He said, She said …

I’m beginning to remember how wrung-out I got during the campaign season[s] … the rhetoric is already amping — it’s theatre of the absurd. It’s only been five months since the last one [and, CRAP, this is going to get worse before it gets better.]

Laura StepfordBush said an unfortunate thing the other day … “No one suffers more” than she and Dubby do over Iraq. [Speak for yourself, Laura ... you still might convince me you have a heart, after being silent for years and absent from funeral one! But don't try to tell it to Sheehan and the family and friends of our 3,333 dead soldiers, the [officially acknowledged] 26,000+ wounded, and the 665,000+ dead Iraqi’s. Maybe it’s a Good Thing that she only opens her mouth once every other year.]

Then Guilianni trotted out that old Righty saw that if a Dem wins the White House, the nation will have “waved a white flag” to terrorists, and we’ll be more likely to be attacked. [Tell it to the firemen who begged for better equipment prior to 9/11 and were summarily ignored.]

Obama responded that the fear conversation is “at a new low.” [I expect it to get lower.]

Adding to the chatter, Tony Snow’s interim replacement, the lovely Ms. Perino, tried to soothe Uncle Dick’s scratchy day by explaining his zealotous outbursts as a product of “times of high drama and passion.” [That's what The Voices In His Head told him, anyhow.]

I need an aspirin. Can’t wait to find out what they all say tomorrow!

Meanwhile, I have a collection of jim-dandy reads for you — make some time for them, or save them til later. One, an excerpt from Lee Iacocca’s new book [so verified Snopes] even got my conservative Father’s approval — now that’s a miracle moment!

These are Don’t Miss Excellent mid-week reads, all — well written, thoughtful, interesting … a pleasure. NOT like the snippy chatter of the day.

What they said, below.

Jude

Ameriholic’s Anonymous
Steven Weber
04.25.2007

Will you join me in the Serenity Prayer?

Common Sense, Art, Science, Literature and Nature: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.

Hi. My name’s ________ and I’m an Ameriholic.

(crowd: Hi, _________.)

Thanks for letting me share. Gosh, I’ve been sober only a short time now and it’s weird, yeah, not being held in thrall of Amerihol. I had the shakes for a while. Bad. Alternately laughing and crying out of context. Couldn’t make a decent poop for days. All that bile, I guess, bunging me up. But finally when I kicked, it was like I woke from a garish dream. Everything suddenly smelled and tasted so strong, so pure, as if my senses had spent years being anesthetized or something. I stopped watching television. That was weird. That’s like, the first thing my deprogrammer had me do. Went into a media lockdown sorta thing. Started me reading books again. History. Yeesh. We had a major fist fight that ended in tears, me being held like a baby, rocking, sobbing, gulping air. My vision slowly cleared. I felt reborn. Raw. Like a person again. But that was just the first step.

After a few days I ventured out into the world. Colors were so vibrant. The crunching of my shoes on the asphalt seemed almost deafening. And then the stares from the other Ameriholics who don’t even know they’re Ameriholics. They walk in such a way that you could tell their fields of vision stopped about five feet in front of them and were blinkered on both sides. They had the look of someone who suspected they were under the control of an unseen hand but were trusting nonetheless. Because they knew they had to do one thing and one thing only: consume.

I heard that word a lot when I got sober. “Consumers,” people are called. Consumers by name and consumers by nature. Like that’s what we’ve become after millions of years, that’s the purpose we serve? Not dreamers or hopers or doers or thinkers or feelers. Consumers. Goes in one hole, comes out another. And they’re everywhere. Like earthworms.

It’s a whole lifestyle choice, believe me. You have to break old habits, which can be tough. It’s about activating dormant parts of your brain, you know? But of all the habits to break, my major hurdles (and we here all know they are different for everybody) were caffeine, sugar and patriotism. I have to say I miss ‘em all but in the end none of them were anything like they started out as being in the first place. But someone saw how people reacted to them and I guess they just added more and more to whatever people were eating or drinking or reading or hearing and bang! Hooked. And that last one — patriotism — brother, that ’s the worst of them. Tough to realize what a hold that particular substance has on you. Look at the effects on the poor bastards it has in its stranglehold, the soulless leaders who bought and bullied their way up the ladder and believe their lies with such wild-eyed fervor that they’d sell their own human values down the river — for profit. Sell their own mothers and grandmothers and sons and daughters down the river. And do it all under the guise of patriotism. And it would be maddening if it weren’t so sad. Because really it’s the Amerihol talking. It’s not their fault. Deep down, people want, need guidance. They want to believe.

But the unscrupulous, profiteering peddlers have chemically tethered themselves to us, making us crave their pretty sounding, spirit-corroding substances. Being an Ameriholic means never facing reality, never absorbing the hard fought truths of your predecessors, never having faith in your fellow man, xenophobia coursing through your veins. And most destructively, Ameriholism induces an insane and unquenchable lust… for money.

(takes a drink of water)

I know I sound like a classic “reformed whore” kinda person. But I’ve had enough of the brimstone and treacle that’s been dished out and called nutrition. I was scared all the time. My faith had become an ornate thing. My scriptures weren’t in The Bible or The Koran, they were on Amazon.com. I was a lemming, believing I was ascending to heaven when I was really plummeting into the abyss. But I want to tell everyone who is struggling that the time has come to break the habit, throw off the yoke and live as our, dare I say, Founding Fathers intended us to live. Expected us to live.

But you have to fight for sobriety. You have to be strong. I know it won’t be easy. There are temptations everywhere. Threats. But the good thing is, our group is getting stronger every day. Our ranks are swelling with the newly sober. And we will help each other to live again as real, healthy, vibrant, free-thinking, caring Americans. Because we were once slaves to Amerihol ourselves. And we know what that’s like. We’ll be here for you. Just like you were here for me. Thanks.

(sits down) ++

When Evil Met Stupid
Matthew Hubbard
Apr 22 2007

The question is asked all the time, by people of all political stripes. Is some person evil or just incompetent? Is some horrible situation caused by evil or incompetence? We want the simplest answer, but in this world, simple isn’t always correct. In too many situations today, we have collisions of Evil and Stupid, and they always conspire to make the world worse.
Let’s take a look at a quick ten, shall we?

1. The Virginia Tech killer was evil. He sent a multimedia package to NBC News, which publicized most of it, though the killer was dead and there was no evidence of an accomplice.

File under: Evil Meets Stupid, and plays Stupid for a fool.

2. John McCain makes a weak joke about bombing Iran, and then acts as if we are too dumb or humor-impaired to get that it was just a joke.

File under: Stupid is Evil, and mistakes his audience for Stupid.

3. Dick Cheney is called to task for his “last throes of the insurgency” remark, and condescendingly explains to us what a “throe” is.

File under: Evil is Stupid, and mistakes his audience for Stupid.

4. The occupying force in Baghdad builds a three mile wall surrounding the neighborhood of one religious minority in a multifaceted sectarian and ethic civil war.

File under: 20th Century Evil meets 21st Century Stupid.

5. Oil companies, led by ExxonMobil, use every trick imaginable to confound the public about the currently bad and growing worse environmental situation. The media casts anyone against this lie as environmental extremists, but holds out hope that the movement will be saved by… Arnold Schwarzenegger and Thomas Friedman.

File under: So much Evil and Stupid in one place, you probably should buy a scorecard.

6. Fred Phelps and his churchgoers (read family) protesting at the funerals of fallen soldiers to get more publicity for their view that the permissive attitude towards homosexuality is the reason God wants our wayward nation to lose in Iraq.

File under: A pro wrestling parody of Evil meets bad performance art imitation of Stupid.

7. The TV show 24 is so popular, the Army wants the lead actor to come to the Pentagon to tell the current and future military interrogators that in reality, torture doesn’t get the vital confession before the next commercial break.

File under: Evil as entertainment meets Stupid as a way of life.

8. Boston is shut down for hours by ads for Aqua Teen Hunger: The Movie.

File under: Stupid mistakes Lite-Brites™ for Evil.

9. The Democratic Congress buys the Washington conventional wisdom that the public has no stomach for the impeachments of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

File under: The Stupidity of cowardice in battle meets the Evil of self-serving lethargy.

10. George W. Bush…

File under: Don’t bother with the details. He’s got his own category. ++

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?
by Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

[Thanks, Airean]

Excerpted from Where Have All the Leaders Gone? Copyright - 2007 by Lee Iacocca. All rights reserved.

Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?
I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you’re eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to - as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I’m going to speak up because it’s my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I’ll tell you how I see it, and it’s not pretty, but at least it’s real. I’m hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don’t vote because they don’t trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

Who Are These Guys, Anyway?

Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them - or at least some of us did. But I’ll tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that’s a dictatorship, not a democracy.

And don’t tell me it’s all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That’s an intellectually lazy argument, and it’s part of the reason we’re in this stew. We’re not just a nation of factions. We’re a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?

The Test of a Leader

I’ve never been Commander in Chief, but I’ve been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I’ve figured out nine points - not ten (I don’t want people accusing me of thinking I’m Moses). I call them the “Nine Cs of Leadership.” They’re not fancy or complicated. Just clear, obvious qualities that every true leader should have. We should look at how the current administration stacks up. Like it or not, this crew is going to be around until January 2009. Maybe we can learn something before we go to the polls in 2008. Then let’s be sure we use the leadership test to screen the candidates who say they want to run the country. It’s up to us to choose wisely.

So, here’s my C list:

A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the “Yes, sir” crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. “I just scan the headlines,” he says. Am I hearing this right? He’s the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper? Thomas Jefferson once said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.” Bush disagrees. As long as he gets his daily hour in the gym, with Fox News piped through the sound system, he’s ready to go.

If a leader never steps outside his comfort zone to hear different ideas, he grows stale. If he doesn’t put his beliefs to the test, how does he know he’s right? The inability to listen is a form of arrogance. It means either you think you already know it all, or you just don’t care. Before the 2006 election, George Bush made a big point of saying he didn’t listen to the polls. Yeah, that’s what they all say when the polls stink. But maybe he should have listened, because 70 percent of the people were saying he was on the wrong track. It took a “thumping” on election day to wake him up, but even then you got the feeling he wasn’t listening so much as he was calculating how to do a better job of convincing everyone he was right.

A leader has to be CREATIVE, go out on a limb, be willing to try something different. You know, think outside the box. George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping. There’s a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty. Senator Joe Biden recalled a conversation he had with Bush a few months after our troops marched into Baghdad. Joe was in the Oval Office outlining his concerns to the President - the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanded Iraqi army, the problems securing the oil fields. “The President was serene,” Joe recalled. “He told me he was sure that we were on the right course and that all would be well. ‘Mr. President,’ I finally said, ‘how can you be so sure when you don’t yet know all the facts?’” Bush then reached over and put a steadying hand on Joe’s shoulder. “My instincts,” he said. “My instincts.” Joe was flabbergasted. He told Bush, “Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough.” Joe Biden sure didn’t think the matter was settled. And, as we all know now, it wasn’t.

Leadership is all about managing change - whether you’re leading a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative. You adapt. Maybe Bush was absent the day they covered that at Harvard Business School.

A leader has to COMMUNICATE. I’m not talking about running off at the mouth or spouting sound bites. I’m talking about facing reality and telling the truth. Nobody in the current administration seems to know how to talk straight anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to convince us that things are not really as bad as they seem. I don’t know if it’s denial or dishonesty, but it can start to drive you crazy after a while.

Communication has to start with telling the truth, even when it’s painful. The war in Iraq has been, among other things, a grand failure of communication. Bush is like the boy who didn’t cry wolf when the wolf was at the door. After years of being told that all is well, even as the casualties and chaos mount, we’ve stopped listening to him.

A leader has to be a person of CHARACTER. That means knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the guts to do the right thing. Abraham Lincoln once said, “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” George Bush has a lot of power. What does it say about his character? Bush has shown a willingness to take bold action on the world stage because he has the power, but he shows little regard for the grievous consequences. He has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths - for what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he’s tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy.

A leader must have COURAGE. I’m talking about balls. (That even goes for female leaders.) Swagger isn’t courage. Tough talk isn’t courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn’t mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.

If you’re a politician, courage means taking a position even when you know it will cost you votes. Bush can’t even make a public appearance unless the audience has been handpicked and sanitized. He did a series of so-called town hall meetings last year, in auditoriums packed with his most devoted fans. The questions were all softballs.

To be a leader you’ve got to have CONVICTION - a fire in your belly. You’ve got to have passion. You’ve got to really want to get something done. How do you measure fire in the belly? Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. President - four hundred and counting. He’d rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake.

It’s no better on Capitol Hill. Congress was in session only ninety-seven days in 2006. That’s eleven days less than the record set in 1948, when President Harry Truman coined the term do-nothing Congress. Most people would expect to be fired if they worked so little and had nothing to show for it. But Congress managed to find the time to vote itself a raise. Now, that’s not leadership.

A leader should have CHARISMA. I’m not talking about being flashy. Charisma is the quality that makes people want to follow you. It’s the ability to inspire. People follow a leader because they trust him. That’s my definition of charisma. Maybe George Bush is a great guy to hang out with at a barbecue or a ball game. But put him at a global summit where the future of our planet is at stake, and he doesn’t look very presidential. Those frat-boy pranks and the kidding around he enjoys so much don’t go over that well with world leaders. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who received an unwelcome shoulder massage from our President at a G-8 Summit. When he came up behind her and started squeezing, I thought she was going to go right through the roof.

A leader has to be COMPETENT. That seems obvious, doesn’t it? You’ve got to know what you’re doing. More important than that, you’ve got to surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing. Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let’s see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we’ve got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we’ve run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that’s just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner.

You can’t be a leader if you don’t have COMMON SENSE. I call this Charlie Beacham’s rule. When I was a young guy just starting out in the car business, one of my first jobs was as Ford’s zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boss was a guy named Charlie Beacham, who was the East Coast regional manager. Charlie was a big Southerner, with a warm drawl, a huge smile, and a core of steel. Charlie used to tell me, “Remember, Lee, the only thing you’ve got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. If you don’t know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream, you’ll never make it.” George Bush doesn’t have common sense. He just has a lot of sound bites. You know - Mr.they’ll-welcome-us-as-liberators-no-child-left-behind-heck-of-a-job-Brownie-mission-accomplished Bush.

Former President Bill Clinton once said, “I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world - and I like it here.”

I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while.

The Biggest C is Crisis

Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It’s easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else’s kids off to war when you’ve never seen a battlefield yourself. It’s another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It’s all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn’t safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day - and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

That was George Bush’s moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he’d regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq - a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn’t listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, I don’t know what will.

A Hell of a Mess

So here’s where we stand. We’re immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We’re running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We’re losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you’ve got to ask: “Where have all the leaders gone?” Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We’ve spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone’s hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn’t happen again. Now, that’s just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you’re going to do the next time.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when “the Big Three” referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen - and more important, what are we going to do about it?

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn’t elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don’t you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough?

Hey, I’m not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I’m trying to light a fire. I’m speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I’ve had the privilege of living through some of America’s greatest moments. I’ve also experienced some of our worst crises - the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: You don’t get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it’s building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That’s the challenge I’m raising in this book. It’s a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It’s not too late, but it’s getting pretty close.

So let’s shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let’s tell ‘em all we’ve had enough. ++

Virginia Tech - Horror, But No Shock: Jock Culture, Guns and Laws Set Stage for Violence
Ted Rall
Apr 25 2007

Most Americans are shocked by school shootings. Not me. I’m amazed they don’t happen more often.

Schools’ cultures of rigid conformity create pressure-cooker atmospheres apparently designed to push alienated, mentally fragile individuals over the edge. Students and alumni of Virginia Tech repeatedly wondered why Sueng-Hui Cho had slaughtered 32 people on the school’s bucolic western Virginia campus. Yet what was wrong was plain to see on national TV.

The post-massacre memorial-cum-pep-rally, held weeks too early in order to maximize media interest, wallowed in the creepy corporatized sentimentality of “go Hokies” chants, school logos and cheap rhetoric about the school’s inevitable, though eventual, recovery.

Little was said about the lost lives of the victims, who were being autopsied at the time.

The President of the United States, or at least the guy who plays him on TV, rushed to the scene of a tragedy where (unlike Katrina) most of the victims were white. Cameras swept over a sea of VT sweats.

Black sweatshirts must have been deemed too formal. You know it’s a bad scene when George W. Bush is the most dignified person in the room.

I won’t jump on the gun control bandwagon here. No one needs guns in the United States, especially not automatic weapons–not now, anyway. But the Second Amendment is still relevant. It’s for the period, three days or 300 years from today, after the U.S. government collapses and the Constitution no longer remains in force. Residents of some future failed post-American state will thank the gun nuts who created a market for the mass production of assault rifles.

Still, isn’t a weird that a green-card holder–a non-citizen–can buy a gun legally?

As occurred after Columbine High School, the news media is already laying the groundwork for the next explosion of violence by a disturbed young man. The juvenile insults and catchphrases used to describe Cho (loser, loner, wimp) were similarly applied to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Today the Columbine shooters are heroes to thousands of disaffected kids who fantasize, like Cho, about unleashing the Mother of All Revenges of the Nerds upon their better-heeled, blonder and more athletic classmates.

The more the media calls Cho names, the more it abets his twisted dream of immortality and inspires his future disciples. Since actual understanding may too much to expect from Americans, can we settle for laying off the jock talk?

The final ingredient in the recipe for school massacres is administrators’ excessive concern for the rights of the deranged at the expense of other students. Sadly, these institutions don’t have much choice. Beginning in the 1970s the federal government reacted to the abuse of involuntary committals (a tactic used by husbands seeking to unload perfectly sane wives by dumping them in asylums) with legislation that has, in the typical American way, gone to an opposite extreme.

Two years before Cho shot up Virginia Tech, the troubled student had received outpatient psychiatric care for suicidal tendencies. Virginia Tech officials say they had no choice but to readmit him. “I know that we followed all of our policies correctly and we acted on information that we had at the time,” commented Edward Spencer, associate vice president for student affairs. “He had broken no law at the time,” added Christopher Flynn, director of the school’s counseling service.

Well-intentioned laws have transformed campuses into collection points for deranged students.

During my four years at Columbia, two of my classmates leaped in front of subway trains. A woman jumped out her dorm’s sixth-floor window, landing on a spiked fence. More notable and more common were the loons who didn’t “act out”–but easily might have.

George (not his real name) was a classic case. Now a full-grown man, he’d gotten hit by a limousine years before. He’d suffered injuries that required him to wear a colostomy bag under a pair of loose, frequently soiled, sweats. As part of his settlement the limo company agreed to foot the bill for housing and tuition as long as he remained enrolled in a four-year college or university.

It was a bad deal. Because the limo guys’ lawyer had neglected to insert a clause setting a time limit for George to obtain a degree, he enrolled in a single class each semester. George, who often babbled about being persecuted by mysterious enemies, had previously attended nine educational institutions in the New York area in nine years–Fordham, NYU, Brooklyn Polytechnic, City College, you name it–all on the car company’s dime.

George’s incomprehensible all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-boy rants, single-spaced, minus margins and banged out on a manual typewriter, were legendary among university officials. His file filled a full-length metal drawer. But it was in class–his one class, physics–that George’s madness manifested itself most spectacularly.

Whenever George felt neglected, insulted or otherwise trespassed against–events that occurred at random and without provocation–he would rise and unleash his walrus-like bellow until class had been so thoroughly disrupted that kids got up and left when he started up. On one memorable occasion, George detached his colostomy bag and announced his intent to aerially disburse its contents across the assembled scholars.

George remained at Columbia after I graduated (taking one class) and after I found a job working in the admissions office. “Can’t we expel this psycho?” I asked the dean. “Of course not,” she replied, as to an idiot, “he has a 4.0 GPA. I know, in one class per term. Still, he hasn’t committed a crime.”

I pointed out the colostomy incident. She just shrugged.

George was scary. He was insane. He was disruptive. But Columbia couldn’t get rid of him.
I fully expected George to enter some class, guns blazing, before being cut down by the NYPD. The hell of it is, I–and the dean–would have had to pretend we were surprised. ++

The Cho in the White House: An Ex-Diplomat Considers the World and Virginia Tech
John Brown, TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 24 April 2007

[thanks, Ava]

Americans rushed to unite in horror and mourning in response to the mass killings in Blacksburg in a way we haven’t seen since, perhaps, the attacks of 9/11. Where I live, in Washington, D.C., residents are already sporting their Virginia Tech ribbons and sweatshirts, the way so many Americans once donned those “I [heart] New York” caps and T-shirts. While media coverage has been 24/7 and fast-paced, if not downright hysterical - as is now the norm on all such American-gothic occasions from OJ’s car chase on - the framing and contextualizing of the massacre/suicide at Virginia Tech has been narrow indeed.

As a former diplomat, educated to see the world through others’ eyes, I couldn’t help thinking about how the rest of our small planet might be taking in the Blacksburg tragedy. Despite the negligible coverage of overseas opinion about this event in the mainstream media, there did appear one comprehensive overview of how foreigners reacted to the killings - a Molly Moore piece in the Washington Post.

“Nowhere, perhaps,” Moore wrote, “were foreign reactions to the Virginia shooting more impassioned than in Iraq, where many residents blame the United States for the daily killings in their schools, streets and markets. ‘It is a little incident if we compare it with the disasters that have happened in Iraq,’ said Ranya Riyad, 19, a college student in Baghdad. ‘We are dying every day.’”

Given my own twenty-plus years in the Foreign Service, on occasions like this I find myself looking at my own country from a non-American perspective. I must confess that, when I first saw psychopathic mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui’s photographs of himself savagely pointing a gun at the camera, I was reminded not only of the violent images in our popular culture, but also of George W. Bush and his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of the thrust of his whole foreign policy.

Indeed, for others on our globe, mass murder in Iraq, scenes of degradation from Abu Ghraib, CIA extraordinary rendition expeditions, and our prison at Guantanamo have already become synonymous with the U.S. government and the President; so, it would not be surprising if Cho’s actions and Bush’s foreign policy were linked in the minds of people outside the United States. I see several reasons why, for non-Americans, a mad student and our commander- in-chief could appear to be two sides of the same all-American coin.

First, as his own writings and evidence from his Virginia Tech classmates attest, Cho felt unloved. A thread running through his psychological profile is that he believed the world was after him. Many abroad will remember how, in the wake of the Twin Towers tragedy, the Bush administration immediately began obsessing about “why they hate us” (whoever “they” might specifically be). Despite the sympathy the President, as the representative of the American people, received from every corner of the Earth - similar in some ways to the fruitless support efforts teachers and doctors gave Cho for his mental problems - Bush, responding only to the hate he saw under every nook and cranny, chose to react with what many overseas considered disproportionate violence.

To begin with, there was the invasion of Afghanistan. Foreigners (and perhaps some Americans) might think of it as comparable, though on a far larger scale, to Cho’s first foray into killing, his early morning murder of two people, a girl he apparently felt had slighted him and a young man who evidently happened on the scene. In each case, there was then a pause while elaborate propaganda was mustered, organized, and sent off to the public to justify the acts to come. In Cho’s case, what followed was his final rampage when the deranged English major killed 30 people in cold blood; in the President’s, what followed, of course, was the invasion of Iraq where the casualty figures, high as they are, are not yet fully in.

The Bush propaganda campaign of 2002-2003 to convince the American people that the Butcher of Baghdad was a WMD demon reached its apotheosis in a made-for FOX News “shock and awe” spectacular over Baghdad (which was, to say the least, not well received abroad). This brutal sound-and-light show - meant to give Americans the sense of getting back at those who “hated” the U.S. by hitting them hard and mercilessly - seems, when I put on my overseas eyeglasses, eerily reminiscent of Cho’s videos of himself as a mean twenty-first century gunslinger, ready to shoot all those whom he dreamt did him wrong.

As someone who lived and served outside my own beloved country for so many years, a second link between Cho’s actions and George W. Bush’s policies appeared quite evident to me. The Blacksburg murders caused enormous grief and sadness throughout a community Cho felt had never accepted him. Distraught students have been offered counseling by the university, so shaken are some by what they experienced. The results of Bush’s preemptive military strikes have been no less disruptive and unnerving, but of course on a regional, if not global stage. Tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people have lost their lives due to his rash wars - and his administration has shown little pity for refugees from this destruction seeking shelter as best they could elsewhere. (Iraqi refugees have essentially been all but barred from the United States.)

As Cho disrupted a small, defenseless college town in Virginia that welcomed him, Bush has dislocated a whole society that was not threatening the United States. Seen from an overseas perspective, there is, as with Cho and his “enemy,” something megalomaniacal as well as delusional about the President’s identification of a vast Soviet-style Islamofascist foe that the U.S. Armed Forces are supposed to face down in the Global War on Terror.

Consider as well a third disturbing analogy that may not come immediately to most American minds. Like Virginia Tech, Iraq could be considered a repository of culture and knowledge. Indeed, Saddam Hussein may have been a cruel despot, but Mesopotamia, as every American high school student should know, is widely considered by historians “the cradle of civilization,” the first “university” of humankind, if you will.

George W. Bush, reflecting an attitude not unlike Cho’s toward a center of learning, showed not the slightest concern or respect for the traditions of a country whose achievements have so enriched the history of humankind. Indeed, when the Baghdad National Museum was pillaged (along with the National Library and the Library of Korans) soon after the American troops took the capital, the American “liberators” simply stood by; while the Secretary of Defense, reflecting on the catastrophe, offered the now-infamous comment, “Stuff happens.”

Finally, Cho’s suicidal assault on a college community might bring to mind the thought that Bush’s assault on Iraq has been no less suicidal - not for himself personally but for the United States as a whole. Bush’s militarism and “bring ‘em on” mentality helped create an atmosphere conducive to violence that Americans inflict not only on others, but also upon themselves, leading to what might be seen abroad as a kind of perpetual national suicidal condition, examples of which appear all too frequently, including in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Bluntly put, overseas the U.S. government (and, by association, the country as well) - thanks in large part to Bush and his foreign policy - is now widely considered the Cho of our world, despite the often risible efforts of Karen Hughes, the administration’s Image Czarina, to improve America’s international standing through what she calls the diplomacy of deeds. The fact of the matter is that the President’s deeds have led other countries to see our government, in its aggressive unilateralism, as unreliable, if not deranged; obsessed beyond all reason with putative enemies and globe-spanning organizations of terrorists that despise us; ready to respond with unjustified violence to any perceived slight; unwilling to listen to, or accept, advice; and unconcerned with the consequences of what it does, even when this results in widespread death and destruction in one of the birthplaces of civilization, where Bush and his top officials now pride themselves on their latest accomplishment, a military “surge” that only seems to further encourage mass murder.

Regrettably, I fear that, after more than six years of George W. Bush, Baghdad and Blacksburg are, to many on our planet, not that far apart. Woe to the diplomat who has to explain us to the world today. ++

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. He left the Foreign Service in March 2003 to express his opposition to President Bush’s war plans for Iraq

Inside Alberto Gonzales’ Diary: My Dementia Defense
Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
Apr 25 2007

Dear Diary:

God, that was humiliating! I’ve never taken a dive before, and it showed. I was sweating like a pig as those senators used me like a punching bag.

Obviously, I couldn’t tell the truth about the U.S. Attorneys situation, or the whole enterprise would collapse — Karl, Dick, The Boss, the whole lot. Ain’t no way I’m going to the slammer, at least not tripped up by anything I’ve said.

If the Demoncrats are going to get me, they’ll have to prove it, and I don’t think they’ll be able to locate anything but circumstantial evidence. The cleaning crew did its work well. I hope.

So there I was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee coming off like someone with early-onset Alzheimer’s: “I can’t recall,” “I’ve wracked my memory and have no recollection,” “that meeting just isn’t in my memory,” and a hundred other such variants.

Embarrassing!

Sure, it was obvious I was lying my head off, but they can’t get me for a “faulty memory” or for when I said “I believe” that such-and-such happened or didn’t happen. I know my way around the magic words. We rehearsed for days so I’d be comfortable using those terms and delivering my lines with believability. (Who was it that said “once you can fake sincerity, the rest is easy”?)

Yes, everyone knew, even my Republican friends, that I was sent up there as a grand deflector, and they were pissed as hell that it was just me in front of them and not Cheney or Rove or Bush. To the senators, I was disrespecting them, treating them like easy marks; they’d just as soon I depart my job ASAP. But they are dumb marks, thinking they’re in control of the situation when in reality, as long as we all keep our various stories straight, we still are.

STILL IN CONTROL OF JUSTICE

We figure my immediate humiliation will pass in a week or two, and I’ll still be in charge of the DOJ, from where we can control the pace and direction of the anti-Bush Administration flak coming our way — especially with regard to impeachment. And our replacement U.S. Attorneys will still be in position to help us for the 2008 election, doing whatever they can to minimize liberal turnout (it’ll be “Democrat voter-fraud” big time) and to protect our Republican office-holders.

After my testimony, as we expected, the Democrats have been blustering and raging, along with a few turncoat Republican weaklings, scared of losing their seats if they don’t cut their open support of the Bush Administration. But the whole mess should blow over quickly, since “I serve at the pleasure of the President” and he’s not going to throw me to the wolves, no matter how loudly they bay.

Bush values loyalty and my years of serving him faithfully (sometimes drawing, how shall we say?, slightly outside the legal lines), so I think I’m safe for the time being. But, they’ve let me know that if the situation doesn’t calm down, if things get really hot for the Administration because of me, I’m expected to resign. A pardon, maybe even a pre-emptive one before indictments are unsealed, should cover me down the line. (It worked for Bush’s dad when he was President, pardoning Iran/Contra scandal figures before they’d even been charged.)

THE NIXON & REAGAN PARALLELS

I know my history. I know how Nixon kept throwing one after another of his assistants overboard in Watergate in order to protect his closest and most loyal aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who knew every illegality they and Nixon and the rest of the crew had committed — and then had to dump them as well to try to save his own hide. So I know I’m ultimately expendable, but we’ll try to keep that day from ever happening. (But if Goodling and McNulty and Sampson at DOJ start dropping bombs on me, that may not be possible. And like Haldeman and Ehrlichman, I know where the bodies are buried as well.)

So, yes, I was thrown back into history with the Nixon parallels. But I had another deja vu experience, this one going back to President Ronald Reagan.

Remember when Reagan, with a straight face, said about the Iran/Contra Scandal: “A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

And there I was the other day responding to the senators on whether or not I mentioned to President Bush that I had received complaints from Rove and Senator Pete Domenici about that New Mexico U.S. Attorney:

“I now understand there was a conversation with myself and the president.”

And pundits pundit-ed and folks laughed, and I had to endure satire like this supposed “translation” of what I said from some creep named Archer at the Lawyerworldland blog, which is now circulating around the internet all over the goddamned world.

In the dim dawning light of understanding, understanding that I never had before and which, miraculous to relate, I have now, I begin to grasp — only because it has been explained to me and I couldn’t grasp it myself and don’t believe it’s really true, but people who are much smarter and stronger than I am have made me understand, or perhaps have brainwashed me … Yes — that’s it — people have kept me up late and interrogated me night after night until I now understand there was a conversation with myself (see how crazy I really am?) and the president. But I only understand that now — I didn’t understand before, because whatever has been done to me to make me say this stuff, whatever terrible victimization I have endured (and no, I don’t remember what it was, so it must have been terrible) had not yet been done to me.”

That’s not funny, diary; it’s too close to the bone. We should find the traitor who wrote those hurtful words — which casts aspersions on our fine roster of DOJ lawyers and U.S. Attorneys around the country, along with the soldiers in Iraq — and send him somewhere for some robust questioning.

PEELING AWAY PROTECTIVE LAYERS

The Democrats really want to get Cheney and Bush in the Senate well, and Rove under oath at a committee hearing, on trial for their jobs. But they know they can’t get to them. Yet. So they are peeling away at the outer core of the onion — with inner-circle folks like me.

Already preparing themselves for likely subpoenas and interrogation on various matters: Rove and Harriet Miers and Condi Rice and maybe Stephen Hadley.

We could all go down on this deal and all the associated “White House Horrors” (as John Mitchell termed the hidden Watergate secrets), what with our manipulating the voting process, harsh interrogation methods, extraordinary rendition, abandoning habeas corpus as a protective judicial concept, etc. etc. Those pinko liberals hate that we take all that law-and-order stuff seriously. We use the law and keep them in order.

So the trick is not to go down. I think I’d better fasten my seatbelt. We’re all in for a mighty bumpy ride during the remaining year-and-a-half of our Administration’s tenure. If we last that long. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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