would not even slow it. We should have learned that last summer, when the dispatch of seven thousand US troops to reinforce Baghdad brought a fierce “counter-surge” - and the highest number of casualties since the Pentagon began issuing quarterly reports in 2005. Those who believe still more troops will bring “victory” are living in a dangerous dream-world and need to wake up.
A major buildup would commit the US Army and Marine Corps to decisive combat in which there would be no more strategic reserves to be sent to the front. As Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway pointed out on Monday, “If you commit your reserve for something other than a decisive win, or to stave off defeat, then you have essentially shot your bolt.”
It would be a matter of win, or die in the attempt. In that situation, everyone in uniform on the ground would commit every ounce of their being to achieving “victory,” and few measures would be shrunk from.
Analogies come to mind: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Dien Bien Phu, the Battle of Algiers. It would be total war, with the likelihood of all the excesses and mass casualties that come with total war. To take up such a strategy and force our armed forces into it would be nothing short of immoral, in view of predictable troop losses and the huge number of Iraqis who would meet violent injury and death. And for what? If adopted, the surge strategy will turn out to be something we will spend a generation living down.
Senator Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) spoke for many of us last Thursday on the Senate floor:
I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore.
Yesterday, when George Stephanopoulos asked Smith what he meant by “criminal,” he replied:
I said it. You can use any adjective you want, George. But I have long believed in a military context - when you do the same thing over and over again, without a clear strategy for victory, at the expense of your young people in arms, that is dereliction. That is deeply immoral.
++
Seven Days in (May) December
Marty Kaplan, HuffPo
12.20.2006
So maybe it’s the Generals who’ll save us from the POTUS. Who would have thunk it?
The idea that military brass would step up to the challenge of rescuing us from a crackpot Commander-in-Chief undermining our national security was first played out in the JFK-era thriller “Seven Days in May,” by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey. The heart-thumping novel — written for the screen, appropriately enough, by “Twilight Zone”-creator and paranoia master Rod Serling, and direected by John Frankenheimer — told the story of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plotting a coup to stop the President from signing what to them was a fatally naive nuclear disarmament pact with the Soviets.
When “Seven Days in May” came out, it wasn’t hard to side with the idealistic President, whose plan turns out to have prefigured Ronald Reagan’s trust-but-verify strategy. What’s so stunning today, as Pentagon vs. Bush plays out, is the way that our rooting interests have switched sides.
Our current President — the one who just told us in his press conference to go shopping more — is hell-bent on a policy that only his boss, the Vice President, supports. The Congress, the country, the bipartisan commission: everyone else thinks the course he’s on is nuts. Yet for W, it’s full speed ahead.
He’s still talking about victory in Iraq. He’s even leaning toward a “surge” of troops in Baghdad that no one but the loopiest neocon ideologues is for, and that deserves its scare quotes; it would actually be yet another extension of duty tours for our courageous but vulnerable and war-weary soldiers. And not only has he rejected the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s proposal to talk with Iran and Syria; he’s even ordered a Navy battle group into the Persian Gulf. Hey, Mahmoud, look how big my stick is!
What’s striking is that each of these blunders by our civilian leadership has sharply opposed by our military commanders, past and present. While media sycophants fawned over the Daddy Party’s unspooked-by-Vietnamishness, it was our Four Star Generals who gave John Murtha the goods he needed to decry the tragic haplessness of American policy in Iraq. It was Generals Shinseki and Zinni and Batiste who have told the nation the truth, despite Rummy’s fangs. Today, not one of the Joint Chiefs wants more troops in Iraq. Nor do Generals Abizaid and Casey, our top brass in Baghdad, want to sacrifice more soldiers for a failed policy. Nor would it surprise me if the Navy quietly believes that W’s gunboat diplomacy toward Iran is batshit insane.
Now the Los Angeles Times is reporting that General Abizaid is going to retire in March, and that General Casey will likely be replaced. Clearly the President’s war policy is to listen to his commanders on the ground, unless they disagree with him, in which case he gets rid of them.
Is it too fanciful to hope that a handful of Generals who are citizens of the Republic, not citizens of Bush’s state of denial, are secretly planning an intervention? Not an actual coup; that’s too Hollywood (unless you count the de facto coup that the right wing effected during the era bracked by Katherine Harris’s rise and Katherine Harris’s fall). Wouldn’t it be sweet if the Texas Air National Guard’s delinquent, the smirker in Top Gun codpiece beneath the “Mission Accomplished” sign, plus the six-deferment VPOTUS who had other priorities than war, were given a good, or-else, ultimatum-laced tongue-lashing by the adults on the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
The movie poster for “Seven Days in May” had this chilling come-on: “THE ASTOUNDING STORY OF AN ASTOUNDING MILITARY PLOT TO TAKE OVER THE UNITED STATES! THE TIME IS 1970 OR 1980 OR, POSSIBLY, TOMORROW.” In 2006 or 2007 or, possibly, tomorrow, it’s hard to imagine something more heartening than an astounding military plot to take over Iraq policy from the bizarro-world bubble boys currently running it. ++
The Clock is Ticking, Mr. President
Senator Harry Reid, HuffPo
12/20/06
Frankly, I don’t believe that more troops is the answer for Iraq. It’s a civil war and America should not be policing a Sunni-Shia conflict. In addition, we don’t have the additional forces to put in there. We obviously want to support what commanders in the field say they need, but apparently even the Joint Chiefs do not support increased combat forces for Baghdad. My position on Iraq is simple:
1. I believe we should start redeploying troops in 4 to 6 months (The Levin-Reed Plan) and complete the withdrawal of combat forces by the first quarter of 2008. (As laid out by the Iraq Study Group)
2. The President must understand that there can only be a political solution in Iraq, and he must end our nation’s open-ended military commitment to that country.
3. These priorities need to be coupled with a renewed diplomatic effort and regional strategy.
I do not support an escalation of the conflict. I support finding a way to bring our troops home and would look at any plan that gave a roadmap to this goal.
It’s been two weeks since the Iraq Study Group released its plan to change the course and bring our troops home. Since then, the President has been on a fact finding tour of his own administration — apparently ignoring the facts presented by those in the military who know best.
The President needs to put forth a plan as soon as possible, one that reflects the reality on the ground in Iraq and that withdraws our troops from the middle of this deadly civil war. ++
from United for Peace and Justice
[...]
Obviously, they haven’t been listening to the will of the people, whose opposition to the war gave them control of the Congress. Only 12% support sending more troops to Iraq — the overwhelming majority want the troops to come home now.
So we need to speak louder than ever:
1) Call or email the office of Senator Harry Reid and tell him you expect the Democrats to follow the clear wishes of the electorate and bring the troops home from Iraq.
Call Reid at 202-224-2158 or 202-224-7003 or email his chief of staff at Susan_McCue@reid.senate.gov
2) Plan to mark the 3,000th U.S. death with a vigil or other event in your community. Under the slogan, “Not One More Death, Not One More Dollar,” the American Friends Service Committee, a member group of UFPJ, is coordinating events all around the country. Learn more at www.afsc.org/3000
3) Now more than ever, be sure to join us in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, January 27, for a massive peace march calling on Congress to use its power to bring the troops home now! Leaflets, web banners, ride and housing boards, and much more for this urgently needed protest are available at www.unitedforpeace.org
With hopes for peace and justice in this holiday season,
UFPJ National Staff ++
Dear Ms. McCue –
I would appreciate your passing my opinion on to your employer.
The only worthwhile thing George Bush has managed to do in six years is make the average citizen aware of politics — when the house is on fire, you eventually smell the smoke. Now that so many of us have very clearly made our wishes known about the misadventure in Iraq, and our desire to end this as quickly as possible, I would appreciate Speaker Reid’s sensitivity to those that supported a progressive outlook … and a more thoughtful response to Bush’s last-ditch effort to achieve a “victory.”
It is tragic that the US of A has to walk away from Iraq a failure, having caused so much instability in the Middle-East and prompted so many needless deaths. But propping up the Iraqi government is an illusion — there IS NO Iraqi government; there are tribes and factions … and no “Constitional Democracy” can be foisted on those who are willing to kill one another for their religious differences.
When an incoming George Bush promised us he would do no nation building, it was because he obviously DIDN’T KNOW HOW … whatever slight chance for victory we had in Iraq fell on the sword of Bush’s ineptitude years ago. It is too late now to do what should have been done … but it’s not too late to save American lives.
In November, this country voted for a return to sanity — we’d like to see some now. It’s time to turn our dwindling resources to the actual challenge at hand — international security against terrorism. The American people have been patient long enough.
Respectfully,
Judith Gayle ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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December 20th, 2006