Digging Dirt

In a front page Washington Post article on Sunday reported that the "National Republican Congressional Committee is planning to spend millions of dollars digging dirt on Democrats. The NRCC has dispatched operatives to comb through tax, court and other records looking for damaging information on Democratic candidates and it plans to spend its entire bank account, $60 million-plus, on what officials described as negative ads to help Republicans keep control of congress on the mid-term elections. GOP officials are quoted as saying that this type of strategy will help limit loses in the House to 10 seats and 3 in the Senate. The NRCC is planning to drive third-party ads in behalf of their GOP candidates; what this means is that their candidate can truthfully pledge to run a clean campaign with a limited budget because neither candidate can control what outside groups spend. In other words, the NRCC will do the dirty deeds and after the damage is done the GOP candidate can distance himself/herself from the negative ads. Federal law prohibits coordinated campaign activities between candidates and groups making independent expenditures. Wink, Wink.

It appears that we will have nasty and misleading mid-term election rhetoric. Once again the real issues will be set aside, and the debates will concentrate in attacks and defenses of derogatory libelous or slanderous material. The so-called journalists will keep on functioning as idiots reporting to the morons and the elections will be decided not on who can best serve the people but on who can smear the best.

Virginia voters are beginning to see the GOP plan in action. Senator George Allen is up for re-election, his Democratic Senate opponent is Jim Webb, a decorated military man who also served as Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan. Research has paid off for the Allen camp. It has uncovered an article by Jim Webb published in 1979 on the Washingtonian magazine that seems to be derogatory or hostile towards women. Reminiscent of the Swift Boat people attack on Kerry, five female U.S. Naval Academy graduates on Wednesday said Democratic Senate candidate Jim Webb fostered an air of hostility and harassment for them with a magazine article he wrote. Excerpts from a Richmond news outlet reports:

• The women said Webb's article in Washingtonian magazine, "Women Can't Fight," made almost intolerable the already edgy relationship between male midshipmen and females, first admitted to the military service academies in 1976.
• In the article, Webb describes the horror of combat in Vietnam for himself and the Marine infantry company he commanded and explains why he believes it was no place for a woman. He wrote that he'd never met a woman, including those at the academy who would become Navy officers, "whom I would trust to provide those men with combat leadership."
• In a statement released by Webb's campaign, he said he did not anticipate the widespread reaction to his article, "and to the extent that my writing subjected women at the Academy or the active Armed Forces to undue hardship, I remain profoundly sorry."
• Webb said in the statement he wrote the article "during a time of great emotional debate over a wide array of social issues in this country, and the tone of this article was no exception." He said he is "completely comfortable" with women's roles in today's military.

Of course, what will be making news is that Jim Webb was hostile to the female midshipmen at the Naval Academy. It will never be put into the context of the social and political times of that era. No sir! He is a male chauvinist pig who could not appreciate the great service those future female naval officers were to provide this country. And this group of ladies will be ready to march all over the state to tell us morons that he should not be representing the state of Virginia in the Senate. But why did they wait over a quarter of a century to complaint? Why not while attending the academy, when it would have served them best? Why go 20+ years in the military with that burden on their shoulders? Those questions along with the questions of the incumbent’s record while in office are not to be discussed. I wonder if these women are aware that in 1996, their candidate Allen, while governor, supported the male-only policy at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), or that he accepted a membership to male-only, all-white club, or that their candidate evaded the draft. I wonder if the money they received from the GOP has eased their pain so that they can ignore these facts.

I have no idea what kind of politician Jim Webb is or how successful he will be in the Senate if elected as the man to represent the people from Virginia, but I do know something about Allen’s record and it is time for a change. The following is just a very small example and I recommend all Virginians to research his record on the war, immigration, health, etc.

Allen on Education:

• In 1995 while Governor he cut the budget for all 15 state-supported four-year colleges. Black colleges suffering the biggest cuts.
• Consistently voted against proposals in 2001, 2003 and 2005 for after-school programs for students
• In 2001 voted against an amendment that would have created a new tax credit of up to $2,000 for education loan expenses for nurses and teachers.
• In 2001 voted against an amendment that would have authorized $2.4 billion for teacher hiring programs, although, Virginia faced a critical teacher shortage.
• In 2003 voted against an amendment that would have provided for an additional $437 million for teacher quality programs.
• In 2003, George Allen voted against a proposal that would have provided $132 million in rural education grants. Virginia has the ninth largest rural enrollment in the United States, with more than a quarter of the state’s students enrolled in a rural school

Allen on Labor:

• Has voted at least four raises for himself while voting against raising the minimum wages for working families
• In 2004 and 2005, Allen voted against amendments which would have applied taxes to American companies who move jobs overseas
• In 2003 voted twice against fundings for job training programs
• In 2003 and 2004 voted to end overtime pay eligibility for workers. Allen’s votes would have taken away overtime pay for as many as 8 million workers--including registered nurses, workers on oil and gas pipelines, field and platform workers, steel workers, teachers, firefighters; police officers; funeral directors; and longshoremen.

Comfortably Numb.

I went to sleep and I woke up inside a Pink Floyd song.

The lunatics are on the run
Gas prices are coming down
Warmongers are on the path
Conservatives want my vote
I am so comfortably numb

The lunatics are on the run
Warmongers are crying loud
I’ll lie to you
I’ll scare you to death
Please seat and be comfortably numb

The lunatics are on the run
Elections are on sight
Conservatives want your vote
Temporary will lower the price on gas
Smile and be comfortably numb

The lunatics are on the run
Shouts of freedom, God and terror
The world will end
Brides, children, and innocents will die
I am safer now than before
The lunatics are on the run
I am now comfortably numb

The lunatics are on the run
Telling lies and much more
The lunatics are on the run
But I am so comfortably numb.

Have your cake and eat it too.

It is obvious the GOP have not heard the saying “You can’t have your cake and eat it too”, or maybe they have, and like all rules of decency and honesty they completely disregard it.

Sometimes during the next few days, a two-part five hour miniseries will be shown nationally by ABC – a network owned by ultra-conservative Disney – which will depict that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could have been prevented if not for the incompetence of the Clinton administration. From what I read – I have no other way of verifying its authenticity – this film is inundate with inaccuracies; letters of protest and request for corrections have come from the Clinton’s administration members which are portrayed as, well, incompetent idiots. It is not surprising to find out that this film was written and produced by a guy named Cyrus Nowrasteh , and directed by David Cunningham, both of them have close ties to evangelical organizations; the latter is the son of the founder of Youth With A Mission (YWAM), the former has ties to Liberty Film Festival (LFF) which has as a partner David Horowitz a right wing activist of immense proportions. The political consultant for this film was Tom Kean, the Republican chairman of the 9/11 commission, a man with apparently questionable morals, since, he admits afterwards that there are errors in the film – Were his “political consultant” views ignored? Did he sleep while the smears were being filmed? Asked if he had apologized to Clinton for inaccuracies in the movie, Kean quipped, "No, he was out campaigning against my son yesterday, so I didn't reach out to him at all!" - his son is running for Senate as a GOP from New Jersey.

Assume that the uproar is unfounded, the errors are minor, and the truth is that the Clinton Administration did nothing with the information. Couple that with the fact that Bush took over power of the administration eight months before the 2001 attacks. Then the question that must be asked: Why didn’t the Bush administration do anything to prevent these attacks? They had all the information. I guess for some “they are allowed to have the cake and eat it too.”

The smell of foul odor is impregnating my sense of decency. I agree with Senators Schumer of New York and Reid of Nevada when they accuse ABC boss Bob Iger of airing right-wing political propaganda.

The secret path to success.

If President Bush is an indication of success, then his chat with Brian Williams a few days ago was quite revealing of the path one must take - "Aim Low" and "read three Shakespeare". OK. I am being facetious, but you must admit this guy can't help it but be funny.

Off the subject but related to his chat with Brian. He mentions that he is reading the Stranger, a book by Albert Camus, an Algerian once a member of the communist party, a man that based some of his views on the philosophy Nietzsche and Bergson, a man that took the plight of the Muslims, a man who sought causes against repression, a man who believed that moral attitudes leads to the absurd, which only exist if there is no God, and finally, a man with the credentials of some of today's more dangerous people, according to ... Mr Bush's rhetoric. But, maybe, the Stranger was just a love story to Mr. Bush - who knows what is going on in that complex mind.

Is Bush a demagogue?

A common dictionary will give you the following definition:

dem·a·gogue also dem·a·gog (d m -gôg , -g g )
n.
1. A leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace.
2. A leader of the common people in ancient times.

I prefer the definition by Henry Louis Mencken, a 20th century journalist and free thinker, perhaps best remembered for The American Language, his multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and his contemptuously satirical reporting of the Scopes trial, which he is credited for naming the "Monkey" trial; he defined a demagogue as "one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."

I would not be as harsh and I will define it as “one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to people he thinks to be idiots”. It is not true that one would have to be an idiot for a demagogue to exist and be successful; after all, he only has to think of a person as an idiot for him to exist, but to be successful he only needs for his target to be intellectually lazy and naïve, that is, don’t question anything and accept the demagoguery as truths.

Case in point will be George W. Bush this past Thursday addressing the 88th Annual American Legion National Convention. “If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.” A false statement, only a naïve and intellectually lazy person would believe. Iraq is primarily an internal civil war among the different ethnic groups fighting for control of their nation; they will not be coming to fight on the streets of our cities if we leave the mess we started.

However, it is election time, it is his duty to rally the voters for his party and what a better way than some demagoguery around his claque which will be televised nationwide. Of course this is neither the first nor the last impassionate appeal he would use to cause the American people to make a premature judgment and/or an irrational decision without knowledge or examinations of the facts. It was this demagogue and his cast of idiots which got this country into a war with crippling strategic mistakes in such a way that the resulting insurgency became inevitable.

One should think that even the most credulous and uncritical person must have realized, by now, that this country reasons for entering into a war was based on lies of the demagogue, that we are not safer, that our civil liberties are eroding rapidly, that our elderly population is being cast to the side, that the health care system is non-existing for millions of poor Americans.

Unfortunately, the demagogue still finds big audiences with a mental attitude that his political rhetoric is believable and should be accepted as true. It is sad, with today’s technology the truth is there for you to find, if not for you being so lazy and apathetic.