Political Apartheid

A thumb on the scale of justice?



By all measures, if any administration EVER deserved to be impeached, it's the current one.

Twice presidents have been impeached. Both times, the effort was initiated by Republicans*, and for political reasons. (The impeachment of Andrew Johnson was instigated by his own party. The "Radical Republican" wing disagreed with his policy of reunification and punishment only of the leadership of the confederacy; they wanted to treat the South as an occupied nation, and not not allow southerners to vote or to participate in our democracy.)

At least in Johnson's case, the Republicans pretended that it was about actual malfeasance — a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. In Clinton's case, not so. In order to impeach him, Republicans lowered the bar for impeachment — for Democrats. It's a bit like Bush v. Gore, a Supreme Court decision which was to be applied, but was not to be considered a precedent (read it — that's actually what the decision said). In other words, one set of rules for Democrats, another for Republicans.

We must not dare question the actions of "God's Own Party"!



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* Nixon resigned before he could be impeached. The effort to impeach him was a bipartisan one.

Technical Difficulties

I didn't think it would be this difficult to start posting again!

Ukraine was pretty much a no-go for blogging. In Kyiv, my cousin only had a very slow internet connection--enough to check my mail occasionally, and send the rare letter.

In Yalta, the situation was worse--no internet on site, and the nearest internet cafe an hour's walk and bus ride away. There they had only a very slow connection that went down frequently, along with sweltering heat and no AC. It was a three hour ordeal to check my mail and send the rare letter (and I did so only once).

In L'viv I had no luck finding a functioning internet cafe on the few days I was there (we spent most of the time out of town in small villages). Myrosia and I did finally find a way to connect her computer, but only with a very slow connection......well, you know the drill. And we did so using a card, so telephone fees were charged, and I didn't want to run up their bills.

Sigh.

Someday, Ukraine may become a modern, wired country. Like, say, the USA........

Err, spoke too soon. I got home, and was able to download my mail just once, and then my connection failed. I spent a lot of time, over the course of a week, on the phone with tech support, and fiddled with wires, IP addresses and the like. The connection remained dead. I'm awaiting a new modem, which is supposed to fix my problem. If it does, I'll be back on line sometime next week (with a new ISP), and not have to try to get a bit of blogging done at work. (I tried to blog at my local library, which now has WiFi, and where I can check my mail and surf, but Blogger seemed to be blocked.)

Then I will be able to catch up on my mail, blog, and finally update the UCARE website and post my vacation and camp photos.


Hmmmmmm.......It's been so quiet and relaxing these past few weeks. Maybe I should......

Naw. I'll be back!

Good Night and Good Luck

I finally got to see this George Clooney film a few nights ago. I was at the library, the DVD was available, and my Saturday night plans suddenly gelled.

I had heard good things, but the film was brilliant. The black and white cinematography made it atmospheric, and it was true to its period. I had heard of and read about Edward Murrow in the past, but had never seen but a rare film clip. I had never understood the regard in which he is held by his fellow journalists. Now I do.

He was brave and his words (and their delivery) awesome. He (and his entire team) stood up to McCarthy during the height of the Red Scare, and spoke truth to power. They were instrumental in bringing him down, and stopping the rise of fascism in America. But they paid a price; one committed suicide, unable to cope with the stress, and the others lost their jobs, their show being cancelled.

Speaking the truth is not a painless process.

Last night I happened to tune in to the last five minutes of Keith Olberman's program (he's been on vacation, so I've not been watching regularly). It was the best television I've seen. He was responding to Donald Rumsfeld's pronouncement, a a speech he was giving to a veteran's group, in which he compared anyone who doares disagree with the Bush administration to Nazi appeasers. Keith responded, channelling (and quoting) Edward R. Murrow:




Full Text:

The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarkable speech to the American Legion yesterday demands the deep analysis—and the sober contemplation—of every American.

For it did not merely serve to impugn the morality or intelligence -- indeed, the loyalty -- of the majority of Americans who oppose the transient occupants of the highest offices in the land. Worse, still, it credits those same transient occupants -- our employees -- with a total omniscience; a total omniscience which neither common sense, nor this administration’s track record at home or abroad, suggests they deserve.

Dissent and disagreement with government is the life’s blood of human freedom; and not merely because it is the first roadblock against the kind of tyranny the men Mr. Rumsfeld likes to think of as “his” troops still fight, this very evening, in Iraq.

It is also essential. Because just every once in awhile it is right and the power to which it speaks, is wrong.

In a small irony, however, Mr. Rumsfeld’s speechwriter was adroit in invoking the memory of the appeasement of the Nazis. For in their time, there was another government faced with true peril—with a growing evil—powerful and remorseless.

That government, like Mr. Rumsfeld’s, had a monopoly on all the facts. It, too, had the “secret information.” It alone had the true picture of the threat. It too dismissed and insulted its critics in terms like Mr. Rumsfeld’s -- questioning their intellect and their morality.

That government was England’s, in the 1930’s.

It knew Hitler posed no true threat to Europe, let alone England.

It knew Germany was not re-arming, in violation of all treaties and accords.

It knew that the hard evidence it received, which contradicted its own policies, its own conclusions — its own omniscience -- needed to be dismissed.

The English government of Neville Chamberlain already knew the truth.

Most relevant of all — it “knew” that its staunchest critics needed to be marginalized and isolated. In fact, it portrayed the foremost of them as a blood-thirsty war-monger who was, if not truly senile, at best morally or intellectually confused.

That critic’s name was Winston Churchill.

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History — and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England — have taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty — and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

Thus, did Mr. Rumsfeld make an apt historical analogy.

Excepting the fact, that he has the battery plugged in backwards.

His government, absolute -- and exclusive -- in its knowledge, is not the modern version of the one which stood up to the Nazis.

It is the modern version of the government of Neville Chamberlain.

But back to today’s Omniscient ones.

That, about which Mr. Rumsfeld is confused is simply this: This is a Democracy. Still. Sometimes just barely.

And, as such, all voices count — not just his.

Had he or his president perhaps proven any of their prior claims of omniscience — about Osama Bin Laden’s plans five years ago, about Saddam Hussein’s weapons four years ago, about Hurricane Katrina’s impact one year ago — we all might be able to swallow hard, and accept their “omniscience” as a bearable, even useful recipe, of fact, plus ego.

But, to date, this government has proved little besides its own arrogance, and its own hubris.

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emperor’s New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we — as its citizens— must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note — with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.

And about Mr. Rumsfeld’s other main assertion, that this country faces a “new type of fascism.”

As he was correct to remind us how a government that knew everything could get everything wrong, so too was he right when he said that — though probably not in the way he thought he meant it.

This country faces a new type of fascism — indeed.

Although I presumptuously use his sign-off each night, in feeble tribute, I have utterly no claim to the words of the exemplary journalist Edward R. Murrow.

But never in the trial of a thousand years of writing could I come close to matching how he phrased a warning to an earlier generation of us, at a time when other politicians thought they (and they alone) knew everything, and branded those who disagreed: “confused” or “immoral.”

Thus, forgive me, for reading Murrow, in full:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said, in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

And so good night, and good luck.

Eating Our Young

In Garrison Keillor's latest column for Salon he wrote about teaching college again. He said:

You have to advocate for young people, or else what are we here for?

I keep running into retirees in their mid-50s, free to collect seashells and write bad poetry and shoot video of the Grand Canyon, and goody for them, but they're not the future. My college kids are graduating with a 20-pound ball of debt chained to their ankles. That's not right and you know it.

This country is squashing its young. We're sending them to die in a war we don't believe in anymore. We're cheating them so we can offer tax relief to the rich. And we're stealing from them so that old gaffers like me, who want to live forever, can go in for an MRI if we have a headache.

A society that pays for MRIs for headaches and can't pay teachers a decent wage has made a dreadful choice. But healthcare costs are ballooning, eating away at the economy. The boomers are getting to an age where their knees need replacing and their hearts need a quadruple bypass -- which they feel entitled to -- but our children aren't entitled to a damn thing. Any goombah with a Ph.D. in education can strip away French and German, music, art, dumb down the social sciences, offer Britney Spears instead of Shakespeare, and there is nothing the kid can do except hang out in the library, which is being cut back too.

This week we mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Current Occupant's line "You're doing a heckuva job," which already is in common usage, a joke, a euphemism for utter ineptitude. It's sure to wind up in Bartlett's Quotations, a summation of his occupancy. Annual interest on the national debt now exceeds all government welfare programs combined. We'll be in Iraq for years to come. Hard choices need to be made, and given the situation we're in, I think we must bite the bullet and say no more healthcare for card-carrying Republicans. It just doesn't make sense to invest in longevity for people who don't believe in the future. Let them try faith-based medicine, let them pray for their arteries to be reamed and their hips to be restored, and leave science to the rest of us.

Cutting out healthcare for one-third of the population -- the folks with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who still believe the man is doing a heckuva job -- will save enough money to pay off the national debt, not a bad legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said, let them die and reduce the surplus population. In return, we can offer them a reduction in the estate tax. All in favor, blow your nose.

A hefty dose of Jonathan Swift, with a dollop of Dickens on the side.

I'm all for it. Those who oppose science should not benefit from it. Those who don't support the social safety net should not be covered by it. And those who find government so unpalatable, such an evil construct, should not be allowed to run it.

A new social contract? I'm all for it, but on these lines, not on Bush's (all the money/tax breaks to the rich, all the debt and taxes to the workers).