A picture of a winter city street, which could be anywhere, except for the inscription at the bottom. It is peaceful and most of us have experienced something like it, yet knowing that it is Tehran invokes something else. What is it?
Fear. I feel it seeping into my life, out of the television and computer screens into my imagination. I watch people now act more uncertain in some ways than in the aftermath of 9/11. I read essays and columns, blogs and diatribes and some of them say we have a lot more than fear itself to fear. I watched part of CBS's Jericho Wednesday evening and agree with previous commentators that it is a stalking horse designed to inure the American public to the idea of a survivable nuclear war.
Another week of remembering 9/11 has nearly passed, the fiery imolations, the destruction of the WTC, destruction at the Pentagon, and death in the hills of Pennsylvania. There have been some very interesting new perspectives taken on the events and aftermath, and we should understand these to be part of the long process of finding a good place in our memories to file this awful event. Among the more poetic new renderings of 9/11 was that penned by John Carroll, a columnist of the Boston Globe. He concluded his "The end of civilization" article on Monday with this:
...In that destruction, we saw the destruction of the mainspring of meaning and hope -- not the clash of civilization, but the end of it. This was more than a sense of individual mortality, the sure knowledge of a coming death that each one carries. We humans live with that by assuming the open-ended continuation of other lives, our children and their children -- on into the indefinite future. But on 9/11, we saw the future itself as mortal.
In Connecticut Ned Lamont defeated former Democratic VP nominee Senator Joseph Lieberman with most of the press and some of the blogosphere declaring the Democratic primary win as a defeat for Bush's Iraq War policy and for those, like Lieberman, who continue to back it. The question that finally arises from all this rhetoric is what exactly is Bush's Iraq War policy, since the predicating statements about going into Iraq have been found to be fundamentally false? Bush didn't stumble ineptly into this war and occupation; he and his administration got us there deliberately. Why?
If you look at our current political situation from one of the other eleven planets, Ceres, perhaps, that soon-to-be former planetoid between Mars and Jupiter, our situation begins to make some kind of perverse sense. We need the distance and perspective.
I chose Ceres not because it is named for the goddess of cereal or harvest ceremonies, but because it is spherical, orbits the sun, and next week may become one of the major planets of our solar system, despite the fact that it is really only the largest of the planetoids, very much smaller than our moon, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence, if our moon is the size of this letter O. Not really in the same league with moons much less planets, you see.
Cross-posted at My Left Wing and The American Liberalism Project
It is clear that Rove's plan for the Republican campaigns depends on the majority of citizens and voters believing that there is a "clear and present" danger to the United States against which only the Republicans are likely to be successful. Boiled down to its core, that's what the election of 2006 is all about ... or at least that's what's going to dominate the news and the punditry for the next four months. We think it's time be done with Rove, once and for all! The best way to do that before 2008 is to humiliate him at the polls.
One of the Rove strategies is to cry "wolf" at any pretext. The assault on the New York Times, (which we explained a few days ago is a deliberate and transparent set-up inadvertently revealed by the Wall Street Journal in their own editorial!), is but a tactic in this over-all strategy. It is always good to impugn the word of an adversary, even one which has carried your lunch for a while, for in the case of the NYT, it remains "the newspaper of record" and "the news the right loves to hate."
There is an article in the current issue of The Nation by Stephen F. Cohen entitled The New American Cold War. It is a long article with some excellent premises and conclusions. I heartily recommend it, not so much to stimulate activity in Russian Studies in our colleges and universities, but to endorse the idea that Bush/ Cheney/ Rumsfeld/ Rice are playing a very dangerous game with a very sick country.
Peace and Quiet
Four projects for righteous anti-war types.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006, at 11:28 AM ET
The Daily Kos lot received such a Niagara of ridicule for their meeting in Las Vegas (Alexander Cockburn's column in The Nation, available in a slightly different form on the Counterpunch site, making me almost feel sorry for them) that I now feel guilty for piling on. In particular, I feel
....
Yes, I am sure the vamp from Vanity Fair feels quite bad about hanging with Cockburn. One thing is sure, Hitchens has learned swift-boating well enough to hang with Ann herself!
Gore Vidal, returning to the United States after years in Europe was asked how he liked America after all that time. Did it feel different? Did he still care? "How is it, then," the reporter asked, "to live full-time in the United States?"
If you care about America it's dreadful," he said. "If you are making money you don't care.
The sad course of the war and now the occupation of Iraq has pointed out the limitations of a small, high tech, volunteer Army. War and occupation are nothing like life in the Pentagon or across the Potomac River in the fever swamps of the federal government. War and occupation are brutal and nerve-wracking tests of individual human beings in the deliberate act of conquest, of asserting power over and control of other human beings.
The casualties of war and occupation are not only soldiers, their minds and personalities, their limbs, sight, and sustainable health. Of course the casualties on the other side are usually much, much higher: the children, wives, mothers, civilians of all walks of life pay a tremendous toll at the hands of our soldiers. Enemy combatants in a lop-sided war and occupation like that in Iraq are unlikely to survive for very long. In Iraq the death count of combatants is ten to fifty times that of Americans (and the piddling contributions from other nations).
One of the more startling announcements this past week was Tuesday's rather passive comment that PNAC is not answering its telephones. Jim Lobe's article in Inter Press Service was picked up by CommonDreams and had all the effect of the last party whistle blast of New Years Morning.
In Generations and in a later book by the same authors (Strauss and Howe) called The Fourth Turning there is an ominous prediction that the Millennial Generation is going to be called upon, like the GI Generation was called upon sixty-five years ago, to do remarkable and self-effacing things ... nothing less than to save the republic and our civilization. If ever there was a group of people representing the nucleus of our redemption, it assembled in Las Vegas at YK1 and knew itself for what it is--completely remarkable!
The United States Supreme Court ruled this week on a case, Garcetti et al v. Ceballos, involving a public official's right to "blow the whistle" on what the official considered to be wrongful or illegal conduct by his employer, a District Attorney's Office in which he worked as a professional. The case revolved on an inaccurate affidavit used to get a search warrant, the evidence obtained as a result of which was, of course, "legally contaminated" and so, the case should not have been pressed using that evidence, asserted Deputy District Attorney Ceballos in a memorandum to his superordinates in the office. His employer thought otherwise and, seeing Ceballos's communication as a form of mutiny, retaliated against him. The Supreme Court overturned the Circuit Court opinion and ruled that the public employee does not have "whistleblower protection rights" under the First Amendment.
At the beginning of this new century, many thousands of years downstream from the beginnings of civilization, we human beings are still very complex and imperfect. In our public lives our failures and imperfections are often magnified, since the consequences of our actions and words can affect so many.
Over the past two weeks there have been any number of news and opinion articles published that purport to understand the politics of impeaching George W. Bush and his friends. Last Friday's Washington Post contained such an article, written by the good soldier Charles Babbington.
Other articles, to which I will not link because they too are not worth the electrons to paint on your computer screen, have jumped all over Mrs. Pelosi
Last Sunday I wrote about the strange behavior of Dick Cheney in Lithuania. Having a week to think about it and to use the PNAC lens on the situation, the situation seems to resolve down to this. The Iran game is probably not going to work for Dick, Donald, and George. The world is too keyed up and will instantly discern any kind of b.s. that Bush might introduce as a pretext for beginning the Iran war. Blair is on the ropes in the UK and cannot provide even the most meager assistance. In addition, Ahmadinejad has written George a letter basically indicating (between the lines) that he is afraid Bush will strike. It is a clumsy letter, but Ahmadinejad is not necessarily completely sane.
The Cheney belligerence is designed to take the next best route
In his Wednesday "Rant" at Capitol Hill Blue Doug Thompson delivered "the Pox" on "both their houses" again. (It is not worth reading, so I have not linked to it.) This time he slurred Nancy Pelosi, painting her with the same brush he used on a corrupt Democratic Representative from Florida. But, friends, isn't it enough already! Of course we know that there are (also) corrupt Democrats, and of course we depend on a non-corrupt leadership to put them in their place until the voters in their home districts come to their senses.
It is tough to deal with corrupt people because you can never be sure they understand you.
I have been reading a recent extended email conversation among folks around America who are blue-collar or non-supervisory white-collar working people. Some rant, some bitch about personal affronts, some make telling points and then heap trash on their own arguments by making ad hominem remarks or misstating facts and general knowledge. General knowledge about labor is decidedly scarce and when available subject to infinite interpretation, it seems. The world of Labor has voices, though, and these voices are generally moving away from centrist ideas and toward the left away from the Liberal Compromise of the 1950's and 1960's.
If there ever was a Liberal Compromise, it was a mélange of forces in American public life
One of the things my Republican acquaintances constantly tell me is that business, you know, American "free enterprise" business as conducted by Ma & Pa all the way to GMC and Exxon Mobile, is the most progressive and creative part of our civilization. These people believe that business not only organizes the productive forces of the population but has a built-in need to express social and environmental concerns and that these are forged by the marketplace for the benefit of all. The fact that business is, by definition, responsible for the life-style of materialistic consumerism is off-set, they might think, by a durable faith in the Judeo-Christian God. It is a reasonable balance for them, although none of them seem to understand that a durable faith and understanding of the credo might have relevance to the conduct of business.
