HERE'S STEVE TUTTLE!

I've saved the best and condensed the rest...

Meanwhile, enough from me. I want to introduce you to my dear friend Steve Tuttle by way of a column he wrote and I am posting below. Steve's one of the savviest, smartest and politically intelligent observers and consultants I've ever known. Here's his contribution to At Wit's End. I'm proud to share it with you all.

WHY ISN'T TUTTLE SYNDICATED?

 

U.S.A. - UTTERLY STUPID AMERICANS

Stephen Tuttle

I used to think we were just a nation of wimps. It's now clear we aren't wimps, we're just stupid. How else can we explain the passive reaction to the latest illegal surveillance revelations?

Seems our charming administration has recorded literally trillions of phone numbers - in fact, if you're an AT&T, Verizon or Sprint customer (their carefully worded denials to the contrary notwithstanding) every call you've made since sometime in late 2001 has been part of that effort.

The President, if one can still call him that, assures us this is not "fishing" or "trolling" but how else can we explain the raw numbers - trillions of phone numbers recorded.

More to the point, why do we continue to believe any of this is for the greater good or will in any way improve our security? This president and the members of his Burning Pants Gang told us Saddam was harboring and working with al-Qaida. That was a lie. They told us Saddam had hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons. That was a lie. They told us they had discovered mobile biological labs. That was a lie. They said Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program. That was a lie. They said he had sought yellow cake uranium from Niger. That was a lie. They said we would be greeted in Baghdad with flowers and candy and be treated as great liberators. That was a lie. They said we had "killed or captured 90%" of the al-Qiada leadership. That was a lie. They said we were not (and never had been) torturing prisoners. That was a lie. They said we were not kidnapping people and sending them to other countries to be tortured. That was a lie. They said they would never intercept domestic phone calls without a warrant. That was a lie. They said they would never undertake mass collection of data for the purpose of "fishing" for terrorists. That was a lie. They said, and still say, we have nothing to fear if we aren't doing anything wrong, and that's the biggest lie of all.

Do you now really believe they're just recording phone numbers and not listening in on any calls, as they claim? If you answered "yes", I'm sorry, but you're an idiot.

That will be the next revelation, the huge number of calls they're already recording. Then we'll learn they're also accessing financial records and medical records and buying more info from data collection outfits. They are building a data base on all of us and that is just not a good thing regardless of the cause they pretend to espouse - security.

The Supreme Court has ruled more than once that we have a constitutional right to privacy that includes, among many other things, the right choose our own birth control methods. In fact, it seems to include everything but actual privacy from our own government's extralegal snooping.

The tattered shreds of the Fourth Amendment that remained after the assaults from the war on drugs have now been removed. It appears we have no right to be free from government surveillance. Arizona Senator Jon Kyl wants to find not what has caused all these failures but to plug the leaks that let us know about them.

And we might not be able to even discuss it that much longer. Our other Senator, John (I Wanna Be President So Bad I Can't Stand It) McCain recently said, right out loud on a nationally syndicated radio show, that he believes "clean government is more important than the First Amendment". I'm not making that up. This is the man who brought us the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law that was going to take corruption right out of campaigns. And hasn't it done a swell job of cleaning up Washington? By silencing advocacy from public interest groups prior to an election, McCain-Feingold had the real effect of making it even more difficult to unseat incumbents and has done nothing to take big money and its various temptations out of the process. Now McCain would like to put even more restrictions on political free speech. Unable to quell the idiocy and corruption that seems to be the norm in Congress these days, McCain has decided to punish us instead of reining in his cohorts. And maybe nobody will notice how utterly dishonest and incompetent is our Washington government.

Our government is not only out of touch with and profoundly apathetic toward issues important to us, they are hell-bent on proving their machismo by systematically destroying the Bill of Rights and eroding our privacy. If we're stupid enough to let it continue, election after election, we'll end up with exactly the government we deserve. And we will have earned the consequences.

AND NOW A FEW WORDS ABOUT EVERYTHING

Stephen Tuttle

For a group our fearless leaders keep describing as "disorganized and on the run", this al-Qaida outfit seems to have plenty of time to make videos. And they've even added production values and gained some weight during their flight for life. Amazing.

I've said it several times before but it apparently needs to be repeated - if you want to know who's doing the gouging when it comes to gasoline prices just follow the money. Yes, the per-barrel price of oil has gone way up and that cost gets passed along and there is little the oil companies can do about that. But if they were just passing along their costs and nothing more their profits would stay the same, wouldn't they? They're experiencing record profits by grossly inflating their refining and delivery charges. They will additionally manipulate the market by timing their "plant maintenance" shutdowns at the least convenient times for consumers.

Nothing Congress or the president is proposing will help bring down prices at the pump. It is pandering of the worst sort, a specialty of our current group of national elected officials.

We didn't go to Iraq to get more oil but it might turn out we went to make more money for oil companies. People have forgotten about those secret meetings between Dick Cheney and the oil executives at the beginning of this administration. I'm no conspiratorialist suggesting all the events since September 10, 2001, were pre-planned. But I'm also guessing it's no coincidence the oil companies' record profits, the highest in the history of humankind, happened on the watch of this president.

Did you know there are now just five major oil companies left? Some experts predict additional mega-mergers will eventually reduce that number to just three. This isn't going to help.

I see where our Latino friends have created their own version of the national anthem. They claim this demonstrates their love and respect for America. Here's a thought - how 'bout if you learn the actual national anthem in the language in which it was written.

If it wasn't for the naked gerrymandering that went on all over the country as Congressional reapportionment took place, the Republicans would be toast in the '06 mid term elections. But Republican legislatures created so many absolutely safe districts it will be more difficult than most pundits believe for Democrats to regain control of either the House or the Senate though it's more likely on the House side.

Julia Kerry's recent death stirred memories. When she and John were married I lived in their home for a few months after John's ill-fated 1972 Congressional bid. She was an honest-to-God, real live one-of-a-kind piece of work, as mercurial a person as I've ever met. Though I hadn't spoken to her for many years, I always thought this was a better place with her in it somewhere and I think we've been diminished by her passing.

Congress' approval rating is now an almost incomprehensible 22%. This seems to be a bipartisan kick in the shins though the Republicans are a bit worse off than the Democrats, the consequence of being in charge of what appears to be a rudderless ship. In 30 years of working in and observing politics I've never seen a Congress more out of touch and removed from the realities of their constituents. They just haven't the vaguest clue on any major issue.

Any day in which The Decider does not make a major decision is a good day.

Now that one of FOX News' loudest mouths is W's Press Secretary, can we please stop the debate about which network is biased? Having the FOX guard the White House should be amusing.

It's no wonder the retired generals are criticizing the Iraq war plans since it's been a dreadful failure on almost every level. It would have been more honorable and effective had they resigned in protest the moment they knew this was going to go badly. The wonder of it is that more current officers aren't bolting. Think about this from a military perspective - our measurement for success is completely dependent on the performance of someone else. As best I can tell, this is the first military action in history to be judged in this way.

We've now spent a third of a trillion dollars in Iraq. For this we've received well nothing. We aren't any safer, we haven't defeated terrorists anywhere (and, in fact, have created entire new generations of the vermin), we haven't freed the Iraqi people, we haven't brought democracy to the region, we haven't protected ourselves from future attacks, we haven't even gotten any damned oil out of the deal - Iraq now produces only half the oil they did before we showed up.

What's especially troubling about our Middle East adventure is that we still fail to acknowledge, at least publicly, the genesis and propagation of the current mess. The real villain is Saudi Arabia, whose oil money allows them to finance madrasses (schools) that teach the most virulently violent form of Islam, Wahabbism. Virtually the entire leadership of most known Middle East terrorist groups was spawned in these schools that openly teach hatred and have now spread their venom throughout the region. The blind rage we see is not genetic, it's taught and the Saudis pay the teachers.

Baseball is a beautiful thing. It just is. On the other hand, Barry Bonds and his ilk are liars and cheats but there is no legitimate way to undo their records. Steroids and human growth hormone weren't even against the rules when Bonds was at his super-human zenith (against the law to use without a prescription as Bonds regularly did but not against the rules of baseball). How can you penalize someone who did not break the rules? Sure, you can indict, prosecute and jail him but he didn't violate the rules. The real shame of it is Bonds was a good teammate and a spectacular player back when he was a lean doubles hitter, base stealer and fielder extraordinaire for the Pirates. He wasn't what you'd call a power guy but he might get you 25 home runs, more in a great year. Now he's just the jerk who cheated himself into the record books.

If the Feds would get the hell out of the way New Orleans would recover at least twice as fast. As it is, even a reasonably small hurricane will devastate the rubble-strewn Gulf Coast.

So Joe Biden now suggests partitioning Iraq into three states. This is the obvious and correct solution to the current mess but comes 2300+ deaths too late. He should have listened to Mr. Witkowski and me when we both first suggested this. Iraq is an artificial construct created on a whim by the British and has never reflected the religious and cultural differences in the area. The Kurds, Shi'a and Sunni all want their own land and that partition is now happening naturally. And, yes, if each received their own state it is likely there will be wars among them, just like there have been for three millennia. But it might help save the next 2300 American lives.

 

"INTELLIGENT DESIGN" NOT SO SMART

Stephen Tuttle

Here's the essential problem with "intelligent design": it presupposes that all human learning has suddenly stopped, that we should declare parts of our existence simply beyond human comprehension and declare them to be the product of some higher power.

You have to think about it for a couple of minutes to let it sink in.

Had human beings accepted this notion from the beginning we'd still be living in caves, eating carrion and wondering what we could do about the cold and the darkness.

That there is knowledge currently beyond our grasp is no great surprise. It has always been so. But we've never before suggested our children should be taught we're too stupid to learn more.

Most of what seems mysterious to us today will be figured out to be replaced by new mysteries. Gaining knowledge has been become an exponential exercise. We've learned more in the last 25 years than in the entire previous history of the world. Computers, one of those mysteries we've figured out, help speed the process. I've no doubt at all that rational, scientific explanations will be found for the amazingly intricate way our bodies work at the cellular level. It is equally likely similar explanations will be proposed and proven to explain the delicate balance of our solar system that allows earth to exist as it does. ("Intelligent design", by the way, has no current explanation for why their perfectly balanced universe includes entire galaxies slamming into each other wreaking unimaginable havoc.)

These discoveries will inevitably lead to new questions we simply can't answer absent new breakthroughs. And the process will repeat itself, a kind of scientific perpetual motion machine.

"Intelligent design" suggests at least some parts of this process are at an end. Well, golly, some of that there stuff is just too complicated for us dummies. What utter nonsense.

To be sure, there will be questions we might never be able to answer that deal with the very essence of existence and life that can only be answered by faith. But to suggest that much of what we do not know today is beyond our ability to understand in the future is nihilistic.

Human beings lived without fire or the wheel, believed the earth was flat, forced poor Galileo to recant his quite correct theory that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around, believed most contagious diseases were caused by what they called "bad air" or miasma, and on and on.

In fact, every single aspect of our lives today is the direct result of us having figured out something we hadn't previously known, usually generations ago.
Most of our healthcare improvements have occurred in just the last half century, modern computer technology in just the last 25 years. We work, live, travel and communicate in a world far beyond what anyone imagined just a century ago.

Yet, "intelligent design" wants us explain away most of what we do not now understand as something simply beyond us. They'd like us to teach our children that.

What the "intelligent design" advocates want us to ignore is that we'll figure out most of their mysteries because both our technology and our brains are still evolving.

Current Commentaries

IDLE THOUGHTS WHILE BUSH IMPLODES

Stephen Tuttle

- The Bushies are trying to expand the death penalty for terrorism suspects, adding another 22 crimes for which death will be the ultimate price. I'm especially fond of the "furthering a terrorist enterprise" offense. It might include anyone who doesn't support the president on anything.
- Bush continues to threaten his first veto for a John McCain amendment to the Iraq war spending bills. Seems McCain would like to stop our practice of torturing prisoners or sending them to countries that can do the torturing for us. The evil triumvirate of Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush believe it would "tie our hands" and reduce the president's options. Well, yes, that's exactly what it is intended to do. We've coerced more than 100 prisoners in our custody to death so it's fair to say the Prez and his Merry Men have abused their freedom and now must be restrained. (If you don't believe torture is a matter of policy for us, find and watch the excellent Frontline program on PBS called "The Torture Question." You will be stunned and appalled.)
- Exxon made $10 billion in pure net profit last quarter. I guess they weren't just passing their costs along to us.
- Speaking of profits, Google is, on paper, now worth $20 billion more than Hewlett-Packard. Google, remarkable as they are, makes absolutely nothing. Look for another tech bubble bursting in the not too distant future.
- Harriet Miers was not qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice. The religious right is not qualified to select a Supreme Court Justice. But they believe they are and have become the only litmus test Bush need pass. The Miers replacement pick will be far, far worse. When did it happen that we started selecting judges based on their fealty to a particular religious belief system?
- There's no longer any doubt as to who the original leak was in the Valerie Plame case it was Dick Cheney. Whether or not he broke any laws should be a secondary concern. What should primarily concern us is the way this White House deals with anyone with whom they disagree - they attempt to destroy their life utterly and totally.
- Remember when we had a Democratic Party? Ah, those were the days. They now watch with undisguised glee as W's reign implodes. But they still have not offered reliable alternatives to Bush's destructive policies and have not even bothered to stand up strongly against this insane war in Iraq. The Republican's now have the chance to turn the '06 midterm elections away from a national referendum on Bush to a series of local elections based on local issues. Pure demographics give them an edge in those kinds of races.
- Wal-Mart has found an excellent way to cut those pesky employee healthcare costs - make their employees part-time and simply take the benefits away from them. What a great company this is. Historians will one day regard them as both an amazing American success story and the single most destructive entity that ever set up shop inside our borders.
- Here's something I'll bet you didn't know: nearly 80% of the Hispanics currently living in Arizona are either native-born, naturalized citizens or are here legally. About 75 % of them speak English as their first language and the majority of our Hispanic families have been here for more than three generations. We do need to stop coddling those who come here illegally (and those who hire them) but we also need to stop painting all Hispanics with the "illegal" brush. Both sides of the illegal immigration argument now just babble incoherently.
- Every member of Congress who voted for the Patriot Act should be impeached. It's an assault on both common sense and most of our civil liberties. Apparently, we so value freedom we had to take it away to protect it.
- Did you read the new leader of Iran's comments? He says Israel should be "wiped off the map". How very helpful.
- The Bushies are already claiming the prez's State of the Union speech, in January, will rescue his flagging popularity. That can only mean it will be filled with WMD-style scare tactics. And it's likely none of it will be true.
- If you're interested in history and truth, I highly recommend two books: 1776 by the incomparable David McCullough and 1491, which will educate you on what this continent was really like before we Europeans came calling.
- Since the 2000 elections, Florida has been hit by a dozen hurricanes. In just the last two years they've been whacked a startling eight times. The religious zanies claimed New Orleans was flooded by an angry god sick of their sinning ways. If that's so, one shudders at his judgment on the people of Florida. Apparently God doesn't like rigged elections anymore than we do. By the way, it's interesting I've not yet heard a single person suggest we shouldn't rebuild Florida as they were so quick to do with New Orleans. Florida has destroyed every bit as much of their protective wetlands, allows folks to put high-rises right on the beach and is 25 times more likely to receive a hurricane hit. In fact, we're making our fourth and fifth insurance payments to some folks in Florida in just the last decade. New Orleans last great flood was nearly 80 years ago. Those who believe the calls to abandon New Orleans were not tinged with at least a bit of racism are simply not paying attention.
- What a great little ball club the White Sox turned out to be. They were the beneficiaries of some startlingly bad umpiring calls and managed to take advantage of every single one. When they were finally the victims of a similarly bad call they simply overcame it. Most impressive. The National League has not won a single World Series game since 2003.
- I defy any one of you in any location to find any professional sports team that sucks as badly as our Arizona Cardinals NFL team. And before you pathetic Cub fans chime in consider this - our Cardinals have won exactly one play-off game since 1947. One. To be fair, in most of those years they didn't qualify to be in any play-off games but when they did they sucked. One play-off victory in 58 years. Now that is championship sucking.

9/6/05

FIDDLING WHILE NEW ORLEANS DROWNED

Stephen Tuttle

We were told no one could possibly have anticipated the attacks of 9/11 because it was an unprecedented event. After the fact we learned there were, in fact, many reports predicting the possibility of exactly such an attack and that we even suspected who some of the players would be.

So we created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which gobbled up FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). We've given them tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. There have been endless meetings and even more reassurances. Every village in the country has held out their hand and received something in the name of the war on terror. We were told that once the mighty terrorists whacked us again (and they do keep telling us it's a matter of when, not if) the perfectly equipped perfectly trained first responders would swoop in and rescue the most endangered and a literal army of Feds would soon follow, restoring us to normalcy almost immediately. All was right with the world.

But, hey, a natural disaster is a different matter. No one could have anticipated something like Katrina.

Uh-huh. Well, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been telling us for a full year this would be an unusually active hurricane season with more storms and larger storms coming ashore here. We've known for about 300 years now that New Orleans is below sea level and for nearly 40 years that it is only protected from a Category 3 hurricane. (The Bush Administration responded to the pleas of the Louisiana Congressional Delegation to provide more funding for levees and floodwalls by cutting the budget of the Army Corps of Engineers, the outfit that would have done the work.) And we saw Katrina coming for about 10 days.

We don't need any after-the-fact revelations on this one. The recipe for this disaster has existed for decades and we watched the bullet heading at us for days. But not to worry - we have the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, lavishly well-funded and ready to help. So we were told.

Now we know the naked truth. There is no plan in the event of a real disaster, natural or man-made. There are no warehouses stocked with water, medical supplies, food or anything else. There are no generators or portable field hospitals. There are no convoys of vehicles of all kinds ready to evacuate anyone from any situation. There are no plans for air-drops of life-saving food and water. There are no pre-determined evacuation routes or evacuee centers. There are no National Guard troops to help restore sanity and safety. There is nothing.

In the event of a real disaster we are on our own for those first few, crucial days. Period.

Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff announced today(I write this on Monday, September 6) that military and National Guard troops had "secured" New Orleans. A full week after Katrina hit, a week of watching a city slowly die as it descended down the levels of Dante's "Inferno", a week of people waving desperately from rooftops, a week of watching people carrying fly-covered babies as they staggered down the interstate to nowhere, a week of drowning and starving and dehydrating, a week of being victimized by subhuman thugs, a week of watching dazed people with nothing left but the rancid clothes on their backs, a week of bloated floating bodies, a week of parents searching for children and children searching for parents, a goddamned week of the most horrific hell any of us could possibly imagine a week and our multi-billion dollar Department of Homeland Security is on the job.

The federal agencies we rely on are simply not going to be there. They will be holding teleconferences deciding whether to wear their DHS or FEMA jackets and hats, as they did last week. When they finally arrive, their primary objective will be to let everyone know they're in charge. They accomplished that in Jefferson Parish by cutting the still-functional local emergency communications lines so they could install their own. They accomplished it up the road in Baton Rouge by kicking evacuees out of a motel, including those in wheel chairs, so they could use the rooms.

The President of the United States will also be missing. On 9/11 he flew to Nebraska and hid in a bunker. During the immediate aftermath of Katrina he flew from Texas to Arizona to give a talk on Medicare and then on to San Diego for a nice photo-op in front of the USS Ronald Reagan. On the third day of the nightmare, he finally decided to curtail his vacation by a day and fly back to Washington but he made sure Air Force One flew real low over the disaster area so he could see. We were all extraordinarily reassured.

Absent changes we should have started making two decades ago, we could not have saved New Orleans or the other Gulf Coast communities now gone. But we could have saved the people. We could have had a plan. We could have been prepared. There could have been contingencies. In fact, we have been told there are plans, we are prepared, and there are contingencies.

They lied. They took billions and billions of dollars and created a lumbering citadel of incompetence that can do nothing. And so people died and are still dying.

Michael Chertoff should be fired. Mike Brown, head of FEMA, should be fired. Any of their underlings involved in this horror should be fired. They could all be replaced by whoever it is that's in charge of the New Orleans Coast Guard operation. They didn't wait for the niceties of protocol or to be officially requested or anything else - they saw people who needed to be rescued and went and did it, immediately and effectively. They made 7000 "saves" in a week in a performance that goes considerably beyond heroic. They were the only federal agency that provided timely and efficient help.

The President's supporters are now spinning so feverishly they must be nearing unconsciousness. But there aren't any secret meetings or papers they can hide this time. We all saw it with our own eyes, live and in grotesque color. There isn't any way Karl Rove can divert our attention from what we've seen. This administration did nothing while people died. They watched and did nothing for nearly a full week while American citizens became refugees.

Today, the Bush Administration accepted a $1 million relief check from Bangladesh. Our disengaged president fiddles while New Orleans drowns and then takes money from the poorest country on the planet to help fix it.
What Ronald Reagan called a "shining city on a hill" George W. Bush has made the panhandler of the world.

We're on our own.

"ORIGINAL INTENT" NOT SO PERFECT

Stephen Tuttle

And so it has begun, the remarkable ugliness inevitably accompanying a Supreme Court nomination. Millions of advertising dollars have already been spent by the crazy people on both sides of every issue. And no one has even been nominated yet.

I'm especially interested in those demanding the president appoint a "strict constructionist", you know, someone who will follow the "original intent" of our Founders rather than be a so-called judicial activist.

It's this "original intent" business that should give many of us pause. We know, absolutely and without question, what the Founders original intent was when it came to the Constitution because they were nice enough to write it down for us. In fact, 39 of these Founders signed off on the Constitution at the end of the Constitutional convention on September 17, 1787. Convention Secretary William Jackson attested.

That was their original intent. But we might want to think about whether or not abiding by that intent is really what we're looking for in a 21st century jurist. The original document permitted slavery, did not allow for the election of Senators by popular vote, restricted voting to white, male, landowners, restricted gun ownership. That was, in fact, the original intent.

The Founders, unlike those today who seem to believe the document is divine, had no illusions about the original constitution. Thomas Jefferson, and much moreso, John Adams, called for some kind of enumeration of rights immediately. Several signatories were equally disconsolate about their final product.

The real genius of those who created the original document is that they did not delude themselves into thinking they had done perfect work. They made provision for changing it. That, too, was their original intent.

So, on December 15, 1791, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were ratified, changing the original intent. By 1805, the original intent had been changed twice more. Then, on December 6, 1865, we finally got around to outlawing slavery, 78 years after the original constitution was ratified. We didn't get around to permitting an income tax until the 16th Amendment in 1913, the same year we changed the original intent regarding Senators, establishing their terms as six years.

It was not the original intent of the Founders that women should vote, and they didn't for an astonishing 133 years after that Constitutional Convention. The 19th Amendment, in 1920, finally gave them their franchise.

We tried to prohibit the manufacture, sale and transportation of liquor in 1919, accomplished almost nothing except helping to create organized crime, then had to repeal that amendment with another in 1933.

In response to Franklin Roosevelt's four-term tenure in office we created the 22nd Amendment in 1951 limiting a President to no more than two four-year terms. The idea that a president could serve indefinitely had troubled many of the Founders, most notably John Adams. He feared, he said, a "royal presidency". Just over 165 years after he said that, the constitution was amended in concert with his views.

Sometimes it takes a really long time to change the original intent. The 27th and last Amendment, which prohibits members of Congress from giving themselves a raise and taking it the same year (an election must take place before the salary increase kicks in) was first proposed in 1789 and finally ratified in 1992.

Our Founders original intent was the Constitution could be changed when necessary. It isn't easy and the process is designed to specifically weed out nonsensical amendments like flag burning and gay marriage. But those who suggest judicial nominees must adhere to "original intent" ignore 218 years of constitutional history, 27 amendments, and the actual intent of our Founders.

Finally, there are also those who wish, they claim, to "return America to God". I heard a politician recently reciting the usual litany of Founders who allegedly wanted this to be a "Christian nation". We've all heard this. Everyone should simply read the U.S. Constitution. It's not very long and it's a fairly easy read. Except in the First Amendment, where the government is prohibited from establishing any religion, religion is barely mentioned at all. There is no mention of God or Christianity in the Preamble or the body of the document. Whatever anyone might have said in another context regarding religion it was specifically left out of the document on which our country's government is based. We should assume that was the Founder's original intent and no one is likely to amend that.

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[A Tuttle Two-Fer!!!]

LESSONS NOT YET LEARNED

Stephen Tuttle

One would think, even hope, that after 40 years we'd have learned how this process works. The most extreme of our Republican friends find something they don't much like, create a fantasy in which they become the persecuted victims of this perceived evil and then never ever stop the drumbeat and wailing.

This is how we got to the point where a clear majority of Americans now believe there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media. Never mind that there is not one shred of empirical evidence to suggest such a bias exists. Never mind that the only evidence we have about media bias points in exactly the opposite direction, the FoxNews internal memos dictating pro-Bush coverage being proof enough. (And ignore, please, Bernard Goldberg's attempts to prove a liberal bias. He was able to establish a pro-corporate bias, but nothing remotely liberal.)

Since Vice President Spiro Agnew famously railed against "nattering nabobs of negativity", extreme Republicans haven't let up for one day in their rancid claims of liberal bias. Now nearly everyone accepts that bit of urban myth as gospel. An objective fourth estate is now mostly ignored by folks who would rather listen to some screaming-head on a cable talk show than read a decent newspaper. Rather than going to the media to seek information in order to make an informed opinion, we now go to the media to confirm our already held opinions. So much tidier that way.

This is instructive today because the same kind of Republicans are now undertaking the same kind of campaign toward the federal judiciary. They're already about halfway home as they rant on about "judicial activists" and "out-of-control liberal judges". We already see way too many members of the public nodding their heads knowingly when politicians, and more often preachers, spout this vile nonsense.

Again, the actual facts tell a different story. A stunning 71% of the current federal bench has been appointed by Republican presidents. How did they suddenly become radical activists? And since they hold a majority on every single appellate circuit except the 9th, I guess they must be part of that group of judicial activists who now comprise a majority of the bench.

Ask those who complain about the judiciary to which judges and decisions they refer. They will bring up Roe v. Wade, of course, and make some comments about prayer in school, flag burning, the Ten Commandments and gay marriage. That's it, the sum total of their judicial angst.

Reality has simply passed them by. They are oblivious to a United States which operates secret courts right here on our soil and operates secret prisons around the world. They blithely ignore a federal judiciary that has slashed away most of our Fourth Amendment protections (searches and electronic surveillance, including on our computers, are now routinely done without warrants), an ugly attack on the First Amendment (citizens legally residing in this country have been detained for writing pro al Qaeda gibberish on their web sites) and a host of other horrors.

If there is a liberal tint to the judiciary it's awfully hard to see. But that doesn't matter. Extreme Republicans dream of a judiciary that bows in fealty to their political whims. And they're doing something about it.

Republicans couldn't exercise much power over the press so they undertook a four decades long verbal guerrilla war they won. We now either deride or ignore the mainstream media. But they can control the judiciary and they've quietly created a simple litmus test for any prospective judges - either agree with everything we stand for or find yourself on the outside looking in.

We silently allowed the neutering of the media. The next year or so will tell us if we're going to do the same with the judiciary.

NIXON WAS A CROOK

Stephen Tuttle

Some of you who read this may not have been around or are too young to remember Watergate. You've probably heard a lot of nonsense, especially recently about who did what back then. Some Republicans and old Nixon staffers have been much in the news, again, bemoaning the raw deal their beloved Tricky Dick Nixon received and how it was all much ado about nothing.

More than thirty years later let's be crystal clear about this: President Richard Nixon engaged in felonious criminal conduct and plenty of it. This isn't a matter of opinion or bias. Thanks to Nixon's own hubris he recorded most all of his White House conversations. You can listen to those tapes at the National Archives in Virginia.

You will learn that "Watergate" was much more than a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters. It was part of a large enterprise of break-ins and dirty tricks, most of them patently illegal, of which President Nixon had nearly full knowledge. The irony is that Nixon's team undertook these bizarre activities as part of a re-election campaign that had no chance whatsoever of losing. Nixon quite literally could have run no campaign at all and still defeated the hapless George McGovern. But Nixon, a paranoid control freak, wanted to make absolutely sure.

The real problems began when the Watergate "burglars" (most believe they weren't there to burgle but to remove bugging devices they had previously planted) were caught. There is no doubt whatsoever that Nixon was actively involved in orchestrating what came to be known as "the cover-up". On the tapes you can hear Nixon authorizing the payment of bribes, obstructing justice and, most frighteningly, using the CIA to stop an FBI investigation of Watergate by claiming national security concerns were at stake. Put more bluntly, Nixon tried to take over the government in a secret coup. He tried to fire the Special Prosecutor who had been assigned to investigate, fired those who refused to fire the Special Prosecutor and finally found someone, none other than Robert Bork, who would serve as his hatchet man. When it was discovered there was a taping system in the White House offices, Nixon's team at first refused to release any, then released what they called "transcripts", a written version of the tapes. When the Supreme Court finally ruled unanimously that Nixon had to release the actual tapes it was discovered the "transcripts" were fiction, a nifty package of self-serving fantasies. The racism, anti-semitism and overtly criminal conduct revealed on the real tapes marked the beginning of the end for Nixon.

That's where Mark Felt comes in. As you now know, he was the famous Deep Throat, the previously unnamed source who provided Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward with tips and information that kept the investigation going.

Felt, then the #2 man at the FBI, was in a bit of a pickle. He wanted to be the new Director of the FBI and was passed over. And he knew the Nixon White House was so corrupt it had tinged the Bureau he so loved. What to do?

Revisionist critics, most notably some of the very criminals who perpetrated the felonies in the first place, now criticize Felt as a traitor and a "snake", a company man who went outside the company to the media. He should have gone to his superiors, the critics charge, or gone to a grand jury. (Getting morality lectures from the likes of convicted criminals Charles Colson and G. Gordon Liddy is roughly akin to get menu advice from Idi Amin.)

Well, one doesn't just "go to the grand jury" as if it were like walking into a Starbucks so let's examine the other possibilities.

He could have gone to his boss at the FBI, Acting Director L. Patrick Gray. But Gray had already been compromised and the CIA had stopped his investigations. Just to make sure no one else could follow through, Gray incomprehensibly tossed a box or boxes of materials from the Watergate investigation into the Potomac River. So going to Gray wasn't a good option. He could have gone to the Attorney General John Mitchell. Of course, Mitchell was an important part of the criminal conspiracy, resigned in shame, was arrested, tried, convicted and went to prison. Maybe Felt should have gone to Nixon's Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. But Haldeman, too, resigned, was tried, convicted and sent to prison. Same story with Nixon's chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman. And with Nixon's White House lawyer, John Dean. And with most other White House aides of any substance and the entire upper echelon of the Nixon reelection campaign.

The problem faced by Mark Felt was that he had no place to go within the normal chain of command that was not a part of the existing criminal conspiracy or had not already been corrupted by it. So he chose to talk to a young reporter he knew and trusted. The result was the uncovering of a vast criminal enterprise and a constitutional crisis for our country that led to the downfall of Richard Nixon and his merry tricksters.

That has led to many on the left declaring Felt to be a hero. But before we beatify this 91-year-old man, we should be a little careful. Felt's decision to become a source during the Watergate mess was clearly courageous and honorable. He risked his career and perhaps his physical well being to do what he did. But Mark Felt was also a loyalists to and apologist for the many indiscretions and extra-legal activities of longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. And Felt himself was ultimately convicted of illegal activities, including wiretapping, when he led investigations against a group of domestic mad bombers who called themselves the Weather Underground.

Watergate was not a minor scandal and Richard Nixon and his cronies were guilty of major crimes. (There is no question Nixon would have been impeached by the House and convicted and ousted by the Senate. It's likely he would have been prosecuted and convicted, like everyone else involved had he not been pardoned by Gerald Ford.) Mark Felt's information led in large part to a cleansing of the Nixon White House and for that the country should be grateful. Perhaps we should leave it at that.

Back to Commentaries

SAME OLD SAME OLD ONLY WORSE

Stephen Tuttle

I've been off on an unexpected hiatus of sorts and thought I'd check back in with reality. Bad idea. Very, very bad idea.

Let's review, shall we?

Things are going really swell in Iraq. It's a regular love fest over there between the Iraqi people and our troops. Seriously. Oh, sure, our death toll is now over 1,600 and we have nearly 8,000 seriously wounded now back home and wondering if the VA will ever give them treatment. It's been a bit worse for the Iraqis who have suffered at least 1000 deaths in just the last month and no one bothers to keep track of the injured but I think we can safely assume there are plenty.

We keep claiming to capture or kill al Qaeda leaders and "insurgent" leaders, always quick to point out some part of the bad guys' operations have been "crippled". Yet the bombings just keep going on and on.

Perhaps it's time to start calling this conflict what it really is ­ the Iraq civil war. And since we're on neither side it seems unlikely we'll emerge victorious.

Unfortunately, it may be that the killing and maiming aren't even the worst of it. We've sold our souls in the name of national security. Abu Ghraib, horrific as the abuses there were, was just the tiniest tip of a very large ice berg.

There is now mounting evidence of systemic torture at Guantanamo Bay and U.S. controlled prisons in Afghanistan. Additionally, we now know we operate prisons secretly throughout the region. Our "rendition" program allows us to kidnap people off the streets in one country and ship them to another, like Jordan or Egypt, where the rules for interrogating prisoners are somewhat less restrictive. In fact, Amnesty International has used the phrase "torture chambers" when describing incarceration in either country. Never mind that these "suspects" receive no legal hearings, have no legal representation, no trial, no verdict, no nothing. What eventually becomes of them is a mystery.

Meanwhile, one of our brave young men in harm's way took it upon himself to shoot and kill four unarmed, wounded "insurgents" after a fire-fight in Fallujah. We know this for a fact because an imbedded NBC cameraman videotaped the entire thing. We got to hear our soldier shouting, "He's (expletive deleted) pretending to be dead." Well, yes, he probably was and we found out why a second or two later when our hero shot him in the head then repeated the process with three more unarmed wounded men, executed for the unpardonable sin of breathing. But the military refused to hold him accountable, saying they didn't want "second guess" a combat decision. The soldier himself said it was self-defense, since the insurgents had been booby trapping dead bodies. So to prevent that, one supposes, he decided to create as many more bodies as possible.

Had that treatment been given to wounded Americans we would have been rightfully outraged. When we commit such atrocities we don't even think about it. We've actually somehow come to the point where it is acceptable policy for our soldiers to shoot unarmed, wounded adversaries.

Trouble at Home

Not that things are much better at home.

The announcement by a bankruptcy court that it was quite all right for United Airlines to default on its employee pension plan was a harbinger of things to come. The promises made to workers 25 or 30 years ago are now meaningless. United's workers and former workers lost $6.6 billion in promised benefits. They are now at the mercy of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Trust, a government outfit created to protect workers whose pensions have been looted by bankrupt companies. (Let's be honest, here ­ the pension funds didn't disappear by themselves. At United, the pension funds were "reallocated" by management.) Unfortunately, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Trust has a couple of problems. One, it limits pension benenfits to $3,900 a month. That sounds like a pretty good retirement to a lot of us but if you deserved and were expecting more, it's not so great. Two, and this is quite a bit worse, the PBGT has a $23 billion shortfall itself and absent government help, it will have to reduce the pensions for which it is now responsible, those of nearly 200 bankrupt companies, even more.

And United will likely be just the first. All of the so-called major airlines are in deep financial trouble, teetering toward bankruptcy if not already there. General Motors, the mother lode of all private sector pension plans, is hemorrhaging red ink at volcanic rates.

It's not as if these trends should be a big surprise. Just 20 years ago nearly 40% of all American workers were covered by some kind of company pension plan. That's now down to 20% and there's 4every reason to believe company-sponsored pensions will disappear altogether in the next 20 years except for those negotiated by top executives and those mandated by federal law.

These are not good times for average workers.

We're repeatedly told the economy is on the rebound and happy days are, indeed, here again. Those declarations are absolutely right if you happen to be at the top of the economic food chain. Top management has made record salary and stock gains in the last year. Even the top dog at United Airlines, which is gushing red ink at the absolutely staggering rate of $800 million every month, got himself a nice little raise up to about $1.2 million per year and his $4.5 million pension package, unlike that of thousands of workers who just got screwed, is guaranteed and the money is already in the bank.

If you're like the rest of us, things are not quite as good. Or close to as good. Out of control fuel prices hit middle and lower income households the hardest because it inflates the price of many other necessities, like food. The boom in housing costs has left a lot of people behind, unable to afford to upgrade their current home or buy any home at all. Healthcare costs continue to rise at irrational rates and healthcare providers continue to jack up rates, reduce coverages and make co-pays so high they are closer to deductibles. Jobs lost to lay-offs and outsourcing are now so commonplace they barely rate a mention in our newspapers. Our own lack of self-control that has led to crippling personal debt isn't helping, either.

The middle class is taking a beating and since it is their productivity on which our economy depends, this is a very bad thing. The European Union is a step ahead of us in converting to new technologies and new realities and it's reflected in the strength of their Euro.

So, we've got ourselves a paralyzing war draining away our treasury and crippling and killing too many of our young men and women. It's a war in which we accomplished all of our objectives and then over-reached, refused to leave and now find ourselves in the middle of a civil war we no longer control. Ironically enough, we are now the collateral damage in Iraq.

And we've got ourselves an economy that rewards those at the top by penalizing those at the bottom and in the middle. In the bunko world this would be known as a Ponzi scheme albeit a really, really big one. Nevertheless, the collapse is still inevitable. We're watching the first crumbling right now.

Maybe I should have stayed on hiatus

 

 

THE MORNING AFTER

Stephen Tuttle

It is the morning of Wednesday, November 3, 2004. Despite outrageous voting irregularities in Florida, New Mexico, Arizona and, most notably Ohio, it appears George W. Bush has been reelected.

While most of America still sleeps, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney are already hard at work. The second term agenda ­ the real agenda ­ is taking shape.

Rove has already prepared a list of a dozen potential Supreme Court nominees. They have been fully vetted and despite W's assertions to the contrary during the campaign each has passed the most important litmus test for nomination; they are all vehemently opposed to Roe v. Wade. Those on the list to fill lower federal appellate court openings share similar if not identical beliefs.

The architects of the Bush makeover of the courts are confident this is where they will leave their greatest legacy; this will be the administration that overturns Roe v. Wade.

But the courts are just the beginning. The Bush team is ecstatic they can now begin to carry out their policies as they see fit, without fear of reelection.

The strategy is simple: the worse things get in the next year the better they will be able to carry out their policy plans the year after. If the price of oil should remain preposterously high, for example, it will justify rollbacks in environmental protections to expand drilling and mining. If the outlook for Social Security solvency remains in doubt it will justify the opening steps to privatization. Continued extraordinary budget deficits, ultimately, will justify Draconian slashing of social programs to "save the economy". The same deficits will also justify additional tax breaks to corporations and extremely high income earners to "stimulate the economy". The looming implosion of our healthcare system will justify new efforts to privatize Medicare. Stagnant corporate earnings will justify drastic reductions or outright elimination of employee benefits including retirement plans.

Internationally, the war in Iraq will be both a useful diversion from and justification for the economic policy changes soon to take place at home. The continued use of fear as a political tool has always been an important part of their plans. Iraq and terrorism have been assets in that regard. Having purposefully allowed both North Korea and Iran to become nuclear powers will justify further military excursions into non-Christian Middle Eastern countries in order to prevent them from following the Iran/North Korea example.

But with all that in the plans and on the table that's not what the Bush team is discussing this morning. No, this morning they are discussing how they can use the Patriot Act to crack down on non-Christian activist churches.

The central underlying reason for going to Iraq, after all, was to bring Christian values to the heathens and sinners in that part of the world. And not just any Christian values but evangelical, born-again fundamentalist Christian values. And if we are risking lives for these values overseas then surely we can do no less here at home.

It is clear that Islam, among the fastest growing religions in the country, is a threat. Islam, the Bush team knows, is a vile and violent religion no matter what anybody says. Plus, they are all potential terrorists who might blow us up. It is clear we will have to infiltrate their mosques, bug their meetings and intercept their phone calls so we can expose their treachery.

Same thing for different reason with Judaism. They have too much power in this country, power that far outstrips their population. And Israel is always causing some kind of problem because of their intransigence and self-righteousness, which is unbecoming for a non-Christian. So we'll have to use the Patriot Act to infiltrate their synagogues, tap their phones and bug their homes.

The campaign strategy had worked perfectly. Just campaign openly for us, the Bush team told church leaders, and we will implement your agenda. Don't worry that campaigning openly from the pulpit and handing out endorsement flyers is illegal, the Bushies said, because it isn't immoral if we are on a righteous path.

And so the reverends rained hellfire and brimstone down on John Kerry supporters and church members voted for Bush with ovine fealty. Post-election analysis will determine that George W. Bush won the election right there in the churches. His hardcore, Bible-thumping supporters are poised to reap the rewards of their support.

It is the morning of Wednesday, November 3, 2004. The domestic Crusade has begun.

 

WHILE WE WEREN'T PAYING ATTENTION

Stephen Tuttle

Had enough? Have we just about wrapped up our in-depth analyses of the 70s? Have we decided whether or not John Kerry completed his military service honorably and whether or not George W. Bush completed his at all?

I suppose it was an interesting diversion. But while we were concentrating on activities three decades old the present circumstances weren't exactly improving, either here at home or on the road.

Iraq is a mess. There just isn't any other way to describe it. While the president and his minions keep telling us it's an "improving" situation, his own intelligence community is telling him "instability" is the best result we can hope for among their horrific options. That doesn't sound like an improvement at all. Nor does the reality on the ground look like an improvement. Iraqi civilians have just endured their worst month since the cessation of "major combat operations" and Americans are still dying at the rate of more than two per day. Delivery of basic services like water and power is still problematic and Baghdad has no functioning sewage or water treatment facilities. Oil production is now less than 25% of what it was before the war.

Saddam might be gone but we've created a power vacuum of anarchy into which the disgruntled and unemployed and every terrorist and terrorist wannabe in the entire region is now rushing to fill. The so-called insurgents are becoming more numerous, better organized and more deadly. Coordinated, simultaneous attacks in several locations, a new phenomenon, are not a good sign. The recent assassination of two Sunni clerics takes the country one step closer to the internecine civil, religious and tribal battles that are inevitable.

Having chosen the wrong path in Iraq, W has decided to just keep blindly charging ahead in the hopes he'll stumble across something good. The trouble is we are not in control and never have been. One would have assumed that even the most thick-headed Bushies would have learned something from our experiences in and around Najaf. We attacked, we laid siege, we bombarded for more than two weeks and despite two dozen dead Americans and who knows how many dead Iraqis, our recalcitrant cleric friend would neither surrender nor command his militia to lay down their arms. On the other hand, it took the Grand Ayatollah Sistani exactly one afternoon to accomplish exactly that. Still, we don't seem to understand who is now in control and who will still be in control regardless of the outcome of elections in January.

While we're wasting our treasury and the lives of our young men and women in Iraq, other wings of the Axis of Evil have been very busy, indeed. Iran is now processing a whopping 35 tons of uranium, more than enough for their nuclear power needs and some dandy warheads. North Korea may be even farther along than the Iranians and they have the advantage of an already proven delivery system. We attacked the weakest and least threatening of the Bush Axis while allowing the most dangerous to grow even stronger.

As a little Bonus of Negativity, Vladimir Putin has put the brakes on
Russia's movement toward real democracy and civil liberties by restricting freedom of the press, limiting direct elections and giving himself significantly greater autocratic powers.

Things aren't really that much better here at home, either. We're spending tens of billions of dollars on homeland security but Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Attorney General John Ashcroft keep telling us we're going to get blown up anyway and it's only a matter of time. Our ports and borders are a sieve and we have little idea of what's coming into the former or across the latter. Worse still, more than half of the fire fighters and police officers we expect to be first responders in the event of biological or chemical attacks have not been properly trained or equipped for either. The men and women we rely on to help us first will instead be among the very first casualties.

Some of the experts think we're having a dandy economic recovery but as I heard one Arizona "expert" describe it, the "employment sector has not yet caught up". This is apparently the new economic success paradigm ­ recovery without jobs. In truth, the recovery isn't being much felt at the street level where both personal and business bankruptcy filings have reached stratospheric levels, fewer Americans are employed today than when W took office, 45 million Americans are now without any health insurance of any kind, and we are still running up absolutely staggering deficits, by far the largest in history. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin says that at the current rate we will experience an "economic Armageddon" in about five years. That doesn't sound very much like a robust recovery. It gets even worse. The Bush Medicare "reform" package, sold to Congress with a $330 million price tag is already up to $526 billion and growing. And interest rates are creeping up.

But the Bushies aren't worried. They are resolute and optimistic. "Hopeful" I believe is the current focus group generated word du jour. It's no wonder. Look at how they handled the August employment figures. They had predicted 200,000 new jobs. The actual total was 144,000, which they said "exceeded expectations". With that impeccable logic it's clear to see why the White House thinks things are going pretty darned well everywhere.

Let's try not to get distracted again. There is no sense in rehashing a war we lost more than 30 years ago. Especially when we have several underway, at home and abroad, we're losing right now.

WELL PLAYED, BOYS

Stephen Tuttle

Terrorism is an old political weapon. It has been a staple of those wanting out from under the heel of their various oppressors. American revolutionaries employed tactics that could be considered terrorism by today's standards. The soon-to-be Israelis chased the Brits out of their land by blowing up the King David Hotel in the 1940s. But it's very unusual that those on the receiving end of terrorist attacks manage to use it to their political advantage.

That's where W and his friends have made unusual strides forward. They've managed to turn their own incompetence into a real political asset.

The latest terrorism warnings are an excellent case in point. We're now so darned good at this entire intelligence and data gathering thing we've actually issued warnings for specific buildings about to be targeted. It's almost miraculous.

One supposes it is just a coincidence the information on which these warnings were based was four years old. (As David Letterman famously said, "I can hardly wait until 2008 to find out what's happening now.") And it is, I'm sure, just a coincidence the announcement occurred just two days after the conclusion of the Democratic Convention. The media skipped on by this quite convinced the Bush team would never so cynically use a terror alert upgrade for purely political reasons. Of course not.

But the Bushies are expert at exactly this kind of diversion, a political variety of the old bait and switch.

Remember Dick Cheney telling Senator Patrick Leahy to "Go fuck yourself"? Sure you do. But I'll bet you don't remember what Leahy wanted to talk to Cheney about nor what the Senate was discussing at the time.

More recently a group of GOP recruited and maybe paid Vietnam swift boat captains trashed Kerry's service in a television commercial. (It's not yet clear if the participants in this hatchet job were paid or not.)

So, we're no longer discussing whether or not Bush completed his military service at all, we're debating the quality of Kerry's well-documented service. Pretty damned clever, huh?

I don't know if John Kerry was a great swift boat commander or not. I do know he actually showed up for duty, saved a couple lives, received wounds himself, was recognized and rewarded for his service. That's what we know for sure. We don't know if Bush even showed up for duty, don't know how long he served or even where. But now we debate the Kerry record, not the Bush non-record.

Same thing with the alleged Kerry flip-flops. The Burning Pants Gang has been spewing this lie for so long it's now taken as fact by an ovine voting public eagerly awaiting their opportunity to be led by the nose.

But the Bush flip-flops, about which we hear almost nothing, are nearly legion. He didn't want U.N. involvement in our nifty little war but now he does. He specifically excluded NATO from the original war planning but now he wants their help. He opposed the creation of the Homeland Security Department, now takes credit for its existence. He opposed the independent 9/11 Commission and now takes credit for it. He refused to allow National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to testify before the commission on constitutional grounds but now brags about how cooperative he was to allow her to testify. He was adamant that neither he nor Vice President Dick Cheney would testify before the commission for the same mysterious constitutional reasons, then acquiesced as long as the two of them could hold hands during the session.

And we've almost completely forgotten about the monumental Bush flip-flops that got us into this mess in the first place. Remember the Iraqis "active" nuclear weapons program? That morphed into the manufacture and stockpiling of "hundreds of tons" of non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction. We even had pictures. When the weapons were never discovered, they morphed into the "means and intent" to create WMD. Absent even that, the Bushies told us Saddam was either an "imminent threat" or a "clear and growing danger" to our national security. When they couldn't even make that stick it finally came down to the notion that Saddam was a really bad guy and we needed to get rid of him.

Oddly, no one seems to be talking about these flip-flops or the dozens of others committed by Bush in his short tenure in office.

What we don't hear from the Bush camp is any new plan that would help us any way on any issue. No plans in Iraq and no plans here at home. Other than to wait until the Kerry campaign actually focuses our attention on the incredibly shabby job being done by the Bushies. Then they spring into action to make sure we quickly concentrate on something else, like whether or not John Kerry actually deserved the Silver Star he received for saving a life while under enemy fire.

Nor are we likely to hear any explanation from the Bush camp as to why their "roaring" economy managed to produce a pathetic 30,000 new jobs in July. (Bush will become the first president since Herbert Hoover to realize a net loss in American jobs during his first term in office ­ even Jimmy Carter's presidency of "malaise" fame produced real job growth.) Or why those jobs, on average, provide only about 70% of the income of the jobs lost. Or why inflation continues to gnaw away at our buying power. Or why corporate CEOs continue to inflate their own salaries while they export American jobs elsewhere. Or anything else of substance. Not as long as they can drag both the media and voters around by the nose discussing the relative importance of John Kerry's military service or the wealth or comments of his wife.

On the other hand it's not all bad. The Bush Team will, one day, be able to brag they ran the most duplicitous and cynical campaign in American history. I guess that's something.

THE JOHN KERRY I KNEW

Stephen Tuttle

We've now arrived at that most annoying of all political exercises, the national convention. This quadrennial excuse for egregious partisan excesses used to be fun because the winners weren't predetermined and there was at least some minimal tension as to who the nominee would be.

No more. Our conventions are now coronation events during which delegates and viewers are more likely to be visited by the gentle breath of Morpheus than to gain any insight about a candidate or party.

John Kerry and John Edwards will be nominated, a platform that will contain at least one oh-my-God-what-were-they-thinking plank will be adopted and the party will pretend to be energized.

Meanwhile, the Republicans will launch their month-long scorched earth campaign against Kerry who is now financially hamstrung by federal election laws that end the collecting and spending of individual contributions once a candidate has accepted federal funding. The Kerry campaign will immediately be on a $75 million budget while the Bushies spend wildly and freely until their own convention in August.

Among the anti-Kerry myths W and his pals will continue to perpetuate is this notion that, on a personal level, John Kerry is singularly unlikable and unappealing. We've all heard this stuff ­ Kerry is aloof, arrogant, distant, patrician, etc., etc. Why, when his Navy buddies were playing craps or chasing hookers, Kerry stayed home and read James Joyce or something. Absolutely shocking.

I have some bad news for these particular critics. I know John Kerry. More to the point, I knew John Kerry and he simply wasn't like that.

When he ran for Congress in 1972, his first stab at public office, I was his driver. We spent 90% of our waking time in each other's company. When the campaign was over, John and his first wife Julia were kind enough to let me stay in their Lowell, Massachusetts home for several months.

As we careened around Massachusetts' then 5th Congressional District I don't recall John being aloof or smug. Like any other person of substance, John enjoyed a full range of human emotions but being snotty was not first among them. He was just a very smart, very ambitious, very hard-working guy.

(I suppose I should point out, in fairness, that I did see John's angry side as few others at the time did. And with good reason: I might have been the worst driver in the history of political campaigns. Not that I didn't know how to drive but I rarely had a clue as to where I was going. As a small town kid from northern Michigan I was wholly unprepared for driving in and around the Boston area where roads appear to have been designed to intentionally deceive you. It became clear fairly early on that even the best, written directions didn't necessarily help you get where you wanted to go. I became so proficient at missing turns and addresses I became known, somewhat affectionately, as U-Turn Tuttle. And since we were nearly always late, I drove at speeds approaching both homicidal and suicidal. It was nothing short of miraculous that I never crashed or received a ticket. These driving "skills" resulted in my witnessing a very wide range of emotions from John, none of which were especially aloof or distant. To his credit John always recovered from our near misses much quicker than did I ­ he was back to wanting to discuss some policy issue while I was still catching my breath and wondering if I'd remembered to bring a change of underwear.)

That campaign, way back in 1972, was bruising. John won a 7-person primary race rather easily but the general election was a much tougher sell. The major population centers of the 5th were Lowell and Lawrence, once thriving mill towns that by 1970 had fallen on very hard times. The blue collar Democrats and Republicans living there valued tradition, loyalty and local connections above all else. The Kerry campaign was the antithesis of that ­ an anti-war, anti-establishment, outsiders-know-best assault on the district. As a bonus, the largest newspaper in the district conducted a relentless anti-Kerry hatchet-job culminating in five straight days of negative editorials, editorial cartoons and giant negative articles that started on the front page then jumped to take up the entire back page of that section. John was soundly thumped in the general election by a mediocre Republican named Paul Cronin. It is quite likely that far more people voted against John than voted for Cronin. That became clear two years later when the late Paul Tsongas, a Lowell native and former City Council member, easily beat Cronin.

I was there for the great joy of the primary victory and the crushing depression of the defeat. Everyone involved in the campaign, including John, was seriously bummed. But John was not especially aloof or arrogant even during that time. He was still gregarious, still actively speaking in public against the Vietnam war and still active with various vet's groups while also deciding what to do with the next chapter of his life.

He had plenty of opportunities to take the patrician route. His candidacy and his previous work with the Vietnam Veteran's Against the War had made him a bit of a darling in some Democratic circles. There were foundations and think tanks and organizations from which John could have lined his pockets and kept his name in print. He could have taken the easy way and let his friends help him out like so many others have done, including one in the White House right now. I know that's not what John wanted to do because I was there when he was deciding. Instead, he went to law school, became an Assistant District Attorney, successfully ran for Lt. Governor, then U.S. Senator and, perhaps, the last step up the political ladder.

I was there at some of John's darkest political moments and I knew the dark, dangerous and dirty secrets of this man. The boring truth is there weren't any. He was honest, forthright, personable, open and friendly. I never saw him do anything unethical, immoral or illegal. I don't know the aloof, arrogant, aristocratic person commentators and critics are now discussing.

Of course, that was a long time ago. I last spoke with John in 1990, while doing a little work for his Senate reelection campaign. Certainly, people change. But it's unlikely that basic core of the person I knew three decades ago has changed into the cold pedant now being portrayed.

He was a good guy then and I'm willing to bet he's a good guy now. And he'll make a decent president, too.

 

THE SIMPLE ELECTION - 7/28/04

Stephen Tuttle

Thank God we now know what's wrong with this country. It's "the left" and their America-hating ilk who have done us in. It's Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand and John Kerry and anyone else who dares criticize anything our current government might do.

How do I know this?

Simple ­ the columnists and commentators who describe themselves as conservatives, and representatives of "real American values", have told us so. In lockstep as usual, the airwaves and op-ed columns have been filled with this latest volley in the culture wars. And they have made everything incredibly easy for us all to understand: we oppose George W. Bush's policies because we hate America. In fact, anyone who opposes W's policies hates America. For those of you have not been paying close enough attention that means if you love America you must vote Republican this year and not just any Republican. No, no. You must vote for those who truly love America: conservative Republicans.

Republicans are as desperate as they can be to make this election, more so than any other of our generation, as simple and simplistic as possible. They've seen the polling data and they now know the horrifying truth ­ the more voters study the issues the less likely they are to vote for W. So we are now being fed the Black and White Election in which every issue is reduced to its lowest common denominator.

Aren't happy with the economy and would like someone to do something about it? That sounds frighteningly like someone who doesn't understand the American value of a free and open marketplace. You must hate America. Concerned about the diminishing coverage provided by your healthcare coverage and suspicious of the billions in pure profit being raked in by the pharmaceutical houses? I guess that makes you a fan of socialized medicine and someone who hates America. Suspicious about the billions going to Dick Cheney's pals at Haliburton, his secret energy policy meetings or the president's suddenly "inadvertently destroyed" military records? I guess that makes you someone aiding and abetting the terrorists and a traitor and someone who hates America.

See how incredibly easy this is? Take an issue, any issue for that matter, and put yourself to the test. Are you a loyal and patriotic citizen, a possessor of real American values or a traitorous American-hater? It's easy to discover where you stand. If you agree with the president and his minions you are a true American. If not, you hate America and should leave the country immediately and move, preferably to France.

The Bush crew has even managed this deflection with regard to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the war in Iraq. Turns out none of the rationale for our getting involved in the first place was true or accurate. Saddam was not a threat to us or his neighbors, he had no active nuclear weapons program, there was no stockpile of weapons of mass destruction or any kind of weapons system with which such weapons could be delivered, there is no connection between Saddam and al-Qaida or any other known terrorist groups, there is not one shred of evidence linking Saddam or anyone else in Iraq with the events of 9/11. The entire story was either a lie or incompetence on a Ruthian scale or both.

But the Burning Pants Gang will just not be deterred. They were all over the Sunday morning talkers declaring the righteousness of the war while quickly dispensing their critics as friends of Saddam and terrorism. The war was and is, they claim, the right thing to do regardless of the now emerging facts because we are better off without Saddam and America is a safer place because of it and anyone who disagrees, as I heard one especially noxious mouthpiece say, "does a great disservice to our young men and women in uniform."

Frank Lunz, notorious GOP pollster and their go-to-guy on disinformation tactics has told all Republican candidates to never discuss the war in Iraq without first mentioning 9/11. That the two are not factually connected in any way is irrelevant. Lunz' logic is unimpeachable ­ attach a Bush policy which cannot be justified to an unrelated activity or event on which we all agree. That way, candidates can turn questions about our imploding healthcare systems into an attack on jury awards in malpractice cases; turn questions about the Bush rollback of environmental protections into an attack on "environmental extremists" or energy independence; turn comments about our now grotesquely bloated military budget into an attack on the questioner's patriotism; turn concerns about the loss of civil liberties under the Patriot Act into a discussion on the war on drugs. And always connect the events of 9/11 to the war in Iraq.

The simple truth is George W. Bush took us into a war based on a set of assumptions now proven to be wrong. He cannot answer the obvious question ­ if we went to war because of a series of lies how do we now justify continuing? They have nothing left in their little bag of explanatory tricks. They must perpetuate this huge mistake, expanding the toll on our military and our treasury, in order to legitimize the original blunder. Their only defense is little more than a playground taunt; you don't agree because you hate America.

Actually, we don't. We'd just like the dunderheads now in charge to give it back to us so we can begin to repair the damage. That's what you do when something you love is broken.

 

JUST ANOTHER DAY - 6/30/04

Stephen Tuttle

Oh, the excitement. We've returned sovereignty of Iraq to some actual Iraqis. It's not clear when or how we took sovereignty from them but, by golly, we've now given it back. Ain't we somethin'?

Paul Bremer, our man behind the curtain in Iraq, has famously left the country. Most of his team, Americans all, remain behind, running the nuts and bolts of our mistake and not especially well. Much of Iraq is still without consistent delivery of basic services like electricity and water. Even oil production is still so low American taxpayers now subsidize gasoline at the pump in Iraq to the tune of $200 million a year so Iraqi drivers can continue paying $.05 a gallon for gas. That's right ­ we send $200 million of our tax dollars to Iraq so they can pay a nickel a gallon for gas.

And no one has said anything about Halliburton or other American companies profiteering in Iraq leaving anytime soon. So I guess Iraqis are not really in charge of administering rebuilding efforts or contracting for the actual work.

We now have 160,000 troops in Iraq. One assumes that pretty much precludes any possibility of Iraqis being involved in the security of their own country. (Don't be surprised if W decides sometime in, let's say August or September, to bring home 25,000 or so troops, claiming things are going so well we can start to pull back. And that would get us back to exactly the troop level Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney have preferred all along.)

So, really, the Iraqis aren't in control of anything despite their newly found sovereignty. Even returning Saddam to Iraqi hands will be a sham, little more than a judicial technicality and a photo-op and he will be right back in American custody for the foreseeable future.

This all serves to further the cause of President Bush and his Burning Pants Gang. Dick Cheney is still trying to claim a direct connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda and 9/11 despite nearly every shred of evidence on the topic pointing in exactly the opposite direction. In fact, Cheney has stooped to the level of demanding proof for the negative side of the argument, as in "There's never been any proof Saddam and al-Qaeda were not working together." When recently confronted by Senator Patrick Leahy for other transgressions, Cheney took it down another notch by responding, "Go fuck yourself." Always a class act, this Vice President, but he did deflect attention from his amazing capacity to avoid the truth.

The problem here has been obvious from the beginning of this mess. We've gone to war against people we do not know or understand. Ignorant of their 5000 year old civilization's traditions, not to mention their religion, we've stumbled into the middle of tribal warfare we cannot stop. There are blood atonements to be made here, thanks to Saddam's idiocy, and the members of the Iraqi Shia community who will be carrying them out are willing to be patient. There is a civil war waiting to happen that our military presence can delay but not prevent.

The puppet leaders we've now put in place are already talking about crackdowns that strongly resemble martial law, with immediate restrictions on Iraqis civil rights and civil liberties. If this all sounds familiar it's because it is exactly how every other Iraqi "leader" of our generation has begun their reign. Truth is no one has yet found a way to govern the militant tribal and religious elements without fully dominating with horrible repression.

This administration, as is so often the case, has missed entirely the lessons of expanding democracies around the globe. Without exception, democratic revolution is an inside-out experience. It's helpful to have a strong, nationally recognized and admired figure at the forefront, like Walesa or Havel or even Yeltsin. Nowhere has democracy been forced on anyone at the point of a gun. The Bushies have it backwards. Iraqis, it turns out, were yearning to be free of Saddam. Their desire to experience democratic freedom as we know it is less certain. Even now, with the entire Saddam regime gone, there is no great clamoring for democracy or freedom in the streets. There is much more talk about turning the place into an Islam-based state on the Iran model.

We cannot force democracy on people not actively seeking it. We've rid the Iraqis of one horror but are only delaying the next. All the while exhausting our good will around the world, our treasury at home and our young men and women being maimed and killed in a country that never directly threatened us or posed even the least risk to our direct national interests.

The supporters of President Bush call this "resolute leadership". It's just plain old bullshit to the rest of us. We're staying in another war/occupation to justify our having started it in the first place. Three more Marines died today. Cheney told another lie today. Just another day at the office for our fearless leaders.

REVERAND BUSH GOES TO WAR

By Stephen Tuttle

It's worse than we thought. Not slightly worse or a little bit worse but way, way worse.

Our president believes he is on a mission from God. This is not the best trait for a President of the United States or any other secular, pluralistic society. Not good at all. Oh, we all understand the need to ask for the help of the Almighty in a pinch, and we should remember to thank Him when things are going well but to actually believe a very specific Christian God is directing your activities is quite beyond dangerous.

To begin with it precludes even the remotest possibility of W ever acknowledging anything he's done could be wrong. It prevents him from changing his mind, from listening to alternative points of view, from making needed changes as events unfold, from gathering as much information as possible before making a decision. And those are just the political liabilities. The social costs can get pretty steep if you happen to be a Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American or any of the other tens of millions of Americans who worship a different god with a slightly different belief system.

The danger here is way past the hypothetical stage. It's been little reported but W and his Burning Pants Gang have been doling out taxpayer dollars, absent Congressional approval, to the tune of at least tens of millions of dollars and probably hundreds of millions of dollars to so-called faith-based organizations, primarily to provide some kind of social services. We don't know exactly how much money, if the funds have been utilized wisely or if any of the programs actually work. But we do know this: so far, the only faith-based organizations to receive this largess are evangelical Christian groups. All of them. Though they have applied, Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim organizations have thus far received not a penny.

Just as bad, the Bush administration apparently believes these groups need neither regulations nor accountability. In one memorable appearance, W said the only rules needed were contained in a special handbook, and he held up a Bible. All right, but that's going to get a little tricky if we accept that literally. I'm pretty sure the Old Testament's approval of both slavery and polygamy, not to mention a near obsession with stoning people to death, is going to conflict rather dramatically with some of our own civilian laws.
The president's great "faith" is often used as the foundational excuse for his fanaticism about "staying the course". He doesn't have to change course, the rationale goes, because he know he's right.

But he does change course. For example, we just turned over the town of Fallujah in Iraq to a Baathist general who used to be in charge of Saddam's Republican Guard. I hate to be a stickler for details but wasn't that the very regime we went to Iraq to change?

Whatever belief system is now driving our president it has let him down in almost every way. Either he is unable to understand the Divine messages he's receiving, a distinct possibility, or his Divine Counselor is an imposter.

Iraq is a mess we've created. The only way we can now win the military war is take such drastic actions that it makes winning the political war impossible. We don't even have the right equipment on the ground to deal with our current problems there. American troops are receiving horrific head and eye injuries in much greater numbers than in previous wars because the roadside bombs explode up through our unarmored Humvees and underneath our soldier's protective helmets. The lack of armor protection in vehicles is also resulting in alarmingly high numbers lost limbs among our young men and women. That simply cannot be part of any Divine Plan.

We went to war without the least knowledge of the region or the people we were fighting. Iraq isn't even a naturally existing country by any traditional geographical, ethnic, religious or social custom standards. It was cobbled together at the point cannons by the British in the 1920s. It has always been ruled by someone with an iron fist because it is the only way to keep the incredibly disparate factions from killing each other. The natural solution for Iraq, and the one no one discusses at all, is to partition the place into its three natural constituencies and force them to share the oil revenues. The Kurds could have the north, which is all they want; the Sunnis could have the middle with Baghdad as their capital and the Shiite majority can have the south and southwest with Basra as their capital. This, of course, is the one solution "off the table" according to the Bush team. But forcing them under one government just isn't going to work.
The 800-pound gorilla in the room is that Bush clearly believes the war is religious in nature. He wasn't kidding early on when he slipped and referred to this as a crusade. He now says our country has a "special destiny", that it's our "calling" and our "mission" to bring freedom to the Middle East. What he doesn't say, but is as obvious as it could be, is that he wants to bring Christianity to the heathens.

We won't succeed in forcing democracy on people at the point of a gun. Nor will we force them to abandon their religious beliefs by pounding them militarily. Government run by religious decree has never worked and it surely won't work for us. You'd have thought we would have learned that in Afghanistan.

CURRENT COMMENTARIES

WE'RE WINNING NO WE'RE NOT YES, WE ARE

By Stephen Tuttle

Let's review our war on terror, shall we? Vice President Dick Cheney was recently in Phoenix, talking to an invitation-only audience of aging veterans, bragging about our many, many successes. To hear him tell it, we've got those pesky devils on the run now.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case in this White House, other reports are not quite as optimistic.

Taking just a cursory glance at information our own government has put out during the last year tells a far different story. According to the very same people who work with Mr. Secure But Undisclosed Location, our nemesis al Qaida has been responsible for bombings of one sort or another that actually killed people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Republic of Georgia, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Angola, Turkmenistan, Chechnya, the Philippines, Indonesia and Israel. This in addition to planned attacks we claim to have prevented against the United States, Germany, France, Mexico and Brazil.

That would seem to be a pretty energetic and ambitious agenda for a group supposedly on the run. Cheney himself said we had "captured or killed most of al Qaida's top leadership." Then who the hell is doing all this mischief the government claims is the work of al Qaida? How are they doing it with no leadership?

I think we have to conclude al Qaida is simply too big and too powerful for us. We can't stop them anywhere, not even in Afghanistan, we can't find their two real leaders and they can apparently operate, with impunity, on large chunks of the planet.

Unless W and Dick and all the rest are lying for purely political reasons.

Things aren't much clearer here at home where we've taken to accusing everyone of Arab descent we arrest for anything of having terrorist ties.

Depending on which government entity provides the information, and you're mighty lucky to find any government agency providing any information these days, we've tried and convicted 260, 280 or 286 terrorism-related bad guys here at home.

Some of the connections are a little shaky. Remember the great powdered milk ring that was supposedly sending millions to the terrorists? Turns out they were just running a good-old fashioned American scam, had been doing so since before 9/11/01 and just happened to be Arabs and Muslims, so they got wrapped into the "terrorism related" category. Or the New Jersey guy arrested for running a fake charity as a cover for financing terrorism? Turns out he actually was running a legitimate charity that was giving money to children victims of the various wars in the Mideast. But, he had lied on his original visa application so he gets counted as a great anti-terrorist prosecution, too.

In fact, the majority of those convictions were not for terrorism related incidents at all but for immigration violations. The punishment for many was simply deportation.

The average sentence for those serving any jail time was a whopping two weeks. That's right, 14 days in the pokey for our fire-breathing enemies. More were deported or received probation than those who were sent to prison.

The government, at least those agencies willing to talk at all, claims this is the result of plea bargaining. Plea bargains with terrorism suspects? We won't negotiate with terrorists abroad but we plea bargain with suspected terrorists here at home? This is a joke, right?

The Bush Administration, you see, has trapped itself. On the one hand, they have to claim great victories in their war on terrorism to justify their policies and their black and white view of the world. On the other, they have to convince us the threats are still great in order to continue what has become a failed foreign policy.

But both stories cannot be true. Either we're making great progress or we're not. And if even half of what the Bushies now claim is the work of al Qaida actually is it's clear we're making little progress.

In fact, when you examine those we've prosecuted in this country, none of whom has ever placed a bomb or killed anyone, and the situation around the globe, it's clear we've made almost no progress at all.

Despite tens of billions of dollars spent and hundreds of American lives lost, we've not yet prosecuted anyone of substance nor slowed down the world's terrorists at all. The Bush Doctrine is a sad failure of monumental proportions.

Unless we choose to believe everything coming out of both sides of the Bush Administration's mouth.

WHY HOWARD DEAN WON

By Stephen Tuttle

Yea, I might be a little premature. The Iowa caucuses are still more than a month away, New Hampshire longer still. As we're now being told ad nauseam by the other Democratic candidates, a month can be a lifetime in politics.

But let's be honest here. Unless something catastrophic happens to the Howard Dean campaign, he's going to win. He could well win in Iowa and he'll do no worse than a close second. He's going to win by double digits in New Hampshire. Not the ridiculous 30-point bulge the polls now claim, but he'll win by a safe, healthy margin.

At that point the rout will be on. Dean might stumble along the way (South Carolina and their peculiar voting habits is a likely problem) but he's better organized, better funded and ahead in virtually every primary state. His biggest challenge will be overcoming the unreasonable expectations of the media pundits. If the margin in New Hampshire falls to, say, 25 points, the headlines will surely read "Dean Slips in N.H.". I don't think it will matter.

So, how did he manage to do this? Here we have a virtually unknown governor from a truly backwater state (Vermont is the whitest and least densely populated state in the union) with little national exposure and no political track record about to walk off with the biggest prize in Democratic politics.

I can't tell you whether Dean's rise to fame was luck or part of some truly clever campaign strategy but it's now fairly clear what happened.

The War -- Democrats were whipsawed by Bush leading up to the invasion of Iraq. They never could figure out how to finesse their position in a way that allowed them to oppose the war without appearing soft on terrorism. They blithely accepted the intelligence reports and briefings, just like Bush did, and voted to support funding the war effort just as they have most recently voted to continue funding the "rebuilding" efforts. Even when it became obvious the intelligence reports under which they had sought political cover were wrong or greatly exaggerated, they still couldn't figure out a way to continue to playing their usual Congressional games and vote "no" on anything. Had they bothered to check with the regular folks outside the Beltway they would have discovered there were plenty of Americans with plenty of questions about the looming war and many more than they imagined who were simply opposed to it. But checking with the regular folks is not the way it works in Washington. They play their own games with their own arcane rules and have become so laughably out of touch on virtually every issue they can no longer be counted on to ever do the right thing. There is good reason that no sitting member of Congress has been elected President in nearly 44 years though 89 members have tried.

Howard Dean faced none of those restraints or traditions. He, almost by default, became the voice of opposition. His attacks were often shrill and disjointed but at least he was standing up to the bastards in Washington. It was tremendously advantageous that the people of his own little Vermont agreed with him and gave him license to continue speaking out without risk to his political esteem and future at home.

Dean was consistent and unrelenting. He needed no stumbling rationalizations to explain away idiotic Congressional votes. He was pure. His opposition to the war attracted new voters, the politically disaffected and old-line anti-war activists, all at the same time. Both true-believers and the perpetually cranky suddenly had reason and permission to support Dean.

The Opposition -- It looked like a stellar field, didn't it? John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephart, Joe Lieberman and, later, Wes Clark, all had at least some decent credentials. To Democrats, any one of them seemed almost infinitely better than the current incumbent. But while Howard Dean was generating attention, money and volunteers, the others were just mumbling along. John Kerry, at one time the presumptive favorite but soon to be a minor footnote, was advised by his braintrust to ignore Dean and remain above the fray; to be "senatorial". Gephart was trying to run the old-fashioned way, quietly stitching together a coalition of office holders, minorities and unions. By the time he and his support team were ready to lead there was no one left to follow. None of the others have really ever gotten off the ground. Lieberman is an honorable and decent man but has generated little enthusiasm or support. Edwards has offered little of substance and nothing to distract attention from Dean. Clark is especially puzzling ­ for a man who wants to be the Democratic presidential nominee he has yet to adequately explain why he voted for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Twice each.

In short, the other candidates have done little to impede Dean's rise and their inaction has cleared the playing field for him.

The Internet ­ John McCain's campaign in 2000 proved the Internet could be a valuable tool for political fundraising. Howard Dean's team took that idea up a notch and made it their chief source of both early fundraising and generating support and volunteers. It worked great. Dean now has a 600,000-name data base of active supporters. He's received contributions from nearly 200,000 voters who had never previously participated in politics in any way. The Dean Team has turned the Internet from a useful tool into a powerful weapon and given permission to an entire generation to get involved in the political process.

The Unions ­ Dick Gephart was presumed to be the Union Guy. His support for labor causes over the years has been steadfast. To be sure, he has picked up much union support. But the key endorsement of the campaign so far has been that of the Service Workers Union for Dean. Not only was this an important breakthrough with organized labor for Dean, it was an organizational entrée into the minority community, especially the Latino community. For years the sizeable Latino community has been a non-player in political campaigns. With the exception of a few areas, most notably Miami, Latinos simply did not vote in sufficient numbers to make a difference except in the closest races. That is now changing. Organizing Latinos into a political force has proven difficult because it requires significant amounts of work at the grassroots level. The Service Workers Union is best positioned to help provide that organizational help and they are now working for Howard Dean.

Al Gore ­ Too many people, especially Republicans, tittered when Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean. They forgot, too quickly, it was Gore who was supported by the majority of voters in 2000, not the man currently in the White House. As the country becomes more polarized, thanks to the Burning Pants Gang, the residual anger of that election and how it was decided bubbles back to the surface. Those people have now been told to convert that anger into support for Howard Dean. Just as importantly, Al Gore still represents a kind of old-line, Roosevelt Democrat updated for the 21st century. Many of those voters have been scared away from Howard Dean by the absurd claims that he is some kind of raving left-winger. Gore's endorsement gives permission to all those old-fashioned Democrats to go ahead and support Howard Dean. It was a far more important moment in the campaign than most now seem to think.

New Revelations ­ As the presumptive nominee, Dean will face even more intense scrutiny as the media piranhas search for that flip-flop or some tired mistake. So far, Dean has actually benefited from his so-called gaffes and misrepresentations. His earlier comments about those with a Confederate flag in the back windows of their pick-ups offended few, gained him the support of some whose support he would not have otherwise received and revealed a truism about the Democratic party ­ in their zeal to be politically correct they've written off chunks of voters who traditionally supported Democrats because of one or two social issues. Dean, apparently alone among the contenders, understands he needs every vote now and the Democrats will need ever vote come November if they have any chance to win.

The first of the network news stories that attempted to "reveal" shocking new information about Dean has come and gone. CBS declared that Dean is hardly a liberal at all, is to the right of Bill Clinton on most issues, is strongly supported by the National Rifle Association, supports a balanced budget amendment and is a fiscal conservative. Well, yes. This is neither new nor hurtful to Dean, it's just different from the smears already being produced by the Bush Muck Machine, then devoured and regurgitated by talk radio and Fox News. Dean need not move to the middle, as Bill Clinton famously did, because he is already firmly planted there. Attacking Dean for that very record would have helped his Democratic opponents early in the primary campaign. It's now too late for them and the accusations actually help Dean position himself for the General Election.

Howard Dean, accidentally or otherwise, has cobbled together a kind of New Coalition of young, disaffected computer geeks; the largest group of minority political players; organized labor and old-line, traditional Democratic liberals. It's not exactly the old Democratic coalition of labor, Blacks and women but it will do.

Karl Rove and other GOP strategists are licking their chops at the prospect of taking on Howard Dean. They were the folks who started and pushed the stories that Dean was just another George McGovern-style left-wing wacko. They claimed they could hardly wait.

Their wait is nearly over. Howard Dean is going to be the Democratic nominee. But this is not 1972 and Howard Dean is not George McGovern. He's another governor from another small state just like the last two Democratic presidents, both of whom were ridiculed for running and ignored as having no chance. And both of whom beat sitting Republicans.

BITS AND PIECES

By Stephen Tuttle

Oh, dear. There's just so much going so wrong in so many different areas one hardly knows where to begin.

If el Presidente Fox of Mexico was half as concerned about Mexican citizens still living in Mexico as he is about Mexican citizens residing here, maybe Mexico wouldn't be the backwater wasteland of a country it has become.

The only way Howard Dean will be stopped is if the other 8 pretenders coalesce around a single candidate, everybody else drops out and lets the anointed one take on Dean one-on-one. Unless, of course, the Expectations Game derails him because he's not winning by as much as the pundits think he should.

The reason there has not been a sitting member of Congress elected to the White House since 1960, while governors have been dominant, is that governors are used to talking directly to voters and members of Congress talk only to each other. Voters know the difference.

Congress, the White House and the rest of Washington have become so wildly out of touch with the rest of us the only way to fix it is to close Congress for 6 months a year and make everyone go home.

Despite the constant whining about the "left-wing liberal media", we now know where the real media power lies. The left-wing was never able to force a major network to cancel programming before it had even aired. Not even the courts have been able to do that. But the shrillest and most remote outposts of the right-wing certainly did.

This is the least honest administration since the Nixon White House. Bush and his cronies lie to justify their actions before-the-fact and then lie to cover their butts and their mistakes after-the-fact.

If the state of Washington won't execute someone for murdering 48 people, how can any state justify executing anyone for having killed fewer? Proportionality is part of the test in every death penalty case. It would appear the bar has been unintentionally raised to such a level that only murderers who ring up preposterous body counts will be eligible. Unless you happen to be a detainee at Guantanamo

Did we catch Mr. bin Laden yet? No? Are we still looking?

Have you noticed that we've seen no video or still photos of the flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base from Iraq? If we can't see the dead then maybe they aren't dying. Excellent logic. Just like the dogs that hide by sticking their heads under the bed while their bodies remain completely exposed.

Not a single item of clothing bearing the Levi Strauss label is still manufactured in the United States. This prototypical American success story ­ a man brings a large bolt of heavy cotton fabric to the California gold fields believing he can sell it for tents, then finds it makes lousy tents but sturdy work pants for the miners ­ is now 100% outsourced.

The desert southwest is going to run out of water. We're sucking the aquifers dry at an alarming rate and the idiot politicians have promised various states more water from the Colorado River than actually exists.

Just because they happened in California does not mean the recent fires were the "worst ever" despite the blathering to the contrary by the media. It wasn't even close, really. A fire that started in Peshtigo, Wisconsin in 1871, during the end of a long, punishing drought cycle, burned more than 1 million acres, wiped out 2 billion trees and killed more than 1,200 (many believe the death toll was much higher) people in less than 5 days. Ironically, the Peshtigo fire, the worst fire disaster in U.S. history, is little known itself because it started the same day as the great Chicago fire of Mrs. O'Leary's cow fame.

Speaking of the California fires, some victims are now complaining they received slow, inadequate fire protection service. The San Diego area didn't even have a single helicopter available or equipped to help douse what started as a little brushfire that eventually burned 240,000 acres and claimed 16 lives in their back yard. This is what happens when the tax cutting, budget cutting frenzy starts to hack away flesh and bone. We want to go first class while paying a discounted economy fare. We're either going to have to expect less or expend more.

It now appears the stock market has become seriously infected with the greed and thievery we've seen so often in big business lately. Enronitis has made its way into mutual funds, the last allegedly safe bastion of the Small Investor. Turns out the funds been used as the personal piggy banks of fund managers and big money insiders. The resulting off-the-top profits have cost other investors more than $5 billion, so far.

Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas is unquestionably the most venal and cynical member of Congress in a long, long time. His latest gambit is selling National Leadership Awards in exchange for political contributions. This is what now passes for statesmanship in the House ­ who can raise the most money by whatever means possible.

The mad bombers in Iraq will never stop. No matter how many schools are opened, no matter how much electricity or water start to flow, no matter how close the country comes to real democracy, even if the U.S. leaves, the bombings will never stop unless the Islamist extremists gain complete control. Their "cause" is not political it's religious and they see no room for compromise.

That prescription drug bill Congress has come up with is a beauty. Guarantees $139 billion in additional profits for the drug companies over the next 8 years, creates a delightful gap that will cost nearly everyone $2,500 in out-of-pocket expenses for prescriptions not covered and, best of all, it steals $16 billion from Medicare cancer treatment funds to pay for it. Most cancer patients under Medicare will now only have a paltry 25% of their brutally expensive chemotherapy covered.

Whatever happened to Gen. Wesley Clark? That was a very short 15 minutes.

Vladimir Putin is quietly returning Russia to modified totalitarianism. There will be trouble there for a long time as he backs away from democratic freedoms. Once a KGB officer, always a KGB officer.

Now the Bushies have got it ­ drop more bombs on those lousy Iraqi sonsabitches and then they'll like us. Get tough! Uh-huh. Seems unlikely that dropping bombs on people who blow themselves up by choice will be a winning tactic.

OH, MY GOD!

By Stephen Tuttle

The Almighty has certainly been in the news more than usual of late. He's been directly and very publicly referenced by the parents of a kidnap victim, more than one baseball player, wildfire survivors, at least one American general and now the Supreme Court itself is going to weigh in.

It's enough to make one wonder just what in God's name is going on here.

It's not that uncommon, of course, for people who are in the midst of great crisis or who have just survived some great trauma to plead with and or thank God. We've all probably shared those thoughts and we all understand the sentiment. It is perfectly natural to utter, "Please, God" or "Thank you, God" in those situations. It's a bit different when we try to force those thoughts onto other people or worse make them part of government policy.

This started to make me a bit uncomfortable watching Ed Smart being interviewed. His daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped, molested and held by a religious loon. The Smart family understandably asked for our prayers during their multi-month ordeal and just as understandably thanked God when Elizabeth was found relatively safe and healthy. It's less easy to understand now as he touts the superiority of his God and his family's prayers. Are we to believe the Smart family's connection to God is somehow superior to that of say Polly Klaas' family? She was also a beautiful young girl, also kidnapped from her own house in the dark of night. Unfortunately all the prayers in the world didn't help and Polly Klaas ended up dead, brutally raped and murdered. When Ed Smart can look the Klaas family in the eye and tell them, "God loved my daughter more than yours" then maybe he can continue to pontificate about his powerful religion. It's interesting to note the Smarts have not mentioned God in connection with their book and movie deals. Nor do they have a good explanation for why Elizabeth was kidnapped and raped in the first place.

The Smart interview was followed almost immediately by the World Series. (In the interest of fairness I should point out that I am not much of a fan of the New York Yankees. I grew up in Michigan as a Tiger fan and spent several years living in and around the Boston area so it's hard for me to imagine that any god anywhere has ever given anything to the Yankees. Satan, maybe, but not God.) Andy Pettite, a quality Yankee pitcher, won an early game and spent most of his post-game interview giving credit to his Lord and Savior, who apparently taught Andy how to throw a split-finger fastball several years ago. Unfortunately, Mr. Pettite also pitched and lost the deciding sixth game of the Series but provided no theological reason for his losing performance. Please. There is a comedian, whose name I can never remember, who does an entire routine based on athletes crediting Divine intervention for their success. The concluding bit is an interview with the star running back of the losing Super Bowl team. The punch line comes from the running back: "Everything was going great until Jesus made me fumble!" Here's the deal ­ God didn't make Andy Pettite win, He didn't make the imaginary running back fumble and He didn't make the Marlins win this year's World Series. There is nothing in the Bible or any other mainstream religious text about baseball. Could we please just accept that God doesn't care who wins football or baseball games and move along?

Annoying as the Smarts and preaching athletes can be, they aren't especially dangerous. That's considerably more than can be said for one Lt. General William Boykin, U.S. Army. The good general believes God is on his side, got George W. Bush elected and is stronger than the Muslim god. We know this because he's taken to saying it quite publicly during a recent round of speeches. This would be amusing if Boykin were some renegade general being played by George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove but, alas, Gen. Boykin is the man in charge of our military efforts to track down our old friends Usama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Seriously. While taking God to the front lines and into foxholes seems like a fairly smart strategy it's a little less productive as a policy for a nation trying to hunt down its archenemies. I'm glad Boykin is confident that his God has taken his side in our quest against terrorism but we were hoping for something that concentrated a bit more on a solution not requiring supernatural intervention. Even worse, the good General has betrayed his own theological ignorance when comparing "his" God to that of Islam. The thing is they are the same God. Islam makes no claim that their Allah is anything other than the very same entity as the Christian God. Different prophet, different interpretation and different worship practices to be sure but the very same God and most of the same leading characters. Boykin, therefore, believes his God is superior to his God. Good one, General.

Which brings us right up to our own United States Supreme Court and a decision on a truly bizarre case involving the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge of Allegiance, bless its little heart, is now treated as if it were written by the Founders as an addendum to the Declaration of Independence or as part of the Constitution itself. In fact, it was a creation of the Boy Scouts, not Jefferson or Franklin or Washington. And the now contested "under God" section was added by Congress in the 50s during a period of McCarthyism and red-baiting to prove we were better than those godless commies. To now make an