Opinion-Columns.com

Shoes, It’s Raining Shoes

The first shoe to drop in the sordid (and wonderfully cinematic) tale of graft and corruption in the Congress was Michael Scanlon, Jack Abramoff’s sometimes business partner, occasional bagman and all-around useful guy. Mostly Indian casino shell-games it would seem, but the footprints of a useful guy can point almost any direction. Hey, who knew you could go to jail for this stuff? Not me. Kerplunk (the sound of a size 10 wingtip hitting the grand jury floor).

As regularly as “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” first one, then another of this cast of motley characters copped a plea. No Partridge in a Pear Tree as yet, but who knows? The next shoe to fall, name of Adam Kidan, was Abramoff’s partner in a neat little scheme to buy SunCruz Casino, a kind of floating crap-game. The inspiration for that particular venture into the world of nautical roulette must have been Abramoff’s and Scanlon’s fleecing of Indian casino operations. Kerplunk #2.

One guy who isn’t able to cop a plea (and thus become a shoe) is Gus Boulis. Gus is the guy Jack and Adam bought SunCruz from, if you can call bad checks and non-existent loans ‘buying.’ Gus would probably have been the most highly motivated of the bunch to plea instead of what he had to settle for. But Gus dropped in a different and much more permanent way, shot, gangland style. Interestingly, two of the three hit-men picked up for that piece of bungled assassination have business ties to Adam Kidan. Business ties? A euphemism, no doubt. But it makes Kidan’s plea all the more interesting.

The three mob goofballs will absolutely make their bargains to tell all, kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk.

But the guy speculated upon to be the next piece of footwear to hit the deck is Jack himself. At the moment, Jack Abramoff is ground zero for the ugliest and most wide-ranging bribery scandal to hit the Congress in . . . decades? . . . years? Certainly since ABSCAM, the 1980s FBI sting operation that ended a bunch of political careers and proved that the lesson taught to an embarrassed legislature wouldn’t last twenty years. One Senator and four Representatives took the fall on that one, but this could top ABSCAM by a factor of ten. Everyone is nervous.

Shoe #7 (in case you’re keeping count) could well be David Safavian. David is (or was until he was arrested at his home) head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy within the Office of Managment and Budget. David was trained at the lobbying firm of Preston Gates by none other than Jack Abramoff. David’s steady and profitable rise through the Washington bureaucracy is said to have been mentored by Jack, who pushed the right button, fiddled the correct dial and quo'd the proper quid on his behalf. Safavian scratched when Jack itched, but don’t look for him to go to prison for it. A serious stumble in a young career isn't the same as ten years in the slammer.

The rule for copping a plea (as they so colorfully call it on TV) is you must have something to trade that is bigger than your personally indictable self-interest. Bob Ney, the somewhat clumsy taker-of-favors who occasionally represents the interests of Ohioans (when they don’t conflict with his own) is not that large a fish. He is merely the first to fall, a sort of test-case, a non-keeper thrown back to the voters to judge their mood. "Look, I don't take this lightly," Ney told the AP. "I have not changed my stripes. I'm doing my job. I commute back home. I go out around the district. Nothing has changed for me." Sure, Bob. One stroke penalty for improving your lie.

There’s only one fish as big as Abramoff in this whole scenario and that’s The Exterminator, Tom DeLay. I would suggest that the very least of Tom’s troubles-yet-to-come are his indictments in Texas. Tom DeLay is the engine that made Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and David Safavian. Guys like those three have always walked the halls of power, dispensing what they could find a market for, but Tom professionalized it, institutionalized the quid pro quo between business and government.The best government money can buy named its price under the stewardship of Tom DeLay and the phrase everybody does it became the currency of shame in Washington as a result.

Frantically, bunches of Congressmen and Senators who partook of the largesse are returning campaign contributions from Abramoff and his clients. Huffing and puffing with huffery and puffery, they are uniformly outraged, calling him a fraud and a crook.

Conrad Burns of Montana is typical, hastily returning $150,000 in campaign contributions and stating for the record, "This Abramoff guy is a bad guy. I hope he goes to jail and we never see him again. I wish he'd never been born, to be right honest with you." To be right honest? A little late for that, Conrad, but I surely do understand that you wish he’d never been born. Now of course, the citizens of Montana have to figure out what to make of how Conrad defines both right and honest.

And so the full Congress and Senate will be judged by the same terms, and be found lacking.

Lacking a Senator here and a Representative there after the mid-term elections, for which we have to thank both Jack and Tom.
_____________________________________________

For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Writing in Silence, Editing at Risk

Who could find Belarus on a map, or even knows such a country exists? I live in Europe, the second country to the left and below Belarus and had to look it up to find out where it was. Ten million people. Who cares?

The thing about caring is, it’s necessarily done one by one. And counting ten million people, one by one, is more people trudging home from work in the thin early winter darkness, to light the gas under their tea, than you and I can comprehend in a single sentence.

But they are twinkly-eyed grandmothers, scowling, dispirited workers in mindless dead-end jobs and kids; kids with the bright-colored promise that kids everywhere bring to gray streets, gray apartments and gray snow.

We should all be kids, the world would be a better place.

Kids become young people and some of them, before the light goes out of their eyes, become the Iryna Vidanavas of gray places.

Iryna is Belarusian, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. She’s been in America for just a year, a student, research assistant and teaching assistant. Oh, and in her spare time, she edits Student Thought, a young people’s magazine in Minsk, which is the capital of Belarus. Since 1998, when she took over as editor at Student Thought, Iryna has challenged other people’s right to shut her away in a caged country. People like Belarus’ President, Alexander Lukashenko, who has been dubbed Europe’s last dictator.

Now you know the cast of characters.

Belarus shouldn’t matter enough to anybody to make such a fuss over it. The bad old days of the Iron Curtain are fifteen years gone, at least for its neighbors, and it’s a fairly small, landlocked country without enough national economic output to fight over. But it borders Russia and Vladimir Putin is tired of losing satellites, angry at the shrinking of the once enormous land-mass Mother Russia controlled. Belarus has the misfortune to lie between Russia and Ukraine, a country of tremendous agricultural importance to Russia, a country trying to slip off quietly to the West.

The Iron Curtain never really fell around Belarus.

Student Thought is a sounding-board off which bounces the nervous, yet amplified exuberance of young Belarusians. Their love of and limited access to things Western make them a threat to a government with nothing to offer. "Young people don't like Lukashenko," Iryna says. "They want to travel. They want to have normal lives. He understands that he needs to control them. Young people will go to the streets -- they don't have that much to lose."

Student Thought is a tree falling in the forest of Belarus and there will be no sound if no one is there to hear.

Last month’s issue of Student Thought was seized by the government on the laughable charge that it was printed with ‘dangerous ink’ that was a ‘health hazzard’ to Belarusians. One can only wonder if the irony is lost on them, that it is indeed dangerous ink, but certainly not because of its chemical content. The cover had a photo of a shoplifter, stolen goods tucked into the stocking of a long, sexy leg. There is no theft in communist countries, nor are there sexy legs.

Social comment . . . dangerous ink.

Student Thought may well land Iryna in prison. Those things still happen in countries that have secret police, countries where young editors simply disappear in the night and are not seen again. To hook this story to a perspective, to make it meaningful to an American audience is damned difficult, maybe impossible, perhaps not worth the doing, and yet . . . it comes down at last to the noise we make about freedom, particularly freedom of speech and of the press.

Iryna is under investigation. It seems financial crimes are possible, a favorite of communist dictators. If charges come from this, a fine is sure and possible prison as well, up to six years. But, also indicative of dictatorships, there is no one to call for information, no way to know when or even if an axe will fall. 

It’s a quiet forest, this second country to the right and above me, where falling trees seldom make a sound.
______________________________________________

More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.

Encouraging Responsibility (Yours, Not Mine)

All you displaced poor folks, listen up! Ol’ Joe Barton, Representative in Washington for those proud Texans hailing from Arlington, which is just barely a smidge to the west of Dallas, has a word for you. Actually, several words. But first a note or two of intro.

Joe is the demolition expert behind the wrecking of Medicaid for all you Gulf Coast unfortunates, along with every other poor person in the country, including a whole bunch of your retired parents and grandparents. Joe Barton got himself so worked-up with the need to protect tax incentives for Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and the Waltons (not the John-Boy Waltons, the Wal-Mart family) that he lost all perspective. Turned legislation into a moral lesson. Christmas and New Year is the time for moral lessons, as the Grand Juries are all on holiday.

Joe Barton knows about moral lessons, because he studied at the feet of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. (Tom and Jack, the Indictment Brothers, one in Texas and the other in Florida) I don't know if Joe actually has fleas, but my old daddy always said "if you run with dogs, you get fleas." Fortunately, DeLay was an exterminator in his past life. But anyway, back to the work at hand.

Ol’ Joe engineered some pretty steep cuts in Medicaid to keep Bill, Warren and the Walton kids in tall cotton. $16 billion lopped off health care for the poor and aged, increasing co-payments at the same time.

I know you’ll think that’s pretty tough at first glance, what with having lost your job or home or maybe being on $800 Social Security, but there’s a purpose in it. As explained by AP reporter Kevin Freking,

"The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that such increases would lead many poor people to forgo health care or not to enroll in Medicaid at all -- contributing to some of the $4.8 billion in Medicaid savings envisioned over the next five years."

Well, that's a relief. We'll save on Medicaid by making it unaffordable.

The further purpose is the moral education of the common man, a subject near and dear to Joe Barton’s heart. He explains the increased co-payments are needed to "encourage personal responsibility" among low-income people. Not that Joe ever knew a low-income man or woman personally, but he's heard about them and their deficiencies in the area of duty and obligation to their betters.

Personally, Joe (as a member of Congress) has a Rolls-Royce version of medical insurance. Best of all, it's paid for by you and me and covers Joe from his bunions to his hair transplant. He’s also in an income bracket just a tad above us worker-bees, pulling in $12,500 a month as a Representative and another $200,000 a month for representing.

The twelve grand a month is for taking care of constituents in his district by slicing and dicing their health insurance. The real money, the two and a half million he grabbed from corporate interests in his election year, is for such delicacies as serving up $10 billion to encourage preferred-provider organizations, something the Senate thought was foolish and wasteful.

$10 bil would certainly make me feel preferred and encourage the hell out of me as well. Rebate demands by the Senate from drug manufacturers were quietly eliminated as well.

Score so far:

• Bill and Warren and the Waltons, hundreds of billions
• Corporate interests, tens of billions
• You and me, an encouragement of personal responsibility

You might want to drop in on Joe Barton in a group, say five-hundred or a thousand of you who might be in close-by FEMA shelters or nursing homes. I wouldn’t give out Joe’s home address, but the Arlington Office is at 6001 W I-20, Suite 200, Arlington, Texas 76017 and his phone number is 817-543-1000.

Tell him you look on the visit as your personal responsibility.
_______________________________________________

More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.

Taking a Bead on Bambi

First Walt Disney and after that the outpouring of Saturday morning cartoon fare for children has raised us a generation of non-hunters. The Bambi-Generation, well-meaning but uninformed, they see each backyard creature in humanized terms. Lovable little animals with voices cringe from the bad old NRA Elmer Fudds that rational sportsmen have become.

And nature, being an opportunity-based force, rewarded us with city parks and golf courses plagued with Canada geese, suburban gardens ravaged by Bambi and a resurgence of predator types from foxes to coyotes to the occasional edge-of-town-lurking mountain lion.

Those who used to suit up on weekends to disrupt this or that form of hunting activity, now lie abed at night in their suburban homes and, if they listen closely, hear the muffled munching of Brer Rabbit in whatever serves for the backyard briar patch. It's interesting and instructive to watch the Bambi-Generation come up against the reality of living in a relatively predator-free suburban environment. Animal rights are giving (ever so slight) way to the every day experience of an urban life that strives to coexist with a perpetually encroaching wildlife.

The Chicago area, where I hail from originally, got a taste of what was to come nationally, some twenty or thirty years ago. Chicago and, specifically, Cook County prides itself on the extensive Cook County Forest Preserve District it pulled around its broad shoulders some seventy years ago. Virtually a wilderness shawl, another of Chicago’s unique preservations of green space. The district encompasses some 67,000 acres, 77 times the size of New York's Central Park.

That luxury used to hold within its boundaries an almost unlimited natural wonderland, abundant in the spring with trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, primrose and wild phlox. Black and raspberry shrubs, cranberry, dogwood, redbud and countless other native plants are mostly absent today from Cook County's’s forest preserves.

A ‘browse line’ some four feet off the ground evidences such all inclusive destruction of wild underplantings that it looks as if man himself had been clearing and cutting. It looks far too neat for nature. Thousands of varieties of native species are at risk to overpopulating deer, who no longer have natural enemies to pare their numbers.

Hunting seasons in and around urban areas are sneaking back into the allowed rhetoric, although we’ve largely lost our hunting dads to the Bambi-Generation. Possibly we'll import hunting instructors from the Austrian Tyrol as we now hire Swiss ski-instructors. These loden-clad Europeans might work through the language barrier to infiltrate the hunting barrier amongst our young and inexperienced.

Thus might the frontier heritage long lost to our culture and our native woodlands be restored simultaneously.

Almost 900 deer are killed annually within Cook County. It’s not a minor accident when a 260 pound deer comes through your windshield, particularly if it ends up in your or your child’s lap. Approximately 150 people a year lose their lives to deer collisions nationwide and nearly $1 billion is spent repairing bashed-up cars. Hunting the population down to manageable size has been the way of the world sine there have been deer and geese.

Just because we have shed our hunting instinct to the humanization of Disney's Enchanted Forest doesn’t mean that the hunting solution is no longer valid.
______________________________________________________

A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Don’t Talk About Leaders, I want to Hear About Lenders

President George has reawakened to the reality of New Orleans once again. It must have to do with his going to the ranch for Christmas. Memories there on the high chaparral of past ranching holidays. One in particular when there was a storm, a few trees down and a major coastal city all but disappeared.

So, before taking off to console himself over recent party desertions and back-stabbings, he doubled the money down for NO relief. Like doubling down on two dealt Jacks at Vegas, hoping to get lucky.

He announced the added dough as a ‘leadership’ thing. Our Prez is high on leadership, if sometimes a little slow on reasoning. Anyway, Donald Powell, the latest of the confused guys running the New Orleans relief efforts, agreed to step in and increase the levee spending from $1.6 billion to three thousand, one hundred millions of dollars.

That’s a lot of thousands of millions for a city whose viability as a long-term survivor is still in doubt.

The idea is to get something going down there, anything to get the taste out of the President’s mouth from that giveaway speech he made in front of Saint Louis Cathedral. Man, you tell people you care about them, promise you’ll help and the first thing you know they start showing up on the front steps of the White House, wondering when it’s going to start happening.

But you have to have levees, even the President can understand that. The squeeze is on to see if the lumbering behemoth in charge of levees, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, can get anything stuck on that will hold by the start of next year’s hurricane season.

A further problem lies in our federal sticking-our-head-in-the-sand over the global warming issue, because that’s of primo concern in the case of New Orleans. No one’s allowed to talk about it for fear of waking the ostrich. Hurricanes are generated by warm water in the southern oceans. Keep this very much under your hat, because it’s classified information, but the southern oceans are getting warmer.

George can’t be told this because he gets testy, starts throwing things, swearing and ultimately stomping out of meetings. Various staff members, declining to give their names, say it’s just not worth it, adding with a shrug, “how much can the oceans really heat up in the remaining three years of this administration?”

Good point. But temper tantrums aside, someone has to lend the money for whatever is done in the surviving shell of what was once an historic city. Pompeii didn’t get rebuilt, not for lack of available contractors in Rome and Naples, but because the Medici brothers in Florence wouldn’t guarantee the loans.

And the fact that no one can bear to tell George is that, although the number of hurricanes coming ashore on the Gulf Coast isn’t going to increase (whew), the severity is expected to increase (drat) and keep on increasing to category 5, 6 and 7 intensity (damn). So, two things better happen really, really quickly:

1. The Corps of Engineers better figure out how to do twenty-five years of levee rebuilding in ten months, and
2. Someone outside ordinary run-of-the-mill commercial investment sources better be found to guarantee the Crescent City’s development loans.

If the feds (you and me) decide to cover this base, there will be a huge public outcry and I will be at the head of the pack, outcrying with the best of them. Which brings up another strange and wonderful coincidence. Donald E. Powell, the guy overseeing the spending of the Katrina money is Bush’s head of the FDIC. The FDIC insures bank accounts in case of a financial disaster or an individual bank failure.

Could the administration, in their wildest dreams, be thinking of allowing the FDIC to underwrite Katrina rebuilding loans?

Nah! Couldn’t happen!
____________________________________________________

A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Entrapped By French Philosophy, Without a Clue

And who would strike us clueless but a Frenchman and aren’t they all Frenchmen, these mystery thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Darrida. And now, come to haunt us on our own shores, Jean Baudrillard. He has a book to flog, titled The Conspiracy of Art.

Philosophy has either taken a wrong turn semantically or else it’s just the popular thing to write and speak obscurely, so no ordinary soul could possibly understand. The U.S. Tax Code is more philosophy than law, defined in this way.

But I make my case by the following statements concerning art and leave it to your sole (soul?) discretion to judge the words of the artist against the words of Baudrillard:

• Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings---George Tooker, artist
• The art scene is but a scene or obscene mask for the reality that all the world is trans-aestheticized---Jean Baudrillard

I guess the ‘art scene’ is what you care to make it. Personally, I find George Tooker’s take on it pretty straightforward and easy to understand.

But brace for this and see if you can tell me what the hell it means when Baudrillard extrapolates as follows:

“We have no more to do with art as such, as an exceptional form. Now the banal reality has become aestheticized, all reality is trans-aestheticized, and that is the very problem. Art was a form, and then it became more and more no more a form but a value, and so we came from art to aesthetics—it’s something very, very different. And as art becomes aesthetics it joins with reality, it joins with the banality of reality. Because all reality becomes aesthetical, too, then it’s a total confusion between art and reality and the result of this confusion is hyperreality. But, in this sense, there is no more radical difference between art and realism. And this is the very end of art. As form.”

What a crock, foisted off on a stunned bunch at a Baudrillard reading, who hadn’t the foggiest notion of what he meant. Or the froggiest notion, if one wanted to be unkind. So, now we have seen Baudrillard’s pronouncement of the end of art, just as we saw Francis Fukuyama’s end of history and both are wrong, each striving for a desperate place as the hot-ticket observer of what's going on. Each strives to arrive by tortured syntax, hiding in a fog of symbolism rather than outlined in stark contrast against a white wall of clarity.

The Conspiracy of Art might be subtitled, the abstract conspiracies of Jean Baudrillard to dance us down a winding lane of his semantic posturing to see how deeply we will slog into the swamp before turning back. Not that it matters much, once we’ve paid the purchase price, memorized the blurbs for conversational purposes and given Conspiracy pride of place on our bookshelf.

The stunned bunch in New York for Baudrillard’s reading, included the usual suspects; the dreadlocked, the white-raincoated, the red and purple-haired (on one head). A questioner, after the reading, summed up for me what icons we have made of the abstruse lecturer on almost any subject (from New Yorker magazine);

“I don’t know how to ask this question, because it’s so multi-faceted. You’re Baudrillard and you were able to fill a room. And what I want to know is: when someone dies, we read an obituary—like Derrida died last year, and it’s a great loss for all of us. What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you? I would like to know how old you are, if you’re married and if you have kids, and since you’ve spent a great deal of time writing a great many books, some of which I could not get through, is there something you want to say that can be summed up?”

In other words, are you understandable to this poor man with no contextual anchor in some form other than your writing?

“I am the simulacrum (vague semblance) of myself,” Baudrillard answered.

And I guess that says it all. Only in New York has the specialty of conning a public eager to be conned been raised to its own art form.

Following which, wine and cheese is expected to be served.
____________________________________________________

   

There are lots more Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Senator Proxmire and the Golden Fleece

Fifty years ago a Wisconsin Senator by the name of William Proxmire took his seat in that hallowed chamber called the United States Senate and for the next 31 years no free-spender was safe. He hated government waste with a passion and there was (and is) lots of it to hate in Washington.

He wasn’t wasteful with his campaign money either. He seldom spent more than $200 on his own re-election campaigns, most of that for postage to send back campaign contributions. And yet he was elected five times to the Senate. He’s been called a Senate gadfly and my dictionary defines ‘gadfly’ as a ‘persistently annoying person.’ That seems a bit harsh and it might be that we could use a few more gadflies in Congress, if he is representative. Proxmire said "Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous." Words to live by and legislate by and a timely reminder to us all.

Bill thought he was sent to Washington to stay there and attend to the chores of the Senate. And he did, setting the record in his time for Senate attendance and still holding the record for consecutive roll-call votes. Proxmire cast his 12,134th vote in April of 1990.

From March of 1975, for the next thirteen years, William Proxmire awarded a monthly Golden Fleece Award for the most (in his opinion) outrageously wasteful government spending or grant.  He was inspired to create the award as a way to galvanize public opinion against wasteful spending.  His first Golden Fleece Award went to the National Science Foundation for conducting an $84,000 study about why people fall in love.  After that, the Golden Fleece Award became a regular news feature and favorite with the public.

It made him few friends among his Senate peers.

Proxmire told The Wall Street Journal in 1988, “The purpose of the award was to dramatize wasteful and extravagant spending to try to discourage it.  Highlighting specific, single wasteful expenditures is more effective than simply complaining in a general way about government waste.” Winners included;

• A $27,000 study to determine why inmates want to escape from prison.
• A six thousand dollar, seventeen-page page document on how to buy Worcestershire Sauce.
• The Department of Agriculture, for spending nearly $46,000 to find out how long it takes to cook breakfast.
• The National Institute for Mental Health, $97,000 for funding a study of behavior and social relationships in a Peruvian brothel.
• And Proxmire’s own personal favorite, a study to find out whether sunfish that drink tequila are more aggressive than sunfish who drink gin.

You get the drift.

In celebration of Proxmire’s 80th birthday, Senator Christopher Dodd proclaimed,

“Senator Proxmire is perhaps best remembered for his fanatical devotion to saving taxpayer dollars.  He refused to travel abroad at government expense, and he returned $1 million to the Treasury over 6 years by cutting back on staff expenses.  This commitment to personal thrift gave him the credibility to stand up to the waste of taxpayer money elsewhere in the governmen.  Golden Fleece not only makes its point about the potential dangers of ill-managed and ill-conceived government programs, but reminds us of the humor and character of this noble public servant.”

Taxpayers for Common Sense has revived and continued the award. Senator Proxmire personally sat on its advisory board in its first few years. Awards can be checked out at the Golden Fleece web site (www.taxpayer.net/goldenfleece). Taxpayers for Common Sense also makes available the excellent repository of historical information on the original Fleece, including the only complete list of all Fleece awards. Even so, the awards will never have the popularity or the media clout they had when Bill Proxmire, the senior Senator from the state of Wisconsin gave them out monthly.

Bill is dead this week, at 93 years of age and the Senate rolls merrily along without fear of his accusatory Golden Fleece.
__________________________________________________

For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Major Ben Connable Checks In

Major Ben Connable has written to me through his friend, who copied and pasted the note and forwarded it to me; all a bit deep cover for my taste, but I asked for the letter and he has sent it. I accept that, in fact I accept it with pretty good graces. I was not anxious to go much further with this and so, here is Ben:

Sir,

I am Major Ben Connable and I'm responding to your blog only because my friend has stuck his neck out in my defense. I am amazed that I have to tell you, and many others, that the views expressed in my article are mine and mine alone. It seems bizarre and exceedingly paranoid to assume that the President could order an officer in the military to write such a personal statement.

I urge you to seek out and speak with people in the military, you might find they are not the anthropomorphic drones of your vivid imagination. You call me elusive, but I'm not sure what I've been eluding. Not everyone reads your blog, although I find it well written and worthy of a scan.

I've had some folks find my email address, including one very angry fellow who wished that I be maimed so my family would have to hear me scream from the nightmares when I came home. I've had some wish for my death, and one who said that he would "laugh his ass off" if I were to be killed. I have to assume these e-mails don't represent the bulk of the anti-war movement or I'd be tempted to point out some contradictions between belief and speech.

Most of my apparent critics just assume that I'm a myopic moron who doesn't "get it," I'm uneducated, or that I'm self-delusional. I suppose those kind of assumptions help some folks sleep better at night and I don't begrudge them their comfort.

I didn't write the article in a futile effort to coax zealots into rational discussion. I wrote the article because I believe very passionately that the war is being misrepresented. I wrote it to prevent an abandonment of the Iraqi people, an act that I would view as the ultimate display of national selfishness.

If you have never been to Iraq I urge you to go. Meet with the Iraqi people. Sit down and have dinner with a few families. Meet their children. Stay for a year to get a really honest impression. If you still think we should leave after you return then we have something to talk about. You would not stand alone, and I am not self-delusional enough to believe that I represent everyone who has ever been to Iraq. I do represent a silent majority of officers and NCOs. I base this not only on poll numbers (which have come under attack) but also on personal experience. I have spoken with Marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen across the country and in Iraq.

Part of my job over the past couple of years has been to teach Iraqi culture to a broad spectrum of Marines and other service members and I have had the chance to speak with thousands of them on the subject of withdrawal. I speak with a relative degree of confidence. I won't have time to engage in an email debate and frankly I choose not to. My article reflects my beliefs and you are more than free to disagree.

Please consider, if even for a moment, that there's a chance you're wrong.

I thank the Major for that response and accept the statement that both the Washington Post and USA Today articles fairly represent his personal feelings, without outside or military influence. His friend argues for a mea culpa from me and I am happy to provide it. I acknowledge that Marine Major Ben Connable not only exists, but wrote the articles in question solely as a matter of his personal opinion.

I agree with Major Connable that it would be bizarre and exceedingly paranoid to assume that the President could order an officer in the military to write such a personal statement, if I had assumed or written that, which I did not.

I also find the anthropomorphic drones of your vivid imagination a bit below the belt, as my imagination (vivid or not) was never exercised in the piece I wrote. I do consider, Major, every hour of every day that there’s more than just a chance that I am wrong and you make the same error your valiant friend makes, that I am arguing America to leave Iraq. I have argued passionately that we should never have gone there in the first place, but I made that argument eight months before we went in and I think it was (and is) a valid position, made at an appropriate time.

I am appalled that there are those who would wish evil upon Major Connable or any member of our military in Iraq. Certainly I am not among them, but I suspect he knows that. I appreciate him taking the time and interest to further illuminate his views and motivation.
______________________________________________________

Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

Following Up on the Elusive Ben Connable

Something in my December 14th Who and Where is Ben Connable must have struck a nerve out there in cyberspace, a place that tends toward nervousness. I got an e-mail from BBC World Service asking me to participate in a radio broadcast on 'whether the media isn't reporting the good news out of Iraq.'

My knee-jerk reaction to that was what media? The Pentagon has been reporting regularly through their script-writers, the Washington based Lincoln Group and, although they’ve been paying for placement, I’m not sure that qualifies them as media.

Then came an e-mail from a friend of Ben's, who wasn’t happy with me. I have deleted reference to his name, so it shouldn’t be a breach of trust:

Mr. Freeman,

My name is ***** ******. I came across your comments that you doubt that Major Ben Connable is authentic or even exists.

I am a close personal friend of Major Connable's, and he does indeed exist in the capacity he states.

One of the reasons you may not be able to find much about him is due to the EXTREMELY sensitive nature of his particular job. I am not sure if listing his personal bio to you would necessarily endanger him, but I will err on the side of safety and not go into the details of his career, education and experiences. Suffice it to say it makes him incredible valuable to the Marines and believe it or not, due to our current military involvments, invaluable to our nation.

There are not many U.S. Marines (or people) who have the specialized education, experience and background that we find in Major Connable. His current and former deployments along with his specialization actually puts him in a unique position to see the "broader picture". Again, I hope you understand why I do not want to go into details, as I would never do anything to betray the safety or wishes of my friend.

You may disagree with his views, but he is real, and I can say with 100% certaintly those are indeed his views and opinions. He is a good,  honorable man and it upset me greatly to see him called into question.

I do not know why I have found it fit to write an e-mail to a complete stranger, I just feel as though the honor and integrity of a close friend has been called into question. You are obviously passionate about your beliefs, and I hope you can understand my passion when it came to your suggestion about my friend, Major Connable.

I do not expect or want to change your views on the war, you have a right to express those opinions and I do not think it necessarily makes you a traitor as some would probably (unfortunately) call you.

I just ask that perhaps you take this e-mail and dig a little bit deeper in your research. Please research a bit more and when you find enough information that validated that Major Connable is who he says he is please retract your statements. You state you are anxious to be wrong....prove it.

Let me know what I can do to help prove you are wrong. I will do what I can as long as I do not feel it compromises Major Connable. As I stated I feel his honor is in question I am willing to "fight" to uphold his honor, especially given that he is unable to given his current deployment.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Well, I said elusive, not that the man didn’t exist and I don’t remember impugning his honor, but people get touchy. So, I replied:

Whoa, ****---slow down,

I am not entirely unfamiliar with the Corps. My cousin made every Pacific landing in WWII, retiring as a colonel; my business partner was a major in both Korea and Viet Nam; my brother-in-law a 1st lieutenant in Viet Nam. My own military was less grand, six years of reserves as a sp-4 medic between Korea and Nam.

You've recognized that the major's 'specialization' as well as the fact his actual name is Alfred B. (Ben) has made him hard for me to chase down. I don't need to chase him down. I have no personal, ideological or political problem with him, his branch of service, his loyalty, his degree of education or how he comes to his 3rd tour. Read this carefully, ****; I am not against Major Connable or (probably) even the work he does that is so 'specialized.'

But when he writes 'just-plain-Joe-Marine' articles that explicate the administration talking points, I want to know where he's coming from and, more importantly, who he's writing for. It's not enough to 'speak for the fighting man' and then be unreachable. We have only recently discovered the Pentagon writing bogus stories exactly like this one.

Kevin Anderson at BBC-Washington wrote me:

"Yes, I managed to reach Major Connable, and he'll be joining our programme live this evening. Yes, the press folks at USMC HQ in Washington helped me get in touch."

It makes me even more itchy that the "press folks at USMC HQ" are about the only way to find our writing-Major. Then there's the fact that Bush referenced and linked to the Major's USA Today 2004 article in a campaign e-mail. Your link to Ben giving a speech at a 'policy conference' further erodes the 'Joe-Marine' voice of his newspaper work.

So, actually ****, I'm champing at the bit to do a mea culpa on your good friend. I don't doubt that he exists, but I am a long way from knowing who he represents. I would hope I never slurred his honor or his integrity. All you need do, if it is in your power, is to get me a statement directly from Ben that he does not write 'on direction' from any branch of the U.S. Military and that 'public relations' are in no way part of his military specialization.

That'll be enough for me. Ben has an e-mail address, so do I. Such a statement should in no way compromise his duties, unless his duties include writing to the press. Then I will be delighted to retract.

Fair?

Thanks for taking the time to write,

Jim

And **** responded (I include only the 1st and last paragraph):

    Thank you for the e-mail.

I understand your remaining skepticism, but at least even if I am unable to prompt Ben to e-mail you directly (he may not want to give his e-mail to you or anyone else he does not know...which I understand...but I will ask him first..perhaps he would let me copy and forward/) I wold think you would at least be as so kind to let your good readers know at least now you know he is not a fake, and not a made up entity of the administration or anyone else.

In any event, you will hear from me soon after I hear back from Ben. If you have not listened to the BBC program I do suggest it.

Which is where we are at the moment.

The only thing I have to say further is that I was not always so doubtful of what I read in the newspapers. Most of my life I have been naively accepting of whatever was served up print-wise with my morning egg and coffee. But this latest Bush administration has been caught time after time managing, paying for and just plain faking the news. That angers me and makes me skittish.

If Major Ben Connable chooses to be elusive, my quite logical demand for clarification and attribution is of his Commander-in Chief's doing.
_____________________________________________

See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

America May Strike Out at the World Baseball Classic

Baseball is America’s game but it traditionally does some really odd things. For me, one of those oddities is calling the U.S.-Canadian championship a World Series. If it were truly that, we’d include other countries in a round of playoffs that would truly represent something international, perhaps like World Cup Soccer. That would probably be good for baseball as well. It’s struggling as a spectator sport.

In its infinite wisdom, Major League Baseball is introducing the Inaugural World Baseball Classic next year, a March celebration of baseball as it’s played and enjoyed throughout the world. It's scheduled to begin on March 3 in Tokyo and end in San Diego three weeks later. National teams will compete from the United States, Japan, Korea, Chinese Taipei, China, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, Italy, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Australia and Netherlands. Holland? Who knew those wooden-shoes played baseball? Sixteen teams.

Oops, make that fifteen. The Treasury Department's gotten all bent out of shape and its Office of Foreign Assets Control told Major League Baseball it will be a no-go for the Cubans. A permit from Foreign Assets Control is necessary because of U.S. laws governing certain commercial transactions with Fidel Castro's communist island nation. A permit? For baseball? Baseball is exempt from anti-trust laws in this country, but somehow constricted by foreign assets control in an international competition. Go figure.

We Americans got to see the Bolshoi Ballet in New York through all those nasty and ugly years of the Cold War, but then Russia was only Reagan's Evil Empire.  We have a particular stick up our ass over Cuba. For forty-four years this country has let a small group of exiled Cuban businessmen, who were kicked out of Cuba, dominate our public policy toward Fidel Castro’s island nation.

These guys, who used to run the casinos and brothels, the auto-agencies, hotels and sugar cartel, want their closed little network back. Then-dictator Fulgencio Batista guaranteed them a lavish lifestyle in the old days before now-dictator Castro threw them all out. These few self-important exiles are the reason Americans can no longer vacation in Cuba and the reason Cubans have suffered so under American policy. Not to mention cutting off access to their outstanding ballplayers for our leagues.

Thus a pop-gun socialist movement in Cuba was built by pressure from this bunch into a major communist threat to the security of our country. What a laugh, and we let this nonsense go on and on because we just can’t stand to be wrong and admit it.

Which would all be just another stupidity on our part, but now our failed Cuba policy has stuck its ugliness into our national sport. And, if we actually do insist upon the idiocy of Foreign Assets Control mixing with baseball, internationally we’ll look like just what we are . . . idiots. Venezuela will no doubt boycott in support of Cuba and then we’re off and running.

Cuban baseball greats in our leagues are many and include first basemen Rafael Palmeiro and the Hall of Fame member Tony Perez, outfielders Minnie Minoso, Tony Oliva and Jose Canseco, along with the great pitcher Luis Tiant. Baseball is the national sport of both Cuba and America.

As a Cub fan who’s celebrating Chicago’s World Champion White Sox, I keep the hope that sports will somehow overcome national political power struggles. It seems logical to me that we now share baseball with our onetime enemy Japan and totally illogical that we let an absurdity of national pride get between us and Cuba, where baseball might have brought us together.

Of course there are those who don’t want us together. There’s always someone in the world who doesn’t want progress, sportsmanship and brotherhood.

Fortunately, the ball is still in play and how we run it out is entirely of our own choosing.
__________________________________________________

More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.