I Oppose the Hanging of George W. Bush

Before things go any further, I want to be very clear: I oppose the hanging of George W. Bush.

True, the man has shown himself to be a menace to the entire globe, a shambling sociopath incapable of uttering the truth or acknowledging another's pain, an unrecovered addict with messianic delusions who spread death and pestilence wheree'er he stepped. He has drunkenly piloted the ship of state toward the rocks, and because of him we are likely doomed.

But he should be tried by an international court and, if convicted, sent to prison for the remainder of his unreflective life. That's how we do things in the civilized world.

Hence my concern about the recent New Orleans tribunal, taking place as it did in a waterlogged former brothel — with evidence permitted only from left-wing blogs, lesbian poets and "conscious" rappers. And hence my distaste at the verdict: Bush and his cohorts, Cheney and Rove, must hang before the Super Bowl.

I suppose I see the logic: Bush's ever-shrinking but still crazed and furious supporters will be unable to tear themselves away from the big game, despite their grief. The conflagrations of the gridiron will provide them with some kind of catharsis. We cannot hope to understand the minds of the Christo-fascists, anti-science jihadists and other Megachurchian megalomaniacs who terrorize our land; perhaps it's true that executing their Imams will show them the folly of their ways.

But I continue to oppose the hanging of Bush. Not because of what it will do to him, but because of what it will do to all of us. The death penalty is wrong — even when the mendacity and grinning evil of the condemned is manifest.

And so, as Bush and his coterie huddle in the looming shadow of the gallows, trying to bribe the guards with Halliburton stock and the alleged home numbers of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, and erupting into internecine slapfights, we have a decision to make.

I hope it will be a merciful one.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

We Democrats are often told that our narratives are faulty.

You know what I mean by narratives — our "frames," our big-picture presentation, the story we tell about ourselves. We hear that the GOP, and especially the Bush administration, has outstripped us in this area, even though our policies are better, our values more true and our implementation more effective. Despite these superior qualities, we get bogged down in particulars, in nuance, and as a result paint ourselves as boring, unmanly and undesirable. The other guys have just told a better story, and in the realm of politics, it's the story that sells.

Well, have I got a story for you.

The stories we tell ourselves as a culture are invariably fables. They reaffirm what we wish were true, and help us make some kind of meaning from a confusing, chaotic and compromised world. Looking at our films, our TV shows, our books — at all our most enduring narratives — we see stories of good guys and bad guys. This elemental realm of moral mythmaking has been the preferred tableau for Republican rhetoric. The President and his loyal followers have (often successfully) painted themselves as the good guys, standing up for America—whether against shadowy terrorists, tax-happy bureaucrats or corrupt, omnisexual, occult-worshipping cultural forces. Democrats have turned their noses up at such simplicity, but their caviling about nuance, we're told, cuts no ice in the moral heartland.

But the Foley episode has led us to a timeless narrative twist, one that virtually everyone seems to understand: the apparent good guy who turns out to be a bad guy. This is not merely a great scandal facing the GOP this week. It is a hook on which to hang the party's every last move for the past five-and-a-half years.

Just as Foley, who himself pushed legislation to make soliciting sex with minors online a federal crime, was overseeing a realm in which he himself was a wrongdoer, the Republicans have put foxes in charge of every American henhouse.

• They bungled, and bagged on, the hunt for bin Laden, whether out of anti-Clinton policy pique, Saudi beholdenness or mere incapability.
• They lied to get us into the Iraq war, giving the terrorists they were supposed to be fighting a way into a country they'd previously been shut out of.
• They lied about how badly the war was going, allowed civilians to be murdered and tortured, stood by while sectarian violence got worse and the whole country fell apart, and devoted their time to public-relations efforts to paint a rosy picture of the nightmare they'd created.
• Their desire to subject unspecified enemies to unsupervised torture and unlimited detention is so great that they gave the President extra-Constitutional powers, regardless of the consequences for our own troops.
• They spy on Americans based on the vaguest whisper of suspicion, often targeting peaceful groups who are guilty only of criticizing the administration.
• They use technology, intimidation and every other tactic at their disposal to prevent those who oppose them from voting.
• They sought (and still seek) to privatize social security and give massive tax breaks to the 8,000 or so richest folks in America (to be paid for by everyone else).
• They riled up lynch mobs with scary fictions about gay marriage.
• They betrayed our kids by stepping on science at every turn, denying the existence of global warming and pushing anti-evolution nonsense.
• Their energy policy is written by the oil companies who pick our pockets and dictate our disastrous foreign policy.
• The FDA is run by anti-regulatory extremists who slept at the switch while Americans died from eating spinach.
• They gave their blessing to the relentless, unregulated pollution of our air, water and public discourse.
• And shall we talk about FEMA and the lax, churlish, racist response to the devastation wrought by Katrina? Heckuva job, indeed.

Now we learn that they hushed up a Congressman's predatory sexual advances to underage boys for several years.

The bottom line: Republican politicians are bad guys who talk like good guys. They thump on a Bible in public, but their actions prove they worship Satan. When they say they've got your back it just means they know where they're going to stab you. Their only motives, like those of bad guys since the earliest melodramas, are increasing and maintaining their own power and wealth. They will kill anyone, steal anything, betray whomever or whatever is necessary to further empower and enrich them. No crime is too great, no lie too bald, no scapegoating or buck-passing too craven.

The Democrats, by contrast, are good guys who've been slandered by the bad guys. You know the part of the story I mean: the middle part, where the bad guy tells a bunch of lies and turns the town against the good guy. The good guy has made the mistake of trusting the bad guy, or of underestimating him, and now must clear his name. Despite his anger, though, he knows that the truth is on his side, and waits for his moment.

That moment has come. The bad guy is cornered. He's got a bullet in his ass and has dragged himself behind the saloon, using a child as a human shield. He's desperate, wild; he sounds, by turns, like a cackling maniac and a self-pitying loser. The good guy must aim carefully. What's more, the good guy will need help from the whole town — the town that once found his capable, thoughtful manner boring and unmanly. He'll need them at his side. They're ashamed, now, that they chose the word of a vicious charlatan over their true defender. But they understand, at last: the bad guy must go down.

This is the narrative, however crude, that is emerging like blades of grass through concrete. It is the story of our redemption as a country. To contribute to some good guys, head for Blue Notes, my ActBlue page, or your nearest candidate site.

THE END

GOP To Dig a Trench Around Its Majority

Embattled, facing challenges from without and insurgents from within, the beleaguered Republican Party today announced plans to dig a giant trench around the political majority it currently holds in Congress, hoping it will hold until November 7.

President Bush approved the digging of the trench — which will be subsidized by slashing all government programs aiding people who don't own yachts — and said the giant hole was just what America needed. "We must dig and dig until we can dig no more," he said, thrusting out his chest in an attempt to intimidate a TV journalist. "We must stay the digging course until we dig our way to victory. I am the digger, and also the teller of other people to keep digging."

Some Republicans privately expressed doubts that the earthen abyss would safeguard the GOP's control of the House and Senate. "Sure, a lot of Democrats willingly jump into any hole we tell them to," said one official. "But some of them have figured out our game plan and might just scale our moat and lay siege to our battlements. Then what will we do?"

The White House and Congressional leaders dismiss such concerns. "Those who claim the trench can be breached are emboldening our enemies, by which I mean everyone who doesn't agree with us 100% of the time," declared press secretary Tony Snow while shutting off everyone else's microphones. "The trench will hold. The majority will hold. Be afraid. Do not test the trench."

"The Path to 9/11": A Guide for Students

As you probably know by now, ABC/Disney's decision to air the ideologically skewed and factually challenged "docudrama" The Path to 9/11 this close to the election has resulted in a firestorm.

The miniseries, which (falsely) alleges the Clinton administration passed up opportunities to terminate bin Laden long before the towers fell, claims to be based on the 9/11 Commission's Report, but it appears to be informed more by the clammy fantasies of its ultraconservative writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, some of which may be actionable.

With no attempt at the political "balance" mandated by its broadcast license, ABC has outraged Bill Clinton and former members of his administration, 9/11 commission members, families of 9/11 victims and millions of other people, compounding its misdeeds by agreeing to let President Bush give a speech during the broadcast. Will there be equal time for his political opponents to speak as well? Of course not.

But perhaps even more stunningly, Scholastic Book Services was snookered into a deal with ABC to "teach" the show in public schools. Once the outcry over the show's myriad falsehoods hit critical mass, Scholastic did an about-face. Most tellingly, they replaced their online "discussion guide," which accorded authority to the film's portrayal of events, with a letter from President/CEO Richard Robinson that read, in part:

We posted a discussion guide on Wednesday, August 23, which we believe was not in keeping with our high standards—and we took down that guide on Wednesday, September 6. We have rewritten this guide to focus more sharply on the issues of the docudrama as well as the background events.
(...)
We believe that the rewritten discussion guide presented herewith will help your students interpret the ABC docudrama, The Path to 9/11, and hope that you will find it helpful in understanding the relationship between facts and drama, and the background of the different views about 9/11 in the U.S. and around the world.

It appears that some kind of class discussion — with an emphasis on the ostensibly neutral concept of "media literacy" — will take place next week. So I thought I'd get the ball rolling with some questions students might ask their instructors, principals and local TV affiliates. Feel free to add your own, and remember to show your work.

• Why didn't educators "do their homework" to find out how far the show strayed from fact?


• What does it mean when Scholastic (with its "high standards") does a deal with a TV network to turn a fictional program into a teaching assignment? Who profits from that arrangement, since we know it's not the students?


• Is the assignment just a cynical attempt by ABC to have a captive audience and drive up ratings for the show?


• Is this assignment an even more cynical attempt by the show's right-wing backers to mislead voters prior to the midterm elections, using schools as an unethical and possibly illegal base of operations?


• Are ABC and Disney so corrupt that they would knowingly insult the memories of those who died on 9/11 with lies and pro-GOP fantasy on the five-year anniversary, or merely too stupid and ill-informed to realize that's what they were doing?


• If schools are ready to pimp themselves out to TV shows that blatantly distort history, why should we bother studying history at all?


• Do facts even matter anymore?


• Why should we believe a single thing our teachers, leaders or media tell us? Doesn't this whole experience prove that everyone who's supposed to be leading us is either for sale or asleep at the switch?


• If Disney's network is prepared to lie about 9/11 for gain, does that mean Mickey Mouse hates America?


• If this show isn't propaganda, what is?


• Why did the Bush administration, mere weeks before the attack, ignore a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S."?


• Where's bin Laden, and why did President Bush say "I truly am not that concerned about him" in March of 2002?


• How come we still consider Pakistan an ally, even though they've smoked a peace pipe with al-Qaeda and the Taliban?


• Why did we invade Iraq, when even the President admits it had nothing to do with 9/11?


• If we're fighting terrorists and the terrorists hate us for our freedom, why are we always giving up our freedom to fight the terrorists?


• Why are Bush, Cheney and Congressional Republicans talking about bin Laden all the time now, right before the election?

Feel free to copy this list, add to it or just use it as a point of departure for your own conversations and lists of questions. I'm hoping that together we can compile a study guide for students who truly love freedom, believe in questioning authority and want to become engaged citizens and voters.

Speaking of which, you can protest the airing of this travesty here. If you'd like to contribute to a Democratic victory in November, I hope you'll visit Blue Notes, my ever-growing ActBlue page.

World War III: NowWith Dissent-Guard™!

If we’ve learned anything about the GOP in the last few years, it’s this: When they all start saying the same thing at once, what we’re observing is a PR-style attempt to steamroll some idiotic notion into the mainstream. Thanks to Newt Gingrich, the man behind some of the party’s most disastrous initiatives, we’re now hearing the latest – and arguably most dangerous – notion yet: That the current crisis in the Middle East is in fact World War III.

This isn’t just labeling. The reasoning, in a nutshell, is that forcing this description down America’s gullet will free the Republicans to (a) pursue an all-out military bombardment of the Middle East and elsewhere, in hopes of fulfilling the psychotic Neocon vision that has already proved a spectacular failure in Iraq, (b) reduce all debate on military matters to a simple “us vs. them” equation and (c) suppress all domestic political dissent and preserve their now-tenuous grasp on the reins of power.

We will be treated to an escalating chorus of this “World War III” concept in the coming months, with lurid previews of the violent repression they have in mind. Anyone who questions this sick idea will be tarred as a traitor, and the party’s hand puppets at Fox News and elsewhere will fantasize aloud about rounding up and exterminating everyone who isn’t on the right side.

Amid all this jingoistic shrieking, I ask you to bear two things in mind. One: Gingrich and his frothing minions are wrong, just as they were wrong in Iraq. This isn’t World War III. It’s awful, but diplomacy and multilateral negotiations are still the only reasonable response. Two: If you want to survive and think having a Democracy in the U.S. is a good thing, it’s time to reject the Republicans in every race, in every state. They couldn’t have failed us more completely, and now they’re ready to kill us all to escape the blame. Let’s make November the beginning of our national return to sanity.

The Party of Death

The Republican Party is the Party of Death.


There, I said it.


They promised us a culture of life, of course.  Remember that?  It turns out they don't talk about life except in code.  "Life," wink wink, means anti-abortion.  "Life," nudge nudge, means anti-evolution, anti-birth control, anti-music, anti-movies, anti-games, except games of death, of course.  "Life" means pro-death penalty. But how can you build a culture of life when you so doggedly chase all forms of death? How can you build a culture of life when you don't take the most obvious steps to forestall death?  Like avoiding war instead of marketing it.  Like regulating polluters instead of giving them tax breaks. Like paying for levees and medicine and flak jackets.


But it turns out "culture of life" is just the password to the hideout where the GOP's deathly benefactors wait grimly to reap their rewards.  Life, in its messy, everyday manifestations, makes them uncomfortable.  Unlike death, which defines them.  Death raining on the Middle East.  Death washing away the city of New Orleans.  Death in Guantanamo and countless hidden chambers around the world.  Death in the ocean, death in the ground water, death in the air, death at the ice caps.  Death by crumbling infrastructure.  Death by budgetary fiat.  A death of a thousand cuts nicking away at the Constitution.  And always, above all else, secrecy - the death that dare not speak its name.


(When I heard the NSA was listening to Americans' phone calls, I took it as a hopeful sign.  I didn't think they ever listened to anyone.)


A daily, deathly diet of dire predictions, premonitions and prevarications.  Like when Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, barely containing his spit-polished indignation, tendered a preemptive apologia for all the NSA's grapplings in the dark.  "You really don't have any civil liberties," he intoned, "if you're dead."


I heard those words and I honestly asked myself: Is Jeff Sessions dead?


Is he nothing more than a perambulating corpse, subsisting only on the meager fumes of vanity and power? Though his mind and conscience have ceased to function, does he trudge on, ever deferring to his ghoulish superiors, out of some vestigial reflex?


Then it hit me: They're all dead.  The GOP is dead inside, and is about death and is of death, with a crispy death coating and a creamy death filling.  


At times the rot has been so pestiferous that it has even resisted the efforts of the cable-news perfumerie.  The stench of corruption, of a fetid disregard for public life, private life, prolonged life, curls around every corner of modern America.


Let's not kid ourselves: The decomposition will not end when George W. Bush ambles out of his Pennsylvania Avenue bunker in early 2009 (assuming he surrenders the place voluntarily).  Look at the Republican leadership - yes, I know it's an oxymoron - and what you see is El Día de los muertos without the sombreros and candy. Death's party.


But wait, I hear you say.  There are moderate Republicans.  Indeed, and they are the moderate members of the death party.  They are occasionally permitted to vote in a manner that isn't an affront to all living things.  But they are part of the majority that lets the party of death trample the landscape on its skeleton horses.


Hold on, you reply, the Democrats aren't so great either.  Again we agree.  But whatever they are, the Dems are not the party of death.  There's only one.  Accept no imitations.  The last five years have been, for all practical purposes, Democrat-free, and look around.  Here's what unfettered, unobstructed Republican control of Congress, the Executive, the courts - plus a highly rated cable station acting as their Pravda - gets you.  Like it?  Neither does anyone else.  And you don't have to be on "CSI" to know what it smells like.


The whole GOP, its entire foggy, grasping, lizard-brain ideology, is death warmed over.  It calls itself Conservative but it conserves nothing.  It claims to trumpet family but it sends military kids into a meat grinder and assassinates the character of their mothers if they dare ask why. It brays about religion but uses God only as a cudgel to wallop its foes. It warbles of freedom while threatening journalists and compiling lists of our phone calls.  It burbles incessantly about values, but it values only death.  


They took true control when mass death, in one dreadful, confusing September morning, crashed into our bubble.  And they swore they would protect us if we would but trust that they knew best.  So we did, in our panic, and they betrayed us.  Their War on Terror turned out to be a war on us, a campaign to terrorize the population with Apocalyptic hints and color-coded charts and yet more secrecy, and with us suitably distracted they robbed us blind.  They squandered our legacy and pissed on our future.  Because that's what they do.  They are wasters of other people's lives, other people's money, other people's pensions, other people's neighborhoods.  They are a culture of death and a party of death.


If we want a real culture of life, or even a culture of being alive, let alone of living, they must be buried.

“Balance” as a Cudgel

Blaming PBS Won’t Save Right-Wingers From Their Own Disasters


Pity the poor conservatives. They’re having ever so much trouble getting their message across, thanks to the Big Bad Liberal Media.

Yep, the fact that Fox News, CNN and an array of right-wing commentators drill their talking points into millions of heads 24/7 scarcely makes a dent. The consolidation of news media into the hands of a few big G.O.P. benefactors makes little difference. The packaging of Republican “stories” under false pretenses (and paid for by tax dollars) has yielded no results. The fact that a complacent news corps, desperate for access, has capitulated to the President’s strategy of only answering pre-screened questions has had no impact, and neither has his relentless schedule of rigged “town halls” filled with unquestioning boosters (and policed by dissent-silencing goons, also funded by the public).

What’s the left-wing juggernaut silencing these tiny efforts at conservative expression? Why, public television, of course.

I was surprised to learn that PBS, home to sonatas and science programming and “Sesame Street,” had such massive rhetorical power. I was under the impression that hardly anyone watched it.

But conservatives are very hurt that some anti-Bush opinions are being voiced – and not shouted down – on PBS stations. And tax dollars are paying for it! The G.O.P.-approved Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, has announced plans to head off this dangerous left-wing bias.

The right only wants balance, you see. And anyone who’s watched the G.O.P. and its various paid operatives in action can see how important balance is to them.

They want to “balance” scrutiny of administration policy with pro-Bush cheerleading. They want to “balance” discussions of science with religious dogma. They want to “balance” investigations of unfounded war-mongering with attacks on questioners’ patriotism and “balance” concerns about the economy, constitutional precedent and the environment by telling those concerned to shut the hell up.

Let’s face reality, though this is an unfashionable construction in politics these days. The G.O.P. has a fearsome arsenal of persuasion at its disposal, not to mention the bully pulpits of the Presidency and Congress. Why would the right wing fear a few talking heads on PBS?

Because despite the endless, ubiquitous babble of Republican talking points – and the lazy acceptance of their slanted framing of every question by a harried, cowed and consolidated mass-media machine, the propaganda isn’t working like it used to.

Look at Bush’s miserable approval ratings, not to mention the crashing failure of the President’s social security plan and public distrust of Sen. Frist’s nefarious attempts to banish the filibuster. While you’re at it, check out the overall unease Americans feel about the economy and their own security.

In fact, a surprising number of people looking at the administration’s activities don’t see an Emperor in gold-threaded robes. They see a lot of naked lies.

Why aren’t those defensive, implausible talking points making them feel better? Why don’t people find a refusal to answer questions reassuring? Who on earth wants politicians to take responsibility for their own screw-ups, or even own up to what they said yesterday?

Blame it on the liberal media.

Amazingly, mass-media journalism itself – once given to such liberal habits as asking questions and refusing to serve as a PR outlet for authority figures – is so terrified of this particular “L” word that it will scuttle obediently into a thicket of nonsense rather than stand its ground.

Indeed, the American press once got to the bottom of a festering political scandal and toppled a corrupt presidency. Once, U.S. journalists brought home the horror of an ill-advised war and helped drag it to an end.

But this once-powerful instrument of the public interest has been neutered; it’s as though Superman, accused of throwing his weight around too much, agreed to wear kryptonite around his neck while Lex Luthor robbed Fort Knox.

PBS is hardly Superman. It’s merely a handy symbol for all the little pockets of resistance the G.O.P. is desperate to “balance” to death. But replacing some anti-establishment commentators with pro-Bush clones won’t change the fact that the Emperor has no clothes.