Author: BobHiggins

During the 1968 election, one of the keystones of Dick Nixon’s campaign was his “plan to end the war in Vietnam.” Of course he had no real plan, or, if he did it was a poor one, evidenced by the fact that the war dragged on for seven brutal years after that sad election season.

It has been said in some quarters that the “plan” Nixon alluded to, but never spelled out, was a nutty scheme (nutty schemes seem to abound in the halls of power) to have Kissinger convince the Russians that Tricky Dick was just batshit crazy enough to use nuclear weapons if the North Vietnamese would not come to the table and end the war on his terms.

History has shown that Nixon was nuts enough. So was and is, Henry the K, but the Vietnamese, after fighting a collection of Yankees, French, Japanese and Chinese among others, for uncountable hundreds of years weren’t impressed with new and improved threats, from new and unimproved enemies.

They had been hardened over the centuries to leave early for work knowing that they might have to bury their dead or rebuild a bridge or two on the way. They would not be cowed by threats of death and destruction; death and destruction was all around them, forever.

Some might say that their difficult history made the Vietnamese nuttier than Dick Nixon but I’ll leave that to the scholars and shrinks of history. After all, most of the witnesses are dead.

The presence of whackos and sociopaths at the highest levels of government is not a new thing, we have seen Caligula, and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, the Bushes and Cheneys, Saddam and Kim il Sung, but I believe that “extreme erratic eccentricity” in power is, unfortunately, a growing trend.

There are hundreds of rising stars and starlets of the future of political and religious subjugation and terror waiting in the wings or auditioning on corporate and theocratic casting couches as I write this.

As people, (the voting public,) continue to divorce themselves from the affairs of their own governance, continue to abrogate their fundamental responsibility to maintain a decent awareness of, and control over, their own public affairs, they open the door ever wider to the cold dark winds of tyranny and oppression.

People around here set their deadbolts at night; they make sure the kids put the bikes in the garage. They protect their property, their stuff. They keep their cash in the safe or a bank. (Perhaps not so much this week) The bikes and snowmobiles will be there in the morning but what of their freedoms? What of the rule of law, what of their democracy?

While we were busy obsessively obtaining, and guarding our wealth and its trappings, bigger SUVs, more palatial drywall estates, we left our only truly necessary and sacred possessions, things like liberty, privacy and due process, out on the lawn, discarded it seems as unnecessary abstractions.

Thieves and opportunists, both public and private, came and stole them in broad daylight. They practically rang the doorbell and announced what they were about. We paid no attention. The way they marketed their programs made it sound as if we would profit. I think that they scammed us, I’m afraid that they will be back for the rest, the tangible as well as the abstract; I fear that they want, and will have, it all.

I’ve listened to John Sidney McCain III for many years. I’ve lived through several of his ever more pathetic and increasingly panicky runs for the one office that he believes will enable him to prove to his father and grandfather that he is worthy of their respect, in spite of his record. (Does that not sound like a “cover” of a record that we’ve heard for years?)

John Sidney McCain III says that he knows where Osama bin Laden is. “I can get him,” he says with Nixonian certainty, as he continues to insist that we must continue to fight bin Laden where we know that he isn’t.

He claims that he knows how to put Americans back to work as he fights against workers rights, the minimum wage, social security and colludes with powerful interests which would deny them health care. He tells us that he has a “plan” to solve the financial crisis, after telling us that it doesn’t exist.

Why is he hiding this important information? Does he really have a plan?

He does not, only people who readily believe his opportunistic pandering, the malicious lies being spread by him and his “running Babe,” and other cynical surrogates speaking on their behalf, believe that he has a plan for anything broader than the continued aggrandizement of himself, his family and his wealthy friends and cronies.

I think John Sidney McCain III is an exceptional fraud. Had he not been the son and grandson of admirals he probably would not have made it through the Naval Academy, nor would he have been permitted to continue flying after his third crash due to pilot error.

Had he been cashiered (at least grounded) after wrecking that third aircraft he would have been saved a long imprisonment and we would have been protected from the sad spectacle of an embittered old man desperately grasping for a presidency that he has come to believe is his birthright, his “lifetime achievement award.”

He claims to be a patron saint of America’s veterans. He is not. His record on veteran’s issues is shameful. I am a disabled veteran; I pay attention to “patron saints.”

No I don’t believe that he should have been commissioned a Naval Officer and should never have held an office of public trust. His willing and eager involvement in the Keating five affair, his everlasting closeness with dozens of the most powerful and probably the most destructive lobbyists in Washington, and his gambling habit, (Senators, Presidents rolling dice in casinos?) has shown him incapable of honoring that trust.

He certainly should never be trusted to replace the current sociopath in chief. America, what’s left of it, cannot afford another decade of wanton abuse of power and privilege, of wanton theft from the public treasury, of wanton waste of the lives of our children and grandchildren.

Like George Bush John Sidney McCain III was a coddled child of privilege, propped up at every turn by family name and money.

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.
From “Make-Believe Maverick ” By Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone

John Sidney McCain III is an anti intellectual of the first order. No surprise there, as his party, or the modern version of it, has made anti intellectualism a cornerstone of its appeal to its base, that voter they call “Joe Six Pack.”

As an aside, that pisses me off because I am Joe Six Pack as are most of my friends and most of us are Democrats or Independents of varying degrees of liberality who despise what John Sidney McCain III represents.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Gimme a beer.

They hate the “scholarly elite,” deride legitimate research, deny climate change, evolution, gravity, and “publicly” despise gerund endings. They build museums with “Barney riding Dino” exhibits and try to sell it as “creation science education?”

Back in 79 or so I took a class at the Chicago Planetarium, titled “New Frontiers in Cosmology.” The class was taught by David Schramm, a professor of astrophysics from the University of Chicago. During those few months, Dr. Schramm changed how I viewed the world by successfully inserting into the mind of this untutored layman a delightful stew which he made from a mixture of the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, particle physics, and nuclear physics.

I have enjoyed few things in life as much as I enjoyed his teaching and his company. Dave was a class act, a well respected, inspired, passionate, wild haired man of science. I was overwhelmed with his brilliance and his almost childlike enthusiasm. I think the class cost me $75.00. My guess is that it was presented to the public as part of one of those evil “government grants.”

During the last “debate” John Sidney McCain III castigated Barack Hussein Obama (I’m not afraid of him or his name) for the expenditure of three million dollars for a new overhead projector. McCain was, or acted outraged.  

I think John Sidney McCain III equates the word “projector” with Lone Ranger and Tonto movies flickering on the wall of a darkened room of his childhood.

Any time the Chicago Planetarium or any institute of legitimate research and learning wants to spend a few million bucks on an incredible learning tool, to bring scientific knowledge to the public, I say, “buy it.” The anti intellectuals of the McPalin camp be damned.

They would rather spend public money on death, destruction or giveaways to already wealthy swindlers.

Trillions to Wall Street flimflam men, hundreds of billions to defense cronies, oil cronies and merchants of death, but declare holy war over a few million for research which might save a species, educate the public or provide health care and education for children, rebuild our infrastructure and move us to renewable fuels.

The only “steady hands on the tiller’ in my lifetime have been attached to the wrists of Democrats. Hell, I have a plan too. Get rid of these damn Republicans. Again, thanks, I needed that.

At every whistle stop, (do campaign planes have whistles?) John Sidney McCain III asks, “Who is Barack Obama,” do we really know who he is?

I think that I know Barack Obama well, because I know John Sidney McCain III very well and the contrast between these two men is profound in every way.

The recent counterpoint of public appearances, of debate, of Vice Presidential choices, the demeanor of their wives and families, and the conduct of their campaigns has exposed an overwhelming and obvious fact.

There is only one person in this race qualified to be the President of my America. I’m voting for “that one.” Barack Obama for President.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Last night’s debate between six term Senator Joe Biden and the former Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

What I saw and heard:

Joe Biden was a picture of confidence and self assurance. He took the stage with over three decades of experience in the Senate and his stature as one of the preeminent legislators of the latter half of the twentieth century and a key policy maker in the current one, was inescapable.

For the most part he offered serious and thoughtful answers to the questions which were put to him and presented a solid supportive picture of the Democratic ticket and their intentions in office.

He performed his first major job as vice president admirably if cautiously. Although I saw his anger rise several times when confronted with Palin’s distortions of his and Obama’s records, and her flatulent cutesiness, he kept it under control. He proved that he belongs in my White House on either position of the ticket.

Sarah Palin, doggone it, what can I say, golly, wasn’t she just precious, the way she read talking points and sound bites to the cameras. She was a model of right wing Church Lady womanhood, all lip gloss and sly winks to the camera, and jeepers she was so folksy, reminded me of the time Aunt Martha fell in the privy at the family reunion.

She was the Stepford Vice President. I thought her delivery to be robotic, canned, and obviously drilled into her by rote.

Compared to the calm seriousness and substance of Joe Biden she offered the ultimate pop cultural spam of what modern Republicans pass off as political discourse.

She also pronounces the word nuclear exactly like George Bush: NuKUler. I find that single fact eerily and enormously frightening. Hell, she even cribbed on Ronald Reagan, “Now Joe, there you go again.”

Palin could not be a more transparent fraud. In that area she needs no practice; she learned the curtsy and dimples shtick in the beauty pageant business.

I do not want this woman anywhere near my White House. Alaska is not far enough away, maybe we can get her a place on Big Diomede so she can see Russia for the first time.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

John Sidney McCain III made his first national “executive” decision a few weeks ago. He chose a person who was singularly unqualified to hold even city wide office to be his (and, unfortunately, our) Vice President.

I think that single decision shows us who John Sidney III really is, reveals him more clearly than anything I have seen in this or his many previous failed campaigns.

His choice, as far as I have been able to determine, may have been partially forced upon him by the darker forces of neo-conservative Republican politics. The Roves and the Cheney’s intend to rule from Mordor long after their official tenures are over in Washington. They need their Bushes, their McCains and Palins.

Forced though the choice may have been, McCain made it with a degree of public glee, of arrogance and cynicism that I have never personally witnessed in presidential politics in my tired old life.
A woman, take that “NOW,” a hunter, a moose skinner which neatly covered the 2nd amendment wackos and the taxidermy lobby, and “as pro life as I can be,” which will solidify the support of the abortion clinic snipers and future Olympic bombers.

“If my daughter were raped by her father, I would be a Grandmother, again.” “All the glory goes to God.” You can’t make these people up, genetic dead ends are absolutely necessary to produce this kind of humor.

Sarah apparently believes that if life gives your daughter lemons, it is a Mother’s duty to make lemonade, and then, host a baby shower.

Sarah Palin really doesn’t count in this deal any more than Tom Eagleton in 72 or hapless James Stockdale twenty years later. Poor Admiral Stockdale was an equally cynical choice made by an equally deranged, desperate and nutty candidate: Ross Perot. I guess that some folks are just destined to become amusing footnotes in history, like “Wrong Way Corrigan.”

I’m pretty sure that Palin was not qualified to be the Mayor of Wasilla. The twenty million dollars in long term debt that she left as her legacy (in a town of 5000) is testament to that. She was qualified to be Governor of Alaska because she was owned, right down to her pageant sash, bathing suit and camouflage knickers by big oil.

I have a feeling (don’t ask me why) that Sarah will be gone by the middle of the month and John Sidney McCain III will take three steps back out of the pocket and throw a long “Hail Mary” to Rudy Giuliani who is streaking toward the end zone wearing uncomfortable heels and shabby drag, but, as he will explain, “they hit me at the 9, again at the 11 but I took it in for the score.”

Rudy Guliani may be “the hockey mom and the pit bull with lipstick.” Try and hold that graphic between your ears.

Oh yeah, don’t forget to vote.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

It’s crucial that John McCain return to Washington at this time, in fact, it is critical as he is titular leader of his party as well as its interim standard bearer. As someone who admittedly knows little about economics it is of the utmost that he be at the center of debate on this recently manufactured economic crisis.

As McCain says, in times of extreme crises like this we should suspend political debate and all this unseemly partisan electioneering and put Wall Street first.

There are a lot of people wearing Gucci shoes and Hermes neckties gathered in the halls of power right now, eagerly waiting for his assistance in the slicing of this historic pie of capitalist opportunity.

McCain, after all, has chips in the game and so do his people, it is important that he, and they, be in on the split. They, who did so much in their tireless, albeit well paid, efforts to deregulate the finance industry deserve to be in on the grim harvest. These are truly historic times.

I have tried to remember, yes, it comes back to me now, Lincoln campaigned against his own Republican party as a National Unionist at the height of the Civil War until he hammered out a deal with Fremont and defeated McClellan, an unenthusiastic Democrat, who he had relieved from command years before. I don’t remember Lincoln running home to avoid public political debate.

Wilson ran a bitter campaign against Hughes during the darkest hours of the “war to end all wars,”
when American neutrality and our imminent involvement in Europe was the central issue. Woody did not run home to avoid political debate, he campaigned to victory.

FDR fought serious health problems and a tenacious Republican named Tom Dewey in 1944 amidst the Allied invasion in France and as a prelude to the “Battle of the Bulge.” He did not avoid political debate with cynical and self serving calls to “put country first.” He solidified his party and beat Dewey’s republican ass although the campaign probably hastened his death.

I know John McCain to be a liar of the first order. I know John McCain to be a panderer and a pimp for corporate, religious, and political interests that he believes will assist him on his road to what he mistakenly believes is power. John McCain is “a fraud.”

I have read that John McCain was dubbed “Songbird” by his fellow POWs. I now believe that John Sidney McCain is an unconscionable opportunist as well as a political coward. In my book he is “unfit for command.”

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Illustration from: The Fata Morgana files, pt. 17

“I believe if we had, and would, keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for…and not the American style, which they don’t want. Not one crammed down their throats by the Americans.” David M Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps 1958-1963

A war in Afghanistan that is now losing ground held only tenuously and shedding blood at the highest level since it began seven long years ago.

The stalled fiasco in Iraq, a war that has nearly ruined our armed forces by stretching them, year after year, on the rack of a bloody and unending futility.

A foreign policy of swagger and boast, diplomacy and firm negotiation recklessly discarded and replaced with bluster, threats and sanctions that harm only the innocent and fuel the fires of radical hatred resulting in the creation of more enemies.

In Iran, Georgia and Russia in Europe and Asia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Honduras in the Americas, sabers are rattled, coups are plotted, gauntlets are thrown and the seeds are sown for another generation of war, of poverty, of  instability and chaos and profits for those control the game.

This is the Bush Foreign Policy, this is the Republican Foreign Policy, this is the McCain Foreign Policy, and this is the Neo Conservative Foreign Policy. This is the “Project for a New American Century,” whose motto seems to be “Peace never, peace nowhere.”
The quotation at the top of this page is from my commanding officer, distantly that is. I was a young Pfc. when he commanded the Marines. We never actually met but I learned to respect him as a man who had known and understood war and all its horrors and who had the courage to speak against it.

During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 many of the “experts” in Kennedy’s military “court” were hell bent on a shootout over the placement of Russian ICBMs on the island. Air Force General Curtis LeMay was among the most vocal in urging a Strategic Air Command strike, including nuclear weapons, against the island, followed by a Marine amphibious invasion.

John Kennedy hadn’t trusted LeMay and many of the Pentagon and intelligence “experts” since the “Bay of Pigs” debacle. He once told White House staffers “I don’t want that man near me again,” and often left meetings when LeMay was doing the briefing.

Kennedy had more faith in the counsel of his brother, his friends and longtime political advisors and David Shoup. General Shoup was then the Marine Commandant and a hero of the Tarawa invasion in the Pacific in the Second World War.

When talk about invading Cuba was becoming fashionable, General Shoup did a remarkable display with maps. First he took an overlay of Cuba and placed it over a map of the United States. To everybody’s surprise, Cuba was not a small island along the lines of, say, Long Island at best. It was 800 miles long and seemed to stretch from New York to Chicago.

Then he took another overlay, with a red dot, and placed it over the map of Cuba. “What’s that?” someone asked him. “That, gentlemen, represents the size of the island of Tarawa,” said Shoup, who had won a Medal of Honor there, “and it took us three days and eighteen thousand Marines to take.” He eventually became Kennedy’s favorite general. From “Douglas MacArthur, Warrior as Wordsmith” by Bernard K Duffy and Ronald H Carpenter

Tarawa had taken 76 hours and cost the lives of 1027 Americans killed and 2292 wounded as well as 4500 Japanese who fought almost to the last man. The “experts,” who predicted a much less costly campaign, were wrong again.

I tell that story to preface this: all Kings, Presidents, CEOs. Dictators, Popes whether despots or saints are surrounded by “experts, “by “advisers,” by “acolytes,” and “wonks,” they are awash in them.”Experts and wonks and advisers, oh my!” They crowd the cubicles, hallways, the streets, the bars and the brothels of Washington, outnumbered it seems, only by the lobbyists and they can be bought for a couple million dollars a dozen.

A large measure of the talent necessary to the saint or despot, to the great leader, whether president or pope, dictator or monarch is having the wisdom, let’s call it “insight” or “native intelligence” or “street smarts,” to recognize the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad.

Some have it, some don’t. More ominously, some don’t care.

I submit that in October of 1962, Jack Kennedy knew that simple difference and acted accordingly, on his gut instinct and the instincts of his trusted personal “court” and because of his, and their, ability to recognize intelligence from chatter, to glean diplomatic realities from bluster and bull, tens of millions were spared.

I wonder, hmmmm, how might George Bush have reacted at that time, in that situation, or John McCain, or Sister Sarah? Hmmmm, again.

The quote that I used to title this little tale was uttered last week by Soviet Premier Vladimir Putin, “It’s the Court that Makes the King.”

When people clamor for term limits, I tremble with fear. Would we exile the kings and cede power to their “courts?” I’m less afraid of the most corrupt king than I am of the gaggle of grasping fools, jesters, charlatans and opportunists which surround him. Putin was right in that sense, the king is a creature of their making.

You might go fishing with His Majesty, look deeply into his royal eyes, commune with his Rovian soul, and enjoy the outing, as Putin did, but a morning on the water with His Majesty’s Counselors could result in an extended swim with the fishes. Putin said as much.

The King may be dead but the court lives on.

While George Bush prepares to end his shameful and disastrous presidency, hopefully to slink off to Crawford and get lost in the brush pile of history, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and the same Neo Conservative court who chose young George have chosen the running mate for the most recent incarnation of John Sidney McCain. More frightening, there is a high degree of probability that she will ascend the throne before the end of a McCain first term.

In an Op-Ed in last weekend’s New York Times, Frank Rich wrote this:  

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.
The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not. The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket NYT 8/13/08

In describing what he calls the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Rich offers this baneful item:

There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office.  The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket NYT 8/13/08

When I vote for someone I try to know who has his or her ear and why. Who influences him and why? Who does he owe, how much and why? If he counts among his trusted influences, experts advisors or posse, Roves, Cheney’s, Dobsons, Hagee’s or other people that I regard as extremely dangerous to my country, I vote against him or her or them.

Karl Rove, far from taking it on the lam or hiding in the shadows in fear of “congressional subpoenas” was front and center at the RNC, and all over the media ever since, extolling the executive experience, command abilities and all around virtue of Sarah Palin.

Sister Sarah is the Neo-Con’s choice as the next figurehead, the next bumbling, ineffectual sock puppet , for the next madcap edition of their “New American Century.”

The King may be in the brush pile but the “Court” lives on.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

It is, or should be by now, plainly evident to most observers that the current crop of Republicans will run the kind of Rovian sleazoid campaign that has worked so well for them in the past.

They will co opt the message of the Democrats at every opportunity and swift boat anyone who gets in their way. They will, as in the past, use the politics of personal destruction, of sneer and smear, a style that has become a necessity in modern Republican strategy as it so purely reflects the mentality and ethos of a sizable and increasing fraction of their base.

The party that has come to reflect the endemic racism, sexism, religious intolerance, and the rapidly widening schism between economic classes in this country has nowhere else to turn. They have become directors of a noisy, and potentially dangerous lynch mob. A criminal mob acting to serve the interests of an out of control business culture and an irrational priesthood that sees the face of God in its own self righteousness.

Republicans dare not run on their party’s record of governance over the last eight years. The record is abysmal and they know it. As much as possible that record will be kept in the dark dank shadows with the sordid history of the modern Republican Party. It will be hidden in that shameful place where they will store Bush, Cheney, their denial of health care to America’s children, denial of decent wages to America’s workers, our terribly fractured economy, serious unemployment, two misguided and mismanaged wars and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

They must try to hide the enormous decline of America which they have, through a combination of gross incompetence and malicious design, engineered.

They cannot run on the records of their candidates. Publicizing the voting record of John McCain would simply add detail to his portrait as a clone of Bush the lesser, show his resume as a generally ineffective and largely disinterested legislator, and serve to reveal him as yet another Republican tool of an increasingly criminal corporate community.

Publicizing the record of his “running babe,” a bespectacled, dewy eyed Alaskan cheerleader, will simply help to expose her incredible shallowness, her complete lack of relevant experience and preparation, her ruthless backstabbing character and shed unwanted light on the many lies she has told in just the last ten days.

They will not run on the issues, McCain’s campaign manager and head lobbyist Rick Davis has said as much, verbatim:

“This election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

They will hearken back to past campaigns of this decade and those of the seventies and eighties and rely on their only strengths. The will use “blue smoke and mirrors.” They will distort, obfuscate and tell the “big lie” loudly and at every opportunity. What the candidates can not lie about directly they will relegate to their various PACs and fraudulent “Mom and Pop” interest groups to perform 30 second drive-by assassinations of Democratic policy and character.

After all, in the words of lobbyist Davis above, this is about a “composite view,” it’s about “what people take away from these candidates.”

The republicans will package and sell Palin and McCain, their shills of the moment, the same way they sell soap flakes, corn flakes, cruise missiles or bridges to nowhere. Packaging, placement and the “appearance” of value are all that matters.

The ability to govern according to the federal constitution in the interests of the people, the interests of the great majority of the electorate, is not and never will be worthy of serious consideration by today’s GOP.

Republicans despise government. I’m not making this up, I hear it daily from their leadership in the media and from the podia in the halls of every level of government. I have heard it from their sadly deluded rank and file for the last 30 years.

How do people who so abhor government expect to succeed in its practice?

The answer is they don’t. They expect to use government to raid the public treasury and transfer  wealth to corrupt corporations, to rob the working and middle classes and line the pockets of an already bloated ruling class. If the government stands in their way they will wreck it. The Constitution to them is a quaint document from a simpler time, as Bush has said “It’s only a piece of paper.”

The sneering, contemptuous and supremely ugly speech delivered by Palin to an obscene, leering, and almost entirely white choir of equally scornful and contemptuous delegates was, for me, a Zen moment. It offered a clear graphic example of what I believe is the greatest danger facing America.

The rabid radical right wing of the party of McCain and Bush, the party of Rove, Cheney and Palin has evolved in this century into a public menace of the first order.

Yes, there are honest, well intentioned members of the Republican Party. I have known them as public officials, as colleagues at work and as friends socially. That they have allowed their party to fall under the sway of such a gang of criminal yahoos as Karl Rove is a great mystery to me. Where are the voices of Republican reason.

The danger of the radical right is amplified by the silence of their more moderate brethren.

“The Republicans believe that the power of government should be used first of all to help the rich and the privileged in the country. With them, property, wealth, comes first. The Democrats believe that the power of government should be used to give the common man more protection and a chance to make a living. With us the people come first.” Harry Truman

The push and pull between the right and left sides of the aisles of American politics dates to Hamilton and Jefferson and into the British parliament of the eighteenth century and before. The animosity is nothing new, the incredible level of rancor is more recent.

I have been a Democrat and a liberal since before I served in Vietnam, more than forty years ago. I grew in that direction because I admired the political thought of Locke and Jefferson, of Madison and Paine, of FDR, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

I was nearly sixty years old and a partially disabled veteran the first time I heard such pathetic people as Limbaugh and O’Reilly or Robertson and Falwell refer to Democrats and Liberals as traitors.

In a few years I will be buried in a VA cemetery with nearly thirty thousand other veterans. My small gravestone will be inscribed with my name, rank, and the war in which I served. Like thousands of other cold stones aligned by rank and file, it will not reveal whether I was White or Black, Hispanic or Asian. You will not be able to find from this bleak marker whether I was Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu or Bhuddist.

There are no Ds or Rs inscribed on these simple monuments, but both are buried there in copious quantities, to know any more you have to dig.

Democrats and Friends, Independents, Undecideds, lovers of liberty, respecters of the rights of man, we need to win this one. There may not be another if we fail.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

“Mortgage Giant Overstated the Size of Its Capital Base,” reads the headline of this morning’s New York Times.

The headline tops a story by NYT writers Gretchen Morgenson and Charles Duhigg which, like so many articles on finance, quickly leaves me floundering in a murky wake of economic jargon, acronyms, and boardroom corporatese.

I understand the gist of what I read, though I would have opted for a different headline, something along the lines of “CEOs and CFOs of Major American Financial Companies Lie to Regulators, Shareholders and Public, Throw Markets into Chaos, Cost Taxpayers Tens of Billions.”

I am I admit on medication.

I realize that writers and reporters seldom write the headlines that lead their stories and shouldn’t be held to account for them. That duty is performed by headline writers under the supervision of editors who are answerable to the corporate structure and its advertisers.

Writers pen their stories under the same supervision and are answerable to the same powers and advertisers, hence we get stories which fail to state the case clearly, as does my substitute headline.

I am not currently working in the “news biz.”

The story of the private collapse and public bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac which follows is well written, as we usually expect from the “Times,” and informative, to a point. However it neglects to tell the whole story or to truly point us in the direction of the “real story.”
For instance:

The government’s planned takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, expected to be announced on Sunday, came together after advisers poring over the companies’ books for the Treasury Department concluded that Freddie’s accounting methods had overstated its capital cushion, according to regulatory officials briefed on the matter.

I hate to bicker but if I were in the “news biz,” the phrase, “overstated its capital cushion” would be replaced with, “lied to everyone about corporate assets and liabilities.”

I think that my prose is crisper, more direct, and perhaps evocative of Hemingway.

Perhaps it’s the meds.

Again:

Then, last week, advisers from Morgan Stanley hired by the Treasury Department to scrutinize the companies came to a troubling conclusion: Freddie Mac’s capital position was worse than initially imagined, according to people briefed on those findings. The company had made decisions that, while not necessarily in violation of accounting rules, had the effect of overstating the companies’ capital resources and financial stability.

The language chosen is part of the problem, the restraint, the circumspection, the absence of emotion, of outrage. We are left fishing without bait, without a hook. Even the regulators and the people they hire (with our money) to investigate, to audit, to paw through this rancid quagmire of business misadministration refuse to use direct language in reporting what they find.

If Joe Blow is caught stealing bread and baloney from the corner store the headline reads “Vagrant Nabbed for Theft at Local Market.” If J. Whitney Blowville is grabbed for stealing the entire store we are told that “errors in judgment were made.”

Joe Blow goes to jail and is hounded by the justice system for the rest of his crummy life. J Whitney Blowville is asked to resign with an attractive severance package and quickly hired by another firm that recognizes his “business acumen, personal initiative and aggressiveness.”  

We see this over and over from the savings and loan collapse of the eighties, through Enron and Arthur Anderson, to Bear Stearns and the present collapse of the entire mortgage lending and finance industry.

“The Fish Rots from the Head,” an Old Russian proverb informs us. We refuse to listen, we use the wrong language, and we are locking up the wrong people. The jails are filled with tail.

Finally, regulators are concerned that the companies may have mischaracterized their financial health by relaxing their accounting policies on losses, according to people familiar with the review.

A “capital shortfall” is “missing money”
“Questionable accounting” is “fraud covering up theft”
“mark-to-market,” and “deferred-tax assets” are corporate bullshit terms used to hide profits and losses.

“Mischaracterized” means “lied.”

Representatives of both companies did not return calls or declined to comment.

A nice direct sentence but I probably would have said, “they took it on the lam”
Apparently they understand the power of language as well as silence.

C’mon, folks, please, let’s sharpen our prose. It is, after all, our only sword.

Ask yourselves this: How would Papa put it?

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

“It is the quality of patriotism to be jealous and watchful, to observe all secret machinations, and to see publick dangers at a distance. The true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears, and to sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief. But he sounds no alarm, when there is no enemy; he never terrifies his countrymen till he is terrified himself. The patriotism, therefore, may be justly doubted of him, who professes to be disturbed by incredibilities…” Samuel Johnson

The stage is covered with American flags, draped and propped and perched everywhere, to the left, to the right and behind the speaker’s dais, which itself is covered with flag bunting and a covey of microphones nearly buried in a spreading nosegay of … flags.

The wall at the rear of the stage is covered by a gigantic “Old Glory” and every participant, from the high and the mighty to the clipboard bearers, coffee servers and floor sweepers wears a flag on his lapel or near her heart. Ubiquitous is the term that comes to mind, sleazy is another, frightening yet another.

The people, the true believers in the audience are waving smaller versions of the national banner in a crazed, grinning, drooling frenzy of nationalistic sentiment, carrying signs, and banners, wearing shirts, hats, and neckties on which the same theme is repeated, ad nauseum projectillum.
All in all, there are more flags in attendance at this rally than swastikas at Hitler’s lovely Nuremberg torch light soirées of the thirties.

Such is the face of American politics, American policy, in the 21st century, lurid, self righteous and jingoistic, the face of rabid, belligerent sanctimony.

There is significant part of this crowd as all the throngs in attendance at these events who wish that, along with the flags there would be represented, with equal prominence, the cross, the symbol of the God that they believe has led them to ravage large portions of the world, to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocents, to maim, to cripple and traumatize, and to displace millions more, to drive hundreds of millions of others to despise with a nearly everlasting hatred, the very symbols that they display in their leering, insensate, mocking pride.

If you can, imagine this scene, which has become so typical of these modern American political debates, rallies, or other functions, so carefully crafted, the throwing of red meat to the circus crowds, displaying for the cameras the totality of the zealous support of an admiring public.

Imagine, if you will, that the cameras have panned back, way back to display the crowd watching from the distance, from other shores, in other climes, crowds who lack the same enthusiasm for the gong banging thirst for empire of their gleefully celebrating oppressors now displayed on the television screens or newspapers in Baghdad or Amman, Lima or Jakarta, Islamabad, Mexico City, Agra or dozens of other locales on every continent.

Imagine what must occur in the minds and hearts of those who treasure other flags, other histories, those who treasure other Gods.

One man, in this crowd, a prominent figure, who in the course of the evening will take center stage to speak or debate, to encourage, cajole or inspire those who thirst for his version of this America does not wear a flag in his lapel.

The absence of this nearly obligatory symbol of patriotic obeisance on his very public lapel has set tongues to wagging in some quarters and caused a great sturm und drang among the more vitriolic talking heads of the mass media and their admirers.

He did not remove the symbol publicly, nor did he cast it into some dramatic fire, nor tread it under foot, he called no press conference to discuss the removal of this small pin from his coat, he simply decided that the time for meaningless chauvinistic displays, so prominent in the wake of the smoldering rubble of the Twin Towers should give way to real patriotism, to simple action, to meaningful discussion of what is right about this America as well as what is wrong.

When the criticism began, when the cynical questioning of his patriotism began to slide unctuously from the mouths of the self serving and opportunistic pundits of the corporate media, he mounted no stages to make a great defense of his simple act, he made no apology, he quietly stood his ground and said this:

“If anyone’s patriotism should be considered suspect, it’s those who want to send Americans off to die in a worthless and destructive war and those who want to eviscerate our basic political values by torturing, detaining people with no rights, and spying on American citizens with no warrants…” Barack Obama

And this:

“A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?

“That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism.” Barack Obama

And this from another time in our history, during the thirties when the patriotic torches were burning in Nuremberg and reaction was forming at home:

“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”  It will not be marked with a swastika; It will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, “Americanism.” Professor Halford E. Luccock of the Divinity School of Yale University said yesterday morning in a sermon at the Riverside Church, Riverside Drive and 122d Street.

“The high-sounding phrase `the American way’ will be used by interested groups, Intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, tear gas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties,” he said. …….

“For never, probably, has there been a time when there was a more vigorous effort to surround social and International questions with such a fog of distortion and prejudice and hysterical appeal to fear. We have touched a new low in a Congressional investigation this Summer, used by some participating in it to whip up fear and prejudice against many causes of human welfare, such as a concern for peace and the rights of labor to bargain collectively.”

As many know this era, this dark age of neo conservative creeping fascism, wasn’t the first time in our brief history that fear was cynically used to manipulate a nervously receptive population, nor is it likely to be the last. What the Cheney / Bush administration has accomplished in these few years is notable not only for its audacity but for the incredible level of our complicity, of our collective and individual silence.

It is not in the fires nor the explosions of the barricades where revolutions are realized, it is in the small and quiet acts of courage, in the voice that says a simple no to power, the single hand held high before the oppressive state. These are the tools of the patriot, no matter how he cloaks himself, no matter what he wears on his lapel.

Admittedly Barack Obama was not my first choice to represent my party in this battle to regain the presidency. John Edwards spoke words that were closer to those that were already in my mind and offered a version of America that I had also dreamed of and I have been torn between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama since Senator Edward’s withdrawal from the contest.

I think that I could make a good case for or against either candidate, they are both capable of turning from the madness of the last near decade and toward a new era of sanity and reason and they both are afflicted with the hairy warts of American politics. Both are capable of beating John McCain and preventing a disastrous continuation of the Cheney/Bush nightmare.

In the end, difficult as it is, I have decided that Barack Obama, because of a simple,yet profound and courageous expression of true patriotism,because of the political courage evidenced by his empty lapel and his refusal to apologize for it gives Obama the edge as my choice for President.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Is there anyone out there who still harbors the delusion that George Bush or most of his administration possesses the slightest shred of human integrity or the tiniest morsel of respect for the truth, for law, for the people of this country or any other?

Sorry, the question was rhetorical and asked out of personal frustration with the evil festering stew of lies, theft, brutality and domestic and international piracy that this administration has created in the place of what was once the USA.

No, I’m not naive enough to believe that we were ever a perfect country, free of guilt from participation in many and various Machiavellian schemes and plots over the last two centuries, the influence of the power lusts of private wealth have always had far too much influence in our public affairs to allow us to avoid responsibility for the results of our contributions to the general level of human misery. We have committed serious crimes against people in places as varied as Vietnam and Chile, and as far apart in space and time as Nicaragua and Iran.

In the generally business driven efforts to support the interests of entities such as United Fruit, Chiquita Banana, Anaconda, various oil giants, mining companies, and financial institutions we have gone to bat for tin horn dictators in Iran, Cuba, Chile, Cambodia and in other places to numerous to name here.  Even the Mafia found support in the efforts to prop up the fascist pig Batista against communist pig Castro.
Much of our record has not been pretty and, in general, has usually favored and supported wealth and property over humanity and justice.

Revelations last week of more administration lies in the widening “Waterboardgate” scandal came as no surprise to most people and, although many expressed shock and dismay in public, the expressions of astonishment seemed to be presented for dramatic effect rather than as spontaneous displays of true emotion. When it comes to the current administration I don’t believe that there are many rose colored glasses left among the body politic, experience having taught us to assume the worst.

Even the families of the long suffering military who have borne the brunt of the aspirations to Empire of America’s transparently criminal ruling class over the last seven years are now beginning to break ranks with the “commander” who has squandered the lives of their loved ones treated them with such contempt.

I suppose that what depresses me and, in truth, causes me the greatest fear is the fact that the oligarchic forces of fascistic wealth have effectively bought out the opposition which showed it’s true face last month with the passage of the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,” one of the most frightening pieces of legislation since the “Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.”

This legislative abomination, added to the so called “Patriot Act,” and last year’s “Military Commissions Act” helped to spell the end of any pretense to adherence to constitutional principle and democratic rule in this country.

The forces which have so cynically manipulated public opinion to bring about the death of democracy have always been with us and have, at various times, risen and ebbed as evil tides, of “red scares,” “commie menaces,” of “outside agitators,” and the currently in vogue “Islamofascism,” a term popularized by some Goebbelian marketing wonk in the bowels of Dick Cheney’s office and pressed forward by money driven waves of irrational fear, and the malignant energy of powerful and pathologically dishonest men.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, caused in large measure by the abdication of reason by rank and file Democrats, the racist and anti-democratic march to plutocracy, halted and long delayed since the thirties by the common blessings of FDR’s “New Deal,” was born again, hidden behind thinly disguised code words like “silent majority,” “hard hats,” or “family values.”

The incubation of this poisonous philosophical monstrosity did not begin to reach it’s full virulence until large measures of neo-conservative and rabid theocratic ingredients stirred into the mix at the millennium, at which point those who most despised the Constitution and the rule of law were then able, due to a perfect storm of world events, a combination of public dread and apathy, congressional and judicial meekness, and the complete corporate takeover of the fourth estate, to seize control of the very government they long held in such contempt and begin it’s thorough looting, dismantlement and replacement with corporate rule.

Now we have a Department of Agriculture run by agribusiness, the Mine Safety and Health Administration run by corporate mining interests, a Department of Energy thoroughly in the control of multinational oil and gas and coal conglomerates, a health care system run by the insurance and drug industries and on and disgustingly on through every federal department and agency.

The takeover has been so complete and the parties involved so incredibly powerful that the Congress and the courts have, in large measure, knelt in fear and supplication before them as evidenced by the aforementioned “legislation” that would have been laughed out of the halls of congress four decades ago.

But as cowardly as the courts, the congress and the media have become, their cowardice is overshadowed by their addiction to the corporate feed bags of their campaign contributors and advertisers. The lure of hundreds of millions of dollars draws them to the putrid feast like hyenas to the sun ripened carcass of a wildebeest and in their lust to feed at the feet of the ruling class they have lost all sense of shame, all sense of the wretched aroma of their own corruption.

On the horizon looms an election, now entering it’s second painful year, in which nearly two dozen of our most respected flimflams have pandered to the National Association of Manufacturers, the health lobby, the defense lobby, the insurance and energy lobbies along with anyone else who will pay them to turn a trick.

By the time the general election is held just under a year from now the various moneyed interests will have spent nearly a billion dollars to place their man or woman on the puppet throne of public policy and the big dance will go on, the music, the lyrics and the tempo unchanged no matter which “party” is elected to represent their masters in industry.

Looking for solutions? So am I. Finding any? I know of only one.

Write, call, speak out, raise bloody hell, make noise and lots of it. The people who rule will never willingly give up control, they will always strive for more, for absolute control, it is their nature as a class. They will never willingly remove the economic and political shackles they have devoted so much effort to place on the “lesser” classes, they will be satisfied with nothing but total slavery, the complete exploitation of the world’s working people, it is the nature of their class. The people must seize power using many of the same methods employed in shedding the British yoke at the end of the eighteenth century.

In the short term, I will vote for any Democrat over any Republican, even if I have to hold my nose, and when we elect them we must hold their feet to the fire constantly, without letup, to insure a return to open and honest democratic government.

In the longer term we have to insist on the immediate passage of public campaign financing, we must place severe limits on the the ability of corporations to stand above the law and avoid responsibility for their crimes and get rid of the revolving door between elected office and the lobbying industry, and the corporate boardroom. We must enact extremely tough ethics rules for elected and appointed public officials and include within them mandatory jail time commensurate with the seriousness of the crime, in other words, treat violations of the public trust as the treasonous acts that they are.

Along the way we have to seriously revise or reverse much of the misguided and flat out dangerous legislation of this dark era of the neo conservative robber barons and build a new era of progressive populism in which the people truly rule, unencumbered by the tyranny of a cynical and self serving ruling class.

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

Links:
Lying Down with Hyenas

Waterboarding is now as “American” as “Mom” and “apple pie”

The “distinguished jurist” told them in open hearings and in written communications that he could not call waterboarding “torture,” and reportedly, pravately expressed his fear that doing so might open the gates for some executive department and military officials to lawsuits or criminal prosecution.

Notice here that what is important to this “distinguished jurist” is not the fact that the laws of the United States regarding the use of torture may have been violated by highly placed government officials, or that subordinates were directed to violate the law, but that those officials must somehow be shielded from civil or criminal sanction.

No matter that the practice known as waterboarding has been around far longer than any of the doddering graybeards in the senate, has been the reason for the prosecution and imprisonment of soldiers and officers of the armies of many countries in this century and is proscribed by US law and international treaties.

The whackjob who calls himself “President of the United States” does not care about the law, in fact the very suggestion that the law might apply to him sends him into paroxysms of juvenile snorting and snickering.

His vice President and the former, now deposed Attorney General regard such things as the Geneva conventions as “quaint.” The fact the “Democrats” in the Senate expected the gang of criminal psychopaths in the White House to send up a nominee for the highest legal office in the land who would be inclined to uphold the law, was absurd from the beginning.

It has been just over a year since about a dozen of the same “Democrats” voted in favor of the infamous “Military Commissions Act,” a piece of “legislation” that reads more like it was enacted through the auspices a “Reichstag” of the last century than any American legislative body that I’m familiar with.

Chuck Schumer said it himself in a revealing oped in the NYT a couple of days ago, amid the firestorm of anger and disbelief over his announcement of intent to vote for the Mukasey nomination in the Judiciary committee.

Judge Mukasey’s refusal to state that waterboarding is illegal was unsatisfactory to me and many other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Congress is now considering – and I hope we will soon pass – a law that would explicitly ban the use of waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques. And I am confident that Judge Mukasey would enforce that law.

A Vote for Justice?

I fail to see where Schumer gains his expectations of confidence in the intentions of the “distinguished jurist” when the man has stated, in open public hearings, that he is unable to uphold the law.

Will we have to enact a series of bills specific to every heinous tortuous act, “The Extreme Removal of Fingernails Act” or the “No Genital Electrification Act of 2007?” The laws against torture are already on the books, written in the field manuals and etched into the history and legal traditions of the last century. Any child can understand that pulling a puppies ears, or swinging it by the tail is cruel and inappropriate behavior. Where shall we send our members of congress and other public officials to receive such training in fundamental humanity?

I am aware that the executive department of this country is in the control of a group of unrepentant thieves and worse, now I’m forced to face the fact that the Senate of the United Sates of America is populated with people who lack the understanding of right and wrong possessed by the average teenager.

Speaking to her support of Mukasey, Dianne Feinstein had this to say:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said she was confident that Mr. Mukasey would be nonpartisan and that his refusal to make a judgment on torture without knowing all the facts of interrogation policy should not keep him from the post.

“This man has been a judge for 18 years,” said Ms. Feinstein, who along with Mr. Schumer provided the key supporting votes to push Mr. Mukasey through the Judiciary Committee. “Maybe he likes to consider the facts before he makes a decision.”

Mukasey Wins Vote in Senate, Despite Democrats’ Doubts

Is this woman as stupid as she sounds? The judgment on torture was made at Nuremburg,, in Tokyo, and in courts martial during the Vietnam war. Many many bestial acts, including waterboarding, were judged to be war crimes, to be criminal acts against humanity and people went to prison for their commission of or involvment in their commission.

“Maybe he just like to consider the facts…?.” No she’s not stupid, she’s just another transparent fraud, bought and paid for and masquerading as a servant of the people.

How did our “senatorial” presidential candidates perform in this test of principle, of fundamental morality? Pathetically. They did what candidates are expected to do in this quadrennial charade of electoral politics, they fell back on their old standby, abject cowardice. They simply abstained from voting on what may be one of the defining legal issues of our times.

Here’s their story:

All five senators who are running for president — Joseph R. Biden Jr., Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Christopher J. Dodd, all Democrats, and John McCain — did not cast votes. The four Democrats had said they would not support Mr. Mukasey because of his equivocation during the confirmation hearings over whether waterboarding is torture. Mr. McCain has also denounced the interrogation method but he issued a statement last week saying he would vote to approve the nomination.

Mukasey Wins Vote in Senate, Despite Democrats’ Doubts

Forty Democrats voted against this terrible nominee , enough to lend an appearance of the existence of an “opposition party,” but the fix was in at the start, most of the posturing was just that, a show, just smoke and mirrors.

There is not a single Democrat who voted for Mukasey’s nomination who should be retained for another term in the Senate, and of the candidates for president, we do not need another coward in that high office, we have suffered under the reign of a cruel and cowardly man for far too long and I’m afraid I see no one as yet who has proven themselves worthy of the office, nor of my vote, nor of my meager support.

Yesterday was yet another day of shame in America.

Bob Higgins

Worldwide Sawdust

Related Stories and links:

How They Voted

Senate Confirms Mukasey By 53-40

Senate Confirms Pro-Torture, Anti-Constitution Mukasey As Attorney General

Waterboarding is not simulated drowning — it is drowning