Author: Curmudgette

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

I have been having tiffs with my daughter all morning. She’s five. She doesn’t understand why the rules are different for her than they are for me. Like why I’m allowed to have beverages in the living room (the coffee goes everywhere I do) and she isn’t. This morning I even resorted to the dreaded, “Because I said so.” I swore I’d never do that. Drove me nuts when I was a kid. But what can I say? Her hands are very small and she spills things. But she’s at that age; testing limits like mad. And some things just can’t be justified to her tiny, five-year-old brain. So I understand exactly how Paul Wolfowitz feels.

Everything about the Bush Administration makes perfect sense if you understand that they are the parents, while we — and by “we” I mean the entire rest of the world — are the children. So Paul explained to the World Bank investigating committee that he had to give Shaha everything she asked for because he’s pussy-whipped. The committee just simply needs to understand that there are things that happen between a mommy and a daddy that are private and that the children really don’t need to know about. That’s what locks on bedroom doors are for. His mistake, if anything, was in not making sure the door was securely locked.
There are larger considerations here that have to do with the importance of the Bush Administration’s unhampered ability to parent and protect the world.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said some board members hope a strong statement of dissatisfaction would persuade the Bush administration to withdraw support for Wolfowitz. But the White House views the stakes as larger than control of the World Bank, said a senior administration official, with U.S. resolve and power on the line — in particular the longstanding right of the United States to name the head of the institution. [emphasis added]

In an interview with Fox News, Vice President Cheney called Wolfowitz “a very good president of the World Bank,” adding, “I hope he will be able to continue.”

See, Vice Daddy Cheney has faith in him. That’s all we need to know.

It’s like Daddy-hopeful Fred Thompson explained recently:

The principles you have been defending since 1981. For Americans, these are found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They include a recognition of God and the fact there are certain rights that come from Him and not the government.

Which is why it’s so unfortunate that Scooter Libby was prosecuted for perjury:

The other man is in a less lofty position. After years of sacrifice and service to his country, he sits at home with his wife and two children awaiting a prison sentence. His name is Scooter Libby.

I didn’t know Scooter Libby, but I did know something about this intersection of law, politics, special counsels and intelligence. And it was obvious to me that what was happening was not right. So I called him to see what I could do to help, and along the way we became friends. You know the rest of the story: a D.C. jury convicted him. . . . I have called for a pardon for Scooter Libby.

Now, yes, on the surface, this looks like a contradiction. That’s why lesser minds like Glenn Greenwald are confused by Thompson’s speech. But all we really need to know is that the law issues from God, and God said: “Honor thy father and mother.” See? Simple. That’s why Uncle Scooter’s unfair prosecution has become a rallying cry for all those Daddy-hopefuls, and why he will never see the inside of a jail cell.

It’s like with Alberto Gonzales:

At a hearing last week before the House Judiciary Committee, he evaded precise answers and professed a poor memory, while insisting that the decision to sack the prosecutors was utterly sound. The apparent administration hope is that by denying and stonewalling, Gonzales can not only save his job but eventually exhaust all interest in the matter.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve tried that. Word to the wise, though, if Congress is anything like my daughter, they can wear you down. Mind like a steel trap, my daughter, and when she sets it on, let’s say, ice cream… relentless. Let’s hope for poor Alberto’s sake that “object permanence” is not as thoroughly developed in John Conyers as it is in my daughter.

Think of Alberto as a teen-aged son; all be it an adopted one. He’s a good son. He keeps the younger kiddies in line, and protects the family. That’s how it’s supposed to be… because… because I said so.

“Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.” — Daddy-Hopeful Rudolph Guliani.

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

In an unusually lucid column, former Iraq War enthusiast Thomas Friedman makes a plea for a responsible policy for military disengagement from Iraq. I’ll go straight to the punch line:

You can’t be serious about getting out of Iraq if you’re not serious about getting off oil.

In other words, it’s the oil stupid.

Friedman has a long history of talking out of both sides of his mouth on Iraq. (On many things actually.) And this is not the first time he’s let the well-oiled cat slip out of the bag.

In the face of the failure of the government/media campaign to build mass support for a US invasion of Iraq, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has felt obliged to come to the aid of the Bush war cabal by proposing a shift in its propaganda. Hence Friedman’s January 5 column headlined “A War for Oil?”

In this thoroughly cynical piece, Friedman concedes what is obvious to anyone who has followed the US military buildup against Iraq with any objectivity: Bush’s plan to invade the country is driven, above all, by a determination to seize control of Iraqi oil….

He continues: “Let’s cut the nonsense. The primary reason the Bush team is more focused on Saddam [than on North Korea] is because if he were to acquire weapons of mass destruction, it might give him the leverage he has long sought–not to attack us, but to extend his influence over the world’s largest source of oil, the Persian Gulf.”

Thus, having acknowledged that the US government is lying to the American people and the world, Friedman seeks to fashion a new justification for war against Iraq. It is not a matter of self-defense, or even countering something Iraq has done. Rather, the country must be attacked and occupied because the regime might–in the future–extend its influence over the world’s largest oil reserves.

Yet, in his relentless cheer-leading for the war he has since soured on, he offered up gems like this one:

The war in Iraq is the most important liberal, revolutionary US democracy- building project since the Marshall Plan. It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad.

Friedman is one of those mind-meltingly wrong pundits who has managed to fail spectacularly upward. In “The Iraq Gamble,” Jebediah Reed gets to the heart of his infuriating duplicity.

Re-reading Friedman’s columns from the six months or so prior to the invasion of Iraq can induce vertigo. Unlike many of his hawkish colleagues, he grokked all the vital details of the situation….

So even a Webelo-grade logician knows where to go from here, right? You connect the dots and conclude that while it would be very nice to get rid of Saddam, it would also be stupid and dangerous.

But somehow he still managed to come out in favor of the war. And if the whole thing weren’t so tragically misguided, his reasoning would be worth a chuckle. Says Friedman: “something in Mr. Bush’s audacious shake of the dice appeals to me.” A nice ballsy gamble of a war. Sure, it could throw the region into chaos, bankrupt this country, and dye the fertile crescent red with the blood of civilians; yet an audacious war is like a red lollipop–who isn’t powerless to resist it?

Red lollipop’s aside, Friedman’s pitch was always a sucker’s bet. The author of “The Lexus and the Olive Branch,” has always known full well what this war was really about and why his imperialistic self supported it. He has known from the beginning that it comes down that  unctuous substance which drives the economic engine of the world.

As Alien Abductee reported a few days ago, the Bush Administration’s naked oil grab is reaching a crucial moment. As discussed here everything rides on getting the Iraqi Parliament to pass legislation which will open Iraq’s oil reserves for exploitation by Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell. But the Iraqi’s have been infuriating Bushco by dragging their heels on selling their souls. Their recalcitrance has been serious enough that Cheney was flown to the Mideast — I’m assuming in some sort of  portable hyperbaric chamber —  so that he could scold those shiftless Iraqis for threatening to take a summer break.

For all the wrangling and veto threats, our own congress looks to be safely on board with a bid to railroad the Iraqis into giving over the bulk of their oil wealth to the conglomerates.

The supplemental appropriation package requires the Iraqi government to meet a series of “benchmarks” President Bush established in his speech to the nation on January 10 (in which he made his case for the “surge”). Most of Mr. Bush’s benchmarks are designed to blame the victim, forcing the Iraqis to solve the problems George Bush himself created.

One of the President’s benchmarks, however, stands apart. This is how the President described it: “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” A seemingly decent, even noble concession. That’s all Mr. Bush said about that benchmark, but his brevity was gravely misleading, and it had to be intentional.

The Iraqi Parliament has before it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only “benchmark” that truly matters to his Administration.

Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex, it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry.

If passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration, and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it.

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” (Keyser Soze) and the Bush Administration has as cleverly sustained the illusion that oil is not the underlying reason for pouring the American blood and treasure into the Iraqi sand. With prestidigitators like Thomas Friedman acting as front men, it wasn’t too hard to pull off.

Returned to the Recommended list — Steven D

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

Well now I’ve seen everything. Prominently placed on The Huffington Post is one of the most sickening bits of apologia I’ve ever read. Ari Emanuel pleads the case of the freshly fired CEO of HBO, Chris Albrecht. Sure he beat up his girlfriend, but he’s a really good at spotting talent!

Writes Emanuel:

Chris Albrecht, like the rest of us, is not a perfect person. But he is a brilliant executive who helped turn HBO from a place to watch movies, stand-up comedy, and boxing into the home for some of the most creative and challenging original programming in the history of television. He has an amazing eye for talent, the ability to nurture that talent, and the patience to let outside-the-box shows find their audience. Without him, we wouldn’t have had The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, or Everyone Loves Raymond (which HBO produced).

The Sopranos?! I love that show. Well, ok then! What’s a little assault and battery?

Officers at the site of the Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather Jr. boxing match came running when they spotted a man later identified as Albrecht grabbing a woman by the throat with both hands and dragging her toward the valet parking station at the MGM Grand.

Police said Albrecht was unsteady on his feet, reeked of alcohol and said of the woman, “She pissed me off.”

So who is this sad apologist for thoroughly indefensible behavior? Rahm Emanuel’s brother. That’s who.

Ari Emanuel, founder of the Endeavor Agency and agent for Larry David, Michael Moore, Sacha Baron Cohen, etc., etc. (and brother of Dem big-shot Rahm Emanuel) is ticked off about how the press has treated his friend and now-former head of HBO, Chris Albrecht. He’s especially bothered by what turned out to be the smoking gun: HBO’s 1991 settlement involving a subordinate and love interest of Albrecht’s who alleged that he had shoved and choked her in her office. Emanuel says the press “dug up a 16 year old incident, dusted off the cobwebs covering it, and suddenly created ‘a pattern’ of behavior that required the delivery of Chris’ head on a platter.”

Yes. Not surprisingly, Albrecht has a history of grabbing his girlfriends around the neck and throwing them on the ground. It must be because he’s “a creative genius given to emotional tirades.” As reported in the Los Angeles Times a previous incident had been effectively buried by a hefty settlement.

In 1991, Time Warner Inc.’s HBO paid a settlement of at least $400,000 to a female subordinate with whom Albrecht was romantically involved after she alleged that he shoved and choked her, according to four people with knowledge of the matter who declined to be named because the payment was confidential….

[Sasha] Emerson, who had joined HBO in 1986, was senior vice president at HBO Independent Productions and reported directly to Albrecht.

By 1990, the two had become romantically involved. Both were married at the time. The affair broke up Emerson’s first marriage, according to one person close to her.

By the time the incident occurred, Emerson and Albrecht had ended their trysts. Albrecht allegedly assaulted Emerson in her office in Century City when she told him she had been dating someone else, said one person close to Emerson. Albrecht allegedly threw her from her chair to the ground, the person said.

But, says Emanuel, Albrecht has expressed “deep regret” about knocking his new girlfriend around. From the Washington Post:

Albrecht said he was “deeply sorry for what occurred in Las Vegas this weekend and for any embarrassment it caused my family, the company I love, and myself.”

Who’s missing from this public apology… Oh, I know! The girlfriend he beat the crap out of!

This is just so bloody typical. Domestic violence affects approximately 1.5 million women and 845,000 men per year, with far more abused women than men suffering severe injuries. (This isn’t hard to figure out. Men tend to be substantially stronger than women.) And the excuses for this brutality seem endless.  One of the biggest comes into play in the case of Mr. Albrecht. ‘Twas the drink that made him do it. So saith Ari Emanuel:

He is an alcoholic who fell off the wagon and made a terrible mistake.

Like so many high profile celebrities who fuck up royally, Albrecht is will seek treatment for his alcoholism.

In a statement sent to HBO staff members and released publicly Tuesday, Albrecht said he had been a “sober member” of Alcoholics Anonymous for 13 years.

“Two years ago, I decided that I could handle drinking again. Clearly, I was wrong. Given that truth, I have committed myself to sobriety. I intend to take a temporary leave of absence from HBO effective today, in order to go back to working with AA.”

Yes, alcholism is a cunning, baffling, powerful disease. It is not, however, a cause or an excuse for domestic violence.

The belief that alcoholism causes domestic violence evolves both from a lack of  information about the nature of this abuse and from adherence to the “disinhibition    theory.” This theory suggests that the physiological effects of alcohol include    a state of lowered inhibitions in which an individual can no longer control his    behavior. Research conducted within the alcoholism field, however, suggests that    the most significant determinant of behavior after drinking is not the physiological    effect of the alcohol itself, but the expectation that individuals place on the    drinking experience (Marlatt & Rohsenow, 1980). When    cultural norms and expectations about male behavior after drinking include boisterous    or aggressive behaviors, for example, research shows that individual men are more    likely to engage in such behaviors when under the influence than when sober.

Despite the research findings, the belief that alcohol lowers inhibitions persists  and along with it, a historical tradition of holding people who commit crimes  while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs less accountable than those  who commit crimes in a sober state (MacAndrew & Edgerton, 1969). Batterers, who have not been held accountable for their abusive behavior in general, find themselves even less accountable for battering perpetrated when they are under the influence of alcohol. The alcohol provides a ready and socially acceptable excuse for their violence.

Evolving from the belief that alcohol or substance abuse causes domestic violence  is the belief that treatment for the chemical dependency will stop the violence.  Battered women with drug-dependent partners, however, consistently report that  during recovery the abuse not only continues, but often escalates, creating greater  levels of danger than existed prior to their partners’ abstinence. In the    cases in which battered women report that the level of physical abuse decreases,    they often report a corresponding increase in other forms of coercive control    and abuse–the threats, manipulation and isolation intensify (Minnesota    Coalition for Battered Women, 1992).

But don’t count on little things like facts to stop good old boys like Ari Emanuel from spouting canards in defense of  those really great guys who just happen to beat women.

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

As for Ephraim, their glory will fly away like a bird–
No birth, no pregnancy, and no conception!
Though they bring up their children,
Yet I will bereave them until not a man is left.
Yes, woe to them indeed when I depart from them!
Ephraim, as I have seen,
Is planted in a pleasant meadow like Tyre;
But Ephraim will bring out his children for slaughter.
Give them, O Lord– what wilt Thou give?
Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.

All their evil is at Gilgal;
Indeed, I came to hate them there!
Because of the wickedness of their deeds
I will drive them out of My house!
All their princes are rebels.
Ephraim is stricken, their root is dried up,
They will bear no fruit.
Even though they bear children,
I will slay the precious ones of their womb.

— Hosea 9: 11-16

I’ve never understood people who say they find comfort in reading the Bible. Every time I open its pages, I stumble on something like the above. I am baffled by those who find this book — replete as it is with genocide and  infanticide — a source for “pro-life” ideals. But I guess it all depends on what page you flip to and whose wombs we’re talking about; God’s chosen or everybody else’s.
One can hardly blame the Israelites for envisioning a capricious god, for surely there is no better description for the architect of the natural world we live in. Evidence of such a god’s unfairness is everywhere abundant and nowhere more so than in pregnancy and childbirth. So the Israelites sought to please a god who would reward them with fertility amongst their wives and other livestock. They prayed that he would punish only the wicked with miscarriages and poverty.

“But if you do not hearken to the voice of the LORD, your God, and are not careful to observe all his commandments which I enjoin on you today, all these curses shall come upon you and overwhelm you:
“May you be cursed in the city, and cursed in the country!
“Cursed be your grain bin and your kneading bowl!
“Cursed be the fruit of your womb, the produce of your soil and the offspring of your livestock, the issue of your herds and the young of your flocks!

— Deuteronomy 28: 15-18

We all have ways of rationalizing the irrational nature of human existence. It provides an illusion of safety in a chaotic world. And the more out of control life feels, the more we seek the simplicity of a black and white truth; an ordered universe where goodness is rewarded and evil is punished. Our deeply religious President talks about bringing evil-doers to justice. Others wait endlessly for karmic retribution to end his bloody reign. Cosmologies may differ, but the desire for divine justice, it seems, is an inherent human longing.

The world does not cleave neatly, along straight lines. It twists madly. It careens wildly. Life itself seeks towards chaos. Birth. Death. We cannot control them. We can only make choices to make our own fleeting moments on this mortal coil a little more manageable; a little more bearable.

Where many of us see difficult choices and troubling circumstances, the Army of God sees resolute, divine order, administered by an inerrant god. One of the most uncompromising of “pro-life” organizations, it seeks not only an end to abortion, but considers any birth control but abstinence as “evil.” Their heroes are pharmacists who withhold Plan B and the murderers of their god’s enemies, abortion providers.

They seek to fashion a world where good and evil are clearly defined and upheld by the nation’s judicial system. The battle against abortion is a battle to build a society where pleasure and freedom, where the capacity of the individual and especially women to make choices, and indeed even love itself, are banished. And this is why pro-life groups oppose contraception–even for those who are married. The fight against abortion is the facade for a wider fight against the right of an individual in a democracy.

Army of God, a pro-life organization that holds up as Christian “heroes” those who murder abortion providers, defines birth control as another form of abortion, as do many other pro-life groups. In the “Birth Control Is Evil” section of their website it reads: “Birth control is evil and a sin. Birth control is anti-baby and anti-child. …Why would you stop your own child from being conceived or born? What kind of human being are you?”

Chris Hedges identifies Army of God as “the greatest threat to choice.” Their ideological fervor seems largely honed in the forge of their own suffering; the unmanageable nature of their circumstances.

[Jeniece] Learned’s life, before she was saved, was typically chaotic and painful.  Her childhood was stolen from her.  She was sexually abused by a close family member.  Her mother periodically woke Learned and her younger sister and two younger brothers in the middle of the night to flee landlords who wanted back rent.  The children were bundled into the car and driven in darkness to a strange apartment in another town.  Her mother worked nights and weekends as a bartender.  Learned, the oldest, often had to run the home.  She got pregnant in high school and had an abortion.

“There was a lot of fighting,” she said.  “I remember my dad hitting my mom one time and him going to jail.  I don’t have a lot of memories, mind you, before eighth grade because of the sexual abuse.  When he divorced my mom, he divorced us, too.”

“My grandfather committed suicide, my mom and my dad both tried suicide, my brothers tried suicide,” she said.  “In my family, there was no hope.  The only way to solve problems when they got bad was to end your life.”

Says Hedges:

For many, their own experiences with sex–coupled with their descent into addictions and often sexual and domestic abuse before they found Christ–have led them to build a movement that creates an external rigidity to cope with the chaos of human existence, a chaos that overwhelmed them.  They do not trust their own urges, their capacity for self-restraint or judgment.  The Christian right permits its followers to project evil outward, a convenient escape for people unable to face the darkness and the psychological torments within them.

Like the young woman profiled in Hedges’s article, I grew up in the Rust Belt. And like so many who sought succor from the decaying breast of a culture in decline, I turned instead for comfort to born-again Christianity. As I said above, I did not ultimately find it very comforting. The implicit contradictions of its holy book created too much cognitive dissonance. The hypocrisy of true believers jangled my nerves. I could not force my brain to see logic where there was none. I could not convince myself, against all evidence, of any divine justice.

No just god does this, or this, or this. Nor does a perfect god fashion new life in a fallopian tube, dooming mother and fetus to almost certain death.

A while ago I scanned pro-life bulletin boards for discussions of ectopic pregnancies. I found, to my relief, that terminating them is acceptable to even rabidly anti-abortion folks. Although there was an odd duck or two who thought it was better to wait and see if the embryo would move into the uterus, most did not consider it a “viable” pregnancy. The mother had no choice, therefore, it was not really an abortion. None, though, seemed able to follow this logic to its inevitable conclusion. None could admit that in a world where such cockeyed pregnancies occur, not every conception is a gift from a loving god, perfect according to some divine plan.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, one of my husband’s colleagues — a young Lt. from my home state in the heart of the Rust Belt — assured him that our pro-choice conceits would melt away. The wonder of life in creation would overtake our liberal arrogance. So, my husband asked me, is being pregnant turning you against abortion? Tell your friend, I said, that if anything I am more pro-choice than ever. The moral of that story: Don’t ask a woman who’s been throwing up several times a day for nearly four solid months about the boundless joy of pregnancy.

Any vestigial notions I had about the perfection of nature and the universe were purged by pregnancy and childbirth. I was idealistic enough, back then, that I sought to have my child at home with a midwife. It was to be a magnificent ritual, in a pool in our living room, just like Donna on “Judging Amy.” Candles, incense, a little pushing, et voila. One emergency c-section later, I am thoroughly disabused of such romanticism. Not that there is anything wrong with home birth. It’s good for who it’s good for. But my best laid plans were upended by real world circumstances, as so many plans are. It turns out my child-bearing hips are just for show. I am cursed, it seems, with an inner pelvis too narrow to pass an actual baby through. If there is a god, fashioning each life in the womb, he has a very dark sense of humor. But for the wonders of modern medicine, I would have died as so many women still do in childbirth. Pregnancy is one of those places where idealized notions collide most brutally with pragmatic reality.

Nature will never conform to our wishes. The desire to make it do so is a vain pursuit, fraught with painful disappointment. The wildness pleases but it also vexes. Outside my window spring gives rise to verdant growth. Grass that must be mowed. Weeds that must be pulled. Such is the endless pursuit of an orderly landscape. Underneath our neatly trimmed shrubbery, I recently discovered a holly bush. Holly is a funny plant; requiring a mother and a father to germinate new life. But this nascent plant found purchase in the worst of possible locations, in the shade, destined to collide with another plant. Just big enough that will be very difficult to uproot and replant, it has already begun to die. Elsewhere in our yard, a couple of pine trees find themselves in a similar predicament. Nature has its own ideas. They are not always good ones.

What the “pro-life” movement does not grasp, in it’s battle against the “culture of death,” is that death is implicit in all acts of creation. The earth creates and destroys with apparent indifference. It kills and it births capriciously, according to whims no mortal mind can comprehend.

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

Now there’s a trade off, huh? Add this to the list of sacrifices that the small minority of Americans known as “our troops” is making for Bush and his cronies. Men and women in the armed services are losing their kids in custody battles for no reason other than being deployed.

Such was the reality of Lt. Eva Crouch, who returned from her National Guard duty to find that she had stumbled into a legal gray area.

A federal law called the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act is meant to protect them by staying civil court actions and administrative proceedings during military activation. They can’t be evicted. Creditors can’t seize their property. Civilian health benefits, if suspended during deployment, must be reinstated.

And yet service members’ children can be _ and are being _ taken from them after they are deployed.

Some family court judges say that determining what’s best for a child in a custody case is simply not comparable to deciding civil property disputes and the like; they have ruled that family law trumps the federal law protecting servicemembers. And so, in many cases when a soldier deploys, the ex-spouse seeks custody, and temporary changes become lasting.

Family court judges have a fair bit of latitude because their mandate is best interest of the child; not necessarily what seems fair to parents. And in a sense, judges such as the one who handed Eva’s daughter over to her ex-husband have a point. Endless war is terrible for the children and family members of the troops who have to fight it; especially given that many of them are serving in back to back deployments of ever-increasing duration.

Two years and $25, ooo dollars later, Crouch has regained custody of her daughter Sara. But an unknown number of other service people have returned from battle to fight on another front; the courts.

Military and family law experts don’t know how big the problem is, but 5.4 percent of active duty members _ more than 74,000 _ are single parents, the Department of Defense reports. More than 68,000 Guard and reserve members are also single parents.

Divorce among military men and women also has risen some in recent years, with more than 23,000 enlisted members and officers divorcing in 2005.

Isn’t it wonderful having a President who is so devoted to family values?

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

Last night “Bill Moyers Journal” aired an interview with Jon Stewart. It was one of those wonderful, rare opportunities to hear Jon Stewart speaking directly and with very little of his trademark humor. He proved once again, as he did when he took the piss out of Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, that he is actually one of the most insightful political commentators in the business, even though he swears he’s not. The entire transcript is available on the PBS site, as is a brief video excerpt. Here are some of the some of my favorite moments.
On what is and isn’t journalism:

BILL MOYERS: You’ve said many times, “I don’t want to be a journalist, I’m not a journalist.”

JON STEWART: And we’re not.

BILL MOYERS: But you’re acting like one. You’ve assumed that role. The young people that work with me now, think they get better journalism from you than they do from the Sunday morning talk shows.

JON STEWART: I can assure them they’re not getting any journalism from us. We are, if anything — I do believe we function as a sort of editorial cartoon. That we are a digestive process, like so many other digestive processes that go on. The thing about you know, there’s a lot of young people get this and you know, young people get that from me. People are very sophisticated consumers of information, and they’re pulling all different things.

It’s the same argument people say about the blogs. The blogs are responsible. No, they’re not. The blogs are like anything else. You judge each one based on its own veracity and intelligence and all of that. And if you like, you could cherry pick only the things that you agree with from various things. Or, if you want, you can try and get a broader perspective, or you can find people who are absolutely out of their minds, or find people that are doing incredibly complex and interesting and urgent journalism. And the same goes for our show. It’s a prism into people’s own ideologies, when they watch our program. This is just our take.

On how the White House uses its apparent incompetence as cover:

JON STEWART: Yeah, it’s kind of astonishing. There is I used to have a real disconnect, I think, with the administration, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I think it’s suddenly become clear to me. They would rather us believe them to be wildly incompetent and inarticulate than to let us know anything about how they operate. And so, they do Constitutionally-mandated things most of the time, but they don’t — they fulfill the letter of their obligation to checks and balances, but not the intent.

For instance, Alberto Gonzales, and you’ve been watching the hearings. He is either a perjurer, or a low-functioning pinhead. And he allowed himself to be portrayed in those hearings as a low-functioning pinhead, rather than give the Congressional Committee charged with oversight, any information as to his decision-making process at the Department of Justice.

And I used to think, “They’re doing this based on a certain arrogance.” And now, I realize that it’s because they believe there is one accountability moment for a President, and that is the four year election. And once you get that election, you’re done.

BILL MOYERS: They’re right, are they not?

JON STEWART: They’re completely not right. The election moment is merely the American public saying, “We’d rather you be President than that guy.” That’s it. The next four years, though, you still have to abide by the oversight process that is there to prevent this kind of bizarre sort of cult-like atmosphere that falls along. I mean, I accept that kind of veil of secrecy around Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but I don’t accept that around our government.

On Alberto Gonzales as Henry Hill in the Bush Mob:

BILL MOYERS: Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of words were written about Gonzales’ testimony last week in Congress. And I still don’t think a lot of people get it. And all of the sudden, there on THE DAILY SHOW that evening, you distilled the essence of it.

JON STEWART: And by the way, that was all just — that was a game, and he knew it, and the guys on the committee knew it. And for the President to come out after that and say, “Everything I saw there gave me more confidence in him,” that solidified my notion that, “Oh, it’s because what he expected of Gonzalez was” it’s sort of like, do you remember in GOODFELLAS? When Henry Hill got arrested for the first time and Robert DeNiro met him at the courthouse and Henry Hill was really upset, ’cause he thought Robert DeNiro would be really mad at him. And DeNiro comes up to him and he gives him a $100 and he goes, “You got pinched. We all get pinched, but you did it right, you didn’t say nothing.”

BILL MOYERS:  Gonzales said nothing.

JON STEWART: Right. And “you went up there and said nothing. You gave them no legal recourse against you, and you made yourself a smart man, a self-made man look like an utter pinhead on national television, and you did it for me.”

On the iconic interview with John McCain:

BILL MOYERS: You know, we watched the McCain interview you did this week. Something was going on in that interview that I have not seen in any other interview you’ve done with a political figure. What was going on in your head?

JON STEWART: In my head?

BILL MOYERS: Yeah.

JON STEWART:  Are his arms long enough to connect with me if he comes across the table?…

JON STEWART: I don’t particularly enjoy those types of interviews, because I have a great respect for Senator McCain, and I hate the idea that our conversation became just two people sort of talking over each other, at one point.

But I, also, in my head, thought, I would love to do an interview where it’s just sort of de-constructed — the talking points of Iraq — sort of the idea of, is this really the conversation we’re having about this war? That if we don’t defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, they’ll follow us home? That to support the troops means not to question that the surge could work. That, what we’re really seeing in Iraq is not a terrible war, but in fact, just the media’s portrayal of it. So, I wanted to just go through– like, is this really the conversation that we’re going other be having about something as significant as this war?

On the devolution of American politics:

BILL MOYERS: Why aren’t we having that conversation? Well, that’s a very good point, Why is the country not having this conversation, the kind of conversation that requires the politicians who are responsible for the war to be specific to the concerns of the American people. I mean, they do come out and a kind of gauze goes up.

JON STEWART: Because I don’t think politics is any longer about a conversation with the country. It’s about figuring out how to get to do what you want. The best way to sell the product that you want to put out there, but not necessarily for the products on you know, it– it’s sort of like, when a dishwashing soap you know, they want to make a big splash, so they decide to have more lemon, as though people are gonna be like, “That has been the problem with my dishes! Not enough lemon scent!”

On our lack of shared sacrifice and why there will be no draft:

JON STEWART: It’s very hard to feel the difficulties that the military goes through. It’s very hard to feel the difficulties of military families, unless you’re in that environment. And sometimes you have to force yourself to try and put yourself in other people’s sort of shoes and environment to get the sense of that.

JON STEWART: You know, one of the things that I do think government counts on is that people are busy. And it’s very difficult to mobilize a busy and relatively affluent country, unless it’s over really crucial– you know, foundational issues. That come sort of sort of a tipping point.

BILL MOYERS:  War?  War?

JON STEWART: But war that hasn’t affected us here, in the way that you would imagine a five-year war would affect a country. I think that’s why they’re so really — here’s the disconnect. It’s sort of this odd and I’ve always had this problem with the rationality of it. That the President says, “We are in the fight for a way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation, and of the generations to come. “And, so what I’m going to do is you know, Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends, and our children and our children’s children all suffer. So, what I’m gonna do is send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad.”

So, there’s a disconnect there between — you’re telling me this is fight of our generation, and you’re going to increase troops by 10 percent. And that’s gonna do it. I’m sure what he would like to do is send 400,000 more troops there, but he can’t, because he doesn’t have them. And the way to get that would be to institute a draft. And the minute you do that, suddenly the country’s not so damn busy anymore. And then they really fight back, and then the whole thing falls apart. So, they have a really delicate balance to walk between keeping us relatively fearful, but not so fearful that we stop what we’re doing and really examine how it is that they’ve been waging this.

On his role in the political conversation:

JON STEWART: I don’t consider myself a serious and social political critic.

BILL MOYERS:  But I do.  And I’m your audience.

As do I, Bill. As do I.

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

Paul Thurman was not supposed to be deployed. His brain had been damaged before he even left Ft. Bragg; a training accident in which a log was dropped on his head. Brain scans showed evidence of lesions. Yet, inexplicably, he was sent to Iraq. There he sustained a second head trauma; another training accident. An IED  simulator went off three feet from his head.

Soon he was having dizzy spells, was losing his balance and couldn’t sleep.

His company sent him to Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Germany, where the doctors, he said, told him he shouldn’t have been deployed to Iraq. They forwarded him on to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he said he spent “eight hours with the USO ladies eating cookies” before being packed off to Fort Carson. He said he was not examined while at Walter Reed.

Since the injuries, Thurman said he blacks out, has seizures that last up to 40 minutes, has short-term memory loss and maintains a constant headache. Once, in front of his Army lawyer, he started throwing up and having a seizure, he said.

But Thurman’s Kafkaesque journey through the Army system continues. Instead of proper treatment, he has received disciplinary actions for problems resulting from his injury; an Article 15 for leaving a formation to take anti-seizure medication and a bad counseling statement for refusing to attend an 80 hour driving course. His medical file says he cannot drive. Today he is hoping for a court martial hearing so that his story can heard farther up the chain of command.

Brain trauma is the signature injury of the Iraq war. As increasingly elaborate body armour protects the torso, and even the limbs, the brain is still vulnerable to shock waves that helmets cannot deter.

For the first time, the U.S. military is treating more head injuries than chest or abdominal wounds, and it is ill-equipped to do so. According to a July 2005 estimate from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, two-thirds of all soldiers wounded in Iraq who don’t immediately return to duty have traumatic brain injuries.

Here’s why IEDS carry such hidden danger. The detonation of any powerful explosive generates a blast wave of high pressure that spreads out at 1,600 feet per second from the point of explosion and travels hundreds of yards. The lethal blast wave is a two-part assault that rattles the brain against the skull. The initial shock wave of very high pressure is followed closely by a huge volume of displaced air flooding back into the area, again under high pressure. No helmet or armor can defend against such a massive wave front.

It is these sudden and extreme differences in pressures — routinely 1,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure — that lead to significant neurological injury. Blast waves cause severe concussions, resulting in loss of consciousness and obvious neurological deficits such as blindness, deafness and mental retardation. Blast waves causing traumatic brain injuries can leave a 19-year-old who could easily run a six-minute mile unable to stand or even to think.

Referred to as “the silent injury,” in many cases the damage caused by concussive waves is not immediately apparent. And these “closed-head” injuries are harder to treat than even those commonly suffered by motorcyclists.

Traumatic brain injuries from Iraq are different, said P. Steven Macedo, a neurologist and former doctor at the Veterans Administration. Concussions from motorcycle accidents injure the brain by stretching or tearing it, he said. But in Iraq, something else is going on.

“When the sound wave moves through the brain, it seems to cause little gas bubbles to form,” Macedo said. “When they pop, it leaves a cavity. So you are littering people’s brains with these little holes.”

Indeed it appears that even those troops who are not at close proximity to IED blasts can be affected. It is estimated that one third of our combatants may be suffering brain injuries, many who don’t even know that damage has occurred. This has prompted the VA to start screening all Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who enroll. That will still leave roughly two thirds unexamined, as most never apply for veteran’s health benefits. More tragic, the Pentagon has demonstrated far less vigilance than the VA in addressing these pernicious injuries.

What’s baffling is the Pentagon’s failure to work with Congress to provide a steady stream of funding for research on traumatic brain injuries. Meanwhile, the high-profile firings of top commanders at Walter Reed have shed light on the woefully inadequate treatment for troops. In these circumstances, soldiers face a struggle to get the long-term rehabilitation necessary for treatment of a traumatic brain injury. At Walter Reed, Macedo said, doctors have chosen to medicate most brain-injured patients, even though cognitive rehabilitation, including brain teasers and memory exercises, seems to hold the most promise for dealing with the disorder.

In fact, last summer the Pentagon reacted to the startling numbers of brain injuries by cutting it’s funding request for treatment and research of the problem in half; from $14 million to $7 million.

That maneuver seems consistent with a larger agenda of minimizing treatment funds to troops across the board. As reported by NPR, troop disabilities are being pencil-whipped down to nothing. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Parker USA (Ret.) found that the Pentagon is now providing disability payments to fewer veterans than they were before the war.

Parker started digging through Pentagon data, and the numbers he found shocked him. He learned that the Pentagon is giving fewer veterans disability benefits today than it was before the Iraq war — despite the fact that thousands of soldiers are leaving the military with serious injuries.

“It went from 102,000 and change in 2001… and now it’s down to 89,500,” says Parker. “It’s counterintuitive. Why are the number of disability retirees shrinking during wartime?”

One of the Pentagon’s disappearing tricks is assigning injured veterans drastically lower disability ratings than their injuries demand. Tim Ngo who suffered a traumatic brain injury was rated by the Pentagon as only 10 per cent disabled.

Tim Ngo almost died in a grenade attack in Iraq. He sustained a serious head injury; surgeons had to cut out part of his skull. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he learned to walk and talk again.

When he got back home to Minnesota, he wore a white plastic helmet to protect the thinned-out patches of his skull. People on the street snickered, so Ngo’s mother took a black marker and wrote on the helmet: U.S. ARMY, BACK FROM IRAQ. On this much, everyone agrees.

But here is the part that is in dispute: The Army says Tim Ngo is only 10 percent disabled.

“I was hoping I would get at least 50 or 60 or 70 percent,” Ngo says. “But they said, ‘Yeah, you’re only going to get 10 percent’… And I was pretty outraged.”

Even a 30 per cent rating would have guaranteed him a monthly check and enrollment in the military’s health-care system. As it was he was given a medical discharge and a small severance payment; leaving him adrift, with no coverage, until he had matriculated into the VA system.

Instead, Ngo enrolled with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Typically, there’s a waiting period for the VA.

In October, while he was uninsured, Ngo had a seizure, caused by his war injury. He remembers being outside and blacking out; he fell to the ground on the driveway.

“My girlfriend was freaking out because she didn’t know what to do,” Ngo says. “She didn’t know if I was going to die because I had hit the wrong side of my head.”

An ambulance took Ngo to the nearest emergency room for treatment. It cost him $10,000. Ngo says that today, the bills for the incident are still unresolved.

Since then, Ngo’s injuries have been acknowledged by the VA as so serious that he has been granted 100 per cent disability. In fact, more than half of disabled veterans who transfer into the VA system have their disabilities uprated from 10-20 per cent to over 30 per cent. The Senate is currently investigating concerns that the DOD is simply punting their disabled veterans to the VA to improve their own bottom line.

What we have is a military system near the breaking point. Our troop levels are stretched so thin that we are redeploying injured, even broken, troops, and a chronically underfunded VA is left to clean up the damage. Ironically, the very resources that are keeping more of our troops alive on the battlefield, are returning them to a living hell of inadequate treatment.

These are the war’s injured who once would have been the war’s dead. And it is the unexpected number of casualties who in a previous medical era would have been fatalities that has sunk the outpatient clinics at Walter Reed and left those in the VA system lost and adrift.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the ratio of wounded service members to fatalities is 16 to 1, if the definition of “wounded” is anyone evacuated from a combat zone. During the Vietnam War, according to the VA, the ratio was 2.6 to 1.

So we are bringing back more of our troops alive but to what kind of life?

Marine Lance Cpl. Brian Vargas was a high school football player. Now, even though he looks fit, he cannot toss the football with his buddies, let alone be part of pickup games with other off-duty Marines.

“I can’t catch anything,” he said. “I can’t remember any plays.”

Vargas, 20, was subjected to innumerable mortar and roadside bomb blasts while patrolling the insurgent stronghold of Hit in the Euphrates River Valley. In mid-January he was shot in the hand and cheek by a sniper and airlifted to Germany and then the United States for treatment.

He has the classic signs of post-concussive injury.

“My thinking has gone down,” he said. “I can’t remember what I did this morning. I have trouble putting memory and speaking together. I’m trying to learn to speak as clearly as possible.”

Lance Cpl. Keene Sherburne, 20, who was injured when a bomb exploded under his Humvee in Fallujah, is frustrated at the slow pace of his recovery.

“I can’t read,” he said. “I used to love it, but now I hate it. I pick up a snowboard magazine and I get so mad because I don’t understand it.”

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

A Pentagon panel has cleared Paul Wolfowitz in its investigation of his involvement in his girlfriend’s Iraq junket.

Paul Wolfowitz, while serving as deputy secretary of defense, personally recommended that his companion, Shaha Ali Riza, be awarded a contract for travel to Iraq in 2003 to advise on setting up a new government, says a previously undisclosed inquiry by the Pentagon’s inspector general.  

The inquiry, as described by a senior Pentagon official, concluded that there was no wrongdoing in Wolfowitz’s role in the hiring of Riza by the Science Applications International Corporation, a Pentagon contractor, because Riza had the expertise required to advise on the role of women in Islamic countries.

 

The investigators also found that Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, had not exerted improper influence in Riza’s hiring. Earlier this week, Science Applications International said an unidentified Defense Department official had directed that she be hired. She had been a World Bank employee for five years at the time.

That Wolfowitz’s girlfriend was hired by DOD contractor SAIC to go to Iraq was reported in the New York Times earlier this week.

The Defense Department directed a private contractor in 2003 to hire Shaha Ali Riza, a World Bank employee and the companion of Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense, to spend a month studying issues related to setting up a new government in Iraq, the contractor said Monday.

The contractor, Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, said that it had been directed to hire Ms. Riza by the office of the under secretary for policy. The head of that office at the time was Douglas J. Feith, who reported to Mr. Wolfowitz.

After her trip to Iraq, Ms. Riza briefed members of the executive board of the World Bank on efforts to rebuild after the American invasion and specifically on the status of Iraqi women, according to Ms. Riza’s supervisor at the time.

As was the fact that the assignment took her well outside of her World Bank job’s purview.

It was not clear why the Pentagon specifically asked for Ms. Riza to travel to Iraq. At the time, however, the World Bank did not have a relationship with Iraq. Normal bank rules do not allow the bank to provide economic assistance to an area under military occupation.

Ms. Riza’s trip raised concerns among some bank officials, who said they did not know under whose auspices she had traveled to Iraq at a time when it was against bank policy for its officials to go there.

Bank officials said, however, that after the ouster of Mr. Hussein, the Bush administration tried to get the bank to help assist in the redevelopment of Iraq and that it was trying to involve the United Nations in the occupation to provide a rationale for the bank’s assistance.

The irony is just a tad hard to miss. This maneuver issued from the same neoconservative cabal that moved heaven and earth to destroy Ambassador Paul Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame Wilson because of  supposed nepotism. But then, Wilson’s findings in Niger discredited a key element in their plan for war in Iraq.

Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper has written that he was told by Karl Rove on July 11 “don’t get too far out on Wilson” because information was going to be declassified soon that would cast doubt on Wilson’s mission and findings. Cooper also wrote that Rove told him that Wilson’s wife worked for the agency on weapons of mass destruction and that “she was responsible for sending Wilson.”

This Washington Post reporter spoke the next day to an administration official, who talked on the condition of anonymity, and was told in substance “that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador’s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction,” as reported in an Oct. 14 article.

Of course the nepotistic boondoggle charge was as false as the rest of the case for war.

Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division (CPD) — not by his wife — largely because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate committee report.

The 2002 mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney on Feb. 12 for more information about a Defense Intelligence Agency report he had received that day, according to a 2004 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. An aide to Cheney would later say he did not realize at the time that this request would generate such a trip.

Wilson maintains that his wife was asked that day by one of her bosses to write a memo about his credentials for the mission–after they had selected him. That memo apparently was included in a cable to officials in Africa seeking concurrence with the choice of Wilson, the Senate report said.

So if you’re trying to keep up with the logic here, it’s pretty simple. Fact finding missions that advance the Administration’s aims are good, even if they are recommended by the paramours of those who undertake them. Fact finding missions that disprove the Administration’s assertions are bad, even when they come at the behest of officials other than the spouses of those who undertake them. So bad that the White House feels fully justified in assassinating the character of both husband and wife, ruining the wife’s career, and undermining the CIA’s efforts to track WMD. It comes down to priorities.

Indeed, the White House continues to affirm its support of Mr. Wolfowitz, in spite of nepotistic machinations that have resulted in a massive job promotion and, it appears, the highly unusual action of granting security clearance to a foreign national, who holds no other such classification.

Riza, who is not a U.S. citizen, had to receive a security clearance in order to work at the State Department. Who intervened? It is not unusual to have British or French midlevel officers at the department on exchange programs, but they receive security clearances based on the clearances they already have with their host governments. Granting a foreign national who is detailed from an international organization a security clearance, however, is extraordinary, even unprecedented. So how could this clearance have been granted?

State Department officials familiar with the details of this matter confirmed to me that Shaha Ali Riza was detailed to the State Department and had unescorted access while working for Elizabeth Cheney. Access to the building requires a national security clearance or permanent escort by a person with such a clearance. But the State Department has no record of having issued a national security clearance to Riza.

As of this writing, Wolfowitz still has his World Bank job. That may change as the World Bank’s board expands its investigation of Wolfowitz to include the hiring and contracts of his closest advisers. Apparently he’s surrounded himself with Bush Administration insiders.

Did I mention that the position Wolfowitz finagled for his lady love reports to the Vice President’s daughter? I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. It’s the hypocrisy, stupid.

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.

The American Prospect sounds the death knell for the slogan that two Bush Administrations have used to whip an ambivalent public into line behind their oil wars.  “Support the Troops.” I hated the phrase during Gulf War I and I hate it now. I know when I’m being manipulated. As Bush the Elder set out to lick the “Vietnam syndrome,” he tweaked a public made guilty by urban legends about returning veterans spat upon by anti-war protesters. My neighborhood, then, was a sea of flags and yellow ribbons. How can you protest the war? You have to support the troops. I support them so much I want to bring them home, I’d say, but there is no reasoning with the mindlessly jingoistic.

In our fifth year of Operation Endless Bloody Occupation, the phrase has been stripped of its utility. As our troops sustain back to back deployments. As they return with broken bodies and broken minds, to rat infested hospitals and a failing VA, any assertion from the Administration that those who want the bloodletting to stop are the one’s who fail them seems like crude burlesque.
So the American Prospect informs us, as it reports that deep in red America, Democratic Senator John Tester is facing no serious resistance to his oppositional stance on the war and his vote for the supplemental bill that included a timetable for withdrawal.

Indeed, the only direct mention of the vote came from a young Army wife, who thanked Tester for “supporting the troops by voting for deadlines to bring them home.” Heather Scharre is 28. She’s married to 27-year-old Sergeant Paul Scharre, who served three tours in Afghanistan while on active duty, then left the Army only to find himself involuntarily recalled last September. He is now on his way to Iraq. “We’ve been told to expect 14 to 16 months,” Heather said of her husband’s deployment.

Scharre asked Tester, who sits on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, to make sure that returning Iraq veterans have access to counseling, including couples and marriage counseling. “We were used to four-month deployments,” Scharre said. The adjustments after those tours were difficult enough; she could only imagine what re-entry into everyday life will be like after a tour of 14 or 16 months.

“I think we been hearing from some people, like the president and the vice-president, that if you don’t support the war, you don’t support the troops,” said Scharre, “and I feel very strongly that that is not the case.”

But the damage done as this idiotic meme crashes to earth is more than the loss of it’s use as a rhetorical bludgeon. There is substantial damage to the troops themselves. For having been used as political cover for a corrupt agenda, they are now convenient targets for a public disgusted by this war. Why not? They’re not so much human as they are human hyperbole. They ceased to be human beings when they were turned into symbols of mindless nationalism. When they became set dressing for speeches and props for photo ops. Made mute in all matters of political debate by their uniform code, they were, none the less, used as instruments of propaganda for dark political motives. Unable to pick and choose their wars by virtue of signature and oath, they went where they were sent.

As any of my regular readers knows, my husband is one who signed, who swore, who went. So, yes, it pains me when he is called a murderer, an uneducated dupe, a fool. While outrage at the troops themselves for their role in advancing American imperialism is, in my experience, still confined to a small, vocal, minority, it, none the less opens a window into the American psyche. It is only the most extreme example of the shadow projection of a cloistered public, cut off for so long from the direct experience of war.

That we have had no war fought on our soil in our memories, has enabled most Americans to view the horror only through a media aperture. But, unlike the first Gulf War, which looked like nothing so much as a fireworks display, this one “comes into our living rooms” with blood and sinew still attached. Not so easy to ooh and ahh at pictures of the dead children on whom the fireworks fall. But graphic as these images are, they still do not, cannot, capture the experience of the troops on the ground or of the Iraqis who live it daily. We still sit at safe distance, discomfited but naive.

And so we reject it, project it, displace it. Those invested in keeping war “glorious” decry that we see it at all, calling on our media to hide the “graphic” photos in the name of decency; diverting our gaze from coffins and amputees. But at the opposite extreme are those who see the horrors and disown the war itself like a bastard child. At both ends of this sharp polarity is the same disease; the utter failure to take responsibility for what our country has become and for what it has wrought.

We must support our troops. They are keeping America safe.

Fuck the troops. Look what they have done.

Our poor troops do these awful things but they were duped because they are young and poor and had no options.

And all of it, all of it, is denial. Mental tricks to keep unimaginable violence “over there.” Ways of keeping a safe distance from the hard reality that war is a fact of life. That every sovereign nation prays for peace but prepares for war. That soldiers the world over are trained to kill, because sometimes killing is necessary. Wars are ugly. People die in them. Many of them horribly. That’s true in “just” wars just as it is wars of aggression waged on lies.

But the greatest shame of all; the one that forces us to glorify, to distance, to displace, to rescript, to shun, is that, like it or not, this war is intrinsically linked to our way of life. If we live here, work here, shop here, pay taxes here, we are responsible. If we use petroleum, including plastics, we are most definitely responsible. This war is the dark underbelly of our civilization. It is an imperialist adventure. We are an imperialist nation. Embrace it or protest it, but for pity’s sake, own it.

This war is not necessary but it was inevitable. Inevitable in a nation where roughly half the people vote, where politics is a football game, where public schools teach ignorance, and social institutions reinforce learned helplessness. In a nation where slapping magnets on our SUVs is participation in a war effort, but a fraction of the populace fights wars mostly hidden from public view. We have a military to protect our borders. And without them our borders would inevitably be breached. As our empire has grown to encompass corporate agendas that know no boundaries, they protect our “interests.” But more than anything, more than anything, they protect our illusions.

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” —George Orwell on a BBC broadcast, April 4, 1942

Author of “The Feminine Mistake” Leslie Bennetts writes in The Huffington Post:

Everyone knows that authors have to be prepared for negative reviews. What I didn’t anticipate was an avalanche of blistering attacks by women who hadn’t read my book but couldn’t wait to condemn it. Their fury says a great deal about the current debate over women’s choices — all of it alarming.

In the comment thread that follows, hcgorman asks:

 Maybe it is the title?

You know hc, I had the exact same thought. And yes, I get that it’s a play on “The Feminine Mystique.” But maybe a lot of us are just tired of being told that no matter what we do, no matter what we choose, we’re always wrong.
There is a lot to recommend this book on the substance. Women who give up gainful employment to raise a family risk a lot. I personally have known a number of women who derailed the career track to focus on childrearing, only to find that in a divorce their lack of earning power left them at a disadvantage in custody battles. Imagine devoting your life to your kids only to find that having done so means you could lose primary custody of them.

Bennetts goes on:

 My goal in writing The Feminine Mistake was to provide women with what I saw as one-stop-shopping that would help close this information gap. My goal was to gather into a single neat package all the financial, legal, sociological, psychological, medical, labor-force, child-rearing and other information necessary for them to protect themselves. My reporting revealed that the bad news is just as ominous as I’d feared; so many women are unaware of practical realities that range from crucial changes in the divorce laws to the difficulties of reentering the work force and the penalties they pay for taking a time-out. I devoted two chapters to financial information alone.

What I find unfortunate in Bennetts’s approach is not the pragmatism, but the hectoring tone and the conflation of financial remuneration with empowerment. Like many who have reacted to her book, I should disclose that I have not read it as yet. Perhaps having done so, I might feel differently, but nothing I’ve read so far, including her own words on Huffington Post, makes me optimistic. Nor does it make me want to read it. I can be insulted anywhere and I don’t need to shell out $24.95 for the privilege.

Bennetts seems highly focused on women who left their careers because of rescue fantasies.

And yet millions of women continue to be misled by the fairy-tale version of life, in which Prince Charming comes along and takes care of you forever. Our culture programs women to believe that they can depend on a man to support them — the classic feminine mistake — and fails to explain how often that alluring promise is betrayed, whether by a change of heart or a heartless fate.

I’m sure those modern-day Cindarellas are out there. I haven’t met them.

There are many reasons that women choose to return to homemaking and childrearing. One is the continuing perception that it is better for their children. And in case it slips our minds, there seems no end to the reminders; like this one from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

The government-funded, ongoing study of more than 1,000 children found that very young children who spent long hours in day care were more likely to become aggressive and defiant in school, beginning in kindergarten and continuing through sixth grade.

I heard that sound-bite today. It made me feel like I had deja vu. As did reading the more complete coverage, which points out that kids who have quality daycare have better verbal skills and no increase in behavioral problems. (So if you’re going to put your kids in daycare, be sure and be wealthy). But here’s the kicker:

While that fact is continually highlighted, it is important to note that 83 percent of the children in the study did not display these behaviors. In addition, this is not a scientific study, and there was no evaluation of how many stay-at-home children displayed the same tendencies. [emphasis added]

So why was this even released to the press? This ongoing study has been marred by controversy from the beginning. From a Los Angeles Times story of 2001:

A week after a high-profile study cast a negative light on child  care, researchers–including the study’s lead statistician–are sharply  questioning whether their controversial work has been misrepresented.

As reported last week, the study showed that the more time  preschoolers spend in child care, the more likely their teachers were to  report behavior problems such as aggression and defiance in kindergarten.

But several academics involved in the study said that its conclusion  was overstated and that other important findings never reached the  public. In the aftermath, a rift has been exposed among the research  team, and questions from other experts have caused the researchers to  perform additional analysis before formally publishing their findings.

“I feel we have been extremely irresponsible, and I’m very sorry the  results have been presented in this way,” said Margaret Burchinal, the  lead statistician on the study, funded by National Institute of Child  Health and Human Development. “I’m afraid we have scared parents,  especially since most parents in this country [have to work].”

Several of those involved in the project accuse Jay Belsky, a  professor at the University of London and one of the lead researchers on  the study, of downplaying other important information when he presented  the findings at a news conference last week. They accuse him of having an  anti-child-care agenda.

Belsky charged that his colleagues are “running from this data like a  nuclear bomb went off” because they are committed to putting an approving  stamp on child care.

The pattern at that time was the same as we are seeing play out now. An alarm about daycare increasing aggression and the caveats ignored by most news venues. Because, lets face it, the idea that working mothers are bad for kids is part of an established narrative. And when facts and narrative conflict, narrative wins.  So many working mothers feel like the trade-offs may be a necessary evil, but an evil none-the-less.

A number of women have embraced the return to “traditional roles.” Along comes Bennetts to tell those women, that — guess what — wrong again.

Stay-at-home mom Nello had the same reaction that the aforementioned hcgorman and I did. Bad title.

Interesting title, no?
That’s what I thought too. And that is why I read the article that has heretofore been given the award for “Article That Has Upset Nello The Most Since She Doesn’t Know When.”

And I quote:

“I think it’s time to tell women, especially young ones, the truth: The feminine mistake- building a grown-up life around the notion that someone will take care of you- is an outdated idea that could jeopardize your future.”. . .

Alright.
Why am I upset?
Reason number one: Because I don’t like my life being referred to as a “mistake”.
Hell.  Who does?

Reason number two: I wasn’t aware that I was “being taken care of”.  I thought that my family was taking care of each.other.
But hey.  I’m just a stupid Home Mom.  What the hell do I know?

Reason number three: Because this Leslie Bennetts obviously hit one of my fragile nerves. Yeah. That’s right Leslie. I’m not afraid to admit that a part of me is afraid that you could be right. Maybe I did make a mistake…

So, yes, women tend to be a little sensitive to the whole, “you’re wrong” thing. But, more importantly, Nello raises what I think is a crucial point. The idea that stay-at-home mothers just want to be taken care of is a canard. Families, whether single or double-income are interdependent units. The “traditional” family structure is at bottom a division of labor. The men worked outside the home. The women worked in it. But, particularly in a highly developed society like ours, work is not considered, well, work, unless it earns a wage and contributes to the GDP.  One of the casualties of early feminism — with its focus on freeing women from codified gender roles — is an idea that NOW has embraced in more recent years:  “Every Mother is a Working Mother.”

This is not to say that the idea that money equals value is a trap only for women. I would love to take at face value Bennetts’s assertion that working for a living imbues us with a sense of personal empowerment, but that’s not been my experience. Too many women and men are living lives of quiet desperation as “wage slaves.” I’ve personally known a number of women who ran back to home and hearth, because the promise of work as freeing and esteem building didn’t pan out. What they found, when they snatched that brass ring, was that it turned their fingers green. They had babies and went home because it turned out to be the more fulfilling choice, after all. And wasn’t personal fulfillment one of the major goals of the feminist movement?

To hear Bennetts tell it, stay-at-home mothers are not making proactive choices at all. They are passive and indolent.

Thus buffered from harsh realities, stay-at-home mothers can often preserve their illusions for quite a while. But over the long run, neither willful obliviousness nor a double standard that treats them like second-class citizens will save these women from the all-too-real problems I have documented in my book. The facts don’t change just because you refuse to look at them.

I hope I’m wrong about this. Maybe the stay-at-home moms will devour the information in The Feminine Mistake and debate my findings in their book clubs. Maybe some of them will even reconsider their choices and start making more sensible plans for the future than relying on the blithe assumption that there will always be an obliging husband around to support them.

Gosh, Leslie, I can’t imagine why you’re getting such a negative reaction. You’d expect to be embraced when you tell a bunch who’ve women who thought their lives were very full and rewarding, that they’re really being feckless.

There’s quite an industry in criticizing women. Many of its voices are female and sound like the mothers and grandmothers who always seemed to be harder on female children than male ones. We’re not accomplishing enough. We try to do too much. We’re too sexual. We’re not attractive enough. We should make our own choices. Our choices are wrong. On and on it goes.

From what I’ve read so far of Bennetts’s work the warnings themselves are sound, like telling women not to walk the streets at night. The world is a far less safe place for women than for men on every level; physically, sexually, economically, emotionally. I guess I’ve just gotten a little tired of being treated like I’m a fool because no matter what I do I can’t adequately protect myself from it.

Crossposted from The Blogging Curmudgeon and the Independent Bloggers’ Alliance.