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Irony---(def) the incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

U.S. Warns Ukraine About Elections

by Jim Heintz
The Associated Press
Friday, October 29, 2004, 5:01AM

Kiev, Ukraine – In a sharp statement of dismay over abuses and official interference before Sunday’s presidential election, U.S. officials say Ukraine could face punitive measures if the vote is not free and fair.

Well, I’ll be damned. Ukrainians in Florida, messing with our election. What the hell will be next? No, wait---it’s their presidential election that U. S. officials are all huffied-up about. The United States, not three days distant from its own presidential election (which will for the first time have European Union observers and which election-watcher Jimmy Carter says is totally out of control) is actually threatening another sovereign nation with sanctions over electoral irregularity.

It just boggles the mind. Consider me boggled.

Irony brought to a new level of definition---it’s always been one of those dicey words to actually define, although we all think we know what’s meant when someone says “that’s ironic” or “isn’t it ironic that the only afternoon I can get away to the post office they close at noon?” I foresee irony ever-after-today defined by example in the new and updated Webster’s Collegiate as: “America threatening Ukraine with electoral misconduct in the midst of its own election scandals.”

The U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a mouthful in its own right, said “If the election fails to meet international standards, a variety of measures to hold officials responsible for electoral misconduct accountable will be considered.” Wow! A variety of measures. “Bilateral relations and integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions will suffer.” Tough words, but those ex-commie countries need tough love.

So, okay, the Ukraine election is Sunday. Do you suppose they can get this U.S. Mission on an airplane in time to check out Florida in the Tuesday election? I mean Ukraine is huge compared to Florida. Broward County ought to be a piece of cake. The Mission in Ukraine also made a stink about the ‘recent beating of peaceful protesters by Interior Ministry employees.’ At least in this country we haven’t yet fallen to such deplorable standards. Unless, just maybe you find the jailing of 1,800 peaceful protesters during the Republican Convention in New York a bit Ukrainian---particularly strange in that after three days in the slammer all charges were dropped just as the convention broke its tents and silently stole away. Not to say the Democrats are blameless. Six were arrested during their convention. That’s 3/1000 of one percent of the Republican head-count. Unconscionable. Those Democrats are so unmotivated.

So get these Mission guys over here pronto, don’t spare the jet-fuel, we need all hands on deck. Bilateral relations are suffering in heartland Ohio and stretched pretty thin in that little prick of land off the southeast coast called Florida. There’s rumors of widespread dismay over abuses among the urban minorites. And someone, surely a governor here, perhaps a state’s attorney there, needs to face punitive measures.

My God, America deserves---and must demand---at least the same freedoms as Ukraine!

Tax and Spend?

President Bush, in New Hampshire, called Senator Kerry a “tax and spend liberal.” It’s not the first time he’s made that tired complaint, but apparently it resonates.

For his part, Bush is a “give back the tax and spend conservative.” That policy has taken us in four short years from a 3 ½ trillion dollar forecast surplus this decade to a 4 ½ trillion deficit. Net loss, eight billion.

The entire history of “tax and spend liberalism” doesn’t begin to equal that figure and our kids will have to pick up George Bush’s check.

My Daddy Knew an Uneven Fight

Sigh! Paul Bremer, the ‘Duke’ of Iraq recently said that the Bush administration was clearly right to invade Iraq. Though no WMD was found, he said there was a ‘real possibility’ that they might be and that Hussein might give such weapons to terrorists.

There’s also a possibility that I might be syndicated in 800 newspapers one day, but don’t bet the farm on it.

Bremer went on to say that the ‘status-quo was simply untenable.” Reporting in on another of the Axis of Evil candidates, North Korea, our ambassador to South Korea recently warned North Korea not to ‘wait for the election’ before coming to the bargaining table. It’s a little late at this writing---four days before the election---but Ambassador Christopher Hill said “I think they need to understand that whoever is elected president, there is absolutely no tolerance for dealing with a country that maintains nuclear weapons programs.”

Oh, come on, Chris. What are countries like Iran, North Korea and, until lately, Libya to make of our snuggle up to Pakistan? Pakistan not only has the bomb, they’ve tested it three or four times and are crawling with Muslim extremists. You and Paul make us sound like a Marx Brothers government.

Bremer and Hill are both guilty of neoconspeak in the first degree. It should be a hanging offense. It’s become endemic this bushwhacking and, unless something absolutely liberating-but-unlikely happens four days from now, we’re in for yet four more years of an administration that says anything it likes, labels it as true and walks away. Orwell would be very much at home in this neocon political environment.

So, as nearly as I can tell, we bought off Libya and their embryonic nuclear program with a normalization of relations. Good deal, very American and no lives lost except Lockerbee. We blundered into Iraq knowing there was nothing there, but Bush did it because he could do it and old scores needed settling. This is a president who remembers old scores, but he’s put us up against the Muslim world and they have two or three centuries on us in the remembering old scores department. Neoconspeak insists that we’re winning but no one puts much value in that oversold stock these days.

I remember some very good advice from my daddy about venturing into bad neighborhoods. First of all he was against it, but second he advised never to initiate a confrontation because it was sure to be an uneven fight. Daddy’s view was that his son was too middle-class-comfortable to put it all on the line in a face-off and that the people one confronted in bad neighborhoods hadn’t much to lose, thereby holding an advantage. Daddy’s views might not have been politically correct to voice in today’s society but they were dead-on, accurate and words to survive by. No neoconspeak from Daddy.

So, this saying-it-makes-it-true thing the administration does seems to be working in middle America, if one can believe the polls. One has to wonder if the ‘con’ in neocon refers to conservatives or merely con-artists and con-men, but nevertheless it seems to be working over here, where we’re middle-class-comfortable and unwilling to put anything on the line, even taxes to finance the war. Out there in the ‘bad neighborhoods,’ the streets of North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and on and on and on, it’s far less a sure thing, this saying-makes-it-true. Those are the folks Daddy had in mind, who haven’t much to lose and we’re eyeball to eyeball with them on very uneven philosophical and material grounds. The perspiration under our armpits is showing. Neoconspeak isn’t hacking it outside of this country.

But the neocons are more than war and terrorists, these are complicated guys and gals. What of this decade’s three and a half trillion dollar surplus that’s turned into a neodeficit five trillion? What of the embarrassment of Russia---Russia---the world’s most egregious polluter ratifying the Kyoto Treaty as America pursues its neoenvironment? What of No Child Left Behind turning so quickly to neochild unfunded? Neocon stands for ‘new conservative,’ but can anyone tell me what is even slightly conserving about the squandering of our money, our future, our reputation, our young men’s lives, our safety and the civil society we enjoyed before being set upon one another like pit bulls? We are nationally exhausted, lying in the dust glaring at one another, our country painted red and blue as the pollsters and pundits play us for suckers.

But we’re not suckers. We’re made of better stuff than that. We’ve always been made of better stuff than our politicians and from time to time when they’ve thought different they paid the price for that arrogance. Americans are tough sons-of-bitches and they take a long time to move, sometimes too long. But they’re not all that crazy about anything neo and you con them at your own risk.

My Daddy used to tell me about that as well.

The Supremes Robe Up For Act Two

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the waters of the next presidential election, the Jaws soundtrack thrums in the background. We may wake up screaming. In any event, we will surely wake up the day after the elections litigating. The Supremes brought us here, that frivolous judicial nine, tap-dancing their way into the 2000 election from stage-left, robes flapping and rolling their eyes.

In that vote-along-party-lines flight of fancy with which they seated an unelected president, they promised us a “one-off” decision that would have no bearing on legal precedence. Sure! Here we are, a couple weeks ahead of the 2004 election and chaotic circumstances abide in several of the swing states, with Florida once again leading the pack. The European Commission is sending observers to an American election as if we were a banana republic.

Perhaps we are.

At any rate, lawyers from both parties are zeroing in on approximately 30,000 precincts that one or both sides consider opportunistic to fraud, deviant behavior, racial grievances, petulant attitudes or some other form of the black arts. Jimmy Carter, who has some experience world-wide in the observance of rigged elections, speaking of Florida, says “the disturbing fact is that a repetition of the problems of 2000 now seems likely, even as many other nations are conducting elections that are internationally certified to be transparent, honest and fair.” Carter goes on to say (see article) “It is unconscionable to perpetuate fraudulent or biased electoral practices in any nation. It is especially objectionable among us Americans, who have prided ourselves on setting a global example for pure democracy.”

I lay that blame directly at the feet of the Supreme Court. Had the court allowed the Florida recount to proceed, no matter if it took two or three months, we would have retained the confidence we deserve as citizens in our electoral process. Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, those who would interfere in elections would have found no profit in the activity.

Now it’s open season, the trust factor in our most cherished constitutional right has been gutted and tossed in the street to profit the quick, the devious and the clever. Republican or Democrat, what has always been healed by faith in the process is torn by charge and countercharge, stripped of its legitimacy and left to the devices of our worst political instincts.

We choked it down four years ago because we are not a nation of anarchists and the unelected-but-seated president seemed, on the face of it, not that distinctively different a choice. But it rankled and it really began to sting when the president, acting as if he had a landslide mandate, turned each of his campaign promises on end. Still, merely an annoyance. As a nation, we survive and even thrive during lapses of presidential popularity.

The Supremes no doubt thought they had made a relatively benign and abridged decision, but bad law is bad law and seldom lies down in the corner to snooze. No one suspected that this anomaly would have to withstand a trial-by-fire and, as if the gods were indeed punishing bad law by the highest court, the tests just kept coming. Terrorist attack, war, a wounded economy, blinding debt and failures of leadership all conspired to bring us---the left, the right and the center---eyeball to eyeball in a polarized environment of distrust and blame.

Well, we are all to blame. Our blame is that we shout rather than come together. Our blame is we have too little compassion for another point of view and not enough interest in hearing a minority voice. Our blame is allowing a climate that advances the politics of fear and the institutionalizing of retribution within our government. Our blame is that we sue the hell out of everyone because we are too intellectually lazy to work through problems to reach common understandings. Our blame is our rage and the transfer of that rage to the driver in the next lane, the homeless man on our street, the delay of our flight to Houston and being out of coffee on Sunday morning. Our civility within the nation is unravelling at the hem.

We’ve always been a litigious society because our founding principle is equality under law and it is the law (at least in part) that civilizes us. But the law takes away as well as gives and we have lost our right to pray in public to the lawyers, as if we were too poor of spirit to be allowed that freedom of individual choice. The law has given our schools a poverty of discipline from which they may not recover and has made us unresponsive to the small civil courtesies that lubricate a society. It may well take from us our ability to elect a leader within a time frame that allows him (or her) to lead. The law may cloud the public trust that the choice by ballot is truly ours in a fairly counted majority.

I pray for an election that is not close, but this doesn’t seem likely. We need an undisputed election, some breathing space, a world that, if it is not normal, has at least some aspects of normality. We need to grin, punch one another on the shoulder, watch Boston play St Louis in the world series and thread our way back to being American again.

Otherwise, the Supremes may find themselves once again on stage for a second act no one expected or desired.

Blind-Siding the Back Ache

A couple of days ago a Washington Post article about the withdrawal by Merck & Co. of their flagship painkiller Vioxx caught my eye. Reason being, I’d written a column just a little over two years ago that questioned the sanity of advertising drugs like they were luxury automobiles and the Vioxx ad was my target. All glitz and a Dorothy Hamill endorsement graced the four-color page, followed by the grim reality of the small print on the turnover side.

Consumer marketing of drugs? When has the consumer ever been capable of evaluating his personal health choices? Consumer marketing brought us fast-food obesity, heavy metal ‘music’ and Paris Hilton. How could anyone, much less the Food and Drug Administration, agree to allow pharmaceutical companies to directly approach the public with complex drugs that have byzantine side-effects? Merck ponied-up $195 million in advertising.

A Google search of Vioxx brings a paid placement for a legal firm seeking class-action clients. Ah, the greed of the drug creator is so quickly overtaken by the greed of the litigator. The user it seems has been abandoned by both except as a target.

Interestingly, the Post article appears empathetic toward Merck. “Now their wonder drug was suddenly under a cloud and Merck officials faced a difficult decision about how to handle the catastrophe.” Further into the article, a Cleveland cardiologist is quoted as estimating that, among its 20 million users, Vioxx may have unnecessarily caused as many as 30,000-100,000 heart attacks and strokes. Thirty thousand to one hundred thousand ordinary citizens also “faced a difficult decision about how to handle the catastrophe.” My scorecard reads, Merck one costly misadventure, the public a personal disaster of huge proportion. In fairness, a very high percentage of Vioxx users probably got reliable pain relief without problems. But it was certainly a roll of the dice by consumers who hadn’t the vaguest idea of how the game was played.

Where have all the physicians gone? Abdicated to leave the drug companies in charge? Cowed by their insurance premiums, overwhelmed by paperwork, no longer with personal knowledge of their patients, the medical community has to a very large degree left us to the wolves at the watering-hole. The AMA ought to get off their asses and put doctors back in charge of health care while there still are doctors. The small print that Merck uses to assure consumers they ought not to use Vioxx without consulting their physician doesn’t count.

The AMA needs to come down four-square against:
· The advertising of drugs directly to consumers
· The use of “infomercials” in health care
· Kickbacks to doctors prescribing drugs
· Any medical article, endorsement or opinion that hides a financial incentive or interest
That would be a start.

Then they might take up the deplorable national conditions that have allowed the insurance and legal lobbies to so screw up our access to doctors that we are left to blindly flail around among the pages of slick magazines, looking for Dorothy Hamill’s health advice.

Nothing personal, Dorothy---I loved you as a skater.

Our Lemming Side

Becoming as a species ever better-informed and lesser-educated, our increasing similarity to those furry-footed rodents is apparent and Darwin be damned. My Thursday Washington Post carries an article by Julia Eilperin “Worldwide Report Says Amphibians Are in Peril,” ecological stresses may be taking toll.

Ho hum, those old ecological stresses again. 32 percent of all amphibian species face extinction, compared with 12 percent birds and 23 percent mammals. “Canaries in the coal mine” scientists call amphibians because their permeable skin makes them particularly sensitive to environmental changes. Well, coal mining has always been a nasty business. The article goes on to say that “this has taken the scientific world completely by surprise.”

Oh, come on. Pissed them off, made them frown perhaps, in some rare cases made them collectively tap their fingers, but hardly took them by surprise.

There are no surprises left.

There are merely consequences and on our collective headlong rush-for-the-sea we are barely able to glance over our shoulders as the consequences blur by in fast-forward. A polar ice cap melts here or there, a larger “dead zone” in this or that fishery. We are able to measure the precise percentage of air pollution America supplies globally compared to its population (24 to 4), but are we surprised? Hardly. Bored perhaps, maybe annoyed, but only at the constant harping and dreary finger-pointing, never at our god-given freedoms to fuck things up.

The following day, another staff writer by the name of Jonathan Weisman marks the moment the U.S. hit its debt ceiling of 7.4 trillion dollars. And it turns out (are such coincidences never-ending?) that that moment coincides with the worldwide amphibian dilemma. Been a busy week, but you gotta admit that the Washington Post has some first-class staff writers. Unfortunately Weisman’s article was another of those ho-hummers, ‘cause neither of these ghastly occurrences is going to put the gun to our head by next Tuesday. And, if it were, we wouldn’t begin to get nervous until Monday afternoon.

That’s the way it ought to be. It’s our heritage, our right as Americans to put off the future. We invented putting off the future and we’re damned proud of it. Just as Europe is known for never forgetting the past and has let it cripple them, America is known for never worrying about the future, their major strength. Consequence is a word in the dictionary. We invented futureless consumption as a Yankee concept, nurtured it in our schools while discipline gave way to chaos and polished it in the glamorization of everything from no-money-down to reality-TV in place of reality. On a whole psychic level, from government to daily life, if we don’t choose to admit it, it doesn’t exist. Yeah! At long last, the unsinkable ocean liner.

And, of course it may well be true. We haven’t yet tested the theory that all these disappearing life forms may change for the better. The icky stuff that spoils camping trips may just go away. It hasn’t yet been put to the test that unending and galloping national debt finally comes to a reckoning. No entity on earth has yet accumulated 7.5 trillion dollars in debt, so how could we really know? And it’s someone else’s job anyway to monitor all that stuff.

Isn’t it?

A Giant Step Up At the Nobel

Wasn’t all that long ago that Nobel Peace Prizes were handed out to the likes of Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Nelson Mandela. At least two out of those three are deserving men who have done much to advance the causes of peace throughout the world.

But they were easy choices, perhaps too easy. Already famous, already known worldwide, and one wondered if the prize was yet one more accolade or was founded to mean more, to be a catalyst rather than a mantle. Surprisingly, in that context, Ghandi never won one. There were some strange choices as well. In 1994, Yasser Arafat shared the prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, a selection that may have been based more on optimism than experience. Few people in this world have backed away from peace more consistently than Yasser Arafat.

Year by year, the parade went by. Mother Teresa? Who could possibly quarrel with that? Kofi Annan? Yep. So, like many such awards, the Nobel has been up and down as it made the obvious and not-so-obvious choices, but one way or another they seldom raised eyebrows. Until last year. Last year the committee chose an Iranian woman little known outside her country, Shirin Ebadi, for her lifelong work promoting democracy and human rights in Iran. A lawyer, judge, lecturer, writer and activist, she has spoken out clearly and strongly in Iran which was never an easy or safe choice under either the Shah or ayatollahs. Who is this woman? was the immediate question and thus the question became the celebration, which in my mind is a giant step up for the award.

Confirming that last year’s choice was no fluke, the committee this year selected Wangari Maathai, at age 64 one of Kenya’s and Africa’s first modern women. Read up on this special woman while she’s still fresh in the news because if I get started, this column will go to forty pages. There are of course hundreds and perhaps thousands of people out there like Wangari, who use their lives and risk their lives to make a difference within the circle of their influence. They are the true internationalists, knowing in their gut that the world must be changed first down the street and then one town over. Last year was a home run for the Nobel Peace Prize and this year, their first chance to step to the plate again, they hit another.

The Nobel committees are a secretive bunch, as well they should be, and I doubt they talk much among themselves. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if this current direction of the Peace committee were to seep under the door at economics. The Nobel Prize for Economics has long gone to academics, my personal favorite being Milton Friedman in 1976. But there are others who till in the fields of economics and some among them who have left theory behind to raise bumper crops. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank come immediately to mind. A Bangladeshi economist, you can read about his astounding Bank at http://www.grameen-info.org/book/index.htm and the trouble you take to learn about him will reconstitute your faith in humanity. Not a bad bargain for a few minutes time.

Maybe someone at the Nobel will check it out as well.

Get Yourself a Cup of Coffee and Read This

All you "anyone but Bush" democrats out there, pour yourself a cup of coffee, sit down, switch off your Nader hot button and read what the man has to say in a Saturday Washington Post editorial...

...click here, sip slowly and think about it.

Let’s Hear It For “Military Intelligence”

I know that’s an oxymoron, but the Pentagon just keeps churnin’ ‘em out and someone has to keep score. And you gotta hand it to those military guys, they’ve got a way with timing. Both of these stories in the same day’s newspapers and I hardly know where to begin, with the tragedy or the comedy.

An article in the International Herald Tribune notes that the Pentagon has ordered Internet Service Providers in some twenty- five countries (including Japan, France, Britain and Spain) be denied access to the site of the Federal Voting Assistance Program. Ostensibly, this is to “protect it from hackers.”

If I have this straight, the Pentagon was given responsibility for providing online absentee ballots to both military and civilian citizens living overseas. And, one might note, the national election is less than five weeks away which allows precious little time to find an alternative that will meet deadline requirements. So someone in the chain of command, thinking the web site could be hacked, decided it was a safer bet to disenfranchise Americans living or working in those twent- five countries. Way to go! Why hack, hack, when one hack does it?

Susan Leader, the web manager of the Federal Voting Assistance Program and Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, both declined to comment further. Now what the hell does that mean? “declined to comment further.” It’s their business to comment. Each of their jobs are primarily communication responsibilities. A web manager? Web sites are nothing but communication. Krenke is a Pentagon spokeswoman? What kind of ‘spokes’ is it to decline to spoke?

Annalee Newitz didn’t decline to comment. Annalee is with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group of passionate people, as they describe themselves — lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries — working to protect your digital rights. She said “It’s extremely ironic that the government is doing nothing to address the security of electronic voting machines, which have been proven vulnerable to hacking, yet they block web sites for expatriate Americans.”

You got that right, Annalee. Comedy or tragedy, you be the judge.

At the same time, busy as they are with blocking voter access, our Pentagon brass is burning the midnight oil to block prostitute access. In a landslide victory for masturbation afficionados, U.S. service members stationed oversees will (if approved) now be subject to courts martial for hanging out with hookers. Aw, c’mon. The courts martial call it “patronizing a prostitute.” Pauline Jelinek, in an AP article, explains that the Defense Department worries that its members will contribute to human trafficking in areas near their overseas bases. Rep. Christopher Smith, a NJ republican said “women and girls are being forced into prostitution for a clientele consisting largely of military service members, government contractors and international peacekeepers.” Smith doesn’t say anything about congressional representatives on fact-finding junkets.

Chris, come over here a minute, let me whisper in your ear. I don’t want to shock you and I know you’ve led a pretty sheltered life, having never actually served in the military, but this ‘patronizing’ stuff has been going on longer than wars. It’s not really an issue you want to get your name associated with, all those Iraq veterans coming home and whatnot.

This same Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke who declined to comment on fucking over the voters was positively voluble on fucking over the soldiers; “If approved, the amendment would make it a military offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to have contact with a prostitute,” spoke the spokeswoman, having finally found her tongue. According to the AP, “expanded evening and weekend education programs, band concerts, late night sports leagues and more chaplain activities” are meant to ease the pain. A band concert, just what every servicemember hopes for to fulfill a weekend pass. But it seems to me there’s no way Rummy’s going to avoid a massive expansion of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” mandate in the U.S. military.

If it didn’t make you want to cry, it would be laughable. Again, you have to be the judge of comedy or tragedy.