Taking a humorous but analytical look at just about anything in the spirit of Groucho Marx: I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member!
Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) has been indicted for accepting all kinds of goodies in connection with a second story renovation and expansion of his home . . . goodies made at the behest of a company with big oil drilling interests. Stevens has protested his innocence, claiming he paid every invoice he received regarding the redo on his house.
What he didn't say is whether he recognized that whatever invoices he received totaled a great deal less than the actual supplies and labor of the work done. That isn't exactly difficult to calculate. If he got bills totaling, say, $5,000.00, one would have only to look at the work done to see how short that bill fell of covering the actual expense. One does not have to be a construction genius to figure this out. One needs only a Menard's ad showing its charges for materials like the ones used on Stevens' house.
OK--I know what you're going to say. If President Bush (I) had no idea about grocery scanners, and Sen. John McCain wears a pair of $500+ Ferragamo shoes while claiming to be "just folks," it's possible Stevens had no clue about the actual expenses of the work on his home. Possible, but not plausible. As I said, one does not have to be a genius to have a clue.
But even if he honestly did have no idea, are we sure we want such people voting on how our taxes are spent? Stevens has been in office a long, long time . . . methinks he got a little too comfy and cozy with being Alaska's designated "Senator for life," as he was (until now) regularly called in the Alaskan media.
I'm not usually very big on conspiracy theories. I maintain that in any society with a vigorous and truly free press, conspiracies cannot hold for long. Once exposed to the light of day, conspiracies "go poof!" Secrecy is their binding agent. Without it, they will oollapse.
This is one of the reasons I used to argue with my [dear departed--Ed.] dad all the time about the Kansas City Chiefs. From the mid-80s on, he firmly maintained that at least one player (usually he referred to the field goal kicker) was being paid to throw close games. And the kicker in those days did seem to have a problem splitting the uprights when a field goal would mean the difference between a win and a loss for the Chiefs. I kept reminding my dad that given the ever-increasing presence of sports reporters (due to the expansion of sports coverage on Cable TV), no reporter would sit on such a story--breaking it would make his reputation and ensure his career success. Therefore, if such a conspiracy existed, someone would have ferreted it out and told us about it.
He clung to his conspiracy theory nevertheless. Perhaps he found it easier to live with the Chiefs' failures when it wasn't really the entire team's fault . . . perhaps he was just "yanking my chain." Perhaps it was a bit of both. For my part, I cling just as firmly to my belief in the power of the free and investigative press, the strength of human curiosity, and the inability of most people to keep their mouths perfectly shut.
On days like today, however, I wonder. The presence of Fox "News" has corroded the concept of a free and independent investigative press--my only question is how far the damage has spread. After 7+ years of the Dubya administration debacle, I am forced to concede that Machiavelli was right about what the exercise of power does to some people. And when I hear about how school systems all over the country are under such financial pressure that (1) teachers pay for classroom supplies out of their own pockets; (2) communities hold "backpack" drives to make sure all students have what they need to attend school; and (3) people everywhere in this country demonstrate their ignorance of American history every time they open their mouths, I wonder: is there a conspiracy to demolish our public school system in order to create a permanent economic underclass?
It would make it much easier for the rich to keep--nay, increase--their riches at the expense [literally--Ed.] of the rest of us. It would do a lot to return the USA to a 19th century model of economic social stratification. It would mean the end of America as "the land of opportunity," where only one's own limitations affect how successful anyone can be. But it would make it easier for those in power to keep selling the "land of opportunity," because no one would have any education by which they could question what the powers that be tell everyone.
Education is the one thing that no one can steal. Once you have it, you are truly free. Destroy equal opportunity education for all, and you destroy the ability of future generations to rise above whatever economic circumstances limit them at their birth. That has always been the true hope America held out to the world. It won't be much for longer, if people like Fox "News" head Rupert Murdoch have their way, however. They don't want people have access to information, to think for themselves, and to make up their own minds about issues. They want to tell us what to think, and to beat down anyone who disagrees. How much easier to accomplish this once our schools are squeezed down into being mere babysitting services, instead of true gateways to Knowledge!
I hate that I am thinking this way. Maybe it's the rainy weather . . . it always makes me tired and pessimistic. But God help me, I have this urge to contact Hillary Clinton and apologize to her for rolling my eyes at her allegation several years ago of a "vast right-wing conspiracy." It doesn't matter that she said it in terms of certain people's efforts to "get Bill." It's part and parcel of the same thing. Rich right-wingers in power want to limit everyone else's access to same. They think the economic pie is limited, and they want to hog all they can for themselves. They just don't get it. When we all have equal access to the keys to success, the pie gets bigger, and there's more to share for everyone. JFK was right: a rising tide does "lift all boats."
Former Dubya administration toady and water carrier (i.e., temporary UN Ambassador) John Bolton has denigrated that administration's noticeable shift toward talking to and negotiating with countries Dubya said formed "the Axis of Evil." Bolton says this shift (1) demonstrates the "intellectual collapse" of the Dubya administration, thus (2) starts "the Obama administration six months early."
Two responses occur to me: (1) before you can have an "intellectual collapse," you must have an intellect. Had Bolton said "ideological collapse," his observation would have been much more accurate. Note, however, that he and I still disagree on whether said collapse is a good thing. He thinks not. I think it's more than about time.
(2) Bolton has unwittingly provided me with some support for a rather paranoid supposition, to wit: far, far right hard-liners are paying people on Sen. John McCain's election staff to screw up McCain's chances to get elected, as they are willing to "endure" four years of an Obama administration in the hopes that by 2012, said hard-liners can regain the presidency . . . only this time, with permanent control of the government. How else to explain the myriad out-and-out stupidities and lies McCain's campaign is experiencing?
[For a stupidity, consider McCain's "press conference" yesterday wherein he was filmed standing in front of a grocery store cheese case. Too tempting, and too easy, to make any number of cheesy jokes about it. For a lie, consider McCain's assertion yesterday that the Iraqi "surge" actually started several months before Dubya announced it. McCain seems to have no idea that the things he says are "facts" are easily checked and easily disproved. No surprise, I suppose, given his admitted ineptitude regarding the Internet.--Ed.]
Not that it really matters. If the Mayan calendar is correct, the world will end about 6 weeks after the November 2012 elections, on December 12, 2012. Long enough for the far, far right to know whether its nefarious plan has succeeded, but not long enough for that plan to go into effect. For them, then, T.S. Eliot's observation will be correct: "This is the way the world will end, not with a bang but a whimper."
I'm sorry, but I am totally fed up with the Brett Favre psycho-drama. For the past several years, Favre has played coy with the Green Bay Packers, leaving the organization guessing as to whether he was going to play another year--until this March, when he finally said he was now officially retired.
Except that he didn't mean it. I wondered during his March announcement whether he meant it, as he kept saying that he knew he could still play, but he wasn't sure he wanted to any more. He seemed less than committed to what he was saying, but he said it, so he should have to live with it.
And now that the Packers as an organization took him at his word and moved on--both in terms of modifying the offense to take advantage of new starting QB Aaron Rodgers's skill set and in terms of whom the Packers chose during the recent NFL college football draft--Favre has come out of the woodwork and is demanding to be given his outright release so that he can play somewhere else.
And women are hopeless prima donnas? My understanding of the situation is that Favre, still owing 3 years' service on his most recently signed contract with the Packers, has the choice of staying retired or of asking the NFL, through a letter to the Commissioner's Office, for reinstatement. Until he is reinstated, the Packers organization is within its rights to consider him retired and to do nothing else.
But Favre doesn't want reinstatement, because Green Bay most likely would neither trade nor release him--rather, Green Bay would make him the most expensive bench-sitting back-up in history, at approximately $12 million a year. Green Bay has no reason to grant Favre an outright release, as Favre would use it to negotiate a contract to play for one of the Packers' biggest divisional rivals, the Minnesota Vikings. [As Green Bay's recent complaint to the NFL suggests.--Ed.] Nor does Green Bay want to trade Favre, as that would be anathema to most Packers fans, not to mention that the only teams with the need and the wherewithal to vie for Favre's services are the very teams, like the Vikings, to whom Green Bay most emphatically does not want Favre to go.
So Favre's family has been making noises for weeks now that the Packers organization has made Brett feel "not welcome in Green Bay" for the past several years, and Favre's legal representative claims the ball is in Green Bay's court and it's up to Green Bay to make the next move.
But if Green Bay doesn't have to do anything until and unless Favre applies for and is given reinstatement, why should the Packers organization lift a finger? Favre's representative says Favre isn't going to ask for reinstatement because he has no intention of attending training camp just to be a backup, and that if Favre asks for reinstatement he'll be fined for every day he doesn't attend camp, so Favre isn't going to do that . . . but get real! He's under contract--either he stays retired or he complies with the terms of the contract, which includes paying any penalties for non-compliance.
Favre doesn't really want to play any more, I suspect. This is a case of Favre realizing he's no longer in the spotlight and still wanting to be the center of attention. He says the Packers organization has been telling him one thing for months but saying something completely different to the general public. However, I have seen no inconsistencies in Green Bay's statements over the past several months. The organization has said it tried to talk Favre out of retiring, but Favre wouldn't listen. And now he's changing his mind, but now it's too late.
If Favre was as unsure of retiring as he now says he was, he never should have made the announcement in the first place. So suck it up, Brett, and realize that you don't get to have everything 100% of your own way just because you hold a whole mess of NFL records. Show a little grace, show a little class--move on.
I have a friend who's husband insists that Brett Favre will be his #1 QB choice forever, but I say this: Favre is durable and workmanlike, to be sure, but give me Joe Montana in his prime any day of the week. At least Montana had--and still has--class. He also knew when it was time to go. [Which saddened me no end. My dad raised me to be a KC Chiefs fan, and I was so tantalized by how close to the Super Bowl Montana got the Chiefs in his 2nd year at KC that I didn't want to see him retire . . . even though I have come to see the wisdom of his decision.--Ed.]
Heck, I still remember when John Elway, newly out of college, was drafted by the Colts, and basically pitched a fit and said he wouldn't go . . . and the Colts caved in and traded him. My dad was disgusted about that for years. Being a career Air Force NCO, my dad understood that when your employer tells you to go somewhere, you go . . . no matter how much you may not want to do so . . . until you've earned the right to make other arrangements, which Elway, never having played a day in the pros at that point, had not yet done.
So I am totally fed up with the crass egoism of certain professional athletes. What else is new?
A commentator on the upcoming Beijing Olympics said on TV the other day that no one should be surprised that an officially Communist country has adopted a capitalistic economic system, because "Communism is a political philosophy and capitalism is not political but economic." First, I apologize for not remembering exactly who said this, as I would prefer to attribute it correctly, and I cannot. Second, I feel like a fool--mostly because I initially attributed a great deal of sense to the statement.
But the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder whether the commentator or I was the one who was crazy. Karl Marx defined Communism (as he would have societies practice it) as inherently political, true. But he demarked the political sides based entirely on their economic status in their communities.
So politics and economics are inherently intertwined, according to Marx. Saying China is not being self-contradictory by combining a Communist-Party-dominated government with a capitalistic economic system is thus delusional. Then again, Communism as it is and has been practiced in the actual world has virtually nothing to do with Communism as practiced according to Marx. Marx maintained that the working industrial proletariat would overthrow capitalism. Yet Communism has taken deepest root in agrarian, subsistence societies. Marx maintained that Communism in practice would cause "the withering away of the state." Yet Communist states are run by pervasive, totalitarian governments. Marx maintained that under Communism, everyone would contribute "according to his ability" and be cared for "according to his needs." [I never cease to be amused by how many Americans think this concept is enshrined in the US Constitution, but who proudly call themselves anti-Communist and who scream bloody murder at the smallest attempts at "social engineering," even when it would help them.--Ed.]
Of course, the biggest problem with Marx's entire system is that he never set forth who decides what an individual's abilities and needs are, thus determining who has to give and who gets to take. The upshot? The rise of nominally Communist totalitarian regimes, because "he who has the gold makes the rules." Even though their existence contradicts Marx's prognostications, their rise answers perfectly what Marx failed to address. Who decides? Those in power do. Whether their power is political and gives them the opportunity to control the economy or whether their power is economic and thus gives them the ability to control the government is irrelevant. Politics and economics are inseparable.
And there's the rub. Capitalism by definition promotes the idea that anyone who can will earn as much money as possible by dint of his own efforts. Thus capitalism, for all its faults, is a bastion of individual liberty. Your success is limited only by your own efforts. And that is the contradiction built into the idea of a Communist totalitarian government running a capitalistic economic system. It contains the seeds of its own destruction. Once people realize the regime is limiting their ability to earn more money, they are no longer going to support the regime. Sooner or later a tipping point will come, and the regime will come down. The only question is whether what replaces it will be worse.
Keep all this in mind while watching the Olympics. And don't worry too much about the title question for this post. It's from a Monty Python sketch wherein notable Communists in history compete in a game show to win a lounge suite. The title question stumped Karl Marx himself. At least Mao Tse Dong knew that Jerry Lee Lewis sang "Gleat Balls of File!"
So I am minding my own business, watching the annual baseball love-fest of the All Star Game, it's the bottom of the 8th inning (the American League is at bat) with 2 out, and a violent thunderstorm rolls in and my power goes off.
When the power comes back on, I find it's the bottom of the 9th and the game is tied 3-3. So the game goes into extra innings. As the National League keeps getting out of defensive trouble yet stranding runners on base during its at-bats, I am enjoying the quality of play (except for poor Dave Uggla's 3 errors and one major failure to drive home a run)--until I realize it's after midnight and I really want to go to sleep!
And then the American League finally wins it in the bottom of the 15th inning. Four-and-a-half hours plus after the first pitch, the stupid AL wins again.
(1) I must be getting really old. I normally am a total night owl. (2) I don't care that it's a love-fest for the final year of Yankee Stadium (AL) in its current incarnation--I'd really like to see the National League win one of these things, as it's been more than a decade now since the NL's last outright victory in the "midsummer classic."
What's worse: I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Those of you who know me know to which team's foibles I refer. I can't say more about it, because I fear I'll jinx the team . . . again. But it's really Hell On Earth when one cannot even enjoy one's favorite team's successes because one fears in one's heart that said successes cannot and will not last.
No one ever said life was fair, but this is ridiculous!
Mark Twain's observation is just as valid today as it was when he first penned it. The problem is applying it. I am quite sure Dubya and his minions would like to fling it in my direction on occasion. Their problem is that I am armed with the facts, thus am more properly in a position to fling it at them than they are to fling it at me.
This morning, Dubya lifted the executive order prohibiting offshore oil drilling in American waters. He also urged Congress to overturn the Congressional prohibition on same. What's wrong with this picture, you ask? Let me tell you:
IT WON'T MAKE A BIT OF DIFFERENCE TO THE PRICE OF GAS, either now or in the long run.
Why not? Because all our oil refineries are already operating at maximum capacity. You can't refine it faster than the laws of physics dictate. No one can, no matter how much Dubya wishes it were otherwise. Not that he does wish it otherwise. He doesn't. He's an oil man, though he wasn't any good at that, either. His interests dovetail with the oil companies, not with John and Jane Average Citizen.
So why don't the oil companies build more refineries? Because the oil companies (1) aren't interested in lowering the price of gas--they are interested in raising the price of oil, thus increasing their profits (they don't need more refineries to sell their oil all over the world); (2) don't want to spend what otherwise goes into their pockets as windfall profits on the costs of building said new refineries, which would in the short term reduce their windfall profits; (3) find it easier to milk the cash cow they already have in the barn than to spend resources [you know, silly things like time, money, and human endeavor--Ed.] developing alternate energy sources.
Evidently no oil moguls have ever been in on the ground floor of developing a new technology. For sure none of them ever studied history in a serious way. And it doesn't even have to be ancient history. If they'd just take a look at the history of the oil industry's stepchild, the auto industry, they could not help but realize that GM (for one) first got into trouble in the early 70s because the executives were trying to tell consumers what kind of cars to buy instead of building the kinds of cars consumers said they wanted--as the increasing level of sales of Japanese imports illustrated.
I suppose I shouldn't blame them. Too much. They are reacting with typically short-term thinking. They care only about the current quarter's bottom line, not about what fortunes they could make 10 years down the road. They merely reflect one of the hallmarks of collective American thinking: we have an embarrassingly short attention span. Most of us don't know our own country's history, even when we think we do. If we did, we wouldn't have put up with Dubya and his minions and their crap for the last 7+ years. We'd not have elected him in the first place. [And maybe we didn't--remember Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004? Ed.]
American history has innumerable examples of creative and inventive individuals (often at the government's behest--witness the Manhattan Project, for example) rising to meet a challenge and keeping America ahead of the technological curve. Morse, Bell, Edison, Singer--just to name a few. Heck, even Abraham Lincoln has a patent! But all Dubya can offer us is the same old, tired suggestions that will not work because they are irrelevant to the real problem. However, if we fall for his shtick, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If we, too, decide that lining the pockets of American oil men is more important to us than our own country's future, we deserve what happens to us.
Senator John McCain yesterday claimed that while he was a POW of the North Vietnamese, he was under such physical pressure at one point that he had to tell them something, and so he said the names of the other members of his Navy unit . . . and used the names of the Pittsburgh Steelers "Steel Curtain" defensive line that helped the Steelers win 4 Super Bowl titles starting in the mid-1970s.
He was on a campaign trip in Pittsburgh at the time.
This would not normally be particularly newsworthy, except for its implicit demonstration that torture does not work. However, there are two things very, very wrong with McCain's account: (1) he was held as a POW before the Steel Curtain defense achieved its fame and fortune; (2) he's told this story before, most notably in his book Faith of My Fathers, only using the Green Bay Packers defensive line.
Both versions of McCain's story cannot be true. At least the original version fits the chronology of the times: the Packers were the winners of the first two AFL-NFL championship games (known forever after as as "the Super Bowl"). Even a casual football fan of the period would have known the names of the Packers' defensive players.
The question becomes whether McCain knew he was lying when he revised his story--in Pittsburgh--to include the Steelers' players. If he knew and he did it anyway, he is guilty of the cheapest sort of political pandering. If he didn't know, he has memory problems approaching senility. Either way, he's not fit to be this nation's president. It doesn't matter whether it's a character flaw or a mental problem. It disqualifies him to be the one we voters select to have his finger on the nuclear button, among other things.
Now if he and his handlers start going around today and try to explain it away as his quirky sense of humor, and that he knew that we'd know that the story as he told it in Pittsburgh wasn't quite true, it changes nothing. For one thing, he never at the time by tone of voice or quick wink or any other gesture indicated this was all in fun. For another, even if he had, do we really want someone as president who takes the single most seminal experience of his life, a horrific one, and turns it into an inside joke? Especially when he's said for years he doesn't want to exploit his time and experiences as a POW for political purposes?
I think not. I hope not. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
The Woodhouse family owns and operates a number of auto dealerships in the greater metro Omaha area, from Chevy to Mazda. The current Woodhouse TV ad campaign startled me with its frankness.
The ads end with children of Woodhouse customers saying their names and ages, and then saying, with various degrees of pronunciation clarity, "I am Woodhouse." (One little blond girl with pigtails is painfully adorable.) The ads all begin with a Woodhouse spokeswoman [and family member?--Ed.] cheerfully informing the viewers that Woodhouse is establishing a relationship with the viewers in order to establish a relationship with "the future generations."
It is well-established that a major purpose of advertising is to generate brand loyalty and repeat business--after all, those things guarantee positive cash flow, which in turn guarantees the business's continued successful existence. But it's not usually so blatantly stated in the ads themselves.
So as cute as the moppets are and as friendly as the spokeswoman's tone is, all I can think of every time I see a Woodhouse ad is, "boy, they get them when they're young, don't they?" The use of the children in the ads strikes me as being akin to brainwashing, and that's scary.
Yes, the Woodhouse ads are being honest . . . blatantly so. Nvertheless, I can't help but put these ads on my list of evidence supporting the notion (which I've expressed several times in these posts) that we as a society have lost our collective sense of shame. That's just sad.
Do you remember the original Star Trek episode, "A Private Little War"? The Federation and the Klingons were both interested in a particular planet, and were trying to influence the leaders of factions in the society there to ally with one side or the other.
The Klingons were also providing technological advancements--read that military armament--to the side they favored. [Oddly enough, this was the side that favored them.--Ed.] Once Captain Kirk found out, he decided to arm the other side with comparable weapons, thus keeping the two sides roughly equal. When challenged by Dr. McCoy about the viability of his solution, Kirk said he knew it wasn't a great idea, but it was the best of the available options.
Gene Roddenberry doubtless intended this to be a cautionary tale about the Cold War, with the Klingons standing in for the USSR and the Federation standing in for the USA. More specifically, he intended it to be a morality play about the Vietnam War, with the lesson being that sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. With both sides having roughly equal arms and technology, a stalemate could be maintained, thus lessening the overall damage that would come should one side gain a big technological advantage over the other.
A balance of power, as it were.
For the past decade or so, at the least, I have wanted to show this episode to everyone who claims Ronald Reagan is one of the greatest US presidents "because he ended the Cold War." Note the presumption in the claim: ending the Cold War is a good thing, a desirable outcome.
But is it, really? Hence my desire to make them watch "A Private Little War." Roddenberry had more insight than maybe even he knew. Neither Vietnam nor the Cold War were wonderful, but maybe they were the best of a set of bad options, as the Star Trek episode demonstrates.
Consider this: when it was the US vs. the USSR (after the Cuban Missile Crisis that is), there was if not peace, a mutual understanding that the lid could come off only so far. The USSR was allied with most of the Arab states--indeed, it contained some of them--and it kept the lid tightly clamped on Islamic terrorists. And when it couldn't keep the lid totally clamped, it was the country spending its young people's lives and its money and its technology to put the terrorists down. Does the name "Afghanistan" ring a bell? Did you know that in the early 80s, we were supplying the Taliban with arms and advice? "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," I suppose.
So why are we now losing our young people's lives and our money and our technology in Afghanistan, Iraq, and [I shudder to think of this possibility--Ed.] maybe soon in Iran . . . which used to be our one major ally amongst the Arab states? Because the Cold War is over. We "won" by spending the Soviet Union into oblivion, and now we are reaping the whirlwind.
The real moral of this story is that no one should ever presume that his/her presumptions are correct. Things change, normally in ways no one could predict. Hence the political "Law of Unintended Consequences." It's true in every other area of life as well: no matter how carefully and thoroughly one plans, what actually happens will be somewhat different from every possibility one considered. Thus what I've been saying for at least 10 years about the ending of the Cold War NOT being such a good idea. (And thus Reagan not having been such a great president.)
I don't know whether I should be singing "The World Turned Upside Down" or Tom Lehrer's "Who's Next?"
Maybe the retroactive immunity provisions for the telecoms under the current FISA proposal don't matter so much after all. Personal privacy doesn't seem to matter to most Americans anymore. This despite personal privacy's status as the foundation of all our liberties--"the freedom to be left alone," as one Supreme Court justice once called it.
There's a tangle of reasons for this phenomenon. One reason is social and multi-generational. In a misguided effort to boost self-esteem, we as a society have jettisoned the concept of "shame." We no longer teach children to be ashamed of the bad, dumb, and stupid things they do. Fear of feeling shame used to be an effective weapon in the fight to get us all to self-regulate our behavior. No more. People no longer seem to realize that there's a difference between bad attention and good attention. They care only about getting attention, of any kind, and the longer, the better.
Another reason is technological. Between the ubiquitous presence of cell phones and the proliferation of Internet sites such as MySpace and YouTube, and the ease with which we now can take and disseminate pictures or videos of just about anything or anyone, the norm has shifted from living in privacy to living in a fishbowl. So our expectations of privacy are reduced . . . if not destroyed.
I remember when airports had bank upon bank upon bank of phone booths--into which one could slip to place a personal call on a land line, with little fear of being overheard and no expectation of the call being wiretapped. Over twenty-five years ago, booths disappeared in favor of kiosks, which made it impossible to converse in private--one had to rely on everyone else's willingness not to overhear. Now, with cell phones, people don't think of using kiosks anymore, even if they could find them. Kiosks have gone the way of the buffalo.
But I wonder--is it that people no longer care that they have no privacy, or do they not realize that they have no privacy? Do they just expect people to respect their privacy while they blurt out the most personal details of their lives for all to hear? Or does it not even occur to them that while they are on their cell phones, they can be overheard not just by the people in the same room, but by anyone who has a receiver on the same frequency? I have heard people telling others their bank account numbers, their credit card numbers, and other information not usually so cavalierly bandied about. I try very hard not to listen, or if that cannot be helped, not to remember what I've heard. I am sure not everyone else would be so circumspect.
Still, it doesn't matter whether people no longer expect privacy or expect it in theory but abrogate it in fact by the way they behave. In either case, privacy disappears. Those who don't defend their rights not only don't keep them, they don't deserve to keep them. Alas for those of us who do care. Our attempts to preserve not just our privacy, but the privacy of all Americans, are overwhelmed by the mere weight of those who just don't care one way or the other. So let the telecoms off the hook for their illegal behavior, and let the members of the Dubya administration who encouraged the warrantless wiretaps off the hook, too. None of it matters anymore, and we're all going to die sooner or later anyway.
The hand-wringers also note that while companies selling things everyone must have, like food, are doing just fine, a lot of other stores are tanking. If I remember correctly, I even heard on NPR this morning that the Bombay Company, CompUSA, and others were going to close all their retail outlets. The hand-wringers used this fact to suggest that as availability of goods shrinks, people will buy less, and once people get "really scared," they'll start saving, which means even less money in retail circulation, which means even more shrinkage in the economy--a downward spiral the likes of which we haven't seen in this country since 1929.
What I want to know is why the last dot hasn't been connected, to wit: with stores going away, jobs are going away, and with jobs going away, income is going away, which means even more people will have even less to spend on necessities, let alone on the "nice-to-haves" that we think we need to live happy and fulfilling lives. Why aren't the hand-wringers expressing concern about what effect the loss of jobs, thus income, thus money, will have on the economy?
What's being ignored or lost in this whole discussion is what the loss of jobs does to the people losing them. Until we as a society make that connection, and until we as a society realize that businesses exist to serve people and not the other way around, we're never going to have long-term economic security again.
I suppose this development should not surprise me. It's a repeated motif throughout America's history. I had hoped we'd collectively learned enough from the Great Depression to avoid repeating it, but I was wrong. Yet again, we get the twin pies in the face: those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it . . . and those who learn the wrong lessons from history are doomed to suffer from their willful ignorance. What's really sad is that those of us who didn't make either mistake still have to suffer the consequences of the actions of those who made both.
John McCain says that Wesley Clark's statement that McCain's military service alone (especially his time as a POW) does not qualify him to be president is an attack on McCain's patriotism and also denigrates McCain's service.
Clark (who himself is a USAF general, retired) was not tactful in his choice of words, though in fairness and in context, Clark was merely answering a question whose terms were posed by CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer on Meet The Press. But the gist of Clark's statement is correct. Consider: Ulysses S. Grant was one of the nation's best military men, yet his presidency has largely been considered a disaster of corruption, graft, and greed. Not by Grant himself--Grant's personal integrity is unquestioned--but by Grant's political allies, who shamelessly took advantage of Grant's inability to notice that not everyone around him shared his level of integrity. Military service in and of itself does not reveal someone's ability to be president. That is the sum total of the meaning behind Clark's indelicately worded answer to Bob Schieffer.
Nor was Clark's statement an attack on McCain's patriotism. Nor did Clark's statement denigrate McCain's service. Clark merely mentioned McCain's service. He did not evaluate it in terms of its patriotism or other level of quality. If McCain believes any mere mention of his service by his opponents in this election cycle equals an attack on his service, McCain lacks the discernment and judgment to be president. If McCain knows better but resorts to such slimeball tactics anyway, he's too craven to be president. Either way, McCain's own behavior, NOT his life's experience, disqualifies him to be president.
Barack Obama's disavowal of Clark's remarks did no service to Obama's campaign, however. By buying into McCain's premise that Clark was attacking McCain's service and McCain's patriotism, Obama falls into the same trap that has ensnared McCain. If he believes what McCain said, his judgment and discernment are not high enough to qualify him for the presidency--and if he doesn't believe it but caved because he saw political advantage in doing so, he's pandering just as much as McCain is.
[This is why I still want to see a "Draft John Edwards" movement at the Democratic Party's national convention. Even though I know it "ain't gonna happen. Wouldn't be prudent."--Ed.]
So how does one decide for whom to vote? McCain has been all over the place: he tells the residents of New Orleans he's supported every attempt to discover what went wrong with the levees and to correct the all problems revealed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but his public record of voting shows just the opposite. He voted against every single piece of proposed legislation that was designed to do the things he told New Orleans residents he said he supported. He said Dubya's tax cuts were dangerous and he opposed them in 2000. In 2008, however, he says the tax cuts are a good idea and he's going to make them permanent. In 2005 he said eventually we'd have to negotiate with organizations like Hamas. In 2008, he says negotiating with groups like Hamas is "appeasement." But he supported Dubya's negotiations with Kim Jong Il of North Korea. Go figure.
I'll give Obama the nod here for being more consistent in his message in terms of the legislation he has proposed and what he says he will support as president.
Call me crazy, but I want a president who is intelligent, who will do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not act out of blind partisanship or expediency, and who has the courage to stand his ground in the face of opposition from his own base of support, as he has done on the FISA bill. McCain, who claims to be a maverick and who says he's bipartisan, has an actual voting record that's nearly 100% in support of Dubya's failed policies. Either he is too dumb to notice the discrepancy between his words and his actions, or he thinks we are too dumb to notice. Either explanation is disquieting.
Nonetheless, Phineas Taylor Barnum is laughing his head off, as both major party candidates prove once again that Barnum was correct: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
