Will the Real Flip-Flopper Please Stand Up?

          Consider the ineffable unpredictability of the presi-dential campaign.
          Much of it is puzzling and too much of it is personal. Bot- tom line: I wish the candidates would talk only about their own proposals to get the country out of what we on this site call "The Bush Messes." Economy, environment, war, world standing, security, debt, housing, crime, you name it.
          Barack Obama proposed a specific timetable for with- drawal from the Iraq fiasco. Even some of his friends were un- easy. Then he "clarified," but seemed to modify, that. His ene- mies were energized and derisive. Flip-flop, they said.
          Then, even Nouri al-Maliki, our puppet in Iraq, and some in the Bush administration are thinking of a timetable, albeit of vary- ing intensity. John McCain continues to believe the U.S. pres- ence in Iraq is a very long-term one. That position brought him considerable moans of dismay.
           McCain was ragging Obama about not having gone to the hot spots in the Middle East. The hidden message was, I have been there, even been kept in a bestial prison.
          But then, when Obama announced his several-stops trip to the region, the McCain reaction was, When I went it was to form my policies; but when Obama is going, it is AFTER he has an- nounced his policies.
          Obama said he would talk with foreign leaders, even some who are very unfriendly to the United States. The Bush admini- stration derided the idea of talking to the "evil."
          But now, the Bush administration has caught something of the national mood, and decided to talk with Iran. An undersecre- tary of State, in fact, just met with Iran's top nuclear negotiator, but just to listen, his bosses said. The Bush administration still does not call the discussions free conversations; the Bush con- dition is: Iran must first pledge to end its nuclear enrichment that would prepare it for a nuclear weapon.
          The fact is, despite the continuing angry national debate about the wars, it seems most Americans are worried about the increasingly desperate American economy. Instead of ragging their opponents, the candidates should flesh out every day their ideas on that issue.
          McCain is wedded to a continuation, even perpetuation, of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which largely brought us to this deep recession because the increased money in rich hands did not help across the board. The old trickle-down idea (remember David Stockman?) that the rich would invest and hire, and help us all, did not work.
          Obama makes the possibly impossible pledge that he will balance the budget in his years in office, with some new tax breaks for the middle class, but restoring some of the old tax rates for the very rich.
          Both candidates should be held to the standard: List spe- cifically how your ideas add up to your promises.
          Complicating the campaigns of both Obama and McCain is the behavior of Congress. But the argument of a selfish, do- nothing-good Congress ignores some of the facts of the legisla- tive/presidential process.
          Even with a slender Democratic majority in Congress, the president still has the veto power, which means every piece of legislation has to have a "super-majority" to get past him. So the Democrats have an argument in that way. But they still have to defend their continuing support of the greedy habit by both par- ties of passing "earmarks," those special home-district projects not subjected to the usual scrutiny in the legislative process.
          And the silly sidebar of the election campaign: When you are in the Senate and running for president, you must schedule carefully so you are in the Senate at just the right moment for some very important things--and absent, campaigning, for the rest. The trouble is, your opponent is watching and can say, "Oh my; my opponent did not see fit to be in the Senate when the important Hangnail Control Act of 2008 was debated today. Shame on him."
          And this tongue-in-cheek comment about this year's cam- paigns: Considering the statements that have hurt the candi- dates the most in this interminable campaign for the presidency, I hereby propose that NOBODY with "The Rev." before his name be allowed to utter a word, publicly or privately, when the cam- paign has begun.

          As Bobby Burns said, "O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us tae see oursels as others see us…. T'wad frae many a blunder free us." The endless campaign is subject to "frae many a blunder."

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REMEMBER

Cost of Bush-Cheney Iraq Fiasco

Well Beyond 4,000 U.S. Dead 

          The Bush administration's misadventure in Iraq has passed a sad milestone with re- ports of the 4,000th American death.
          The number itself is not magic. In fact, some counters come up with slightly different figures. But it is startling, nonetheless, in its big-round-number starkness. And it becomes enraging when balanced against Dick Cheney's brutally, arrogantly dismissive "So?" when asked about the fact that the preponderance of Americans polled about the war believe it not worth the enormous cost.
           The cost that prompted the question to Cheney was the death toll. But Americans should remember, more strongly with each passing month to this year's elections, the real cost beyond the deaths.
           Remember that 30-something-thousand of our servicemen and servicewomen have been injured, maimed or rendered mentally trauma- tized because of the war.
           Remember that several times that number -- nobody has an ac- curate count -- of Iraqi civilians have lost their lives through the destruc- tion of war, the lack of medical care, the disappearance of the usual in- frastructure of everyday life.
           Remember that our National Guard has been so weakened by Iraq tours of duty that it cannot adequately respond to domestic emer- gencies.
           Remember that millions of Iraqis fled as refugees and only a frac- tion have moved back.
           Remember that, despite Bush's pipedream that this war will be remembered as bringing peace and happiness to the Middle East, the war in fact has alienated much of the Middle East against America and has made us the objects of hatred in much of the Muslim world. Even the Iranians are made understandably uneasy, fearful, defensive about the sabre rattling from Bush and his henchmen. Not to mention the Iraqis whose country has been ruined in the name of democracy.
           Do the Palestinians applaud him for progress toward peace? Do the Israelis think Bush has brokered peace and happiness? Do the Sau- dis think Bush policies have made their country safer or more peaceful? Do the Turks sleep better at night? Are the Syrians happy about devel- opments? Do Spaniards and Britons, who have endured terrorist strikes, think Bush policies made those explosions less likely?

           Remember that in dollars, the war has cost something around $1 trillion. (That would buy two million homes worth $500,000 each for New Or- leans and the other Gulf Coast areas devastated by hurricane Katrina.)
           REMEMBER these things and determine not to vote for any candidate of Bush's party who voted for, abetted, supported, sympathized with the Bush-Cheney words and policies that brought this war about.                                            

American philosopher George Santayana:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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Is Anyone Reading This?

When Words Are Not 'Just Words'

          One of the most destructive ef- fects of the George Bush years -- which are mercifully soon to come to a close -- is their contribution to the dumbing-down of the populace. Comfortable in his mar- ginal literacy, Bush has given us "People misunderestimate me" and "Is our children learning?" At a time when newspapers are struggling to interest the young and keep the old, Bush famously said he hardly read more than the headlines and left the actual reading of newspapers to his staff, whose members, he presumed, were reading.

          Joining Bush in the stampede away from reading are nearly half of Americans. A National Endowment for the Arts report, quoted in the Washington Post, said only about 67 percent of U.S. college graduates read for pleasure and only about 60 percent of Americans under 44 read a book a year. The conspirators against literacy and intelligence include the multitude of video games, the texting craze, the surfeit of television offerings. These may stimulate communication, but do little to create eloquence and understanding. ("OMG," your children are saying. "It's NBD.")

          Even basic communication seems to be suffering. Witness the parent or nanny pushing a stroller and holding a telephone to her ear. The child in the stroller is getting nothing of the back- and-forth of words except the cryptic one half of the phone conversation. How many baby-sitters -- or parents, for that matter -- read regularly to their charges?

          More and more words are showing up in dictionaries as acceptable alterna- tives to what used to be the only proper usage. People now increasingly seem to be using "lay" instead of "lie," for exam- ple in the expression "lie low." Webster's Unabridged says "lay" is the "informal" usage. It used to be the joke that if you had a painter put your name over your door, it would come out something like "The Smith's" or "The Brown's." That apostrophe sneaked (or "snuck" as is now accepted) into the words, having migrated from such as the clumsy signs on restrooms announcing "Ladies" and "Mens." Is there harm in careless usage of punctuation or grammar? Yes, because it surely has a role in the overall reduction of literacy. "The car careening out of control smashed into a retaining wall" or, "The car, careening out of control, smashed into a re- taining wall." The first implies one car among several, the second indi- cates a car alone.

          Back to Bush: Whereas his prede- cessor in the White House was articulate in offering details on many topics on the spur of the moment, Bush most often is reduced to such sweeping and detailfree declarations as "I am the decider," "I am a uniter," "It's hard; I understand it's hard," etc.

          The solution, of course, is more than political. Educated Americans must fight the temptation to let television re- place books in the struggle for their attention and must work to get their children interested at an early age in the wonders of the printed word.
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Remember Afghanistan? Still There, Still A Mess

          The Bush administration has redis- covered Afghanistan, now that the Taliban is resurgent, Pakistan is in tatters and the misbegotten war in Iraq is far from over. Re- member Afghanistan? The war we could have won? Where we could have doomed the Taliban? Bush and his handlers had decided Afghanistan had no good bombing targets and besides, Iraq was home to the guy who wanted to kill Bush's Daddy.
          So the U.S. military largely put Afghanistan on the back burner. Now, with our allies in Afghanistan bristling, Bush decides it's time to put 3,200 more Marines into Afghanistan.
          Canadian, British and Dutch troops are carrying the heavy load in the most dangerous front in that war. The Canadians said that in 2007 their casualties were proportionately larger than the Americans' losses.
          So now, we deploy extra Marines. At the same time, the Army chief of staff says combat tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq will be shortened. So how can we come up with the needed combat troops and simultaneously feed the "surge" in Iraq and simultaneously give our over- burdened troops shorter tours? 
          The Pentagon says it is difficult at best to find the troops for ex- isting and anticipated deployments. We all remember the national anxie- ty to find out that the National Guard did not have enough remaining strength Stateside to handle its disaster duties.

          It is good that Bush has decided to pay some attention to Afghanistan, but "too little, too late" comes to mind. Afghanistan is not so cut and dried as Bush's early disdain would signal. Remember the Soviets' misadventure in Afghanis- tan. Consider the supreme irony that "Charlie Wil- son's War," while it humiliated the Soviets,  also armed combatants with weapons that now are turned against us in George Bush's war.

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Backgrounder:
Charlie Wilson's Legacy

     Charlie Wilson arrived at the Texas House of Representatives, fancying himself a Piney Woods Populist. He was a character: very tall, very egotistic, very good-look- ing and very much interested in skirts.
     He was against the sales tax for all the good reasons (regressive, etc.), but by the time it came to a vote for the first time in ''The Lege," he was for it.
     The first vote failed on a tie. Somebody moved for reconsideration and somebody -- probably not Charlie -- changed his or her vote and the sales tax passed. In Texas, of course, it would have been impossible, even with a Legislature totally dominated by Democrats, to pass anything as progressive as an income tax.
     "Charlie Wilson's War" is a most amusing movie, well done and well acted. The only glaring error was to portray his gorgeous congressional staff all with considerable cleavage showing. One of his congressional aides now says, "I didn't HAVE any cleav- age." But the women were all uniformly beautiful, if not all curvaceous.

     The movie closely matched the book, but both of them should have an epilogue explaining that the shoulder-fired missiles the United States provided for the mujahed-din to kill Soviets are now being used by the mujaheddin to kill Americans. Wilson is not singly to blame for that, of course, but it is a sardonic note to the earlier Afghan War. The book by George Crile has a long epilogue explaining that, but the movie doesn't get into it.

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Standing Tough On Lies

     If the president tells you the sun rises in the East, would you believe him? Not if you have been listening to his utterances.

       CNN                 Now it turns out intelligence had de-         US News termined Iran suspended--long ago--its weapons-related nuclear pro- gram. In fact, the National Intelligence Estimate said, the program was suspended long BEFORE Bush asserted just the opposite.
          Is the president embarrassed at being caught in another mam- moth lie? Not in the least. He stood on his hind legs at the White House and said the report changes nothing. He said Iran is still dangerous and it could restart the program at any time.
          Does this sound much like the "slam dunk" dance surrounding Iraq several years--and thousands of U.S. casualties--ago?
          Now Bush says he wants the United States to be a leader in the fight against global warming. Do you believe him? Of course not.
          He wants to renew some international accords he shredded upon coming to office. Do you believe him? Of course not.
          He says the United States can show the way to peace in the Middle East. Do you believe him? Of  course not.
          It is not enough that we have a stubborn dunce for a president, but a lying stubborn dunce at that.

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Even after the NIE,

Nope. It's Alfred E. Neuman

Why is the following item still current?

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 Diplomacy This Time Or
Dropping Bluster Bombs?

          Iran is rapidly becoming another opening for military blunders by the United States under Bush.
          As Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., told a forum on Iran recently in Alexandria, Va., "It is clear to me that most congressmen know little about Iran." That could be applied to the public at large as well. That shortage of knowledge is raising the temptation to take a military action --surgical strike, air strike, or whatever--to halt any nuclear developments in Iran.

          "Rationality is not guiding our decisions" in the region, Dr. Trita Parsi  said. "We have not even tested diplomacy." Instead, the administration is busy condemning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his bluster, without acknowledging at every step that he "is not the decision-maker" in Iran, Parsi said.
          For his part, Ahmadinejad seems content to behave like Vene-zuela's Hugo Chavez, with insults and taunts to the United States de-signed to improve his standing in his country.
          Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., who organized the forum, said the more the administration rattles sabres in Iran's direction, the stronger Ahma- dinejad becomes.
          People forget that some time ago, Iran was willing to help in the struggle against the Taliban and "wanted to cooperate" with the United States, Parsi said. Parsi, president of the Iranian-American Council, said Bush then gave his "Axis of Evil" speech, not the best way to gather support from Iran. After the misadventure in Iraq and the "Axis of Evil speech, Parsi said, Iranians are all tied up with, "Is the United States going to bomb us? Is the U.S. not going to bomb us?"

           The intelligence available to the United States about Iran "is worse than in Iraq," forum speaker Lawrence Korb, of the Center for American Progress, said. Parsi said the Bush administration "equates (uranium) enrichment with the bomb," when enrichment is several steps and years away from production of a bomb, if that is Iran's intent. "We don't even have hard evidence" that Iran's enrichment plans have a bomb in mind, he said.
           Even after enrichment capability is reached, it could be two to five years before a bomb could be produced, Korb said.
           If the United States tries a military action in Iran, Iran could block the Strait of Hormuz and throw the world's oil market even further into chaos, Korb said. Because of that, and because of the shortcomings of intelligence and the strength of Iran's military, a war with Iran "would be 10 to 100 times more difficult than Iraq" and would require a military draft in the United States, Korb said.
          "Sometimes, patience is the way to go," Korb said. Military ac- tion should be "a last resort," Tierney said.

          He said a poll in Iran, which has a youthful popula-tion, showed that most Iranians are not very happy with Ah-madinejad, most want nuclear power without bombs, and most want peaceful relations with the United States.
          Sounds like a fertile ground for American diplo- macy rather than American military might.

There used to be a satirical song
about Pervez Musharraf in this spot,
but nothing about Pakistan seems
to be funny anymore.