Opinion-Columns.com

Stand and Deliver

It’s come to mean other things now, but ‘Stand and deliver’ was the term bandits used when they dropped a tree across the path to stop and rob a stage coach at pistol-point.

In a modern-day re-enactment, Senate bandits like Trent Lott have thrown the log of ‘earmarks’ across the road to approval of an emergency spending bill for the Iraq war and hurricane recovery. Standing around the coach that represents this particular piece of banditry, swords and guns drawn, Lott and his lot have already shaken an additional $14.3 billion from the public pocket, but it’s not enough.

Not enough.

The bill itself is a sad necessity, the whole $92.2 billion the President asked for.

This fiscal disaster is born partially out of Iraq War costs run wild, as ‘reconstruction contractors’ are holed up in the Green Zone, afraid to reconstruct, some of them billing $100,000 a day on stand-by. Halliburton has become the ‘scandal du jour,’ not even causing news-blips any longer as its hands are found in yet another, and another and another cookie-jar. War profiteering was once a crime. The Iraqi oil that was going to ‘pay for their own reconstruction’ as Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz repeatedly promised, seems not to have materialized.

The rest of the dough is to be pounded into a similar rat-hole on the Gulf Coast, only this time the enemy is not insurgents but in-surges, as in the increasingly stormy Gulf of Mexico flows into town during hurrican season. Congress hopes to float this loan before the current hurricane season begins in 45 days and proves them idiots. As Congress approves money, insurers are quietly stealing away to higher ground.

But getting back to the Senate, they're in town this week, heads in the trough, because this war and this hurricane have not been funded. Funded? They should have been funded?

Uh-huh. That’s the time-honored way of running a fiscally responsible government. Congress takes in various excise and income taxes to run things. Like your own budget at home, when an extraordinary expense comes along, something that’s not planned for, it has to be accommodated. Usually, a family

• Takes it out of savings
• Borrows from a friend
• Puts it on a credit-card
• Or goes to the bank for a loan

But Congress, in its wisdom, failed to fund the most expensive war we have ever fought and (ditto) failed to fund the most expensive natural disaster the nation has ever known. That’s what is known as going two for two and it’s not always a sports metaphor.

Because this country has no savings, it borrows from friend China. Because it has no discipline, it puts what's left on a credit-card to be paid off by future unnamed and (apparently) uninformed citizens. You would think these citizens would want to know ‘how much,’ but it’s been unpolitic to tell them. And, they're busy with other things, they never asked.

So, I will tell them.

As of April 18, 2006, the total U.S. Government debt was $8.4 trillion. For a family of four, that’s a 'mortgage' to pay off of  $129,200.00 and no house. If you’re a single guy or gal just out of college, stick $32,300.00 onto your college loan and credit-cards to see just how long it will be before you can pop for a new car. That's only current total. Long-term total, the kind that comes down on the grandkids is five times that much.

But I digress. That number I just gave you was before Congress stopped this latest stage coach at gunpoint. Put off buying that new laptop, ‘cause you owe another $330 for Bush’s request, plus $37 for what he didn’t ask for and maybe an additional $25-50 for Trent and his Casino buddies before everyone sheaths their swords and puts their guns away.

Of course, that's all in addition to your regular taxes.

The banditry, nearly all of it by those who have mid-term elections coming up and are desperate to bring home someone’s, anyone’s bacon, include

• Four thousand million to ranchers and farmers (Sen. Conrad Burns, MT) Note: 2005 farm-sector cash receipts were the second-highest in history.
• $794 million for highways, less than a year after a $24 billion highway package.
• Lott’s $700 million already-repaired railroad.
• $15 million to promote seafood.
• $176 million to repair a retirement home.
• $500 million to a defense contractor for storm damage (Trent Lott again)
• $11.3 million for a river bank in California.
• $27 million for the new U.S. Capitol Visitors Center, hundreds of millions already over budget.
• Fifteen hundred million to farmers to offset higher natural gas prices, while you and I scrape by.

Wipe the blood off, you have just been the victim of an earmark. The term ‘earmark’ originated because farmers ear marked their cattle and hogs, either by punching out a notch or wiring in an actual tag. Painful and a little bit bloody, but they allowed a cattleman to know, for sure, which cow or hog was his. Cattlemen and Congressmen still do this.

The question is, whose hog are you?
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More about politics in America at my opinion columns web site.

Outraged Against Themselves, Congress Throws a Tantrum

Like little kids in the check-out line, holding their breath ‘till they’re blue in the face so mom will buy them gum, Congress and the President are outraged, apoplectic, appalled, indignant, offended, shocked and scandalized by gas prices at the pump. A national disgrace, time to convene a committee, appoint a prosecutor, appear on the Today Show and 60 Minutes . . . anything, absolutely anything except take the blame.

The answer, of course, is to do what mom always did. Wait until breathing begins again, stuff their little quivering bodies in the back seat and drive home. Three things that one must never do; buy the damned gum, feed the animals at the zoo or take congressional outrage seriously.

Exxon just posted a record quarterly income. The Congress just posted a record quarterly deficit. Exxon just earned nearly $10 billion and the un-indicted co-conspirators who run our national government pissed $100 billion down the drain, both of them in the past 90 days. Guess which one has the Senators and Representatives ranting on every talk-show they can book?

You have to be older than fifty to have any recollection of the Great Oil Price Run-Up of 1973, when Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and lost a second term. Carter was too honest for the job, but America learns fast and we don’t elect honest presidents anymore. We are in the era of DreamWorks politicians these days and it’s much more entertaining to convene a congressional committee in front of a Washington gas station than it is to take the blame.

DreamWorks politicians

• Gave us SUVs, Hummers, pickup-trucks, the return of the muscle-car and a bankrupted automobile industry.
• Played off the Middle-East countries against one another, armed them to the teeth, supported the oppression of their underclass and looked the other way as crude eased its way from $2 to $70 per barrel.
• Failed in all the ways it is possible to fail, to encourage any form of transportation other than the individual automobile.
• Financially supported (and by tax policy encouraged) endless suburbanization that depended on the car for access.
• Worked to defeat or marginalize every possible form of alternative energy development.

And now, they’re on the floor, kicking, screaming and red-faced, insisting as Claude Rains did in Casablanca, insisting that we ‘round up the usual suspects.’

And no one laughs. This great American comedy is playing out across the country and not a chuckle in the house. Come on, Bostonians, where’s your sense of humor? You there in Chicago, birthplace of Saturday Night Live, have you no sense of irony? Out there in the West, where the oil-wells flow, is there no joy in last year’s $42 oil coming out of the ground at $70 and not a penny added to cost of pumping?

Exxon isn’t the problem, folks. Your DreamWorks government is the problem, Exxon is just unavoidably enriched by thirty years of idiotic Washington’s self-serving policies. We have contrived a war in the land of oil. We have smashed blindly at the hornet’s-nest of a cartel that no longer needs us and blame our local gas station for being stung.

It’s over. Crude will move fractionally from time to time, but inexorably upward, well above $100 a barrel and probably in excess of that over twenty years. The wealthy will drive, the rest of us will rent cars for special occasions or vacation trips. Wal-Mart will re-invent the peddler-wagon and come to you when you can no longer go to them in sufficient quantity.

We’ll finally get bullet-trains down the medians of the Interstate roads and we’ll do it whether or not the private automobile survives. We’ll do it because no commuter in their right mind will be willing to spend two to three hours of their daily life in jammed traffic.

But it would have been nice if we’d not been so gulled. It would have been intelligent and useful, pleasant and agreeable to have designed our suburbs with light rail, commercial centers and local schools. Our kids would like to be off the two-hour schoolbus as much as we would like to be off the two-hour commute.

We could have used alternative fuels, alternative transport, alternative housing, schools and planning in this concreted, asphalted nation we have devised. And there was time, plenty of time. Thirty years wasted. The Interstate highway network was built in ten.

Now the government that provided no alternatives, leaves us no alternatives and blames Exxon.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

A Writer, Not Necessarily an Author

Kaavya Viswanathan is a writer, defined as ‘a person who is able to write and has written something,’ which is the general definition. Further defined, ‘writes books or stories or articles or the like, professionally for pay.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ayn Rand, Stephen King and Anne Rice are authors, people who create an alternative reality that may or may not keep you up late at night, engrossed in imaginary worlds. The difference between a writer and an author is that a writer writes and an author originates.

All of them, whether using a Remington typewriter or Microsoft Word, are essentially creations of Johannes Gutenberg. Nearly 600 years ago, he invented movable type and the printing press.

He did not invent plagiarism, that came way before the invention of various ways to present someone else’s thoughts. Actually, it’s something we all do. Our lives are based on what we hear and read and intuit from others, whether it’s granny or dad, a teacher in school or the kid down the block. It’s called learning. Some call it life.

But there are rules that came as the result of Gutenberg and his marvel. It was at last possible to read words on one printed page and compare them with words written on another printed page and, as soon as dates began to be included in books and manuscripts, the writers of those musings and phrasings began to get very picky.

Shortly after we got movable type, movable lawyers were invented and the rest is history.

The Internet, as Al Gore would no doubt agree, allows us to search vast gazillions of printed words, musings and phrasings. The corner-cutters among us found that an inestimable source of content for the Monday homework assignment that’s been put off until late Sunday night. The trick was to take pretty good stuff and reduce it to pretty ordinary stuff, enabling A) not getting caught and, B) a grade that’s passable, but not too far from our norm.

Gutenberg would not approve, but then Gutenberg is long dead and doesn’t have to bust his ass to get into Harvard.

Recent embarrassments into the realm of plagiarized work notwithstanding, Viswanathan’s publisher, Little, Brown and Co., pulled her chick-lit book from the bookstores nationwide in a record seven days from the first whisper of impropriety.

The whole stink dropped directly into Kaavya’s lap and it’s a big one (the stink, not the lap) because chick-lit  is big business. Her first ‘novel’ attracted a $500,000 advance (for two books), a ten-times-the-usual printing of 100,000 copies and a DreamWorks film deal. Quite incredibly, the whole brouhaha is supposed to have begun with a consultant Kaavya’s family hired to help her get into Harvard, who recommended another consultant, a book packager.

What book packagers have to do with getting into Harvard is less clear, but 17-year-old Kaavya was off and running.

Story line, plot direction and editing was by 17th Street Productions, since acquired by Alloy Online, Inc., who shares copyrights to the book with Viswanathan.  Alloy describes itself on its web site as  ‘a leading Internet destination for the 56 million teens in Generation Y.’ The acquisition promo names 17th Street Productions, ‘a leading developer and producer of media properties for teens.’

So, what we have is not an author caught out, but a writer caught filling in, as in the blanks.

Alloy grinds this stuff out for big bucks, but they need a writer they can publicize, someone attractive and with an immigrant-on-the-way-up story of their own to serve as their version of Cinderella. Who better than Kaavya? A literary marriage not only of convenience, but profit. No one will yet confess who got how much of the half mil advance, but I suspect Kaavya is off the hook for whatever part of it was hers.

Amazon.com 'reviews' reinforce the politics and profit: Jennifer Weiner, author of In Her Shoes and Good In Bed, says 'A funny, fast-paced, and utterly winning first novel . . . an irresistible read ' Kavita Daswani purrs, 'A treasure. Kaavya Viswanathan’s voice is fresh and funny, her protagonist instantly relatable'

A ‘reader from London’ who is obviously not on the payroll, writes, ‘Pathetic attempt at chick lit..., about a third of the novel is product placement for various make-up brands, designers and teen TV series, the rest is full of stereotype characters.’

No one in this incredibly manipulative crowd wants this to go to court. Court is unprofitable, although it occasionally makes for good marketing.

Megan McCafferty, author (writer?) of the two chick-lit novels from which Kaavya plagiarized, said

"I am not seeking restitution in any form. I look forward to getting back to work and moving on, and hope Ms. Viswanathan can too."

Spoken like a true capitalist. McCafferty, deeply and profitably sitting the saddle of her own brand of chick-lit, considers the matter ‘closed’ and is no doubt cranking out sequels as fast as her well-polished little fingers can fly.

The really cool finish to this recent example of the banality of writing pumped out for the semi-pornographic teen market consumption, is Kaavya’s professional hopes for her future. Writing? Not a chance, never was a goal. She expects to become an investment banker.

With her credentials, you can bet J.P. Morgan and Merrill Lynch will be busting her door down. If Kaavya Viswanathan  was a stock, listed on the exchange, even I would buy 100 shares.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Mowing Down a Marketing Bonanza

It’s such fun watching American manufacturers shoot themselves in the foot. They do it with such dedicated focus.

Mr. Briggs and Mr. Stratton fired up their opposition to California’s lawnmower emissions control legislation instead of seeing it for what it is, the golden opportunity to market the hell out of the environment. Green machines! Nah, too much trouble. Wal-Mart wouldn't like it. Too costly, no one’ll buy ‘em.

California, which may as well be another country because of it’s opposition to dirty internal-combustion engines, is having none of it. In answer, Briggs and Stratton merely dialed up their lobbyists, whispered in a couple Senatorial ears and hunkered down. John Shiely is B&S CEO, a nice, young, well-turned-out Brooks Brothers type fellow with the well-bred Milwaukee reverence for the bottom-line.

According to a NYTimes article by Felicity Barringer, Briggs and Stratton’s all-new and highly polished 2006 line of engines is almost a hundred times as polluting (gallon per gallon) as today’s calalytic-converter equipped automobiles. A golf-ball sized small-engine catalytic-converter would add about $20 to $25 to the cost of the engines and solve the problem.

Twenty-five bucks to agreeably meet standards they’ll have to knuckle under to anyway, not all that far down the road. Shiely ought to give Chrysler, GM or Ford a ring to see how well they made out trying to stiff-arm the EPA. Of course it’s not just lawnmowers. Briggs and Stratton engines are found on leaf-blowers, golf carts, generators, outboard engines, chainsaws, rototillers, small tractors, weed-eaters, snow-blowers, jet-skis and irrigation pumps, to name what immediately comes to mind.

All this great stuff, all polluting, all fixable, all a great marketing opportunity—but John Shiely claims it ain’t easy being green. Muppet mentality strikes again. When all else fails, haul out the China threat. Senator Christopher Bond, B&S’s Washington shill, argues that tightening small-engine standards nationally would take 1,750 jobs from his constituents and send them to China.

As we all know, China is the world’s most efficient maker of golf-ball sized catalytic-converters. According to the Senator, moving this critical function to Asia is tantamount to destroying the PGA Tour (I made that up), killing off yet another great American industry and decimating the employment of Bond’s Missouri constituents He’s not having any, thank you very much.

Not so long as he chairs the committee that controls the budget of the EPA.

All over golf balls, or things the size of golf balls, or thingys that cost about the same as a dozen golf balls. Who would have thought that a worldwide engine provider such as Briggs and Stratton was so horribly vulnerable? My god, it’s Harley Davidson all over again. Or not. It’s so confusing when we get Brooks Brothered. Possibly John can slip down the road and have lunch with Jim Ziemer at Harley and ask how they were able to afford converters, still kick Yamaha’s butt and stave off those vicious Chinese motorcycle builders.

What’s at stake in California is a pending regulation that would tighten emission requirements for small engines, Briggs engines, Stratton engines. Cutting 22 tons of smog-forming chemicals from the California air daily, or the equal of  800,000 cars per day, give or take a few.

That sounds reasonable on the face of it. That sounds like something a major green-machine ad campaign could be built around. That sounds like consumers wouldn't be able to get around the law by buying a non-Briggs, non-Stratton mower or outboard motor. Shiely and Bonds think it only sounds that way, that far murkier plots against American industry are afoot.

So, if John Shiely can just figure out how to convince all those chainsaw and jet-ski buyers out there that twenty-five bucks is a good investment and if he can de-claw Senator Bond and if he can just buy the little converters from China instead of having them ravage yet another American company . . . then, maybe we can all sigh in relief, mow our lawns and weed-eater a little around the picnic-table without destroying the world as we know it.

Whoops, small item I nearly missed from Barringer’s article:

“But four small-engine makers say that their engineers have figured out how to meet the pollution standards safely, with or without the devices.”

We can only hope those four are not Japanese makers. We’ve been there, done that, got the tee shirt some thirty years ago and lost our auto industry. Not because Detroit couldn’t make efficient, well-made cars, they've long since proven their ability to do that.

But because they wouldn’t.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Fiddling While Baghdad Burns

Side thought, before getting to the current problems inside Iraq:

I can’t help but comment on former President Ford’s Friday support of Rumsfeld against his military critics. Looking for champions to their cause, Rummy, Cheney and Bush no doubt tried to find the ‘latest and greatest.’ They came up empty. Beating the bushes (oops) all the way back through Dad and Reagan, nary a voice could be found this side of the discredited Nixon administration. 84 year-old Melvin Laird and 92 year-old Jerry Ford are appropriate bookends for Donald Rumsfeld, swinging in the wind.

Leaving that, I suppose it’s unfair to criticize the democratic experiment in Iraq for not getting its shit together over four and a half months while their country skewers itself on the twin swords of Shiite-Sunni rivalry. But then maybe not.  Maybe Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad needs to rub their nose in it. What we’re seeing unfold isn’t unexpected, but it’s demoralizing and merely proves that there’s no early way out without leaving a civilian massacre in our wake.

The secular, autocratic dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is devolving into an Iranian-Taliban style mullocracy. Throwing a bone or two to Sunnis and Kurds, the Shiite majority has let loose the dogs of religious war, this time on their terms and the pay-back is both bloody and relentless. Khalizad and George Bush need to lean very heavily on the bickering Iraqis and Zalmay knows how to do it. He's very tough and very able if left to the work.

But of course there’s a price. The price is staying and, without squaring with the American public about why that price is worth paying, the president could pay another price in the November elections. He will pay the former or surely pay the latter. But that would be the honorable rather than the political solution and he is, above all else, a political president.

The supposed difficulty with which an Iraqi Prime Minister has been chosen is no more than an excuse to let the blood run sufficiently to chase out whatever Iraqi intellectuals and middle class remain. They are impediments to a Shiite Sharia blanket, drawn from Tehran to Baghdad. The Iraqi Interior Ministry dictated in 2003 that anyone found eating in public during the fasting month of Ramadan would be detained three days and fined. Does that sound like Iran, or what? Secular Iraqis were livid.

Under this new 'democratic' government, secular Iraqis will be gone or suffer the consequences.

The Interior Ministry can only be impartial if it is under secular control, but there’s precious little chance of that happening when it affords such productive killing fields. The “Wolf Brigade,” exists within the ministry, a semi-legitimate death squad. How’s that for a cultural reference back to Hitler's days in pre-war Germany?

Interior Ministries in Muslim countries don’t run the parks and sea shores, they enforce the law of the Mullah, no matter what the professed law of the country may be.

Death squads. Torture cells in more than a thousand lockups across Iraq. You take your choice in the Middle East; there’s the dictatorships of  Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, the ‘President’ of Pakistan and the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia or the mullocracies of Afghanistan and Iran. And now, it seems, Iraq. The unelected, who call the shots. No wonder Saddam was such a tough guy.

Iraq may be a place we should never have gone, but it is now a place we cannot leave.

Not if we ever hope for accommodation with the Muslim world. Ultimately, we make it here or there will be fewer and fewer options open to us. If civil and semi-democratic society fails in Iraq, it’s a not-so-slow slide into less and less Middle East oil and an ultimate confrontation with Asia centered on energy as well as commerce. Muslim oil will turn more and more toward Muslim Asia.

So this wrench George Bush has so disingenuously thrown into the Muslim machinery isn’t about to be retrieved by ‘bringing the troops home’ any time soon. Bush and Rummy, Condi and Dick have shit in the American pants in Iraq and the stench is there for everyone to smell. It’s not enough to say ‘excuse me’ and run on home to change their underwear. The problem, not the face-saving problem, but the real problem is how to assure a lasting democratic legacy in Iraq.

I’m very much afraid that isn’t going to be achieved by turning over peace-keeping responsibilities to an Interior Ministry that boasts of a Wolf Brigade allied with Shiite militias. The truth that no one talks of is not a political truth, it’s a humanitarian truth. Walking away, limping away or merely waving goodbye and getting out is to put a Shiite majority at the throats of a well-armed and desperate Sunni minority population who became used to running things.

Cleaning George Bush’s underwear may take ten years of boots on the ground, many more boots than are there today. The alternative is a hell-hole of America-haters, a power-vacuum that will probably bring down Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia and our oil sources of supply.

Which will ultimately bring a war of annihilation, because it’s the only kind we know how to fight anymore. The world that once believed in American-style democracy and opportunity for all, no longer believes. The tragic direction this administration has taken America since 9-11 laid all our cards on the Iraqi table, a bluff-bet with a losing hand.
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Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

The World According to Melvin Laird

What an interesting rebuttal Karl Rove mounted to the current flap over Donald Rumsfeld’s ability or lack thereof to run the Pentagon.

84 year old Melvin Laird dragged out of mothballs, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense before Nixon got shamed out of office, something in today’s ambiguous world that seems an act of simpler times. Is it possible we used to have some degree of moral power over our elected presidents and co-conspirators?

One can imagine the call to arms.

Mel, Donald needs you. Mel, wake up, you remember Donald Rumsfeld, the guy Nixon had around all the time. What? No, Bob Pursley will write it, Mel, just say he’s doing a fine job. No, not Pursley, Rumsfeld, Mel. Get your head together.

So goes the reach back to a discredited administration to shore up a discredited administration. What goes ‘round, comes ‘round.

Laird’s op-ed piece is appropriately titled, Why Are They Speaking Up Now? and asserts the “retired general officers who have recently called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld want to convince the public that civilian control has silenced military wisdom regarding the war in Iraq.”

That’s not what I read of it, Mel, but then all you Nixon guys seem to have a hard time with certain flavors of reality. Major General John Batiste claims “a pattern of poor strategic decisions and a leadership style that is contemptuous, dismissive, arrogant and abusive.” Doesn’t sound to me like anyone was silenced, they were merely overruled with contempt and disastrous results.

You rather charmingly propose “the important time for them to weigh in was while they were on active duty.” I know we've interrupted your nap, Mel, but they did that and were ignored.

When civilian leadership gives direct orders to the military, the military salutes and executes. Didn’t they explain that to you when you were in the Secretary’s chair? It’s called chain-of-command and the top part is the President, who this morning simply said

“I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”

That particular form of Nixon-before-the-fall arrogance is what Batiste and the other generals are disputing and, quite properly, they have chosen to dispute it from outside the military, from retirement. You continue, Mel,

“For them to now imply otherwise is disingenuous and quite possibly harmful for our prospects in Iraq. And it misrepresents the healthy give-and-take that we are confident is widespread between the civilian leadership at the Pentagon and the capable military hierarchy.”

Hello. Earth to Mel. They have not implied otherwise, but if you are ‘confident’ that a healthy give and take exists between Rumsfeld and senior officers, then you must have been off somewhere fly-fishing for the past four years. This Secretary of Defense has gloried in his personal power, asserting it publicly and driving out dialog until he arrived at his present Joint Chiefs yes-man, General Peter Pace.

When Rumsfeld called a press conference, Pace stood at his side, interrupting to answer questions asked of Rummy. One wonders when press secretary became one of the duties of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but then all things are possible in an administration born of and reaching-back to Nixon.

“But ultimately, and rightly, our system leaves the final decisions to the elected civilians and their appointees.”

Elected officials like whom, Mel? Like Dick Nixon? Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Condi and George, the architects of this disaster who claim omnipotence while the bits and pieces are falling on their (and our) heads?

“Access by the military through the Joint Chiefs of Staff structure and especially through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is frequent and influential,” Laird writes.

Unless of course the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is otherwise busy serving as press secretary.
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Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

Welcome to International Politics, to Deal With China, Press 9

The exuberant, yet somewhat Indian-accented voice instructs;

• To complain about lost jobs, press 1
• To discuss human-rights, press 2
• To argue trade issues, press 3
• To buy latest CD, A Bigger Bang (Rolling Stones) $1.13 in caselots, press 4
• To inquire about intellectual-property issues, press 5
• To re-invent your company in China at incredible cost-savings, press 6
• To facilitate this through the Wal-Mart 12-step program, press 7
• For a re-mastered photo of you, holding back the tank on Tiananmen Square, press 8
• To deal with China on all other issues, press 9

Unfortunately, President Bush doesn’t have these options available to him as Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Washington this week, but it won’t much matter. Anyone who thinks anything substantive comes out of Alpha Dog to Alpha Dog discussions, is hopelessly naïve. Those issues have already been fought over, chewed on, threatened about, pleaded, coerced and ultimately negotiated as best our country could from its traditional position of weakness.

Thus the headline and press-conference after the State Dinner will showcase two leaders, each of them smiling, each putting the best face on what was agreed, neither of them surprised.

Traditional weakness? America? Yeah, these are two great nations, improbably joined at the hip, China dependent upon exports, America, imports and financing of our national debt. The United States moving from largest investor nation to largest debtor nation is a big-time weakness. The value of the dollar has dropped like a rock, 30% internationally during these past six unfunded years of war and tax relief. At any rate, neither country comes to this meeting entirely comfortable with the obvious and necessary see-sawing priorities.

Decades ago, we told China it had to become more Western, embrace Western culture and develope a capitalistic worldliness to raise the standards of their impoverished people.

So, they took the American model, undervaluing their currency (something we once did with slavery), setting their worker-class against their agricultural class (a feat we accomplished with mechanization), causing enormous environmental damage (as did our lumber, industrial and mining industries) and wrapping the entire package in dodgy legalities (as with our union-breaking and waves of immigrant labor).

Now, as we look at what China has wrought in our likeness, we find it’s not as pretty a picture as we would like it to be. Nor has it found a way to provide the cheap goods Americans demand without takingour  jobs and ignoring copyrights. As Ann Landers always said, there ain’t no free lunch.

As a practical matter, we are helpless. The bill sponsored by Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham to impose a 27.5 percent tariff on imports of Chinese goods, until they see certain things our way, won't happen. It plays well to the voters, but is prevented by China's membership in the World Trade Organization. We are members as well and the WTO precludes members from imposing unilateral tariffs on other members. Pffffttt! Sorry, Charlie and Lindsey.

We are further made helpless because China holds so much of our paper debt. We’re at an all time high right now in taking on that debt and there aren’t that many players in the let's-finance-America game any more. The oil-rich nations are tending toward Europe and Asia at the moment, watching Iraq and Iran with a wary eye.

So it seems this dance of only marginally suitable partners will go on.

Until it suits China otherwise. And it will. China will mature as a producer-nation, as Japan and Korea have matured. Their labor force will mature as well, amidst rising wages and the creation of a more abundant Chinese middle-class that demands consumer products on a truly massive scale.

And that is the real question mark in future Chinese-American relations, the what happens as their consumer-economy develops and comes into play? But don’t kid yourself that there will be any unexpected ‘breakthroughs’ in two huge economies that are individually unstable for different reasons.

And have such potential for mutual economic destruction.
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More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.

Angry As Hell for Not Paying Attention

We are, as individuals, as a nation, as faith-based groups, bloggers, husbands, wives, entrepreneurs and wage-slaves . . . angry.

Fed up is what we are, with lying politicians of both parties. Pissed-off with each new day’s revelation of scandal, more than unhappy with misadventure, misallocation, misbehavior, misbelief, miscalculation, missed chances, mischief, and miscommunication. Had it up to here with misconception, misconduct, misconstruction, miscues, misdeeds, misdirection, misfeasance, misfortune, and misfits. Tired as hell with all these misgivings over misgovernment.

We’re not even sure how we feel about Miss America anymore. Maybe she’s an old concept.

This is supposed to be representative government, but we’ve been hijacked. That’s what anger is all about, that sense of having not paid attention until suddenly the house we’ve always lived in has been foreclosed and we’ve out in the street, sitting on the curb, mad as hell but powerless.

Three and a half years ago, six months before we marched into Baghdad, I wrote

It seems few in this nation share the administration blood-lust for war with Iraq but George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice. The Five.

Not the Secretary of State, the Congress, the United Nations or our allies. Certainly not the generals who must win this one, if winning is even a relevant or obtainable goal. Not the public, at least not as represented in growing editorial opposition. Not even Henry Kissinger, that hawk-of-hawks, or the former Bush, Sr. presidential advisors.

The Five have not yet made their case. Despotism in Iraq is not a case. Despots abound in the Middle East. The possibility of Iraqi terrorist support is not a case, compared with the reality of terrorist support in Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nuclear possibility is not a case, considering nuclear reality in Pakistan. Allegations are not enough. Indeed, unless American society is prepared to become a pariah throughout the world, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war must not stand.

Now the generals, finally able to speak from retirement, have had enough. They honorably served a wrongheaded Secretary of Defense, blinking back tears of frustration as their military was destroyed ethically, wounded tactically and its honor brought to its knees through the malfeasance of The Five.

In the face of blistering flag-officer criticism, Bush has today reaffirmed his confidence in Donald Rumsfeld.

It would be one thing if these were gripes of the passed-over, quite a different matter if the critics weren’t so deeply credentialed. Rumsfeld dismisses them as a few among thousands of generals and he is right in that, but consider just what particular few these are.

• Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No. 2 U.S. military officer there but he declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld.
• Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who held the key post of director of operations on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2000 to 2002.
• Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi army troops in 2003-2004.
• Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was the chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, in the late 1990s.
• Marine Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, who until last year commanded Marine forces in the Pacific Theater.

That’s fourteen stars worth of opposition to Rumsfeld, who flew Navy jets between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Perhaps he’s waited all these years, fingers tapping various desktops, to finally get his way over superior officers. Of course, some would say they call them superior for a reason.

Is America really paying attention? Or does the Bush statement from Camp David seal the issue, send us back to the office after the Easter break without a murmur?

I don’t want George Bush’s or Don Rumsfeld’s blood, I want my country back. I want that hijacked vehicle called representative government pulled over to the curb, revolving lights and all, and made to account for itself. Not abiding by the laws of our country doesn’t mean they no longer exist.

Rolling back environmental concerns, engaging in pre-emptive war, failing to guard the economic viability of the nation and flat-out refusing to listen, The Five have brought us to this nationwide anger and distrust of our President because they could. In a dominant Republican Congress, they could and so they did.

Not paying attention to the details is what got us here. Architect Mies van der Rohe is famous for his claim that “God is in the details.”

Even the Religious Right is beginning to wake up to that.
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More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.

Hell Breaking Loose, in a General Sort of Way

The recently-retired-bunch among the nation’s General Officers are on the war-path. They’re individually and collectively after Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, something Rummy claims to have offered his president on several occasions.

There's a very weird climate out there in politics, with our President unpopular and at the same time unassailable. It’s almost as if, unable to bring down the main man in a Republican controlled Congress, each and (nearly) every cabinet secretary is under fire. Snow, Chertoff, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, all have become targets.

Serious enough targets that they are becoming ineffective in their jobs.

Pardon me while I wax historic, but there was a time when the United States Congress was required to commit us to a state of war. But the Congress has gotten busy, stuffing its socks with money for re-elections and now presidents just go ahead and do that part of the job for them. Congress burps, high-fives the first Bush’s quickie Gulf war, complains about the stalemated Vietnam and Iraq wars and goes back about the business at hand, the higher priority of stuffing their socks with money.

The 1947 National Security Act, signed into law by Harry Truman, was designed and enacted to prevent a recurrance of the concentration of power and secrecy FDR exercised during WWII. The act also gave us the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Truman was heartily supported by Generals Eisenhower and Marshall in this diffusing of presidential power. Yet the power remained vested in the President to command the military, as was dramatically proven in Truman's sacking of General Douglas MacArthur.

All of which, in the present circumstances, has led some recent-day Generals and Admirals to question whether the process is being carried out by our current president in accordance with the spirit of the 1947 act.

It was and is their job  to not question civilian authority when the country is all on the same page. But we are not on the same page and this is the second time we are not in a very major way. The Generals and Admirals are tired of getting their ass kicked for what they feel (with some justification) are civilian inadequacies and hubris. This is not about the war, but the waging of the war.

The generals don’t question civilian authority over the chain-of-command, although 4-star General Eric Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff questioned civilian policy in front of the Congress and it cost him his job. The message at the Pentagon was instantaneous and chilling—go along to get along.

Criticism now comes exclusively from the retired and the calls for Rumsfeld to step down are unprecedented.

Army Major General John Batiste (Ret), who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said on CNN that he and many other top-ranking retired officers felt Rumsfeld’s micro-managing ways were damaging the military. "We need leadership up there that respects the military as they expect the military to respect them. And that leadership needs to understand teamwork." Batiste is said to have turned down a third star and retired rather than to continue under Rumsfeld.

“We won't get fooled again," retired Marine Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold (Ret) was quoted in a WaPo article by Thomas Ricks. Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2000 to 2002, charged in Time magazine this week "McNamara-like micromanagement" mistakes by Rumsfeld and called for "replacing Rumsfeld and many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach."

Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton (Ret), wrote in the New York Times last month that Rumsfeld is "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically and Mr. Rumsfeld must step down."

Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni (Ret), a longtime critic of Rumsfeld and the administration's handling of the Iraq war, says "The problem is that we've wasted three years" in Iraq. Chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, in the late 1990s, he "absolutely" thinks Rumsfeld should resign.

According to the Ricks article, other retired generals are hugely frustrated. Partly because Rumsfeld gave the impression that "military advice was neither required nor desired" in the planning for the Iraq war, said retired Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, who until last year commanded Marine forces in the Pacific Theater.

Another retired officer, Army Maj. Gen. John Riggs, said he believes that his peer group is "a pretty closemouthed bunch" but his sense is "everyone pretty much thinks Rumsfeld and the bunch around him should be cleared out." He believes Rumsfeld and his advisers have "made fools of themselves, and totally underestimated what would be needed for a sustained conflict."

If these were men looking for excuses, there would have to be a public after their tails to provoke such a response, but there is not. Overwhelmingly, the public supports the military and perceives that it has not been given the tools, troops or planning it needed. All three fall uncompromisingly on Donald Rumsfeld’s desk.

A desk where hell is breaking loose, in a general sort of way.
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Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

Dick Cheney’s Fingerprints

A modus operandi is a fancy Latin term for a ‘habitual method of procedure’ and  Dick Cheney’s methods during his terms as Vice President have become so habitual as to become virtual fingerprints.

It’s inspiring to see a national vice-leader so committed to an idealism, no matter that the ideals are not borne out by actual facts. But it’s charming. Gutsy, as well.

I had a grandfather like that and he carried a burning faith in his own infallibility through the wreckage of his five daughters’ lives, the destruction of his small-town Iowa reputation and, finally, his doctors’ advice on matters of health. The last infallibility killed him, but not until the reasonably old age of 78. He was, to everyone but his daughters, charming. He charmed me, as a ten-year-old.

And so it is with Cheney, who probably charms his own grandchildren. Steadfastly predicting our invading forces in Iraq would be greeted with flowers in the streets and, as recently as last May, declaring the insurgency to be in it’s ‘last throes,’ he soldiered on.

Clearly beaten but, as yet unbowed, our intrepid advance-man for strange takes on facts from Iraq continues to label the desert-disaster as the necessary removal of a tyrant with ties to al Qaeda and WMD. Fingerprints, Dick, you're leaving fingerprints all over the scene of the crime.

The latest reversal for the administration comes in the form of a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) shelving of inconvenient fact. Turns out that the ‘mobile biological laboratories’ the P and VP so stunningly unveiled in May of ’03 were phonies. More interesting, they knew they were bogus before making the claim and knew the facts to be incorrect for months afterward, as they continued to sham and shame the truth.

Now, if you say something that turns out to be untrue, you’re mistaken. Happens to everyone. But if you say something you know to be untrue, you’re a liar. No other word for it. When you knowingly deep-freeze the evidence that proves you knew you were lying and soldiers under your command are dying at the time, it comes dangerously close to . . . well, I don’t really know how to describe what it comes dangerously close to.

But it’s certainly more evidence of fingerprints. And it’s akin to the same lack of moral road-map that allowed the VP to set his chief of staff off to do the ‘family’ dirty-work and then let him swing for it when he got caught. Neither Bush or Cheney came to Scooter Libby’s defense by volunteering the info about de-classification and marching orders to leak. That might not have fit Dick’s habitual method of procedure.

The lovely thing about a free society is that it can be scammed and lied to for only a limited period of time, as we Americans have been scammed and lied to. But the truth eventually surfaces. The great old peg-legged pirates of yesteryear buried their treasure, then shot the diggers of the hole and buried them as well. We don’t (yet) shoot those in the know.

What we do instead is classify the pirate-treasure ‘secret’ and put it on a shelf. Almost as good as in the ground. Nearly as safe from prying eyes. Good as gold.

Almost.

Joby Warrick’s Washington Post article has President Bush proclaiming

“a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

We have found the weapons of mass destruction-- hardware-store pressure gauges, some cannisters and a little bent tubing. Actually, what may have been found in the Iraqi desert was just an ordinary Kentucky moonshine still. No? Ammonia fertilizer, perhaps? Did any of the containers happen to say John Deere on them?

No matter. Dick Cheney had already put the anti-WND report on the shelf. Not to worry, George. Because it was stamped Secret, the nine guys who did the research were unable to say anything in public about it. Disclosing classified information is a big-time federal offense and people go to prison for it.

Unless they’re Dick Cheney, trying to shoot down the credibility of Valerie Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, and his outing of another Dick Cheney lie. In that case, Dick gets the President to de-classify whatever secret document he needs, leaks it through his hapless chief of staff, complaining all the while of leaks. Scooter goes down to the federal prosecutor, Dick goes quail hunting and all is well amongst the spies and lies. Except for more fingerprints.

And except possibly for Scooter deciding it's not all that cool to actually fall on his sword for his boss.

They say it’s lonely at the top. Certainly George Bush has gotta be getting more and more lonely, as his credibility takes wing along with advisors, cabinet secretaries and now, most probably his vice president.

Before planes crash, standard drill is to throw everything heavy out the back door. The combined Libby accusation and now the WMD report being ignored, on top of an 18% approval rate, make Dick Cheney too heavy to keep this administration airborne.

But if he goes, who will actually run things?
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More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.