Def Takes a Holiday

This evening I had the pleasure of sharing an after-dinner beverage with Wonkette’s two associate editors, Jim Newell and Sara K. Smith. They both blogged that they were trapped in a hellhole in the deep south among the cattails, humans incapable of motion under their own power, and Lincoln among the Cupolas. I thought the scene looked familiar and after a few arrangements we met in front of the Berkley Hotel, where our exhausted heroes were disgorged after a grueling three-hour tour at one of Richmond’s better-known dining establishments. They had arrived discussing Tycho Brahe, and whether the story was true that he had died of a burst bladder. Not an auspicious beginning.

And then they would be off the next morning at a ridiculous hour, as though half a day in Richmond gave any sense of its history. You can walk across Richmond in half a day – to talk abou it could take a year straight without any interruptions, corrections or going back over known territory.

We talked for a while about scandalous stuff. I’m too incapacitated to remember any of the details, but there was lots of it. You would be shocked.

And then suddenly the waiter began muttering “get the fuck out of here” as he walked past us. It seemed like we should go. Outside we chatted with a nice couple from Vladivostok about the standard of living in DC. I slipped into my car wondering if I had made a good impression. If I don’t hear from the CDC tomorrow I’ll call it a yes.

Like a Rock: If You Thought GM's Stock Sucked, Just Look at Their Pension Fund

You might think our recent economic trouble – whether you call it a recession, a depression, or enforced cannibalism – has hit bottom and is about to start turning around. Recently President Obama saw a glimmer of hope in the economy – mortgage refinancing is up, for instance. And even though it’s a small and subjective measurement, things have been looking up. Alas in the economy, as in many hospitals, a patient in critical condition can perk up right before he rolls over and dies.

Unfortunately the bailouts and potential bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler have revealed a long-standing and disturbing truth – their pension funds are short about $49 billion, and our choices, as the responsible corporate socialists that we have become, are both few and painful. We can either spend money bailing out the pension and health plans that the auto companies have underfunded for decades, or we can let retirees work as Wal-Mart greeters and sell their kidneys for spare change.

Reasonable peole might look at the books of major corporations with pension plans and wonder how we arrived at this ugly impasse. After all, the greatest minds of several generations were allegedly focused for decades on making the United States the world’s economic powerhouse, churning out goods faster and cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Turns out that most companies just made big promises and hoped they could keep them years down the road.

When the brilliant people in charge of your corporation’s pension fund didn’t meet their projected growth rate – or, heaven forbid, lost money – they would compensate with what’s popularly known as the gambler’s fallacy. They would put more money on riskier bets in the hopes that they’d strike it big and everything would work out:

On the investment side, pension plans cover over their funding shortfalls first by assuming future returns on equities that, while possible, are not guaranteed. The assumption makes funds look healthier than they are, and drives their investments deeper into the stock market.

Is it comforting to find out that people with years of training and allegedly great financial acuity were acting like drunk vacationing neophytes at a Las Vegas craps table? Then you’ll be thrilled to know that the people who guaranteed that money did the same damn thing.

Maybe the people protesting President Obama’s acquisition of corporate power are rightly afraid that the federal government is a bad manager and not really responsive to the interests of the people. If that’s so, then they’re a few decades late in looking out for the little guy. Right now we’re all the owners of a hundred billion dollars of IOUs for the retirement and health care plans of our friends, families and neighbors. We’re going to have to pony up somehow, and it’s going to be painful and expensive. But at least the worst alternative – which the free marketers keep advocating in spite of the facts – is one we can eliminate quickly. The people who lost all our pension funds in the first place have absolutely no business managing them anymore.

Torture in the Cathedral: How Petty Politics Subverted Our Best National Character

NOTE: This is an analysis of the just-released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee's report on detainee abuse. I have limited my coverage to a section of the Executive Summary, although there's much much more to go through. As limited as it is, the story of how an unprepared bureaucracy was used to justify torture is worth telling. The Committee's report can be found linked in two parts at the bottom of this page. All citations are from part I of that document unless otherwise noted. Any spelling or grammatical errors are likely mine in transcribing it from its original pdf format.

Late in the evening of April 21, 2009, the Senate Armed Services Committee released its report on detainee abuse. This report focused on the chain of events that led from Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of torture (i.e. harsh or otherwise euphemized interrogation tactics) to the spread of such tactics throughout the theaters in the Bush War on Terror, including Abu Ghraib prison.

The report’s executive summary and conclusion sections by themselves are a cold foray into the banality of evil. From its evidence a careful reader can glean traces of the internecine bureaucratic battles between Donald Rumsfeld and his allies and the established forces that – in this case at least – tried to preserve the rule of law against the buildup of an autocratic feifdom. From nearly the beginning of the War on Terror, Secretary Rumsfeld sought for the military unprecedented and clearly illegal leeway to use torture on detainees. The Senate Armed Service’s Committee’s report documents, in rather bland and acronym-heavy language, how the administration carried out this task, propping up a flimsy legal framework when it could and simply ignoring other legal hazards when it had to.

The story begins three months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, with a relatively small arm of the Department of Defense called the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which is charged with “training American personnel to resist techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.” Its most famous activity is the SERE school, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. Soldiers going through SERE school are subjected to the kinds of rough treatment they might expect to endure if they had been captured in 1950s Korea – brutal uses of force intended to break them down and elicit false confessions to be used for propaganda purposes.

For some reason, JPRA was the group that Rumsfeld turned to when the US captured several high-value detainees, among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and abu Zubaydah. According to a McClatchy article, the adminstration’s goals were twofold – to find out what other al-Qaida plots were in the pipeline and to uncover the fabled Iraq-al-Qaida connections that could be used to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The continual lack of good information – especially of the latter type – spurred the use of harsher techniques.

A month after Rumsfeld solicited JPRA’s assistance with developing torture techniques, President Bush signed a memorandum stating that the US was not going to abide by the Geneva Conventions in the case of al-Qaida and Taleban operatives (p. xiii). Rumsfeld was set to shove his interrogation tactics through that open door and set up whatever justification was necessary to make it look acceptable.

In the process of appropriating JPRA and the SERE school techniques away from their original mission to one of interrogation, a number of red flags went up throughout the military establishment. First of all (p. xvii) “SERE techniques were ‘developed to better prepare US military personnel to resist interrogations and not as a means of obtaining reliable information.’” Furthermore, the Committee concluded that JPRA had never conducted any investigation into which, if any, techniques garnered reliable information.

Not that that seemed to matter. In the months that followed, JPRA, in conjunction with other elements of the military and the CIA, drafted plans to use SERE school techniques, including waterboarding, on the high-value detainees. Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee was assiduously redefining torture to accommodate whatever new techniques would be tried out on America’s captives (p. xv).

With the groundwork now set for the application of torture, the first place the Defense Department would try them would be at Guantanamo Bay, where a makeshift prison camp for enemy combatants had been set up. On October 11, 2002, Major General Michael Dunlavey, in charge of the Gitmo detainees, formally requested use of the SERE school techniques. His backing legal analysis came from Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who fully expected a more comprehensive rationale to be executed by a higher authority. General Dunlavey’s request worked its way up to the General Richard Myers, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who solicited opinions from throughout the military (p. xvii).

The reaction was swift and certain: Objections to Lt. Col. Beaver’s analysis, as well as to the techniques themselves, came from the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, DOD’s Criminal Investigative Task Force and the Chief of the Army’s Internal and Operational Law Division. General Myers’ chief legal counsel, then-Captain (now Rear Admiral) Jane Dalton, initiated a thorough legal review of the proposed procedures in light of the avalanche of troubled responses from the military establishment. According to her testimony, she made DOD Chief Legal Counsel Jim Haynes aware of her actions (p. xviii).

Shortly afterwards, however, General Myers put a stop to Dalton’s review, apparently at Haynes’ request. The Committee’s evidence points to Secretary Rumsfeld growing impatient with the review and pressing for a recommendation before the investigation was stopped. However, only Captain Dalton seems to remember Myers and Haynes calling a halt to her analysis. The general and the lawyer expressed no recollection of the events, although they didn’t object to Dalton’s testimony.

Haynes then issued a one-page memo allowing the SERE school techniques on the Gitmo detainees. When asked by the Senate Committee what his legal basis was for his conclusions, he cited only Lt. Col. Beaver’s legal analysis, which legal authorities throughout the military had called “woefully inadequate” and which she herself had expected would be supplemented by more thorough studies.

Thus did Donald Rumsfeld and the advocates of torture roll over decades of civilized advance in the conduct of war, in the process severely tarnishing America’s image abroad, not to mention turning back the clock on the history of humanistic principles. You might imagine such a momentous decision made only after thorough deliberations by the most erudite minds of the nation in a time of great peril. And while the peril existed, it’s shameful to see that threat held up not as a pretext for fighting a great and principled battle, but as an excuse to trash the values we hold dear.

Determination and fortitude will be necessary to uncover and undo the damage that Rumsfeld and other petty bureaucrats have wrought over the previous eight years. And after that, ideally, prosecutions and convictions will convince anyone longing to follow in their footsteps that this country won’t stand for it.

You Can't Even Torture Some of the People Some of the Time

Hey everybody, there’s good news on the torture front. First of all, we definitely do not torture. This is the official opinion of the Bush administration on August 1, 2002, in a memo released just yesterday by the Obama White House.

The August 2002 memo’s author, Jay Bybee (who is a federal appellate judge now, if that makes you feel any better) was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel at the time. The OLC originally functioned to advise the president on the legality of proposed actions; however during the Bush years it turned into an apologist and justifier for the most sordid form of American exceptionalism: that because our nation advocated human rights and liberty, anything we did in their name was justified. Essentially, since we’re the world’s supernanny, it’s okay if we beat the children.

Bybee served for two years as the mind behind this ethos of exceptionalism – and while his 2002 memo is not brilliant work (an NYU law and ethics professor called it “abysmal”), it gave the executive branch enough wiggle room to say it was justified in using several dicey techniques against al-Qaida travel agent abu Zubaydah, including sleep deprivation, slamming his head against walls, forcing him to stand for days on end until he risked embolisms and renal failure, and other practices classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions.

Advocates of torture have long argued that today’s circumstances call for extraordinary measues in dealing with detainees. Today’s religious fanatics apparently put SS troops, kamikaze pilots, Ghurkas and berserkers to shame. The only way to deal with al-Qaida and its associated threats (including innocent cabbies and people whose relatives we killed) is with some sort of muscular pose hastily ripped from a 24 episode’s rough draft. Unfortunately the memo’s prose doesn’t come from the sort of bloody-knuckled streetfighter you would imagine favored torture – rather, it exhibits the logical contortions of an oleaginous schoolboy trying to kiss up to the headmaster while hiding from ideas he does not fully understand. For instance, here is Bybee’s take on pain and suffering:

“Pain and suffering” as used in Section 2340 is best understood as a single concept, not distinct concepts of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering.” See Section 2340 Memorandum at 6n.3. The waterboard, which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering.” Even if one were to parse the statute more finely to attempt to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

All clear now? Bybee shows an immense faith in the idea that future legal scholars will be embroiled in a debate over whether torture had to constitute both pain and suffering or merely one item. While Bybee might be capable of regurgitating dogma about the Transubstantiation if spoon-fed it slowly enough, it is clear that his mind is not capable of arriving at the truth when armed only with facts.

And maybe the Bush administration sought to keep this work of legal ingenuity secret for so long because they knew what an embarrassment it would be if publicized. Either way, the fact that the Obama administration released it with almost no redactions whatsoever shows two things: that the memo held no critical national security secrets, and that the Bush administration’s arguments that revealing such memos would somehow compromise the deterrent effect of torture was an empty one.

Bybee exhibits a corrupt peanut plant inspector’s disregard for oversight when he cites the CIA’s own research into the safety of sleep deprivation: “Your review of the literature uncovered no empirical data on the use of these procedures, with the exception of sleep deprivation for which no long term health consequences resulted.” In fact, the CIA published a manual in 1963 outlining the debilitating effects of such treatment. Accounts by people who suffered sleep deprivation have been around for decades before that. John Schlapobersky was tortured using sleep deprivation in South Africa in the 1960s, and described its effects vividly:

“I was kept without sleep for a week in all. I can remember the details of the experience, although it took place 35 years ago. After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and after three nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which is a form of psychosis.

“By the week’s end, people lose their orientation in place and time—the people you’re speaking to become people from your past; a window might become a view of the sea seen in your younger days. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with their equilibrium and their sanity.”

Bybee, acting as Dubya’s legal enabler, justified sleep deprivation for up to eleven days – well into the realm of causing deep psychosis. And while later accounts bear out that most of the information extracted from abu Zubaydah was useless, the relentless torture did at least succeed in revealing one deep, dark national security threat – that we, as a people, are almost as barbaric as the ethos we profess to fight. Ideally, bringing these torture memos to light will inspire us not to abandon our defense of our civilization – but to renew it from behind the bastion of our humanist values and not just our basest fears.

Ghost in the Graveyard: Is the War on Terror Really Dead?

Jake Tapper, Teddy Davis and Kirit Radia at ABCNews.com think the War on Terror – the phrase at least – might be over. Or not. While there is no apparent continuation of its use since the previous administration, it doesn’t seem to be officially banned either. The sole shred of evidence of its demise is a context-free memo asking an unnamed recipient not to use it. Tapper and his colleagues have either a mako-like acuity for tiny concentrations of blood in the water or else they’re stumbling around in the dark looking for their car keys.

Although in fairness the term deserves to be cut loose to languish in some historical backwater – for it was a McMansion of a phrase: an ugly brick fortress rising up over a garage and swallowing a moderately-terraced entryway, dotted throughout with a hodgepodge of bay windows, turrets, the occasional exposed rafter, a kitchen bar and butcherblock table opening onto a tiki-themed Florida room. It was a meaningless pastiche designed more to frighten and impress the neighbors than to address any single goal. Most egregiously, cloaking the strategic blunder of invading Iraq, its horrible planning, the White House’s inability to adjust to evolving battlefield conditions and the institutionalization of abhorrent practices were given cover of the entirely rational attack upon the Taleban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001.

The War on Terror is not the naming of enemies, like the Franco-Prussian War or the French and Indian War. It does not name a purpose the way The War of Spanish Succession or the War for Independence does – these tell you at least what the war is about. The War on Terror almost reeks of a semantic cover for something much nastier and controversial coming up. Having bought the loyalty of the frightened, The War on Terror told us the government was about to make us watch it beat up a kid and take his candy, otherwise we were out of the club. And we knew as we watched, sick to our stomach, that it was only going to get worse.

As a name, The War on Terror buys into the jingoistic hoopla that comes out of the mouths of fourth-graders building a fort in the backyard. Tapper reminds us of an incident during a Democratic debate in which there was a show of hands asked of candidates who believed there was a Global War on Terror. Was is really only two years ago that legitimate reporters were asking this question? Now it seems that we’re concerned with strategic alignments of tribes in Pakistan’s Baluchistan and how much infrastructure to invest in schools and roads in Afghanistan. The difference? We’re not constricting our thinking in the moral straitjacket of some Tom and Jerry plot, where opponents trade blows with hammer and chainsaw until one is eventually beaten into submission. Free to handle tactical problems as tactical problems, the coalition in Afghanistan can attempt to win the battlefield – which in a guerilla insurgency is always the population – in practical steps rather than bullying our way into the hearts of the Afghan people. The War against The Taliban and al-Qaida is now something to win, rather than amorphous cover for a snakeball of cockeyed global domination projects.

If this is a return to sanity, then, let us make the most of it – you never know how long these things last. Any old alcoholic can wake up shivering on a curb, in his bare feet, covered in his own filth and swear never to end up that way again. It’s the serious ones who find a way to stay on the wagon. We as a nation need to re-establish the checks and balances among the three branches of government. Never again should the executive be allowed to claim sole power and determine that it should oversee itself. This is just as bad an idea in government as it is in the derivatives market.

Finally we should prosecute the people who led us down this road of madness in the first place: those who authorized torture and warrantless wiretapping, who manufactured evidence to lead us to war, who covered their own ineptness with official secrecy, who wilfully flouted the laws of civilized behavior, and who used the Constitution as though it were the Lead Pipe of Freedom, a self-rationalizing cudgel whose bearer could do no wrong. Many of the architects of Bush’s administration admired the Nixon White House’s approach to the world – and if they’re not thoroughly repudiated, they’ll stand as a shining example to the next generation of oversimplifying, paranoid Napoleons waiting to take their turn wrapped in the flag.

When Awful Things Happen to Terrible People

Spring, that heartening season when life returns to the world, brings on a wonderful sense of renewal and restoration of a long-lost balance: migratory birds start arriving home, bugs and flowers peep out of the ground and begin celebrating the warm, moist days – and a Spanish prosecutor contemplates indicting Alberto Gonzales for war crimes.

Gonzales has garnered himself a coveted niche in the annals of American jurisprudence – he rose from a hapless Texas yes-man to then-governor George W. Bush to the yes-man for the Bush administration’s initiatives to keep Afghan prisoners out of the reach of any criminal authority in his stint as legal counsel to the president, and from there ascended to Attorney General, inspiring many Americans to do something they never thought possible: miss the wisdom and sober judgment of John Ashcroft.

Currently Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon is considering an indictment against Gonzales and others in the Bush Justice Department for authorizing torture – a term which elicited, in a White House noted for its disdain for such fancy ideas as ethical relativism, an almost reverential degree of nuance, ambiguity and downright confusion. On January 25, 2002, Gonzales issued a memo calling a long-standing treaty against abuse of detainees “obsolete,” while in its defense the Bush administration adamantly declared, “We do not torture.” As though, possibly, the legal opinion that the Geneva Conventions were outmoded was really only a commentary on their oh-so-1950s typeface.

Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, another cautious and deliberate figure when it came to matters of law, issued a memo the very next day that Afghan detainees would receive protection only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity." While there is no evidence that Rumsfeld also issued thumbscrews and fireplace pokers to relevant combat units, this was probably an oversight on his part, as he was extremely busy underequipping and underplanning the subsequent invasion of Iraq because of the urgent fear that Saddam Hussein might commit more human rights abuses.

Subsequent investigation has shown a direct link between Gonzales’ authorization of policies that go beyond limitations of US law to cases of torture and abuse that riddled the military for years afterwards, from the waterboarding of high-value detainees to the torture of prisoners held without charge at Guantanamo Bay to the beating to death of a cabbie in Bagram in US custody to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

You might think that after creating such a memorable legacy, your average sadist would rest on his laurels (i.e. the skulls of little children) and spend some time congratulating himself on the vast swath of unspeakable horror he’s managed to exsanguinate onto the Constitution. But that would be to misunderestimate Gonzales. It was he, after all, in his previous capacity as legal counsel to then-Governor Bush, who had formulated a memo summarizing the clemency petition of death row inmate Terry Washington – a memo so cursorily penned that it barely mentioned the mitigating factors in Washington’s case – among them that the mentally-retarded 33-year-old had the developmental abilities of a seven-year-old and that he and his siblings had been frequently “beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts.” Bush denied Washington’s petition on May 6, 1997 and he was executed that same day.

If anything could further exacerbate Gonzales’ fetishizing of human suffering and his Rumsfeldian inattention to obvious facts (besides a passion for clown paintings and a large crawl space, that is), it was his ambition to play out his medieval sense of right and wrong on a larger stage – as Attorney General or even as a justice of the Supreme Court. Fortunately Gonzales’ own ineptness, partisanship and downright stupidity kept him from that particular appointment – instead, after a scandal involving the firing of US Attorneys and his subsequent Congressional testimony that displayed equal parts ignorance, corruption and condescension, Gonzales announced his resignation on August 27, 2007, and has since spent his time puzzling over his inability to land a job.

In spite of Gonzales’ horrific performance as Attorney General, equal to the legacies left by previous Republicans such as John Mitchell and Ed Meese, it’s Gonzales’ sycophantically eager authorization of torture and other war crimes that did to American justice what a bus driver with macular degeneration and the DTs might do to a schoolyard full of children and puppies. His conduct has rightfully earned the attention of Judge Garzon – if not, alas, that of serious legal authorities in this country. And while his ambitions to the highest court in the land were thwarted, there is still hope that some sort of international tribunal can find him the lifetime appointment that would cap off his brilliant career.

Cotton Candy for the Republican Soul

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, “It is better to be thought of as a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Now, however, Republicans (i.e. the Party with the Same Name as the Party of Lincoln) have decided that since their credibility is already in a hole, they may as well keep digging in the hopes that they strike oil.

What they’ve emerged with, though not any kind of Texas tea, is certainly a viscous, smelly mess that nobody wants to touch. Behold – The Republican Road to Recovery. The most obvious fact about this document is that, were it ever to be a bill on the House or Senate floor, there would be absolutely no excuse for not reading the entire thing. It’s a massive 19 pages from beginning to end – but you can leave out the front and back pages, which, though some very pretty shades of blue, are devoid of any substance.

Not that you should only read the substantial pages – that would leave you with nothing but a few connected circles you might want to color or doodle in. Essentially the entire plan promises to cut taxes, cut the deficit, create jobs, increase access to health care and limit lawsuits. Sound familiar? It’s as though someone dug around in Ronald Reagan’s old campaign closet, took out all the “evil empire” references and updated the years, and the result was this candied, empty-calorie glop. It’s like Captain Queeg trying to relive his glory days tracking down the quart of strawberries.

Of course there’s nothing preventing the Republicans from coming up with any actual ideas – nevertheless, they insist on sticking to tax cuts (which they call, cleverly, “cutting taxes and creating jobs” because, you know, the two go hand-in-hand) and reducing spending. Granted, no Republican has reduced government spending in decades, but this doesn’t prevent them from advocating it with an endearing tenacity. They are content to stick to a good, morally sound idea despite its untenability – just as the Wright brothers decided to forego learning about aerodynamics but instead kept glueing feathers to their arms and jumping off cliffs until only Orville and Wilbur were left and they had saved up enough insurance money to afford that wind tunnel.

Unfortunately a wave of pity has overtaken me and I can’t help but offer these poor bastards some ideas. Not because I feel any empathy for Republicans – but just in case they manage to purchase another election, they might be armed afterwards with something other than their neolithic talismans and hoary shibboleths to confront the real problems that might be lying in wait tomorrow. What they do with these suggestions is up to them.

Sell Encyclopedias
I was going to start off with actual education, but it’s probably an acquired taste, and it seems a bit much to force the party that believes the current economic downturn is somehow Adam and Eve’s fault to jump in to the fact-based world headfirst. So maybe putting some Republicans next to some actual facts would be a good start. I went this route myself for a little while after college, and while I never made any money at it, I did learn that the poinsettia was named after the first US ambassador to Mexico. Laugh if you want to, but I’ll bet that’s how Einstein got started.

Have a Car Wash
Now who doesn’t love to stop at an intersection and look up from fiddling with the radio to see a bunch of earnest young people waving car wash signs at them? It hearkens back to everything that makes America great – warm summer days on hot asphalt, making almost no money, chasing the girls with the hose until the big redheaded chick locks you in the trunk, and the violation of countless child labor and safety laws. If that doesn’t get this country back on its feet, at least it’ll give the parents an afternoon to get loaded without having the kids around demanding to be fed.

Export Something
One of the best ways of making money for your country is making something that other countries need but don’t have. Unfortunately, the only thing Republicans have been good at exporting lately are credit-default swaps, and the bloom seems to be off that rose for now. The only other two exports the party is good at are missionaries and “America – love it or leave it” themed country songs. The first tend to get eaten, and the second, like many fine wines, don’t travel well. It’s too bad there isn’t a country out there that’s in dire need of education and frequent car washes that Republicans have been longing to improve anyway. Oh, wait – problem solved.

When Is a Campaign Contribution Not a Campaign Contribution? When It’s a Bonus.

It’s fun to watch the birth of a meme. I don’t know if it began with this essay by Dan Spencer at examiner.com, but his was one of the earlier ones, at least. Spencer has checked out OpenSecrets.org, a collection of campaign data including breakdowns of the 2008 presidential race, and announced this gleaned fact:

Senator Barack Obama received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group in the form of political contributions according to Opensecrets.org. The two biggest Congressional recipients of bonuses from the A.I.G. are - Senators Chris Dodd and Senator Barack Obama.

He then goes on to call these contributions “bonuses” and wonders if, given Obama’s outrage at bonuses for AIG executives, he’ll be returning his own bonus.

The issue has since ben raised elsewhere, and even ABC News ran a similar story in its Politics section that, in some feint at balance, also mentioned how much Senator John McCain got in AIG contributions before turning back to Obama. Mysteriously, the ABC story didn’t bother to link directly to its sources, or even provide a link to OpenSecrets.org, the Center for Responsive Politics’ site that seems to be the original source of this information.

Which is odd, because it doesn’t take long before this scandalous little fact turns out to be a fairly thin slice of the big picture. And after a little poking around OpenSecrets.org, the thin slice apears to get almost transparent.

First of all, you can only search their database by donor or by donor’s employer. For what little effort I’ve put into it, there doesn’t seem to be a way to differentiate between donations from individuals who happened to be employed by AIG and donations resulting from a corporate effort by AIG or its subsidiaries. To the contrary, OpenSecrets makes clear that is does not have any data that would distinguish one type of giving from the other. In truth, neither Spencer nor anyone who has repeated his story has any way of knowing how much of that $101,322 was from any direct effort by AIG to influence an Obama administration’s treatment of it.

But there are other, more detailed slices of this pie that Spencer doesn’t care to mention. While searching by supporter’s employer doesn’t seem to clearly state whether a set of contributions came from a party representing a specific interest, OpenSecrets has another category that might: Bundlers. They are, apparently, “people with friends in high places who, after bumping against personal contribution limits, turn to those friends, associates, and, well, anyone who's willing to give, and deliver the checks to the candidate in one big "bundle."

So Bundlers might be even more indicative of who was getting contributions from interest groups than Employer turned out to be. Because clearly if I was going to seek out money for my candidate, I’d seek it from people who held views in common with mine. They might be creditors of the same company or on the same board of directors – nevertheless, they would probably have more in common, as a group, than would people with the same employer.

And guess what: when we look at campaign contributions by bundlers, Barack Obama raised $63,200,000 of his $745,000,000 total – or less than ten percent – from bundlers. John McCain, on the other hand, raised $207,200,000 out of a total of $368,000,000, or fifty-six percent, of his campaign contributions from bundlers. When John McCain outraised Barack Obama from special interests by a ratio of six to one, it makes it appear that the $101,332 from AIG employees is a fig leaf hacked out by the Republicans because they simply have nothing else to use to stall President Obama’s legislative agenda.

I’m frankly not surprised that Mr. Spencer’s allegations turn out to be nothing more than a narrow interpretation through a particular statistical prism. Beginning with Joe McCarthy’s lists of known communists in the US government and culminating in their current redefinition of socialism as a tax rate 30 percentage points below the one they just approved, House Republicans have often chosen a strategy of slander over rigorous analysis as a measure of success. This latest episode is just more evidence that they are wise to do so.

Kill the Patient, Reward the Disease

So President Obama, confronted with the actual sordid behavior of those who pretend to live by the free market, is now going to try to reverse the $165 million in bonuses that AIG managed to pay its worst employees as the country was bailing it out to the tune of $170 billion.

The ironies inherent in this whole fiasco are, of course, delicious – or they would be, if the slathering greed of the principles involved hadn’t cost millions of people their mortgages, jobs and life savings. First, every time there’s a booming market we’re subject to endless paeans to the corporate executive, the stock trader and others who allegedly risk losing everything at the hands of the mighty economy so that they might stand a chance of winning the world.

The truth, however, seems to be a little more complicated – the everything they risk isn’t usually theirs, and if and when they do fail, they go running to Uncle Sugar (whether that’s investors, other corporations or – as a last resort – the government) crying about how they got a boo-boo and need a billion dollars or so. Then – humbled by said experience – they pack themselves off to a spa in Arizona and sit by the pool congratulating themselves for a week. Or they keep giving themselves fat bonuses. After all, a derivatives trader can’t be denied the hookers and blow to which he’s become accustomed, can he?

Even more egregious is who’s getting the bonuses:

The bonuses will be paid to executives at A.I.G.’s financial products division, the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages.

In other words, they’re going to the same bunch of commission-happy yahoos whose recklessness brought AIG to its knees in the first place. Oh, and they’re retention bonuses – because you don’t want bright minds like these getting snapped up by the competition. Or maybe becoming more willing to talk to the SEC, for that matter.

Unfortunately the Treasury’s hands might be tied on this one – apparently AIG is contractually obligated to make the payouts and they were already agreed to by the previous administration (who shall remain blameless).

Still, is it too much to hope that some lawyer somewhere can come up with a good justification for not giving more money to people who already proved themselves incapable of handling it carefully? Hell, it would be better spent retaining the services of the thousands of mail clerks, secretaries and other drones who make any organization function and who not only suffer low pay and parsimonious benefits, but also have to show deference to the yellow-tied assholes who have been the reason for so many secondhand toys this Christmas. Especially if, as in the case of AIG’s financial products division, they’re probably still strutting about like Napoleon on St. Helena, demanding to be addressed as "your majesty" and complaining about the food.

World's Smallest Whale Shark Caught by World's Largest Dwarf

On the southern tip of Luzon island in the Philippines, an ecotourism trade is steadily growing -- participants swim with whale sharks, who congregate there from December through May.

Recently the WWF documented the inadvertent capture by fishermen of a whale shark, and as the officials raced to investigate and free the animal, they got quite a surprise:

They expected to see a giant animal helplessly stuck, its tall dorsal fin and tail sticking out of the water. But there was nothing there. All they saw was a stick, stuck in sand, with a small rope leading away from it, into the water. Elson walked up to the stick and was amazed to find the smallest whale shark he had ever seen – a mere 15 inches long!

This part of the Philippine archipelago is apparently a hatchery for whale sharks as well as a congregation point -- something that nobody had known for certain until this pup was discovered. Although whale sharks -- or butanding, as they're called in the Philippines -- are the world's largest extant fish, they're not well understood. It's still not known, in fact, whether whale sharks incubate their eggs inside their bodies or are free-floating.

As much as people get aesthetic pleasure and unique experiences out of ecotourism, it's cool to see that its controlled expansion into new areas can also add to our knowledge of biological life. Who knows but that a few years earlier, a specimen like this tiny whale shark pup would have ended up not in the ocean, but in a much less hospitable environment.

Excommunication Breakdown

Too often in America we see faith portrayed as an unmitigated virtue, a means of making us good people even though our understanding of what makes up that goodness only reaches about the third grade level. Christians accept Jesus’ assertion of “love thy god with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself” is the basis for all of the law, although this makes little sense alongside some of the more bizarre proscriptions in Deuteronomy or the salacious rantings of Saul of Tarsus. Ultimately a morality based solely on circular reasoning and argument from authority, as most faith-based moralities are, leads at best to confusion and opportunism. At worst, faith manages to take the misery of the human condition and use it as an excuse to inflict even more pain and suffering.

Such is the case with a nine-year-old girl in Brazil who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather for years. Recently, on a doctor’s visit after complaining of stomach pains, it was discovered that she was four months pregnant. With twins. She was given an abortion because even under Brazil’s restrictive abortion law, which allows the procedure only in cases of rape or danger to the mother, the girl met both conditions.

The laws were applied and the girl was given an abortion while her abusive stepfather – who is also suspected of molesting the victim’s physically-handicapped older sister – was arrested as he was trying to flee town. And then, from the 14th century, the Catholic Church weighed in and excommunicated the girl’s mother and doctors:

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.
The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.
He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

In the ensuing row, Brazil’s President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, also a Catholic, disagreed: “In this case, medicine is more right than the church,” he said. While the qualifying “in this case” seems pretty superfluous – in what instance has faith shown to be better than science at finding anything out? – Lula’s sentiment is reasonable if not painfully obvious. The Vatican, however, has backed up Archbishop Sobrinho. The cardinal in charge of Latin American bishops, Giovanni Battista Re, justified the decision on the grounds that the fetuses were innocent and had a right to live. Even if a nine-year-old girl suffered and died as a consequence. And even if her twins ended up dying as well.

And as a final illustrative outrage comes the complete silence on the church about the responsibility of the girl’s rapist stepfather. While it’s obvious to the archbishop and cardinal – and their brethren with a long institutional history of enabling and covering up pedophilia – that any Catholic performing an abortion deserves excommunication, the pedophile father who put a minor, her mother, and several doctors in this situation seems to have escaped the church’s attention entirely.

It’s certainly true that human laws can be draconian and outrageous. But at least human laws have in them an inherent basis for change. An informed electorate can overturn them; judges can overrule them; even in a dictatorship, another arbitrary leader can come along and negate them. Not so with the Catholic Church and, to extrapolate, all other societies where morality and law are identical and morality is handed down by revelation from an uncontactable being that won’t explain itself.

Think about that the next time some religious fundamentalist argues that the United States is a Christian nation and that the Constitution ought to be brought in line with the Bible. The Enlightenment Humanism on which our Constitution is based is vastly more compassionate, reasonable, and egalitarian than a concept of morals that deems itself “above any human law.”

Update: Archbishop Sobrinho actually did think about the father -- and concluded that his crime was less serious than getting an abortion: "'It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion,' Sobrinho said." How such barbarians have any claim to morality is one of religion's great mysteries.

President Obama Announces Website For Holdout Opponents

On the same day that President Barack Obama announced a new logo to highlight the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, our most internet-savvy president also announced the launch of a website dedicated to “those who have yet to realize that the tide has changed.” The website, known as IWonBitches.gov, is intended, according to Mr. Obama, “to reach out to those lost souls who are like that last Japanese soldier hiding in the Philippine jungle until the 1970s because he didn’t believe the war was over.”

In a speech today at the US Department of Transportation, Obama implored those opposed to his economic stimulus package, his foreign policy and other aspects of the platform he ran and was elected on to peruse the new website.

“Before you write your congressperson – or if you are a congressperson,” said the president before an enthusiastic crowd, “before you let some AM radio loudmouth whip you into a frenzy about us talking to the Iranians, check out IWonBitches.gov. It has a helpful page called There’s Nothing Stupider than Threatening to Beat Everybody into Submission Unless They Do What You Say. It explains, in terms even Ann Coulter can understand, that if you thought Iraq was easy – well, the rest of the world is a lot bigger, and so we’d better find a less expensive way of getting other countries to cooperate. I’m not sure this has gotten through to some people.

“And,” he continued, “If you’ve been told that my new budget proposal is a conspiracy to expand the size of government, you can go to IWonBitches.gov and click on the page called Private Industry Just Lost Three Million Jobs So Somebody Better Start Hiring People. It’s full of information on how maybe having millions of poor and unemployed people running out of money to pay for food and shelter might not be such a good idea.

“Opposed to gay marriage, or don’t-ask-don’t-tell? Click on IWonBitches.gov. There’s a page you can go to called Maybe That Gay Friend, Relative or Neighbor Won’t Secretly Hate You Anymore If They Have the Same Rights as You Do.

“Worried that some bureaucrat is going to dictate what kind of healthcare options are available to you? On IWonBitches.gov there’s a link to a very useful section entitled Some Bureaucrat Already Decides What Kind of Healthcare Options You Get and If You Don’t Believe That Try Getting an Expensive Disease – But Only If You Already Have Healthcare To Begin With, Because Otherwise You’re Just Going to Die. It describes, point-by-point, the advantages of not letting some people leave their tuberculosis untreated.

“In conclusion,” said the president, “IWonBitches.gov is an essential site for anyone who is still afraid that a government that actually does things that help you is somehow going to destroy America. With sections ranging from If Abstinence Education Really Works Then Why Is My Virgin Daughter Pregnant? to such interesting reading as If Letting the Finance Industry Regulate Itself Was Such a Good Idea Then the Collapse of Every Major Investment Bank in the Country is Obviously a Statistical Fluke, IWonBitches.gov is an invaluable resource for everyone who still doesn’t understand why the direction this country is going now is such a deep departure from eight years of unmitigated calamitous failure.

“And for those of you who feel that, after reading about all the reasons we’re doing things on IWonBitches.gov, you would still rather go back to the way things were, there is final section that you will find particularly appealing. Just click on the link at the main page that takes you to If You Really, Really Must Live in a Country with a Limited Government, Where Nobody Whines about Their Civil Rights, Where You Can Own All the Guns You Want, Drive the Biggest Hummer You Can Find, Start Any Business You Can Dream of and Nobody Taxes Your Hard-Earned Profits, Then Have a Great Time in Somalia.”

Rick Santelli Isn't Happy

I had never heard of CNBC loudmouth Rick Santelli before last Thursday, but his little rant about President Obama’s homeowner relief quickly became the hottest thing on the internet. Standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli blasted the $75 billion that the administration plans to spend on restructuring the loans of people who now can’t afford their mortgages. Santelli called these people losers and wondered why he and others who were careful with their money (i.e. who are rich enough to pay cash for the typical house) had to pony up to get them out of hot water. Ideally, he argued, they should be allowed to go bankrupt and the market would correct for the failure.

Of course free-market advocates tend to be selective in their protestations. While the $700 billion bailout for the banking industry, passed by the allegedly free-market advocating Bush administration, drew widespread outcry, at least as much of that was due to its opacity, lack of detail and rewarding of banks like AIG whose investments in mortgage-backed securities and subsequent misstatement of their losses brought immense harm not only to themselves but caused a chain-reaction that brought the world’s economy to a screeching halt. On top of this was the realization that the lifting of regulations and gutting of oversight bodies that set the stage for this economic calamity hadn’t been addressed. And when Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson’s beneficiaries slathered giant bonuses on themselves, it became evident that personal responsibility was about the only luxury the rich couldn’t afford.

The poor and middle class, however, were another matter. While Obama’s detractors have cried “socialism!” since well before the election over his plan to let the Bush tax cuts for the rich die a natural death – letting the rate go up to the 39% allowed by that commie, Ronald Reagan – Santelli and others seem intent on dragging the blame-the-poor myths out of the Republican toybox and bitching about how their taxes are going to coddle the poor and irresponsible.

Well, Mr. Santelli, a portion of everybody’s tax money goes for shit they don’t approve of or wouldn’t pay for themselves. Hell, my tax money has paid to get American soldiers’ legs blown off in Iraq so Halliburton could have no-bid contracts to send pancakes by armored C-130 to Baghdad, which I’ve also paid for. I’ve paid to stop gay people who love each other and are in long-term relationships from getting married. I’ve paid to enforce an embargo against Cuba long after the cold war ended. I’ve paid for the Pakistani intelligence service to give money to the Taleban who gave it to the people who perpetrated 9/11. Then I paid to give money to Pakistan again so they could buy weapons that they pointed at India, who I also paid to arm. I paid to teach abstinence to — and withhold information about abortions from — people in Africa, many of whose children will die of AIDS because they never heard of birth control that could prevent its spread. I paid for George H. W. Bush to send troops to Somalia, then I paid Bill Clinton to pull them out, then I paid the salaries of the grandstanding assholes who laid the blame for al-Qaida on this and other actions. I paid Ken fucking Starr’s salary for the years he investigated and impeached Bill Clinton. I’m paying for miners to dig in our national parks, for cows I will never eat to be packed into filthy feedlots you can smell a mile away, and for rich bastards to run people off their land so they can build stadiums there instead.

Paying to give a second chance to some poor shlubs who bought into the American dream and were conned into biting off more than they could chew? Sign me the fuck up.

I Can Hear the Ocean!

U.S first lady Laura Bush listens to the address by her husband U.S. President George W. Bush to the 63rd United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York September 23, 2008. Reuters Pictures

Would it be wrong of me to presume that Laura Bush is having her husband's speech translated into English?

A Position of Strength

So the last time we couldn’t leave Iraq, it was because (among other things) we couldn’t let someone like Moqtada al-Sadr believe that he had defeated us. If he thought he won, the argument went, then he would be emboldened. Al-Qaida would be emboldened. Rogue nations around the world would be emboldened, and suddenly the forces of Good would have no safe haven, while legions of little Hitlers seized power all over the world and mad scientists worked feverishly to plant death rays on the moon.

Of course this opinion wasn’t universally shared. There were some (i.e. Democrats, traitors) who argued that a) the terrorists weren’t going to follow us home, b) we were part of the problem in Iraq, and c) we could deal with other problems better if all our troops weren’t tied down in a war whose planners don’t regret a thing, even though they admit their initial cause didn’t exist and they can’t agree on a retroactive cause now.

This would be wrong, said the war planners. To deal with a host of threatening nations, the world must know that we have force and the will to use it and to do so even if it’s irrational or downright harmful. After all, it’s well known that the rest of the world is composed mostly of inscrutable foreigners – various hordes, despotisms, satrapies and emirates, all shouting out ultimatums and entreaties and demands in their strange staccatos and clicks and ululations. There would be no way to bring this wretched refuse to order unless you were prepared to stomp on one – hard – and tell everyone else that this is how it’s gonna be.

And since we chose Iraq as the example we were going to set, and our various continued successes have kept us gummed up there for five years, we’re told we cannot extricate ourselves because it might give someone the wrong idea. And yeah, there might be a point to that argument. But in order to do a real cost-benefit analysis, you have to weigh the risks of the action against its benefits. And the main benefit is that we would actually have the resources to deal with another problem in the world. Even a petty tyrant from his overstuffed couch in his harem is enough of a strategic genius to know which of our actions frees him up to invade the neighboring chiefdom’s hippo wallow and which doesn’t.

And this is what brings us to the occasionally-independent nation of Georgia and its ever-looming neighbor, Russia. Last week Georgia invaded its semi-autonomous region of South Ossetia – on the Russian border, mostly ethnically Russian, and manned by Russian peacekeeping troops. It was probably a bad idea, to say the least. Russian army, navy and air forces sprang on the Georgian troops like a bear trap on a puppy.

This hasn’t been going over well with the Bush administration, which has taken the time to register an opinion even though most of it is on vacation. One brave soul who’s carried on vacationing, however, is Secretary of State and alleged Soviet expert Condoleezza Rice. Rice’s absence means that she’s either given up entirely, or it’s a signal to Putin that no matter what Bush or Cheney say, the US isn’t going to jump out of its hammock and put a stop to this invasion anytime soon.

And hell, even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. We don’t have an infantryman to spare, and even if we did, it would require a huge number of troops constantly at the ready to guard against any re-invasion. The fact of the matter is that Georgia stinks as a defensive position. That’s too bad, really – because ever since September 11, this administration has been swearing that its highest ideal is democracy and that exertion of military power gives it a strong bargaining position. And now here we are – faced with the option of defending a democracy that we have nurtured and set up as an example, fighting for its life in a military conflict. Oh, and we sorta told them we had their back, too.

The only problem is, we’ve got nothing. We need the Russians at least as much as they need us. Our NATO allies, who live a medium-range missile trajectory away, don’t see the fun in poking Russia with a stick. Whether this amounts to appeasement, they know one thing – Russia’s getting whatever it wants in Georgia, and no amount of US righteous indignation is going to change that. Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was educated in the US. He speaks fluent English. He instituted democratic reforms and rooted out corruption in government. And he’s probably toast, because we’ve foregone every option except the military one, and we clearly don’t have that either.

So Putin looked at the US military situation, added up the figures, and was apparently emboldened by the fact that we hadn’t left Iraq, not cowed into submission by our great display of will there. No doubt other military geniuses are awakening to the fact that, in the last months of the Bush administration, the world’s ass-kicker is tapped out, unheeded, unwanted and practically unbearable. And with the world’s economy in the toilet, this is an even better time to impress the populace by getting them that annexation they’ve always wanted.

We’ve spent the past seven-and-a-half years trying to solve every problem by menacing it with a six-shooter and showing it that we’re willing to put up with more crap than it ever dreamed of. Unfortunately we’ve spent so much on the example that we’re too beat to reap any of the rewards of the violence and insanity we’ve spread. It’s a shame, really – you spend the best years of your life beating your subjects into submission, and then they all rise up against you while you’re reloading.

Maybe a cleverer leader than George Bush would have tried to make more friends than enemies. Tried to solve problems in the age-old way of tedious negotiations, planning years ahead for diplomatic triumphs rather than kicking in every door and tasering the people on the other side. On September 11, 2001, the neocons claimed we were engaged in a battle of biblical proportions armed to the teeth. And yet today we find ourselves in a tragic comedy weilding only the jawbone of an ass.

Hot Geeky Chick in Spaaaaaaace!

It’s a great day for space geeks everywhere, as Anousheh Ansari, sponsor of the Ansari X-Prize, telecom entrepreneur and all-around admirable woman, blasts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to rendezvous with the International Space Station. Yes, she paid $20 million to go as a tourist, but unlike some other potential applicant for the trip – whose closest approach to space was having his poster next to a bunch of glow-in-the-dark stars on many 12-year-old girls’ bedroom ceilings – she’s earned it.

Ms. Ansari will be blogging her 10-day jaunt, assuming she has the time. Aside from participating in some vaguely-described experiments about back pain, she’ll likely be goading the men into arm-wrestling matches, Lysoling the Space-o-Let (I’ll bet it’s disgusting) and studying the effects of weightlessness on potpourri. Seriously though, I wish her and her fellow voyagers, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and US astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, a safe excursion and many happy returns. Same goes for all those other folks in orbit right now – space is currently more crowded than Whitney Houston’s paraphernalia drawer. So remember folks – use your turn signals and don’t go any faster than 17,000 miles per hour.

Forward to the Past?

So suddenly we’re all familiar with the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, thanks to the Pope, who quoted a particularly undiplomatic passage of a recorded dialog between the emperor and a Muslim scholar at the end of the 14th century. Manuel dismisses Islam by telling the scholar, “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Manuel certainly had his reasons for objecting to the violent spread of Islam – notably, his empire was getting the tar whipped out of it by the Ottoman Empire after the failure of the latest crusade to spread Christianity by force.

What’s interesting is that the Pope’s speech doesn’t really have anything to do with jihad and violence so much as it deals with the compatibility of faith and reason. In this sense, it’s very much like a palm reader attacking those charlatans at the Psychic Friends Network for just making stuff up. Benedict wanted to make an abstract point and just chose a quote that he figured wouldn’t bother anybody in the room. Someone should tell him that with the internets (brought to you by reason) nobody’s ever just preaching to the choir anymore.

Granted, Manuel’s quotation is inflammatory, though the outraged reaction of some in Islam is equally ridiculous. Even more ridiculous, though, is the Pope’s central point, which has become lost in the subsequent brouhaha. For the Pope concludes that science is rightly subservient to faith: “Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.” (emphasis mine). While such a statement might be warmly embraced by the Kansas school board, any scientist can tell you that religious revelations have only hindered the pursuit of empirical knowledge.

Religion deals with humans’ relation to God. Science deals with empirical, testable reality. While 4,000 years of Judeo-Christian inquiry has brought us such wonders as the Kabbalah, snake handling and the strappado, modern religion seems no closer to enlightened understanding than its ancient forbears. Science, however, has in its meager four centuries seen 13.5 billion years into the past, split the atom and fed billions who would otherwise be starving. Of course science doesn’t have all the answers – acting ethically is still a mystery to most humans, for instance (although a rational, non-religious approach to ethics could likely help). But for science to subvert itself to religion, as the Pope insists, is to hitch its wagon to an anvil. Muslims might be outraged by one quotation in Benedict’s speech – but the scientific and rationalist community should be pointing out the idiocy of the whole damn thing.

For when the giant bugs take over the earth

I just want you to know I like you guys. Really, I swear. And I only call you bugs in the vernacular, knowing that many of you (including Mr. Annual Cicada here) aren't true bugs. So I hope that's not taken the wrong way or anything.

But who am I kidding? You're not going to reason with a class of animals for whom a brain is a few knots of nerve cells -- even if they did come up with a female-dominated socialist society millions of years before our giant craniums envisioned Forbidden Planet.

Yet I can't help but hope that one day we'll realize we have more similarities than differences. That we'll look beyond your freakish exoskeletons, six legs and compound eyes to accept a higher truth -- that we're all just bouncing around inside a giant lampshade somewhere, flailing helplessly as we struggle with the evolutionary hurdle created by the 60 watt light bulb. Some days I think we're going to make it -- you, us, the bryophytes, the ring-tailed lemurs, and maybe even certain Texans. At least until the Ambien wears off, and I find myself standing on the edge of someone's swimming pool, looking down at my car shimmering in the deep end and wondering why I'm holding a set of soaking wet bagpipes. Then it seems more of a crap shoot.

Those Magic (Everything) Changes

Once again we commemorate September 11, 2001 – a day imbued in our collective memory with grief, confusion and inchoate rage – and strangely enough called Patriot Day. I have no idea how the name Patriot Day came about unless it just bubbled to the surface of a conversation at a DAR potluck one Wednesday night and caught on through phone trees and work email until it had become a fait accompli. Our gang wrote over the “Terror Day” tag of the gang down the street and now we get to celebrate Patriot Day with solemn readings and brass bands and F-15 overflights and the latest American Idol winner singing such a jazzed-up version of “America the Beautiful” that the melody reminds you of a greased pig at the state fair.

I don’t know where the name Patriot Day came from, but most holidays are polite enough to be named something that sorta reflects the nature of the holiday. Halloween and Independence Day and St. Patrick’s Day are all pretty clear, and will be a hundred years from now. But what would an alien or a person from the distant future make of Patriot Day? A sharp mind might deduce a corellation with flag decals, and that would be about it. But nowhere in that name is the idea that we couldn’t bring ourselves to call it what it was: 3,000 People Killed at the Office Day.

And that’s why I doubt another one of the grandiose ideas about that day – that somehow Everything Changed. If we don’t have the intestinal fortitude to understand what happened to us (we could call it Terrorist Attack day, too, if the first suggestion was too pitiless – although it makes a point) then maybe everything didn’t change enough. Maybe there are some more things that need to change before Everything Is Quite Done Changing. Maybe the time for easy clichés and cheap platitudes is over – and what we really need to do is pull our socks up, reach deep within ourselves, and take it to the next level. And here are a few suggestions how.

The Civil Liberties Pass
Air travel used to be so easy – you checked your pistols and detonators through at the counter and a bored clerk in a polyester jacket watched the x-ray picture of your pocketknife, your mace and your bag of weed zip through in your carry-on luggage. But now it’s all so complicated – take off your shoes, ditch your hair gel and your mango tango bubble bath and be prepared for the third degree if they notice your copy of The Management Secrets of Suleiman the Magnificent. Shouldn’t there be an easier way to get from Pittsburgh to San Diego? Now there is with the Civil Liberties Pass – a simple microprocessor embedded in your skull transmits a constant stream of sensory input to the Transportation Safety Administration. Just have your chip scanned at the express gate, and an ultra-fast computer connection verifies that you haven’t been near any dangerous substances, harbored any evil thoughts or filled in an absentee ballot and you’re whisked past security like a VIP – that’s a Virtually Inspected Pre-terrorist.

The God Bless America Tax Cut
Isn’t it time we stopped sticking it to the rich – who, after all, are responsible for creating jobs, keeping Hollywood cops fully employed, and exploring the vast uncharted territories of Caribbean tax shelters? In an age when the poor and middle class are paying less than their fair share in taxes, why are the rich left to find as many deductions as they can using only an army of accountants and a few shadow corporations? The rich deserve a reward for their ingenuity – and under this new program any graft is tax deductible as long as it’s over a million dollars per fiscal year. We could lower the limit, but deductions for cheaters who can’t think big would just be the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The Cusp of Victory Voluntary Draft
The all-volunteer army has been one of the must successful innovations in the free world – at last we have a military comprised entirely of willing recruits who are skilled, motivated, and who came to serve out of an abiding love for the ideals that made America great. And that was cool and everything, but this touchy-feely nonsense needs to stop. Effective immediately, all patriotic Americans will throw their names into a hat, and anyone who can’t afford a lawyer or a ticket to Canada will volunteer for two years of service or until we decide you can come home. All unpatriotic Americans must report to California, where they will be detailed to jump up and down on the San Andreas fault.

Islamoconfusion

The worst possible news for the proponents of the Iraq war has now come to pass – for the next two weeks President Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld will be criscrossing the nation, explaining why we’re there. This is a bad idea because they can never keep their explanations straight. Sure, it wasn’t about the first few reasons, they’ll admit – awfully smug of you to bring it up, by the way – but really, is the reason important? The real reason is that we’re there to honor our war dead. No wait – the real reason is that we’re there to transform the Middle East. But the best reason so far is that Iraq is part of the decisive struggle of the 21st century.

You get the idea. And you’ll notice that as the explanations grow increasingly desperate they become increasingly abstract. The facts, having become impediments to the general progress, are tossed aside, much the way a lost navigator might hurl his sextant into the ocean and start cutting up bird entrails. It might not help any, but you’ll have certainly shut up those traitors who said you didn’t know how to use the damn thing.

And also – you might not be the best person to explain something if you resent the idea that you’ve been asked to explain it in the first place. It looks a little testy when the first argument for the war out of your mouth is that anyone who demands an argument is a traitor or an appeaser. Maybe this sort of strategem worked for the tobacco lobby, or maybe it’s something you learn in CEO school – when you’ve got nothing, accuse your accusers. By the time the ink clears, you and your tentacles have squirted under the nearest rock.

But now we’re coming into the home stretch and the old BS just isn’t working anymore. I’m not sure our leaders have faced that, though. When the Middle East stubbornly refused to magically transform into DemocroExxonDisneyland, Rummy, Bush and Cheney insisted that magical, sudden transformations take time. And warrantless wiretapping. Now even after all that, the traitors are still coming out of the woodwork – the Pentagon, of all people, recently released an assessment of Iraq that says the country is sliding into civil war. If the military brass doesn’t have the will to ignore reality, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

But don’t be afraid, voters. It’s natural for the reasons we’re in the Middle East to be a little confusing sometimes. Hell, even the people who make this stuff up can’t keep it all straight. Right now, in fact, the big reason – the overarching theme – the leitmotif – as it were – is the battle against Islamofascism. Islamofascism is one of those axis-of-evil kinda terms that means the most when you define it the least. Like pornography and weapons of mass destruction, we won’t wait till we see it, but we’ll know what it is anyway.

It’s only too bad that Iraq – a Stalinist state, if the giant bronze artwork is any indication – had nothing to do with Islamofascism before it suddenly became a seething hotbed of the stuff. It’s not like we used that as an excuse to go in before, and even when we did, it was wrong (damn that faulty intelligence). But now the real reason has suddenly become clear, and while Iraq is the definitive battlefield, its neighbor is the center of the evil. So does this mean we’re in the wrong country? Oh, shut up.

See – if you take all the explanations as though they were supposed to fit together into a coherent whole, it makes no sense whatsoever. That’s how clever our enemy is. The trick is to take a particular idea that you like and repeat it over and over again. And when that fails, pick another one, and so on as needed. This is called “staying the course.”

And if the people don’t understand that, be patient with them. They just need one more whirlwind speaking tour to convince them that their only options are following the president into a world of moral clarity and factual pandemonium, or joining the silent majority of vicious traitors and misguided cowards.

But the person who put the choice in its starkest terms this past week was President Bush, who said, “If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.” See – our borders are so porous that 20 million armed Iraqis trying to sneak into the country wouldn’t raise an alarm at all. So if that doesn’t prove we got into that country just in time, nothing will. Just imagine what could’ve hapened if all those people had the bomb.