Wesley Clark’s campaign has rocketed out to the stratosphere, despite problems that should be crippling like a virtual lack of organization. I guess a lot of uncommitted Democrats were just hoping and waiting for him to say “yes”. Look at him go! He announces and the following week he is leading the pack, at least according to Gallup which did a poll for CNN and USA Today. This poll shows Clark leading the Democratic candidates for president by a large margin: 22% vs. 13% for Dean, his closest competitor. The same poll says that if the election were held today between Bush and Clark that Clark would win 48 percent to 46%. (Bush’s approval rating is down to a record low of 50%, according to this poll.)
It must be about image because it can’t be about substance. So far Wes has been pretty silent on substance beyond vague generalities. He’s actually stumbled a few times, suggesting in Tampa that if he had been in Congress he might have voted for the war with Iraq, then back tracking. I doubt those who were polled heard these little gaffes.
Dean, who was used to being in the limelight, is now back in the pack and playing the challenger role again. Meanwhile on his website he is challenging his supporters to contribute $5M over the next 10 days. It’s an audacious goal. Will he make it? If he doesn’t some will say he is losing momentum, perhaps at the expense of Clark. I did my part and gave Howard another $50.
I’m still trying to understand the Wesley Clark phenomenon. I understand the Dean phenomenon pretty well. Dean articulated a clear antiwar message and put together a savvy internet marketing team. He tapped the energy of those who wanted to change this country and empowered them by putting them together in MeetUps. He has to spend little of his time or attention on fundraising. This helps him concentrate on campaigning. The other candidates, except Clark, are still trying to figure out what hit them. They were operating under the old rules.
I think there is something in the American character that likes guys riding high in the saddle. Bush gave this illusion and perhaps that’s why he won a narrow victory in 2000. Democrats want to look up and admire someone too. Clark gives them the image of someone who is supremely capable and competent. It can be intoxicating. And we Democrats want to win so badly in 2004. Clark looks like the obvious choice, at least at the moment.
But Democrats also need to look rather seriously at this guy. He is a Johnny come lately Democrat. He candidly admits he voted for Reagan and Bush, both times. I certainly like his position on the war and the United Nations, but given that he has mostly worn conservative credentials it makes me wonder how sincere a Democrat and liberal he really is.
Those looking for vast right wing conspiracies might also consider vast Clinton conspiracies. Bill Clinton has let it slip that Wesley Clark is his man. Maybe it’s because he’s from Arkansas. Or maybe since Bill represents the moderate, centrist Democrat he thinks he has outfoxed Howard Dean by picking Wes. Clinton probably perceives Dean as unelectable and too liberal, and found a way to bring his perfect man into the running to ride the growing tide of disenchantment against Bush.
It remains to be seen if the Clark candidacy has wings. He may be smart, but he’s never run for office before and there is a steep learning curve. He is bound to say the wrong things from time to time, and come across as ill prepared. It may not matter if voters, as they seem to be, are more concerned with personality than they are with issues.
But it is way too early to rule out Howard Dean. This is the Democrat with the money and with the organizational skills that the others seem to lack. He can still collect money hand over fist via the Internet simply whenever his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, wants to. He just puts another Louisville Slugger bat on the web site and the money pours in. That money buys a lot of media attention. Moreover Dean, unlike any other candidate, has grass roots. He has people turbo charged, not so much because they think he is the ideal candidate, but because he has them believing they are empowered.
I am impressed far more with Dean’s supporters than I am with Dean himself. Most of the reason I give him money is because he can feed the energy of these people. This is one determined bunch of people, and they are talking to everyone they know. Don’t think they plan to stop with Howard Dean’s election. They want more. Much more. They want to take back the congress and the country. They want to reverse the last four years. They want to drive a stake through the heart of neoconservatism. He has lots of supporters but most of them are 20 or 30 somethings. In other words he has energized the disenfranchised younger voters, got them to care, and got them to organize. And they will vote in much larger numbers in 2004.
This may well turn into a tsunami a year from now. If Clark is the better candidate so be it. But don’t dismiss the Dean phenomenon. It is much more real and it has legs. I’ve caught the wave too. I’ll be going to my first official meet up for Dean on October 1st at the Chantilly, Virginia regional library. I hope to see some of you there. I want to be part of this energy. I want to take back my country.
September 23rd, 2003 at 02:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
one comment
Tags: Democrats, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark
So Wes Clark is finally in the presidential race. He’s been playing coy with the American public for months now about running for president, which is probably a smart political move since it puts him in the public limelight without the expense of having to run a campaign. He sure has sounded like a candidate for the last few months. And I can understand why his running for president would excite a lot of people and perhaps pull in some wavering Republicans big on national security but disgusted with Bush’s foreign policy. Every vote against Bush is needed.
I’m trying to figure out what it is about him that is giving me second thoughts. It is hard for me to articulate. Maybe it’s a gut political instinct. Maybe I’ve invested too much of my hard earned time and money in Howard Dean. Or maybe it’s because I’m leery of focusing on ex-Generals as a way to solve our national problems.
I’ve read a number of articles that are not the least bit complementary about him. He has pissed off a large number of subordinates and people in the military. This isn’t that unusual; really strong and motivated people tend to do this by default. And in my opinion the DoD could use more officers willing to take some chances.
But depending on whom you read, his work as commander of our air war in Kosovo and Serbia was either brilliant or he was dangerously arrogant. Some say he threatened a new world war by forbidding the Russians from landing any more troops at an airfield in that area. One general under his command actually refused his direct orders on the subject. Russia was supposed to be helping out in the war but, of course, it had long existing ties with Serbia. Clark also got permission to use depleted uranium weapons on the battlefield. Such weapons were also used in Iraq, in both of our latest wars there, and are allegedly causes of a lot of problems including polluted water supplies and increased cancers in the region. It’s not easy to clean up after these weapons either.
His military career also went down on a sour note when he was essentially fired as NATO commander three months early.
On the other hand he is a decorated Vietnam era veteran, was awarded the Purple Heart, and has distinguished himself on virtually every assignment he ever had. People who consider him haughty and arrogant will, at the same time, also admit he is about the most brilliant, creative and resourceful man they have ever met. Clark, like Dean was an early and frequent critic of President Bush’s inadvisable war with Iraq. I have to like him for such a bold stand that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.
But he has zero domestic credentials. He has never held elective office. The last time he ran for anything it was for president of his homeroom class, and he lost. One cannot succeed in the military without mastering politics, but he has no credentials as a politician. He has never voted for anything. He himself admits he has a steep learning curve ahead of him as he tries to stake out his positions on domestic policies. Dean has walked this walk as two terms of a governor of a state, and has balanced budgets and made hard decisions. But of course Dean lacks in foreign policy experience what Clark lacks in domestic experience. Perhaps those things even the two out.
Perhaps what worries me the most about him is that if he is elected president he may become yet another arrogant person in the Oval Office convinced of his own infallibility. This could lead the country again down dangerous directions. I don’t get that feeling from Dean, although he certainly can be passionate about those things he believes in. I am also very suspicious of military people as president in general. I don’t agree that success in the military arena translates into success in the political arena.
So I see no reason to rush out and embrace the guy. I do heartily subscribe to the ABB (Anyone But Bush) philosophy. I will even hold my nose and vote for Liebermann if I have to. Bush is a disaster as a president any anyone of our candidates would be an improvement over him.
To the average voter positions don’t matter as much as personality. Gore had no personality that anyone could relate to. Bush didn’t have much but he seemed firm about his convictions and that was enough to win him an election. Clark and Dean are people with large personalities and ego, and they are both articulate and convincing in front of a microphone. None of the other candidates have any stage presence.
I’ll pretend I am from the show me state and try to not let my biases get in the way of independently assessing Wesley Clark. But for now I see no reason to stop devoting my time and energy to electing Howard Dean as our next president.
September 19th, 2003 at 10:47am
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
no comments
Tags: Military, Wesley Clark
As a career federal employee I am keenly aware of the Bush Administration’s outsourcing initiative. In case you don’t know it is, it means the Bush Administration would like to fire federal employees and hire contractors to do their work providing (they say) that they can justify a cost savings.
As you may recall I have discussed this topic before in an entry in January and an entry in May. What is new is that Congress is beginning to pay attention to this subject and it appears they are saying “Enough!” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) managed to attach a rider to a House spending bill that would essentially require the Bush Administration to play by the old rules on outsourcing. What is surprising is that a Republican controlled House, virtually always in line with whatever the Administration proposes, deviated from the Bush’s position on this issue.
There are similar rumblings going on in the Senate too, although nothing like the language in this bill has emerged yet. The Bush Administration promises a veto of the bill if it gets to the President’s desk in its current form.
Naturally I have a vested interest in the outcome of this fight. I don’t believe for a minute that my job is any safer from outsourcing than anyone else’s. I have twenty years in the civil service, have consistently earned top performance ratings and generally take pleasure in my job. It would be nice to be treated with a little more dignity for my long years and hard work, but to the guys in the green eye shades I’m not really a person, just a statistic in a political game that affects real people who are often doing very good work.
Yes, certainly the perception exists that there are lazy and incompetent federal employees out there. And there are. There aren’t nearly as many as critics would like to believe. There are also lazy and incompetent contractors working for Uncle Sam out there. I see them all the time in my organization. In some cases they are goofing off because of the inability of the government to keep them busy. (We federal employees are very multitasked and increasingly we have to delegate rather than micromanage.) In others they simply ARE being lazy and they find checking their Yahoo! Mail far more engaging that the drudgery of doing their assigned tasks. So it cuts both ways. But in general, and I have had SOME experience in private industry, despite my 20 years in the government, I have not seen a correlation that people working in the federal government are any more or less efficient than our private industry brethren. Just like our private industry brethren, we are making do with less … a LOT less. I have seen our own staff shrink year after year. Year after year I take on more and more complicated projects from people who are retiring, transferred or moved on. When a guy in my office transferred to the Social Security Administration I got stuck with two of his projects, at no extra pay of course. His slot vanished so that we could make some arbitrary administrative goal about keeping down the size of government.
The resistance to outsourcing is increasing for a variety of reasons, but rest assured it’s not because federal employees alone are complaining. We’ve been doing that for years and it hasn’t stopped the trend. What it has resulted in are all sorts of gimmicks like early out retirements instead. Outright layoffs are relatively rare, which is better than most private sector employees receive.
But the real reason things are somewhat different now is that Congress is starting to figure it out: the government is about as outsourced as it can get. To use one metaphor, the “low hanging fruit” was picked off long ago. Now the ladders are way up in the apple trees and people are extended out on weak branches trying to grab the apples. In real life this would introduce a lot of risk and take a lot more effort to collect apples. The same thing is happening with outsourcing. It has reached the point where in most cases going through the effort is more costly than any imagined benefits and negates any marginal cost savings that would result.
For example The Washington Post reported that much of the National Parks Budget, which would have otherwise gone to desperately needed improvements to the parks infrastructure, was instead spent this year on numerous and costly outsourcing studies. Can we get rid of a handful of park archeologists and geologists and outsource them instead? We certainly could and there are beltway bandits spending gobs of taxpayer dollars to prove it in official looking reports. But Congress is finally paying some attention to these increasing bizarre outsourcing stories. It just doesn’t make that much sense, unless you are trying to pay off some political contributors, to throw some GS-12 archeologist out of work to save a couple thousand bucks. Certainly park visitors have a more enriching experience when someone who has been around a while can provide education and insight that some fly by night contractor cannot.
Enough already! Yes, if government takes on a new function let’s look carefully to see if it can be done more efficiently by the private sector. But trust me on this: there is not an agency in the federal government that hasn’t been combed from top to bottom numerous times by various administrations trying to find spurious savings on jobs that can be outsourced. The low hanging fruit was picked long, long ago. There may be an agency or two that somehow managed to hide a pocket of people, but they will be the rare exception. There are no more GS-2’s cleaning restrooms, or GS-5’s maintaining motor pools. It’s been years since I’ve seen a federal computer specialist like myself actually program a line of code. Computers have squeezed out almost all the administrative and secretarial staff. Even my office director, a GS-15 who likely makes $100K a year doesn’t qualify for a secretary. He has to type his own darn memos.
This outsourcing madness has reached its logical end. It’s time to stop pretending we are shrinking the cost of government by transferring duties from federal employees to contractors, and to admit the government has grown much, much bigger because politicians have hidden the true size of government in an expanding contractor community. This shell game is over and even Congress is realizing it. Let’s hope the Bush Administration emerges from its ideological hole and stops this nonsense that no longer saves taxpayers any money.
September 15th, 2003 at 09:47am
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
no comments
Tags: Civil Service, Outsourcing
One of the more useful courses I took in college was Economics 101. Surprisingly, I retained a few nuggets of gold from that course I took some 28 years ago. One nugget was the notion of a sunk cost. For those of you who never took economics, or conveniently forgot about sunk costs after taking the exam, the economic dictum basically says that any money you spent on the past is irrelevant if it no longer meets your current needs. The present matters, not the past. Perhaps it is better stated as: don’t continue to pour more money down a black hole.
The tendency to do so anyhow is very human. You can invest years trying to repair a marriage that cannot be repaired because your spouse has no interest in repairing it. Of course you want to believe it can be repaired. You can build your house on a fault line and keep pouring concrete into the foundation to raise it up again. We want to think, “If I spend just a little more to fix something, it will be fixed right this time.” When the expected result doesn’t happen we spend a little more and a little more, or perhaps tinker along the edges, but the solution we seek continues to fail us in the long term. Hope springs eternal.
The key to making these judgments is to understand when an implemented solution is fundamentally flawed. If you can analyze your approach objectively, you can determine when you have a sunk cost and when you don’t. Once you lose your objectivity though the consequences get dangerous and increasingly costly, and endeavors can turn into pure folly.
Those of us old enough to remember Vietnam remember that the Johnson Administration was going to stop communism from spreading in Indochina no matter what the cost. By 1968 we had over half a million soldiers and airmen in Vietnam. There were over 800,000 men in the South Vietnamese Army too. B-52s were blitzing Hanoi and bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail.
The Bush Administration is engaged on the same sort of myopic thinking. Last night President Bush pulled a rabbit out of his hat. Apparently the $75B he asked for earlier isn’t quite enough to do the job needed in Iraq. But now with another $87B we are going to solve the problem. For $87B we can win the war on terrorism in Iraq, rebuild its infrastructure, and bring peace, security and democracy.
I have of course a few questions that are unlikely to be answered for the Bush Administration:
- Why wasn’t $75B enough?
- Since $75B wasn’t enough how can we trust you when you state that $87B will be enough, given your track record?
- If we spend $87B and the situation has not markedly improved, are we going to spend more money?
- If we spend the money and the situation does not markedly improve, do we have an exit strategy? Or is the strategy to spend whatever it takes in money, lives and time to win this war?
- How do we know the money will be spent wisely?
- If this strategy did not work in Vietnam why are you certain that it will win in Iraq? What is the probability of long term success or failure and what assumptions did you use, if any?
- If you are certain this strategy is going to work, why hasn’t it worked in Afghanistan where similar tactics are being used but have not achieved the desired result?
- Can our military and police force in Iraq truly stop a war on terror if a police and interdiction force can’t stop a drug war which has lasted now for over 30 years?
- Has anyone polled the Iraqi people to see if they want a western style democracy?
- If the Iraqi people democratically voted for us to leave immediately, would we withdraw?
- Given the long history of ethnic and religious conflicts in Iraq, what makes you think in the short term we can do a better job of managing it than Saddam did?
I do know this: the $75B allocated already, unless we get out immediately, is a sunk cost. It’s largely been spent and won’t be coming back. I and future generations will be paying the interest on this money that so far has brought no discernable results except for Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. It hasn’t resulted in the find of weapons of mass destruction. It hasn’t kept the lights on or the water flowing reliably for the citizens of Iraq. It hasn’t ensured public safety; indeed the streets of Iraq are now much more dangerous than before we started this war.
We can’t afford to lose this one, Bush is telling us. We could not afford to lose the Cold War either, but we lost in Vietnam and still won the Cold War. Why is withdrawing or losing this skirmish in the war on terrorism mean we’ve lost the war? Couldn’t it also mean that we could use our resources more effectively somewhere else to win the war on terrorism?
In reality the American people don’t care very much about the people of Iraq. It’s not that we wish bad things to happen to them, it’s just that we don’t really believe that what happens there affects our national security. In reality it is not we (the American people) who cannot afford it to lose in Iraq. Rather it is Bush who cannot lose face and admit he made a mistake and waged a war on false pretenses. This $87B means we are essentially hedging a bet to cover Bush’s ass for his miscalculations and mistakes.
In a way, the money is going into the coffers of his reelection campaign. But let’s not fool ourselves. If Iraq was no threat to our national security before we invaded, it probably isn’t one now. It may turn into one by giving terrorists and people who hate our country an easy way to lash out at us. But if we withdraw, that easy target goes away.
A better example of what awaits us can be seen on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For more than 30 years Israel has occupied these Palestinian areas. The more they try to root out terror, the more terror they get back in return. It appears that there is a force greater than the best military in the world. It is the human spirit. Short of being able to read the minds of everyone on the planet, there is no way to tell friend from foe. If sufficient numbers of people are against us then success in Iraq is impossible. In that case we should realize our money was wasted and is a sunk cost. I believe that point has been reached. Any economist worth his salt would say bring our soldiers home.
September 8th, 2003 at 03:15pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
one comment
Tags: Critical Thinking, Economic, Iraq, Money
Dear Mr. President,
I hope it’s okay if I can be informal and call you George. I promise not to call you, for today at least, some of those less flattering names that many have openly called you.
I have for you today, sir, one heaping serving of humble pie for your immediate consumption. It is time for you to come to the table. I know you don’t want to but I know you are heading that direction, however unwillingly, because I read this today online, from Reuters:
With American soldiers dying nearly every day in Iraq the Bush administration decided to negotiate with the United Nations Security Council on a multinational force under U.S. command that would encourage more countries to contribute troops and money.
All I can say is good luck George. You’re going to need a lot of it. You’re not just a day late and a dollar short. You are six months late and at least $50B short. And I fear even after eating this large dish of humble pie, it won’t be enough. You’ve so thoroughly upset our traditional allies that they want to have nothing to do with you or your ideas now. No one will blame Germany and France now if they say “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.”
How could this have happened George? You knew that our invasion of Iraq would be a cakewalk. And that was largely true. The invasion went fine. We rolled over Saddam and his army without too much work. This is, after all, a nation that had suffered over a decade of sanctions. It is a country where outside of Baghdad much of the population lives in mud huts. With the largest and best equipped army in history winning the war was a given under these circumstances. I’m sure you felt a great deal of pride at your sterling leadership when you walked out of that fighter jet and onto the desk of the carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln back in May. You said major combat operations were over. But golly, it seems we’ve lost more soldiers in Iraq since that day than prior to it. This must be very puzzling to you George.
In retrospect are your mistakes clear yet? Probably not, but let me lay them out for you:
- Even the largest military in the free world has its limits. We apparently can occupy but not actually control one country the size of California with the bulk of our Army, which is about 150,000 men and women. Better put those dreams of an American empire on hold.
- The United Nations may be a disagreeable organization to you and what you perceive to be our national interests, but it is not irrelevant. In fact it is the only organization on the planet that can speak for the world. Because it can, it has legitimacy the United States does not. When the UN speaks, people and other countries listen.
- You don’t launch wars based on what you believe the truth to be. Decisions of this magnitude are based on actual facts and credible intelligence. You discounted your own intelligence community because it wasn’t telling you what you wanted to hear, and you gave credence to known Iraqi expatriate flakes with known criminal backgrounds like Ahmad Chalabi.
- They are not either with us or against us. They are with us when it meets their selfish needs, and against us when it doesn’t. Actually most of the time “they” don’t give a damn. The fact that terrorists attacked us on 9/11 is our problem, not the government of Botswana’s.
- If you tell terrorists and insurgents to “bring ‘em on” they are likely to rise to the challenge.
- For some reasons countries behave a lot like people. Perhaps that is because countries consist of people, and their leaders have feelings just like you do. So telling France and Germany effectively to piss off does not build good will; it makes these countries react in more extreme ways than they would otherwise.
- As I told you before diplomacy does not mean “we get things our way or we leave”. It means coming together in good faith and without bad feelings and making necessary compromises so that all parties can find a “win-win” solution. It means going in to negotiations with a genuine willingness to listen and to take the positions of other parties seriously. The United Nations is not irrelevant, George. Rather than proving it irrelevant, you have proved it is needed now more than ever.
- Wars can’t be won on the cheap, and are much harder to win when large and ill advised tax cuts are bleeding the treasury of the money it needs to run the government. Tell us taxpayers again how, in a bad economy, it is more important to rebuild Iraq instead of restoring the cuts to fully fund your “No Child Left Behind” law.
- Maybe contracting out essential services on the battlefield is a terrible idea. Your contracting out nonsense means that our soldiers cannot get spare parts they need to keep their Bradley vehicles running. Haliburton employees apparently aren’t going to risk their lives to get spare to our forces when our army isn’t sufficient to ensure their safety. They are contractors, not soldiers. They cannot be compelled to put their personal safety at risk.
- Maybe it’s not a good idea to open up a second front while the first front is still engaged in heavy action. Maybe we should have demonstrated we could find and kill bin Laden, destroy the Taliban and al Qaeda and bring democracy to Afghanistan BEFORE we rushed into Iraq to topple a despot who was no threat to us.
- In fact, maybe to run a war on terrorism, we should concentrate on those terrorists who are an actual threat to OUR citizens. There is no doubt Saddam terrorized and killed his own people, but he was NO threat to our citizens. Al Qaeda is a demonstrated threat to our national security. Hezbollah is not. Let Israel deal with Hezbollah and if we ever destroy Al Qaeda then let’s then think about those lesser known terrorist organizations with other axes to grind.
- Maybe it’s a good idea to listen seriously to divergent opinions before starting a major war. We were out there holding peace rallies and marching on the Mall. You were in Camp David isolated with your parroting advisors. We were wasting our breath protesting. You had made up your mind months earlier to invade Iraq and wouldn’t let some “misguided” fellow citizens deter you from your own pompous convictions.
George, one would think we have learned these lessons before, such as in Vietnam, and would have learned from them. It’s a shame you couldn’t be bothered to read about the causes of our involvement in that war before you launched this one. Some would contend you were strung out on cocaine at the time, or drunk. I don’t know if that’s true but it’s clear you avoided Vietnam like the plague and your service in the Texas Air National Guard was scattershot at best.
It was my opinion even before this war started that not only would it turn out badly, but it would be your undoing, be bad for your party and put a Democrat in the White House in 2005, if not overturn the Congress. George, when history is written about the decline and fall of the modern Republican Party, you will be its poster child.
I hope you enjoy clearing brush in Crawford, Texas in 2005. You’ll have plenty of time for it.
Sincerely,
Mark
September 3rd, 2003 at 10:50am
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
one comment
Tags: Bush, Iraq, Military, Outsourcing, Terrorism
I’ve been fascinated by a web log I was learned about. Riverbend is the pseudonym of an apparently young Muslim lady living in Baghdad. She was a fairly well paid geek until the war started and like lots of people she is now unemployed. The unemployment rate in Iraq is now 65%! She had a great command of English that picked up, she tells us, from both living abroad and the omnipresent American media that is all over their airwaves. Her web log is riveting reading and well worth your time.
What makes it memorable is it offers an unfiltered view from an Iraqi citizen, posting anonymously, on daily life in her strife torn country. It should be required reading for our pompous policy asses who think they know what is going on but who are really fairly clueless.
Her writing is not only riveting it is excellent narrative. Here’s an excerpt:
April 9 was a day of harried neighbors banging on the door, faces so contorted with anxiety they were almost beyond recognition. “Do we leave? Do we evacuate?! They sound so close…”
It was a day of shocked, horrified relatives, with dilated pupils and trembling lips, dragging duffel bags, spouses and terrified children needing shelter. All of us needing comfort that no one could give.
It was the day we sat at home, bags packed, fully dressed, listening for the tanks or the missile that would send us flying out of the house and into the streets. We sat calculating the risks of traveling from one end of Baghdad to the other or staying in our area and waiting for the inevitable.
It was the day I had to have ‘the talk’ with my mother. The day she sat me down in front of her and began giving me ‘instructions’- just in case.
“In case of what, mom?”
“In case something happens to us…”
“Like what, like maybe we get separated?”
“Fine, ok. Yes. Separated, for example… you know where the money is, you know where the papers are…”
Yes, I know. But it won’t matter if anything happens to you, or dad, or E.
It was a day of stray dogs howling in the streets with fear, flocks of birds flying chaotically in the sky- trying to escape the horrible noises and smoke.
It was a day of charred bodies in blackened vehicles.
It was a grayish-yellow day that burns red in my memory… a day that easily rises to the surface when I contemplate the most horrible days of my life.
That was the ‘National Day’ for me. From most accounts, it was the same for millions of others.
According to Riverbend while no one except the Ba’athists are sorry to see Saddam go, there were still many privileges afforded to women that are now vanishing in Iraq. With the rise of Islamic fundamentalism via Iran rushing to fill in a void, young women like her risk serious injury if they do not go outside escorted, and wearing a very conservative dress. They are not yet in the burkas, thank Allah the most merciful, but they had better be wearing long dark dresses with long sleeves and a hajib or some self appointed arbiter of decency is likely to harass or hurt her. And lord knows she had better not go out alone — the very idea!
Frankly, I am not that good of a prognosticator of future events. But my call on this Iraq war was unfortunately very close to the mark. I fear for Riverbend and all those of moderate and educated outlook in Iraq who see the issues clearly but will be swept aside by forces outside of their control. Her future, once so happy and promising, is bleak. It is highly unlikely the kind of democracy envisioned by George W. Bush will be happening in her country anytime soon or possibly in her lifetime. Most likely she will be forced back into the closet by Islamic fundamentalists and she can look forward to being in some sort of arranged marriage and raising a lot of Islamic brats. A spirit that was born to soar will more likely be snuffed out under the weight of an oppressive future state. But before that happens count on continued faltering efforts to make the country safe and secure, lots of internecine warfare between various factions, crime, death and continued cruelty.
Saddam Hussein was a very bad man. But seeing how Iraq is now, it is much worse than when he was in charge. The bulk of the Iraqi people would probably have been better served by keeping him in power.
September 1st, 2003 at 04:56pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
no comments
Tags: Blogging, Iraq
Goodness, I am morally deficient!
Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.
What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
August 24th, 2003 at 01:35pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
no comments
I think it was 1980 or so when then Gov. Ronald Reagan was just starting his run for the presidency. He was in a candidate’s forum in New Hampshire and was getting dissed by the host who said “Turn Mr. Reagan’s microphone off.” To which a very upset Ronald Reagan lashed out “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!” The crowd went wild with approval. Here was a Republican who could only take civility so far before his true nature came out. And it connected with the voters. It may have been the defining moment of his whole campaign. It cast him in the eyes of Americans as not quite the man they thought they knew. They liked the genuine article.
Actually I was a bit enamored with George Bush (Sr.) at the time. I didn’t vote for Reagan in 1980. But I did admire Reagan’s spunk. Arguably because of it the Republican Party caught fire too and the rise of the neoconservatives began. Like them or hate them, they shook up their fathers’ dour little party, usually out of the majority, took the presidency, captured the Senate in 1984 and in 2002 hit the trifecta: all three branches of government fell under their sway. All, perhaps, sparked by one dissed and somewhat pissed Ronald Reagan whose spirit came through at a defining moment and connected with the average voter who, until then, saw him as just another governor.
The Democratic Party is a lot like the Republican Party in 1980. Joe Lieberman reflects the careful centrist, trying to ride in the wake of Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s successes and hoping that there is something there in the center that can win the Democrats the next presidential election. And as my blog readers know, I think the 2004 presidential election is eminently winnable for the Democratic Party, barring some major changes to the economy and in the war on terrorism that are highly dubious.
To use a metaphor, the Democratic Party is burning the embers and is nearly out. There is nothing the neoconservatives would like more than to kill us altogether. What we Democrats need though is something to spark the embers and feed a little, no a LOT of oxygen into the fire. We need our Ronald Reagan.
And I think we have him in Howard Dean. The DLC and the DNC don’t like to admit it, of course, but Howard Dean scares the hell out of them. He is shaking the Democratic Party from the bottom up. The DNC will, of course, claim to be neutral about who wins the presidential nomination. But of course they aren’t. They want someone who is familiar and who plays well against all the key demographic brackets. Perhaps Kerry will do, although he is very Northeastern. They’d be happy with Lieberman or Edwards.
But these candidates have neither much soul nor passion. They’re just kind of like milquetoast: dry and uninteresting, but really packaged like most Democrats we’ve seen lately. They are not the fancy new labels on the shelf; they are more of the same Geritol. Lieberman is clearly a good debater and could twist Bush around a flagpole in a debate, but Gore did the same thing and it didn’t seem to matter on Election Day.
Howard Dean has soul AND passion. It’s not that his followers are all that passionate about his policies. The liberals running after him at the moment have only a vague notion that the guy has much more in common with Lieberman than he does with the late Paul Wellstone. Dean is basically a centrist. This will become clearer as people understand him. Right now they just see a man not afraid to speak his mind clearly and forcefully and to let the chips fall where they may when he believes he is right, like on the foolishness of our war with Iraq or on balanced budgets. Democrats and, I think in time, the general public will connect to a man with spirit. Bush doesn’t have any.
Go Howard go! Stir us up! Get us to your meet ups. Keep doing unconventional ads like your latest spunky ad against Bush right in the heart of Texas. Tell it like it is! We need to hear not just the truth; we need to feel your passion. We need to be stirred up. We need to put aside politics as usual and find our spirit and our courage that has been nearly whipped out of us by the relentless Republican and neoconservative onslaught. We need to believe we can and will not just win the presidency, but take back the nation and the country in 2004.
That won’t happen if Lieberman or Kerry wins the nomination. They might well win the White House but they won’t change the congress. That will take a lot more. That will take an infectious spirit and leadership that in the current pack only Howard Dean possesses. He is the Democrat’s response to the Ronald Reagan phenomenon. He is oxygen for the Democratic Party. Let’s welcome him for crying out loud and give him wide berth. And let’s keep our fingers crossed that Dean has the savvy to be different but not obnoxious. It’s a fine line but one he has to stay on.
What can you do? Contribute to his campaign! Please! Yes, Republican fat cats can write big checks but Dean is proving he can raise in volume and small contributions what Republicans do in relatively small volume and large sums. Send him $25, $50 or $100. I’ve contributed $100 so far and will continue to do so unless he screws up in a major way. Dean is the real cowboy of this race. Bush has always been a cowboy pretender. If you want spirit and passion in your president, look no further than Howard Dean.
August 5th, 2003 at 08:06pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
one comment
Tags: Democrats, Election 2004, Howard Dean
The gods must be highly amused.
News items: At a press conference yesterday President Bush said in one breath “I am mindful that we’re all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor’s eye when they got a log in their own”. Then in the next breath he said, “I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or the other.” He and his aides are working hard to figure out a way to figure out a way to make sure those pesky, immoral homosexuals stay deep in the closet by outlawing gay marriages permanently through a constitutional amendment.
Not to be outdone, the Catholic Church, an institution rife with homosexual priests, significant numbers of whom are apparently also pedophiles, and whose leadership has spent the last 2000 years detached from anything resembling reality, had the gall to state on the very same day: “Homosexual relationships are immoral and deviant, and only traditional marriages can fulfill God’s plan for the reproduction of the human race.” As if, of course, the point of marriage is to make babies only. If that were the case my wife and I, who are both sterilized, should now be divorced. Clearly our marriage is now a moot point in the eyes of the Catholic Church, not that we were married there. (God forbid!)
Metaphorically I’d like to do the Monty Python fish slapping dance on both the President and the Pope. What can I say? When it comes to government or religion, apparently you have to abandon all common sense or you can’t get in the game.
Let’s examine our constitution which promises equal rights and justice for all. Just in case we didn’t get it from first reading, we subsequently ratified the 14th amendment to the constitution in 1868 known as the “equal protection” amendment which states: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
In short the intent of our constitution is to treat all citizens equally. It obviously hasn’t always worked out that way, but that was the intent. Gradually though, as was clear from the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on state sodomy laws, states trying to discriminate against one class of people are finding they have no constitutional grounds to do so. And this just freaks our politicians out. That’s apparently their mission in life: to provide favors to one class of people at the expense of another class.
I’m trying real hard to understand what is so immoral about homosexuality. In particular I am trying to figure out why the government should care. I can understand why a backward, xenophobic religion like the Catholic Church would be up in arms against gay marriage. This is an institution which sees refusing to evolve as a virtue. No matter how wacky its thinking was 2,000 years ago, it needs to be faithful to it, is what passes for reasoning in this institution. But the government? Why wouldn’t it want to encourage gay marriages or gay unions?
What are the consequences if we have no civil unions or marriages for gays? One might be the myopic belief that by scorning gays for their sexual orientation they will see the light, the good fairy will come down, fill them with some sort of grace, and they will magically convert into happy, healthy heterosexuals. Soon they are living in the burbs like Ward and June Cleaver and raising little Wallies and Beaves. Fortunately, not one in a hundred homophobes believe this crap anymore.
So law by itself apparently can’t make homosexuals become heterosexuals. So homosexuals are going to keep being homosexuals even though it ticks off the anally repressed majority. We “moral” people can pray that all homosexuals will lead lives of celibacy and quiet contemplation instead of acting on their completely natural urges. This is one way for them not to be immoral and thus give us no offense. One could look at the Catholic priesthood as a positive example but apparently all that repression just makes the longing worse and encourages the sorts of deviations we seem to fear the most. Eventually human nature wins out and people couple with the gender or genders that turn them on.
By not allowing gay marriages and civil unions society in effect encourages homosexuals to sleep around. From a public health standpoint that encourages the spread of disease. One would think it would be intuitive that government would want to encourage people to have long term, monogamous and healthy relationships instead of lots of short term, sexual relationships. So I would think gay marriages or gay unions would be seen as a logical and moral response by society to encourage everyone to live in peace and respect the rule of law.
If we are hung up on the word “marriage” let’s purge it from the law. Traditionally marriage has been a religious ritual, not a governmental function. In a way by the government sanctioning marriage, it is violating the separation of church and state. In medieval times you didn’t need the government’s permission to get married, just your local cleric’s permission. Let’s have civil unions if people want the legal protections of marriage. Let religions sanctify these relationships in marriage ceremonies for those with religious inclinations.
Clearly I will never be a politician because this is plain common sense.
August 1st, 2003 at 08:18am
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
3 comments
Tags: Homosexuality, Marriage
So has Bush jumped the shark? Or is shark jump sometime in his future? Or is the guy such Mount Rushmore material like that he’ll never jump the shark?
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “jumping the shark” goes back to the TV show “Happy Days”. It captured the moment when the Fonz (played by Henry Winkler) went from cool to ridiculous. This happened to the Fonz in some episode I never saw when he was apparently in a surfboarding contest and he … you got it.
In retrospect that was the moment he became ludicrous and he was no longer cool. The show didn’t survive too many years after that.
Now it is almost irresistible to pinpoint those “jump the shark” moments in the life of any celebrity. With Richard Nixon it was at Disney World when he proclaimed, “I am not a crook”. (He couldn’t have picked a more perfect place to make this announcement either.) We saw it with Bill Clinton when in a deposition he said, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” (Or perhaps it was “I never had sex with that woman!”)
Admittedly with Bush the call can be a hard one. For example, on July 14th Bush inexplicably said: “The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.” In case you were snoozing earlier this year, inspectors left Iraq not because Saddam kicked them out but because we warned the U.N. that invasion was imminent.
In retrospect I believe it will be shown that Bush jumped the shark on May 1, 2003. On this day he landed on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, somewhere off San Diego, emerging from a fighter aircraft in a flight suit. Pompously parading down the flight deck with a huge banner in the background that said “Mission Accomplished” Bush basically said we had won the war and there was just a little cleaning up to do. You know small things like bring civil order, turn on the lights, prevent looting and instill democratic values. Small stuff apparently. Just a few addendum to the nation’s checklist, hardly worth mentioning really!
Since that time more soldiers have died or were wounded in Iraq that occurred during the war itself. Last week, unfortunately, saw more American soldiers dying in Iraq that any week since Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished”.
The carrier episode, particularly in hindsight, was the defining moment. You can rest assured as this war of attrition drags on and on that you will see this video clip used endlessly against Bush in the general election next year. Michael Dukakis’s moment emerging from the turret of a Massachusetts’s National Guard tank has nothing on this wholly preventable photo op.
Forget about jumping the shark for a moment, talk about jumping the gun! He, or rather his staff should have known better. (Bush clearly isn’t the brightest light bulb in the house.) But I guess they couldn’t help themselves. Why did they do it? Was it to push the president’s momentary popularity up a couple more points? They should have had some inkling it couldn’t be sustained. The whole thing with the flight suit was also way over the top; it invited the criticism it received, particularly when we learned the carrier was within 50 miles of San Diego and was essentially doing a holding pattern just so the Commander in Chief could be seen landing on the carrier in a very hirsute fashion aboard a military fighter jet.
The message was: Bush is no wimp and will get the job done.
Except, of course, the job had just begun. What many of us believed going into the war was that the winning the peace was the hard part, not securing a military victory. With Saddam’s army a third of its size from the Gulf War, and with no allies for Saddam to turn to, and with us being the only superpower, the only question was how quickly we would win.
But it appears that Bush is a lot more wimpish that he let on. One need only look at the dodging he is doing on the bogus claim trumped up in his State of the Union speech wherein he said Iraq had acquired uranium recently from Niger. If nothing else the man has a talent for dodge ball. Let Tenet take the heat, no Condi’s assistant National Security Advisor (although inexplicably don’t make anyone resign), but certainly don’t expect Bush to personally take any responsibility. Clearly the buck passes at his desk. But this charade won’t last much longer because, well, he has jumped the shark. His sagging approval ratings certainly suggest it.
Harry Truman wasn’t afraid to dodge responsibility. Neither, for that matter, did Reagan on Iran-Contra or the mass murder of our marines in Lebanon. Maybe Reagan wasn’t held accountable but he knew to cut his losses and acknowledge responsibility.
Bush hasn’t learned that lesson and he is too pompous and full of himself to admit anything resembling humility. His balloon has burst but he is totally clueless that the air is rushing out.
July 27th, 2003 at 06:07pm
Posted by
Mark |
Politics 2003 |
no comments
Tags: Bush, Iraq, Neoconservatism
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