Frank Rich Scratches the Surface of America's Denial Crisis

Whats it gonna take to open the eyes of Americans in denial?

Frank Rich scratches that surface, in his Sunday Op-ed, What We Don't Know Will Hurt Us, and all that's clear is that its all unclear.

No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans’ reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly “changed everything,” slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama’s toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

Its starting to sound to me like Americans are slowly backing towards the real rude awakening, and no matter how many years of warnings there have been, the evidence laid out on the table in the hard light of day, and our crushing need, need, need to hold on to the dreams and possibilities; the American Dream, with all of its boring stability, yet promise of how things could change with one lottery ticket or game show win, the reality of the situation is so bad that even considering the alternative of a normal life of making ends meet causes many to cling hopelessly to the chance rather than live in the reality. Its not the safety from the terra that we really want, its our 15 minutes of fame! That's because we're special! I don't know if we know what we want, really. With all that information out there, it seems that we have become more provincial in our tastes than ever. Maybe the menu is too big.

Rich talks about our "cultural pattern of denial," as if it just came about on its own and wasn't born of a system that purely and clearly doesn't work. Yeah, I'm talking about capitalism; the unregulated brand. American Dream Capitalism can only flourish, and then temporarily, in a world where credit companies go hand in hand with advertisers, hand in hand with retailers, paying less and less to workers, who then need more credit to fulfill what the advertisers tell them to want. The media claims that they are just giving the American people what they want, but I don't think that its possible to know what you want with no clear idea of whats out there, relatively, in a world full of differences and possibilities. Its all a big manipulation for which each generation will blame the one before it, but clearly, we have a skewed world view anyway, so infighting isn't going to help. The truth may be that the sham of the American Dream is that its not really enough because we are so spoiled that even if we don't personally need that fame, we need to watch others gaining and losing it on our large screen TV.

The fear that we are traipsing down the path to socialism is very real to many for whom capitalism has done little. Why is that?
We are, in fact, a semi-socialist country with what little that really works here being part of that redistribution thing that is so hated. Most people knee jerk about keeping the money they earn and yet pay private insurance companies a premium level premium only to have to do battle when push comes to shove, and live at the mercy of which doctor takes which.

I'm not against everyone making a fair or comfortable living, but its clear to me that if regulation stopped the money up top from all traveling upwards, like we used to have a rule of thumb to put a certain amount of profits back into the business, and then pay back into the workers, community, society, and the infrastructure, maybe we all would be a little safer and happier.


The problem is really more of a sociological phenomenon in which rather than being angry at the rich, we direct our anger towards the poor for taking up our resources with their neediness. The truth of this is far from whats disseminated and somehow billions more in corporate welfare is OK, but feeding children is not. Its taken so many, many years of this manipulation for the tables to finally turn. It's taken home movies of gold fixtures and multi million dollar birthday parties, empty accounts where hedge funds were supposed to be, and no bid contracts, carried out by crony companies with ties to the government, (to put it mildly;)...companies that carried out their duties so negligently as to feed tainted water bottles to our soldiers fighting their war of profit, build buildings in which pipes burst and shit dripped from ceilings, and that managed to lose truckloads of cash...truckloads...all of this with evidence in front of the American face. Evidence like videos, documents, drawings, and testimony, and all anyone had to do was to dangle the carrot or the threat of losing the carrot that you don't really own, and we went right back in line.

My big disappointment in the past 8 years has been less the crooks that would steal their own country blind and walk away able to sleep at night, because there are some bad people and absolute power corrupts, etc... but that half the American people went along with it because of some shiny, shiny, and a vial of white powder, to lazy to do the research or even open their eyes.

Its probably not that all of those people are bad, but more a sort of cognitive dissonance, where what is accepted societal behavior becomes corrupted by what is the line from the propaganda team, and the actions following go so against what one stands for that the opposition of the two creates a mental vacuum. It becomes a matter of accepting the unacceptable behavior or admission that one has played a part in something that is criminal or wrong. The wrong becomes the new truth and the person clings to it as if it was the gospel truth because the alternative of having been so wrong and acted on it is too much.

Americans are not raised to look at their reality under the light, lest we become dissatisfied with our position in the order of things, so we cling tighter to the truth that we have come to believe, based in fear or denial, and the slightest possibility of joining the monied classes and the belief that they should be able to keep what they have earned. Every successful American CEO has stood on the shoulders of this entire society to get where he or she is, and a society that allows success even one tiny bit as big as many of them have achieved, deserves a kickback into society's pot; not a tax loophole and an offshore account to try to keep the money that they have earned. The regular American, as well as the poor American is expected to kick back in, but its accepted that the loopholes for the rich exist because they somehow deserve them. This is the group that has benefited the most from the Bush years and their tax cuts. Now some of those guys actually sunk their businesses, took bailout money from taxpayers, and managed to give themselves their huge bonuses at the end of last year. What are we supposed to do with that? Let them get away and we've reinforced the helplessness of law abiding citizens everywhere. Rock the boat too much and the corporate influenced government ceases to move forward.

So, yes Obama is up against it, and he may be the one we need right now in that, as much as he skirts around the truth in the interest of not overwhelming the undereducated masses and offending the cronys, he will state the truth, and he will do what has to be done. I believe that because I have to. I believe that because there is nothing else, except that the specter of families with babies on the street and on the soup line may not hit home until that family is your neighbor...or you...and until the post apocalyptic country starts to look too much like a Mad Max scene that even the Reaganomics of the 80's couldn't fully carry out in NYC. That NYC was where I stepped over the AIDS ravaged homeless and the broken glass of car windows every day for years, shouting at a deaf government, and it was heartbreaking. This is much worse, but we no longer have a government with its fingers in its ears and humming.

How bad does it have to get before we take action? It has to come right to the front door and maybe inside the house! Its gotta take a camera into the Willowbrook asylum and drop a microphone down the well so that we can hear the stuck baby wailing. Its beyond 9-11, obviously and way past Katrina....Being out of work may the the thing that creates time for Americans to reassess whats been happening and to get back to basics.

The same people who very gravely told me in the past 2 presidential elections "I'm not sure if your guy can keep us safe," have to realize that this is not something that any individual can figure out, but rather a broad policy of base belief that got us into or is gonna get us out of the current can o' worms; that base belief should probably start with at least following the constitution and laws, and then turn to how our neighbors are treated. If we give up our base beliefs out of fear, then we have nothing.

Rather, what I was seeing in those frightened voters was the wielding of the power of the vote in the direction of the possibility of winning the lotto and joining the Halliburton class, or remembering some Pearl Harbor memory of America as the Hero, in the right, which was just laughable in its gravity and sincerity, considering what was going on in the world and how we were acting. The same people who wouldn't know a Thief from a Socialist if they hit them in the bank account, thought that they were influencing the halls of power with their belief in a Bush or a McCain or a Palin as a way to stay safe and right; because if the simplistic neocon view of things could keep us safe, then any working stiff espousing at the local bar could make it big, and there is a certain leveling in that bluster, as much as its totally nonsensical.

Americans may need to be slowly led into the harsh reality of what lies ahead. But hopefully it will be done before its too late in a world of tipping points. We may see Obama nationalize the banks and we may see a "socialist" turn to how things are done in this country. The alternative has been tried and it doesn't work, so get ready for something new and maybe even a little familiar.
If its not dawning on the other half by now, then it may never. That doest stop the necessity of moving forward before things get worse.

If in light of the bailouts already put out there, the executives at the huge corporations and banks cant see the path ahead, then they have to go; and not with their golden parachutes either! If the credit companies are only using the bailouts and reorganization to put the screws to their customers rather than stop offering up new credit at every turn and make a sane way to get out of debt, then they will go too, and along the way they will see many more Americans in straight default, rather than honestly trying to pay their debt down.

The real point of this illustrated lesson for the American people and the world is that the dream that you were promised is earned, not promised, and you were bamboozled into a position where you can't earn, beg, borrow, or steal it anymore...its dead! and no matter what anyone says, you cant get anything for free. If the credit industry had to fold and stop offering credit to individuals, how would we live? well, we'd learn. If that effected the world economy horribly and the CEO couldn't get the corporate jet he wanted this year along with his 20 million dollar bonus, well, we would go on and dig out. What we are seeing may be the collapse of unregulated capitalism, and surely, if America doesn't hold those responsible accountable right up to the top, then we are doomed to repeat our mistakes over and over. Laws are no good if they are only for the rabble, especially if everyone right up to the president and his VP get away with murder.

Industry in this country may be based at this point on the vinyl to CD, CD to MP3 player model, just as the digitization of the television signal, (our airwaves,) serves to force new equipment onto Americans credit cards at a time when people just don't have the money to pay that debt back. But at some point, the camel's back breaks; especially when the paying jobs to make that new equipment are long gone to other countries that have entered their own cycle of Americanized mistakes.

So I look forward to hearing a little hard truth. As I said, frank Rich barely scratched the surface of the problem here. Its a problem of growing up and getting with a reality based model, and having the government carry that out in regulating how much these companies can lie to us and entice us to get in too deep, while they stab us in the back, and blame us for being negligent for not reading the print so fine as to serve the smaller denizens of the doll house world. I'd like to see simple terms in normal layman's print, and I'd like to see the country get back on a track that is livable and from which we can recover to a sensible level of realistic living where everyone has a chance and the worker is once again valued as much as the CEO.
c/p Brilliant at Breakfast

John Hagee Says that the Roman Catholic Church Will be Devoured by the Anti-Christ and John McCain Happily Accepts his Endorsement: Frank Rich

Today Frank Rich covers the mind bending Reverend John Hagee and his ongoing endorsement of John McCain. The fact that this man can even find followers is a testament to the level of desperation out there in the search for meaning and the wasteland of American life. How low does one have to go to find oneself adhering to a life plan set forth by the likes of this twisted man preaching hate from a television screen, and getting rich doing it?



Watching this video makes one wonder how its possible that Presidential contender John McCain could not only welcome his endorsement but continue to welcome it, with little notice of whatever inflammatory statements he has made along the way. Jon Stewart weighed in on McCain...and if you really couldn't make this stuff up, why does it take Jon Stewart to deliver it?:



Today Chris Matthews chuckled with his panel about the other pastor in the M$M's religious endorsement wars being the crazy uncle in the attic who pops out to say odd things. The panelists discussed Obama's every action and reaction to the mistake that was the handling of the Jeremiah Wright debacle and unbelievably, thats it.... Its all just a little hard to watch, and honestly, Ive been turning it off lately; all of it. This primary is basically over. If its not for some reason, then I don't know what thats going to mean, because the truth is that this country has a huge emotional problem, and it may take some sort of huge disaster to get us back to some semblance of what were were supposed to be about.

Meanwhile, over at the Old Grey Lady, Frank Rich managed to lay out something that is so urgent and damaging to our country as to make Obama's passive pew/fence sitting during Wright's inflammatory,(if largely correct content-wise,) sermons, seem mild. The truth of McCain and Hagee is that McCain pursued the twisted fuck for his endorsement and that, even in light of having the possibility of standing on a stage next to the next possible President, Hagee consistently repeats his insane claims. And no matter how it has been approached on the kid-gloves-Sunday-shows, McCain refuses to acknowledge how insane the guy really is. Included in the morass of ideas by Hagee , are such gems as his belief that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God because of homosexuality in New Orleans, that a war in Iran should be started immediately as a "Holy War," and that the Catholic church is "The Great Whore," that is drinking Jewish blood. This is only part of the venom that this man spews regularly, and McCain is still happy to have his endorsement.

McCain claims that he does not accept "anti-anything" statements by Hagee, and dismisses any implication that there is a problem with Hagee's outrageous statements. Its unclear if McCain even is aware of what Hagee is saying, but he clearly seems to think that he can disassociate himself from some things that Hagee says and embrace the fact that the guy is religious at all. There has been incredibly little media coverage of McCain and his relationship to Hagee, but for some reason the media has seen fit to cover Obama and Wright ad nauseum, until watching political programming has become nearly impossible. As Rich notes:

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

And I would go further than that, in that what gets wall to wall coverage is transparently aimed at shaping the dialog in this country, and in fact to shape the race itself. Rich's point is that black transgressions get more air time and press than similar white transgressions. In support of this he notes Falwell and Robertson and their wacky take on the reasons for 9-11, and the Giuliani priest, among others. But is this merely a matter of racist coverage rather than pure favoritism towards a party, a candidate, or the status quo? Could it be just this simple, or maybe should we try to look at the fact that the outlets are all owned by large corporations that stand to benefit from the preservation of the status quo, represented by a Clinton or a McCain Presidency.

The press certainly loves McCain, and regularly accepts barbecue from him, which could be considered to be a bit of a conflict. There is a dearth of real reporting going on anymore, and the specter of Tim Russert or Matthews hosting another McCain lovefest is sickening. When does Rich call his colleagues in reporting on their behavior? Why is this as simple as a racial issue?

Obama sat for years in church and, if you believe his claims, he didn't much pay close attention to what was being said. That is not what anyone would call unusual in churchgoing Americans, though I would expect more of Obama, considering that he is a pretty deep and spiritual guy with a long term plan. John McCain was tickled to have Hagee endorse him over Huckabee, and continued to seek him out and welcome his endorsement even as the incredible sound bytes came out. ...and Obama is the one deserving of scrutiny? Perhaps that is racial, but there is also a programming angle to it that I see as having a much stronger influence on this thing than any white fear of the coming race war.

So, as much as I was happy to see Frank Rich cover this story, I wish he had gone deeper with it. Perhaps one can speculate about the racial thing easier than one can about actual entities making decisions. But this thing being driven by race would indicate that there are ratings being considered, just like when a blond girl goes missing in the Caribbean, and so doesn't that also indicate a decision by management? The question is, who is willing to take responsibility for what is going on? In the long run its easier to blame the ratings, the shareholders, and ultimately capitalism, than to own up to being part of the problem.

So, why is Obama still being questioned about Jeremiah Wright? Oh, its because crazy black preachers are much more Jerry Springer Show than white ones....right? In other words, its our fault.

c/p Brilliant at Breakfast

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Baby Bird Sunday...Memorial Day Stuff To Do & Frank Rich....

Yes, its been feedings every two hours since this little guy's hatch date, 05-22-07, day and night, night and day...but its more than worth it, as he starts to hold his head up and open his little mouth. These green-cheeked conures are just dolls as pets, with so much personality. Having lost the first 3 to crushing incidents, I couldn't take a chance with this one. Mama Rosie, is sitting on 3 more eggs, one of which appeared out of the blue, so I have no projected hatch or dud date until 28+ full days have passed from from last Sunday. Its a mean and messy business, this bird rearing...and at some point you have to decide if you want to let nature take its course and let the parents try to do what they do, or step in ...and I guess that after 3 losses in nature, I decided to step in, with the hopes that I can design some sort of foam lining for the nest box before the next clutch. Meantime, I'm tired...and it will go on for another week or so before I can cut the feedings down...but I have finally devised a way to be more mobile with the thing, in being able to plug a heat pad into the car in case the temperature drops....whatever....and yes, thats the bellybutton above with the last dried up bit of yolk on it....


Jill put up a really great link today: IAVA ....This site allows you to connect with organizations to help our soldiers directly in many different ways, from fostering pets for extended tours to sending books to bored soldiers...to just writing a letter to someone who maybe doesnt get much mail.
Isnt that a good thing to do for Memorial Day, as opposed to just putting flowers on graves...lets remember them when theyre alive!

Here is Frank Rich, for anyone who cares about this crap anymore...I suppose I will again at some point, but, man, its so disheartening now....

May 27, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Operation Freedom From Iraqis

By FRANK RICH

WHEN all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.

However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico.

Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”

It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.

But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.

Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters.

In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator Kennedy’s phrase, have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs” because they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration’s most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had “absolutely nothing to do” with Saddam’s overthrow: “Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”

Actually, we haven’t fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn’t was that L. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were hired after they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The administration is nothing if not consistent in its employment practices. The assistant secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now, Ellen Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of Maryland with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.

Ms. Sauerbrey’s official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” in March, is that most of them “really want to go home.” The administration excuse for keeping Iraqis out of America is national security: we have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist ties. But many of those with the most urgent cases for resettlement here were vetted already, when the American government and its various Halliburton subsidiaries asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the first place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be vouched for, there is the contrasting lesson of Vietnam. Julia Taft, the official in charge of refugees in the Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000 Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months of the fall of Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like opposition at the time. In the past seven months, the total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.

The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began during the Vietnam War, told me that security worries then were addressed by a vetting process carried out in safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees set up beyond Vietnam’s borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke also points out in the current Foreign Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to American treatment of Iraqi refugees isn’t that war in any case, but World War II. That’s when an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling the available slots under existing quotas. As many as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before the Germans cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941, according to Howard Sachar’s “History of the Jews in America.”

Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats. This month Mr. Bremer declared that the real culprits for his disastrous 2003 decision to cleanse Iraq of Baathist officials were unnamed Iraqi politicians who “broadened the decree’s impact far beyond our original design.” The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is chastising the Iraqis for being unable “to do anything they promised.”

The new White House policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has joked, is “blame and run.” It started to take shape just before the midterm elections last fall, when Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memo (propitiously leaked after his defenestration) suggesting that the Iraqis might “have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.” By January, Mr. Bush was saying that “the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude” and wondering aloud “whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.” In February, one of the war’s leading neocon cheerleaders among the Beltway punditocracy lowered the boom. “Iraq is their country,” Charles Krauthammer wrote. “We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.” Bill O’Reilly and others now echo this cry.

The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything that’s coming to them. The Iraqis hear us and are returning the compliment. Whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American demands for timelines and benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is setting its own timeline for American withdrawal even while flaunting its vacation schedule, Iraq’s nominal government is saying it’s fed up. The American-Iraqi shotgun marriage of convenience, midwifed by disastrous Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated into the marriage from hell.

While the world waits for the White House and Congress to negotiate the separation agreement, the damage to the innocent family members caught in the cross-fire is only getting worse. Despite Mr. Bush’s May 10 claim that “the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially” since the surge began, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the number of such murders is going up. For the Americans, the cost is no less dear. Casualty figures confirm that the past six months have been the deadliest yet for our troops.

While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time some Iraqis did greet the Americans as liberators. Today, in fact, it is just such Iraqis — not the local Iraqi insurgents the president conflates with Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda in Pakistan — who do want to follow us home. That we are slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though the war’s godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved.

Elizabeth Edwards for President...and The Reptilian Core of the Republican Party Still Has Questions About All This.....

This is where the wheat and the chaff part ways. Its less about how brave one or another of us is, because surely Elizabeth Edwards is in a rare spot, with a loving husband, all the money in the world, and a clear vision of what she wants her life to be until it ends, however it ends. She could never stand in front of us and expect sympathy beyond a familiar fondness for someone who is just brave and real. What she can do is be somewhat of a mirror into the real life choices that are made in America every day. This is not Father Knows Best, and most of us who have dealt with illness ourselves or with sick family members, have continued on, however we can, to take care of the business of living while we're alive.
In the bastardized religiosity that has taken over certain swaths of this country (or maybe I'm just more New England and New York than to spend alot of time judging people's choices unless they severely impact my life,) it seems to be OK to demand a certain set of actions in this particular case, as if to channel some wishful thinking about what is even possible in the world as it is....And I get a smacking of the feeling that maybe certain folks out there don't want to see this death battle at all because they are, A, afraid of it and want deny it, B, don't believe in it and would prefer to focus on the rapture and heaven or, C, worst of all, are worried that someone who clearly illustrates the inequities that are growing every day in America might get people riled up enough to start questioning the house of cards that is serving as the bookie office of the neocons....all that paper goes up in flames pretty easily guys....Watch out, because thats a boulder rolling down the hill behind you.
I guess its the reptilian core of the conservative brain (i.e. Rush Limbaugh, Katie Couric....) channeling what the rest of them are thinking.....like, shouldn't they go and HIDE at home, holding hands and watching each other in trepidation, "enjoying every moment together," until the end?
But then, the Edwards have always done the unseemly thing in public, haven't they?
How dare they turn so publicly to public service after losing a son, when they should have gone and hid their grief...what a public display! How dare he uncover all of these unseemly problems like the embarrassing and vast divide between rich and poor...oh yes, and the silly little problems of corporations that inadvertently (or maybe on purpose?) kill little children while saving 75 cents on a part....
And worst of all...how dare she parade around in public when shes got the big C?
Unseemly, I tell ya...I would call that blind ambition...ha!
Here is the deal as I see it, and as I've seen it since the Edwards came on the scene: These people are the real deal. Political kids are constantly on the road or playing around the press lines. Whatever they decide is THEIR DECISION...They are making the best decision for them, and probably for the country, because when was the last time we saw some actual truth out there and the struggles of life that we can relate to? I don't think that they care what we think. If there is some positioning going on here, it feels to me to be less than we've seen in a long, long time.
And thats the real rub here.
The slow movement of the conservative rule making machine and enquiring minds into our bedrooms has been troubling enough without an ongoing commentary from the likes of Katie Couric, a supposed news anchor, who is asking the questions that no doubt the CBS brass wants to know: isn't it wrong of you to decide how to live your life when we're here watching?
The glaring obviousness of throwing the doubt out there is doing more harm to the right in this game, but really, it looks to me to be just a symptom of our national sickness, that would have us all back in some dark ages where our sick were hidden in the attic and we never got to see a body bag come back from war....oh wait...
When it comes right down to it. I don't care if Elizabeth Edwards dies right in front of our eyes, as long as she is doing what seems best to her and her family. At least its honest and truthful and real....Ive had enough of the plastic yet crazy Bush family, and the red meat eatin' Cheneys, to last me a lifetime.

April 1, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Elizabeth Edwards for President
By FRANK RICH

ELIZABETH EDWARDS’S choice to stay in the political arena despite a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about Elizabeth Edwards. People admired her before she was ill for the same reasons they admire her now. She comes across as honest, smart and unpretentious — as well as both devoted to and independent of her husband. But we have learned a great deal about the political arena from the hubbub that greeted her decision. For all the lip service Washington pays to valuing political players who are authentic and truthful, it turns out that real, honest-to-God straight talk about matters of life, death and, yes, political ambition, drives “some people” (to use Katie Couric’s locution) nuts.

If you caught Elizabeth and John Edwards in the Couric interview on “60 Minutes” or at their joint news conference in Chapel Hill, you saw a couple speaking as couples chasing the presidency rarely do. When Ms. Couric gratuitously reminded Mrs. Edwards that she was “staring at possible death,” Mrs. Edwards countered: “Aren’t we all, though?” It’s been a steady refrain of her public comments that “we’re all going to die” and that she has the right to make her own choice to fight for her husband’s candidacy even as she fights for her life. There are no euphemisms or equivocations in her language. There’s no apologizing by either Edwards for the raw political calculus of their campaign plans. There’s no sentimental public hand-wringing about the possible effect her choice might have on her children. The unpatronizing Mrs. Edwards sounds like an adult speaking to adults.

Americans understood. A CBS News poll found that by more than two to one, both women and men support the decision to move forward. So do prominent cancer survivors in the media establishment, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum: Tony Snow (before his own rehospitalization), Laura Ingraham, Cokie Roberts and Barbara Ehrenreich all cheered on Mrs. Edwards. But others who muse on politics for a living responded with bafflement and implicit moral condemnation — and I don’t mean just Rush Limbaugh, who ridiculed the Edwardses for dedicating themselves to their campaign instead of, as he would have it, “to God.”

No less ludicrous were those pundits who presumed to bestow their own wisdom upon the Edwards household as it confronted terminal illness. A Washington correspondent for Time (a man) fretted that “Edwards’s supporters, and surely many average Americans” will be wondering when his “duties as a husband and a father” will “trump his duty to his country and the cause of winning the White House.” (Oh those benighted “average” Americans!) A former Los Angeles Times reporter (a woman) who covered the 2004 Edwards campaign suggested to USA Today that “this is a time when they would want to be home together savoring every moment that they’ve got.” A Washington Post columnist, identifying herself as a fellow mother, faulted Mrs. Edwards for not being sufficiently protective of her children.

As Mrs. Edwards moves forward both to manage her cancer and to campaign for her husband, she’ll roil more of the Beltway crowd. In a political culture where nearly every act by every candidate and spouse is packaged to a fare-thee-well for the voters’ consumption, the Edwardses’ story by definition will play out unpredictably in real time, with a spontaneity that is beyond any consultant’s or media guru’s control. Here is one continuing familial crisis that cannot be scored with soothing music to serve as a Hallmark homily in an inspirational infomercial at the next election-year convention. The Edwardses’ unscripted human drama will be a novelty by the standards of our excessively stage-managed political theater and baffling to many in its permanent repertory company.

That’s one reason it will be good for the country if Mr. Edwards can stay in this race for the duration, whether you believe he merits being president or not. (For me, the jury on that question is out.) The more Elizabeth Edwards is in the spotlight, the more everyone else in the arena will have to be judged against her. Next to her stark humanity, the slick playacting that passes for being “human” and “folksy” in a campaign is tinny. Though much has been said about how she is a model to others battling cancer, she is also a model (or should be) of personal transparency to everyone else in the presidential race.

This is especially true in a campaign where the presumptive (or at least once-presumptive) front-runners in both parties have made candor their calling card: John McCain is once again riding his Straight Talk Express and Hillary Clinton is staking her image on the rubric “Let the Conversation Begin!” They want us to believe that they are speaking in a direct, unfiltered manner, but so far their straight talking, even without Elizabeth Edwards as a yardstick, seems no more natural than Cheez Whiz.

Senator McCain’s bus has skidded once more into a ditch since the Edwards news conference. He’s so desperate to find the light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq that last week he told the radio jock Bill Bennett that “there are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk.” Yes, if they’ve signed a suicide pact. Even as the senator spoke, daily attacks were increasing in the safest of Baghdad neighborhoods, the fortified Green Zone, one of them killing two Americans. No one can safely “walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection,” according to the retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who delivered an Iraq briefing (pdf) to the White House last week.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign “conversations” with the public have not stooped to the level of Mr. McCain’s fictions. But they have been laced with the cautious constructions that make her stabs at spontaneity seem as contrived as her rigidly controlled Web “chats.” This explains why a 74-second parody ad placed on YouTube by a Barack Obama supporter had enough resonance to earn (so far) nearly three million views. Reworking a famous Apple Macintosh commercial from 1984, the spot recasts Mrs. Clinton as an Orwellian Big Brother by making her seemingly innocuous campaign catchphrases (“I intend to keep telling you exactly where I stand on all the issues” and “We all need to be part of the discussion”) sound like the hollow pronouncements of the Wizard of Oz rather than the invitations to honest interchange the words imply.

Since the Edwards storm broke, there have been unintended consequences for other campaigns, too. In an accident of timing, Judith Nathan picked the same day as the Edwards news conference to explain that she was only now, after six years in public life, correcting the inaccurate published record of the number of her pre-Giuliani marriages (two, not one). Juxtaposed with the Edwards headlines, the dishonesty unmasked by this confession looked even worse than it might have otherwise. In a less vulgar vein, the first major Democratic campaign event after the Edwards announcement, a forum on health care, prompted more than the usual sniping about Mr. Obama’s substance when his policy prescription lacked the specifics in Mr. Edwards’s plan.

The power of Elizabeth Edwards’s persona is such that the husband at her side will be challenged to measure up to her, too, perhaps even more so than his opponents. No one may be labeling him “the Breck girl” anymore (the subject of another popular Web video parodying his coiffure maintenance), but should his campaign prove blow-dried when he moves beyond health care, he’ll pay his own hefty political price for the inauthenticity.

Whatever Mr. Edwards’s flaws as a candidate turn out to be, he is not guilty of the most persistent charge leveled since his wife’s diagnosis. As Ms. Couric phrased it, “Even those who may be very empathetic to what you all are facing might question your ability to run the country at the same time you’re dealing with a major health crisis in your family.”

Would it be better if he instead ran the country at the same time he was clearing brush on a ranch? Polio informed rather than crippled the leadership of F.D.R.; Lincoln endured the sickness and death of a beloved 11-year-old son during the Civil War. In the wake of our congenitally insulated incumbent, who has given our troops neither proper armor nor medical care and tried to hide their coffins off camera, surely it can only be a blessing to have a president, whether Mr. Edwards or someone else, who knows intimately what it means to cope daily with the threat of mortality. It’s hard to imagine such a president smiting stem-cell research or skipping the funerals of the fallen.

Indeed, of all the reasons to applaud Elizabeth Edwards’s decision to stay in politics, the most important may be her insistence, by her very action, that we not compartmentalize the harsh reality of death and the imperatives of public policy, both at home and at war. Let the real conversation begin.

Whats So Bad About What Libby Did? Frank Rich Does Libby and Walter Reed, and it's Damning....

Today on George Snuffleupagus, George Will matter of factly let it be known that in his opinion, the Libby conviction means nothing because it was only about a silly article. He writes thousands of them per year and the idea that a silly article could put someone in jail seems ridiculous to him.
Who cares if the right hand man of the Vice President of the United States, upon orders from his boss, gave out the name of an undercover agent? Who cares if the ramifications of that range from people losing their jobs, their lives, and their reputations, to the loss of trust between agents and the government that has sworn to protect them, as they risk their lives for the security of us all. Who would want to joint the CIA, FBI, or the military, for that matter?
The trial was about Libby lying about what he had done, but he did also do this crime, and the indictments are not over yet.
The right has a moan and cry rising from the ashes of this farce, demanding that Libby be pardoned immediately. As Frank Rich said today in the New York Times, the pardon is very likely because Bush and his people believe that their cause is so righteous that they would kill thousands upon thousands of people for it, so what is a law or the identity of an agent in the face of...whatever it was their cause was? Lets see, there was the democracy, weapons of mass destruction and the danger posed to us, the rapture, self enriching privatization of the war, and....what else? A guy like Bush/Cheney doesn't care at all about the structure of the government. Laws are for the little guys, and there are those signing statements anyway...
The really wacky Bill Kristol on Fox today said that Bush needs to get this pardon done right away to reinvigorate and rally the party.
The pardon will certainly say one thing to us...as if we didn't know already...the cause of the war and the need to keep all players in line using whatever means necessary, is above the laws of this country, the constitution, and any promises made to our undercover operatives, and regulations in this country preventing the treasonous outing of agents (who have been working undercover within the past 10 years.)
How can that all just be about an article? What is it with the parade of conservative pundits who want to pooh pooh this as if its a gossip column scandal. How can the strong arming of experts who disagree with the administration be a reason to commit treason?
Passing of confidential government information for dissemination in a newspaper, when the information is clearly classified, has to be against the law.
So why is Scooter Libby the only one being tried, convicted, or pardoned? Where is the missing link here...and why are the complicit individuals in the press corps allowed to just go ahead with their jobs as if they have something truthful and important to say to us?
I suppose that we are witnessing more of the dying gasp and downward spiral of this tragic group of criminals and their stenographers. But why do we have to stand on convention at this point?
I just don't see why the democrats are not starting impeachment proceedings right away. What are these dems so afraid of? I'd like to see some movement beyond the endless hearings that are so upsetting in that....how did this all happen?

March 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Libby’s Pardon Is a Slam Dunk
By FRANK RICH

EVEN by Washington’s standards, few debates have been more fatuous or wasted more energy than the frenzied speculation over whether President Bush will or will not pardon Scooter Libby. Of course he will.

A president who tries to void laws he doesn’t like by encumbering them with “signing statements” and who regards the Geneva Conventions as a nonbinding technicality isn’t going to start playing by the rules now. His assertion last week that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the Libby case is as credible as his pre-election vote of confidence in Donald Rumsfeld. The only real question about the pardon is whether Mr. Bush cares enough about his fellow Republicans’ political fortunes to delay it until after Election Day 2008.

Either way, the pardon is a must for Mr. Bush. He needs Mr. Libby to keep his mouth shut. Cheney’s Cheney knows too much about covert administration schemes far darker than the smearing of Joseph Wilson. Though Mr. Libby wrote a novel that sank without a trace a decade ago, he now has the makings of an explosive Washington tell-all that could be stranger than most fiction and far more salable.

Mr. Libby’s novel was called “The Apprentice.” His memoir could be titled “The Accomplice.” Its first chapter would open in August 2002, when he and a small cadre of administration officials including Karl Rove formed the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a secret task force to sell the Iraq war to the American people. The climactic chapter of the Libby saga unfolded last week when the guilty verdict in his trial coincided, all too fittingly, with the Congressional appearance of two Iraq veterans, one without an ear and one without an eye, to recount their subhuman treatment at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

It was WHIG’s secret machinations more than four years ago that led directly to those shredded lives. WHIG had been tasked, as The Washington Post would later uncover, to portray Iraq’s supposedly imminent threat to America with “gripping images and stories not available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence.” In other words, WHIG was to cook up the sexiest recipe for promoting the war, facts be damned. So it did, by hyping the scariest possible scenario: nuclear apocalypse. As Michael Isikoff and David Corn report in “Hubris,” it was WHIG (equipped with the slick phrase-making of the White House speechwriter Michael Gerson) that gave the administration its Orwellian bumper sticker, the constantly reiterated warning that Saddam’s “smoking gun” could be “a mushroom cloud.”

Ever since all the W.M.D. claims proved false, the administration has pleaded that it was duped by the same bad intelligence everyone else saw. But the nuclear card, the most persistent and gripping weapon in the prewar propaganda arsenal, was this White House’s own special contrivance. Mr. Libby was present at its creation. He knows what Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney knew about the manufacture of this fiction and when they knew it.

Clearly they knew it early on. The administration’s guilt (or at least embarrassment) about its lies in fomenting the war quickly drove it to hide the human price being paid for those lies. (It also tried to hide the financial cost of the war by keeping it out of the regular defense budget, but that’s another, if related, story.) The steps the White House took to keep casualties out of view were extraordinary, even as it deployed troops to decorate every presidential victory rally and gave the Pentagon free rein to exploit the sacrifices of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman in mendacious P.R. stunts.

The administration’s enforcement of a prohibition on photographs of coffins returning from Iraq was the first policy manifestation of the hide-the-carnage strategy. It was complemented by the president’s decision to break with precedent, set by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among others, and refuse to attend military funerals, lest he lend them a media spotlight. But Mark Benjamin, who has chronicled the mistreatment of Iraq war veterans since 2003, discovered an equally concerted effort to keep injured troops off camera. Mr. Benjamin wrote in Salon in 2005 that “flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night” and that both Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda barred the press “from seeing or photographing incoming patients.”

A particularly vivid example of the extreme measures taken by the White House to cover up the war’s devastation turned up in The Washington Post’s Walter Reed exposé. Sgt. David Thomas, a Tennessee National Guard gunner with a Purple Heart and an amputated leg, found himself left off the guest list for a summer presidential ceremony honoring a fellow amputee after he said he would be wearing shorts, not pants, when occupying a front-row seat in camera range. Now we can fully appreciate that bizarre incident on C-Span in October 2003, when an anguished Cher, of all unlikely callers, phoned in to ask why administration officials, from the president down, were not being photographed with patients like those she had visited at Walter Reed. “I don’t understand why these guys are so hidden,” she said.

The answer is simple: Out of sight, out of mind was the game plan, and it has been enforced down to the tiniest instances. When HBO produced an acclaimed (and apolitical) documentary last year about military medics’ remarkable efforts to save lives in Iraq, “Baghdad ER,” Army brass at the last minute boycotted planned promotional screenings in Washington and at Fort Campbell, Ky. In a memo, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley warned that the film, though made with Army cooperation, could endanger veterans’ health by provoking symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The General Kiley who was so busy policing an HBO movie for its potential health hazards is the same one who did not correct the horrific real-life conditions on his watch at Walter Reed. After the Post exposé was published, he tried to spin it by boasting that most of the medical center’s rooms “were actually perfectly O.K.” and scapegoating “soldiers leaving food in their rooms” for the mice and cockroach infestations. That this guy is still surgeon general of the Army — or was as of Friday — makes you wonder what he, like Mr. Libby, has on his superiors.

Now that the country has seen the Congressional testimony of Specialist Jeremy Duncan, who has melted flesh where his ear once was, or watched the ABC newsman Bob Woodruff’s report on other neglected patients in military medical facilities far beyond Walter Reed, the White House cover-up of veterans’ care has collapsed, like so many other cover-ups necessitated by its conduct of this war. But the administration and its surrogates still won’t face up to their moral culpability.

Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who served with Mr. Libby on WHIG and is now on the board of his legal defense fund (its full list of donors is unknown), has been especially vocal. “Scooter didn’t do anything,” she said. “And his personal record and service are impeccable.” What Mr. Libby did — fabricating nuclear threats at WHIG and then lying under oath when he feared that sordid Pandora’s box might be pried open by the Wilson case — was despicable. Had there been no WHIG or other White House operation for drumming up fictional rationales for war, there would have been no bogus uranium from Africa in a presidential speech, no leak to commit perjury about, no amputees to shut away in filthy rooms at Walter Reed.

Listening to Ms. Matalin and her fellow apparatchiks emote publicly about the punishment being inflicted on poor Mr. Libby and his family, you wonder what world they live in. They seem clueless about how ugly their sympathy for a conniving courtier sounds against the testimony of those wounded troops and their families who bear the most searing burdens of the unnecessary war WHIG sped to market.

As is often noted, any parallels between Iraq and Vietnam do not extend to America’s treatment of its troops. No one spits at those serving in Iraq. But our “support” for the troops has often been as hypocritical as that of an administration that still fails to provide them with sufficient armor. Health care indignities, among other betrayals of returning veterans, have been reported by countless news organizations since the war began, not just this year. Many in Congress did nothing, and we as a people have often looked the other way, supporting the troops with car decals and donated phone cards while the same history repeats itself again and again.

Now the “surge” that was supposed to show results by summer is creeping inexorably into an open-ended escalation, even as Moktada al-Sadr’s militia ominously melts away, just as Iraq’s army did after the invasion in 2003, lying in wait to spring a Tet-like surprise. And still, despite Thursday’s breakthrough announcement of a credible Iraq exit blueprint by the House leadership, Congress threatens to dither. While Mr. Bush will no doubt pardon Scooter Libby without so much as a second thought, anyone else in Washington who continues to further this debacle may find it less easy to escape scot-free.