Let the Campaign Begin

Why is it that I'm amazed anymore? I've been amazed by the Bush administration SO many times that you'd think my capacity to be amazed might have passed by now. So what's my current beef?

After an embarrassing under-reaction to the catastrophic events in southeast Asia, our never-leave-the-learning-curve President has finally realized his world class blunder, has finally regained his footing, and has come up with a damage control plan (a relief plan for Asia is a damage control plan for Bush).

Y'know, for this administration's fabulous intuitive ability to manipulate the minds of the American voter, they're clue-less over some of the most basic other stuff!

At any rate, he's promising scads of cash, lots-n-lots of military machinery and manpower to help with cleaning and stabiliztion. To his credit, he's doing the right thing there. Finally.

But here's where even the cynical must be shaking their heads. Along with Colin Powell, Jeb Bush is heading to the scene of the devastation. "But Jeb Bush has plenty of experience in dealing with natural disasters!" you say, and you're right. But so does the head of FEMA. Thing is, the head of FEMA isn't running for President in 2008.

Jeb Bush has experience in Florida where they speak English and Spanish. In Florida, where the freeways are wide, the infrastructure is sound and there are airports out the wazoo. This isn't about experience, it's about setting himself up to look compassionate and johnny-on-the-spot years before the first campaign commercial. And I'll bet my bottom dollar that's precisely where footage of him in the midst of the devastation will end up--in a campaign commercial.

GW Bush: from giving a palty 15 million to taking the bull by the horns, becoming (finally) the world leader, and then setting your brother up to squeeze maximum benefit from it. I'm left without words adequate to express my disgust with this family.

It's All The Rage!

President Bush's reaction to the Tsunami disaster. There's a lot we don't know about behind-the-scenes wrangling but what we DO know is this: He initially issued a statement wherein 15 million American dollars were pledged to help.

When I heard that I thought "15 million? I've got half of that in the bank myself!" Okay, I didn't actually think that. I'm short just almost 15 million to be able to think that.

But I did marvel at how at least twice that amount was being spent in Bush's honor and glory for the second inaugural. And really, tell me this: what exactly is an inauguration? More specifically, what's a second inauguration? I'm going to give you a hint: a 2nd inauguration is, in a national sense, very much what Monica Lewinsky is known for.

Isn't it?

And it's not as though Bush is spending 40-60 million that we have. We don't have it. We're borrowing money to waste on giving the president a national Monica.

Last I heard deaths the in South Pacific are approacing 80,000. And this will only get worse. Are we being stingy with our aid? I'm no expert, but it looks like it to me. This article makes some interesting comparisons.

To recap: Bush's initial relief dollars started out really small. Then western nations were called stingy, and Bill Clinton stepped into the picture. Suddenly, the steadfast and resolute George W. Bush, who never lets polling or the public whim dictate the way he steers this ship of state, suddenly doubled the amount of aid. Then Bush trotted out one of our most ethnic faces--Colin Powell (it looks good to those ethnic faces who are suffering so horribly overseas)--and now they're talking about monies and efforts will likely amount to more than a billion dollars. My calculator tells me that a billion is roughly 66 times the 15 million originally pledged.

Is there anyone foolish amongst us enough to believe that Bush had planned on that amount from the start? Does anyone actually believe that his change from 15 million to a billion isn't a HUGE shift in course--a shift that we're told he's constitutionally incapable of making?

Methinks ol' George did what right wing folks always accused Clinton of doing: bowing to the whim of public sentiment.

Well allright. If I'm going to borrow money I think the relief efforts are a worthy cause. Now if we can just eliminate the inauguration...

My Looney Left Outlook

Here's my bizarre wacko loony left outlook:

I believe in governmental accountability and a media which follows the money to show where influence and corruption originate and flourish. I believe the FCC should really view the airwaves as the public's and that those who milk money from it--that's us in the television media--should be made to prove they're serving the public.

I believe in reasonable constraints on business to protect the environment. There's only one environment and once you fuck it up it's hard to get it back.

I believe in a government fixated NOT on war, but on stopping the hemorrhaging of the middle class jobs. We're in debt up to our eyeballs on this stupid stupid Iraq mistake, and climbing out will take decades. I see more rich people now than I've ever seen in my 50 years. And I see far more destitute, sick and drug-dependent people. Th middle class is dying. I wish my government was trying hard to figure out a way to deal with that instead of spending millions of dollars a day in Iraq. Don't you?

I believe in psychological help to overcome drug problems instead of jail time to totally screw up people's lives. 1/4 of the $35,000 or more a year it takes to incarcerate people could pay for a helluva lot of high-grade counseling, and even hospitalization.

I believe we should find a way to elevate the wages of those who educate our children. We need better teachers because too many of the good ones are leaving the profession.

I believe that if we're the best country in the world, somehow there shouldn't be more than a hundred million of us who can't afford to get sick. We're gonna whether we can afford it or not.
We need an FDA which is more concerned with protecting people than on getting dangerous drugs approved so the already wealthy become far more so. I read recently that 40% of Americans are on prescribed drugs. Seems to me the FDA should be investigating THAT.

I'm looking all around for looniness but that stuff just doesn't sound looney. Seems to me that common sense runs right through the middle of all that.

My Wife's Blog

So here's the deal. My wife's got a blog too. She went from being essentially apolitical in 2000 to being fairly rabidly anti-Bush and anti-Republican today. She's very unhappy with where they've taken this country in the last 4 years and expresses that freely in her blog.
My wife comes from the poster family for the "Let's Have a Dysfunctional Christmas", and her sister has recently taken the cake. They get along far better than not, and are often quite close. She's married to a really great guy, who happens to be conservative. He buys without question the Bush world view. We absolutely avoid political discussion and get along with the two of them quite well.
But recently the sister has shown signs of wearying of the Bush mantras and the lack of success in Iraq. So my wife told the sister about the blog (oops. That was, as it turns out, a mistake).
The sister blew a gasket and has been posting obnoxious responses to the blog. While unfortunate, that's the nature of bloggery, right? We're free to post and everyone's free to respond.
But the sister has done something pretty weird: she's sent the blog's URL to all of my wife's relatives. It's a move that's thousands of years old--using familial pressure to rein my wife in and tell her to STAY BETWEEN THE LINES.
This morning an uncle my wife hasn't heard from in years posted that despite what she's doing "he still loved her..."
What? Did my wife get arrested for doing something illegal? No, she disagrees with the 51% of the people who voted for Bush. She agrees with the record number of voters who voted against Bush. Ain't no crime there.
I love the USA from the bottom of my heart, but it amazes me how we're unable to deliver on the Freedom we so loudly sing about. Those with a different opinion than the predominant one are still shunned and made to feel the lesser. Isn't it about time we actually respected others' opinions? I respected my brother and sister-in-laws opinions...it's a shame those fine Americans can't do the same.

Manifest Destiny

I was raised a lot like most of you probably were. Our textbooks were filled with a sanitized version of our history which put the most positive and least tainted spin on what really went on. Our slaughter of the Indians and seizing of the west was attractively labeled Manifest Destiny. I'm not a scholar and haven't studied the origins of the phrase, so my ignorance might well be showing.
But do you think that'll stop me? Nah! It's my blogparty, I'll pontificate if I want to.

Manifest Destiny strongly suggests to me that since we're just manifesting what is our destiny we don't have any say in the matter. We're just doing what God has willed us to. This is, involuntarily, what we must do. That of course removes responsibility from our actions, doesn't it?

Manifest Destiny just sounds pretty, plus makes a great looking heading for a chapter in a history book. But once you get past that title, it was still the seizing of land that wasn't ours from an indigenous people, and the killing of tens of thousands of their people.

And so here I sit in 2004 and our president pontificates that we're helping the Iraqis on their MARCH TO FREEDOM. The words Liberty and Freedom and Democracy have been thrown about as if they have the power to take the stink of what we're doing out of what we're doing. The really horrible thing is, those words seem to work. The president was (allegedly) just re-elected on the power of his record. I can't imagine someone with his 4-year report card of D's and F's getting re-elected, so my theory is a mass shared illusion. More than a hundred million Americans think he's a great guy who's doing the best he can, and that what he's doing needs doing.

We invaded a FAR less powerful country on false premise and have killed at least tens of thousands of their people. And our leaders have trotted out this century's pretty phrases to mask the fact that we're being an aggressive super power fighting an unnecessary war.

Lawd help us.

The President's Press Conference

I just caught a portion of the President's press conference on NPR while I was out-n-about doing Christmas things. I suppose that we should be careful what we wish for...I always think he should have far more press conferences...then he has one and I just shake my head and are amazed that if the Martians landed and said "Take me to your leader" it's him I'd have to take them to.

I'm not amongst those who say George W. is stupid. He's nowhere near stupid. But as it relates to the talent of constructing sentences with nouns and verbs and complete thoughts, and of course the premise, which is HAVING SOMETHING TO SAY, he truly is stupid. The only endearing quality he has along these lines are seen by those who love him. His unpolished total lack of skill in extemporaneous speaking is remarkable, and excels all other men of high office that I can recall. But to his fans, that makes him all the more adorable!

Lyndon Johnson was a man of unquestioned intelligence. And Lord knows his accent was every bit as thick as Bush's--though Johnson came by his honestly. When Johnson spoke though, he had something intelligent and crafted to say, he just did so in the language of Texas' rural poor of that era. Absent his enormous Viet Nam mistake, I think he'd be considered one of the country's great presidents.

But we're stuck with the Shrub. Oh, Lord it's going to be a long 4 years! And I don't know whether to look forward to or dread the coming press conferences. Because if he doesn't speak to the public I worry about what we're not being told. And when he DOES speak to the public, he does so s-o-o-o poorly that it makes me worry even more about his competancy. 1 consolation: 2008!

Moyers: We're Gonna Miss You

Bill Moyers signed off tonight from
Now with Bill Moyers.
and I really find that disturbing. There's no Moyers II waiting in the wings to take over. David Brancacio is great, but he's not Moyers.

Moyers was like no other. Despite decades of living in NYC, his East Texas drawl still drips honeysuckle. After having seen a dozen or show of his TV documentaries, as well as about 2/3 of his Now programs for the last three years, I've come to see him as a very exacting writer, and when he's reading a prompter, a speaker who caresses every syllable. Like any good writer, he knows that some of the best writing happens when the writer simply takes out everything that doesn't absolutely have to be there, leaving the core thought.

Moyers didn't get credit for his bravery. As a liberal in times where conservatives rule--literally--he stood up proud and tall and said what was unpopular, but what he had to say. There are powerful folks arrayed against him, pressuring PBS and and congressmen to get him off the air. The DID succeed in getting Sucker Tarlson his own show right after Moyers, but they didn't succeed in killing Now.

This is an era of extremely ambitious journalists. Lots of the people popular now, and those on the rise, aren't folks who were raised to love the written word. I think they were raised to think of journalism as the path to the riches they seek.

So I mourn for Moyers' departure. And I mourn for journalism. And I mourn for the world my daughter will inherit. But I won't mourn so much that I can't thank Moyers for his highly polished craft. Thank you Bill Moyers. You will be missed. You will be missed.

My Mom's Birthday

Donald Rumsfeld.
He's a really great guy. Well, other than that doing a war when we didn't have to. And that whole obfuscation tango thing with the soldier at the press conference. He thought he'd "dodged a bullet" (that's kinda funny if you think about it) at the press conference when he did the song-n-dance about it not being a matter of will or a matter of money, it was a matter of physics. God, that's a great line!

Ah, but then some
journalist found a cojones or two and actually checked it out. Thank God or whomever that not every journalist has taken early retirement! Aren't you glad that someone still realizes that if a politician claims something, those claims can be verified or disproven, and that it might involve a little legwork, maybe quite a few phone calls, but a lot of things can be investigated.

Given that I'm in the TV bidness, it's a little inspiring to see that someone's still doing it how they ought.

So on this December 16th--my mother's birthday--you have a little something to be thankful for. Happy Birthday mom. All is not right with the world, but something is a little less wrong with it. Be thankful for small favors...

Welcome to Me!

Welcome to the internet, dear Bloghead (me). I'm new to this whole thing. The wife is waltzing me through this.
But enough about the trite, what about the war in Iraq?

I know, I know...everyone has an opinion, and I'm not unique in that regard. But I heard projections today about the war costing at least 200 Billion to complete. And I'm thinking, it's a damned good thing that America's a perfect place. No one's hungry. No one has incurable disease. Everyone was born perfectly able to deal in this world both psychologically and physically. No one's abused. And no one has drug or alcohol problems.

Because otherwise there might be a great big fat reason to get upset over the idea of borrowing 200 Billion dollars--you realize that, right? This is all deficit spending...so we're borrowing that amount and paying back with interest--otherwise, borrowing and spending 200 Billion bucks might seem just a little...just a tiny bit indulgent, doncha think

So like I say, I'm glad this here country where we live is such the land of plenty that we can afford to borrow all that money, make all those enemies, and piss away our futures...our kids can pay for the whole thing, 'cause Lord knows we'll still be paying for this by the time I'm pushin' daisies.

Okay, I guess that's it for my first diatribe. My wife sits here tapping her feet saying "Hey, I'm ready for bed...enough already!" So I sign this off, with love for our beloved president...and, more seriously, with concern for all those young men and women doing his dirty work abroad. Goodnight and Godspeed (whatever the hell that means...I never understood it, you probably didn't either...)