When a blogger posts outright lies, it stirs a little wave of annoyance and criticism in blogdom — as it should.
When our American president lies outright, it should stir up a whole lot more.
…It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush’s signature as president./…. The pattern is now well established. Soothing rhetoric — about compassionate conservatism, about how much money the “average” American worker will get through the White House tax program, about prescription-drug benefits — is simply at odds with what Bush’s policies actually do. Last month Bush promised to enhance Medicaid; his actual policy would effectively end it as a federal entitlement program.
So, why isn’t there revolution stirring among the American people? Or at least impeachment?
More distressing even than the president’s lies, though, is the public’s apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it. The post-September 11 effect and the Iraq war distract attention, but there’s more to it. Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the president’s lies?
Go here to read documentation of only some of the little man’s lies.
Hypocrisy has been defined as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. George W. Bush lied about all these policies because the programs he pretends to favor are far more popular than the ones he puts into effect. But unless the voters and the press start paying attention, all the president’s lies will have little political consequence — except to certify that we have become something less than a democracy.

While conversations go on about allegory, good writing, truth, lies, and authenticity, I keep going back to poetry. It’s all there.
‘Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front’ – from The Country of Marriage (1973) by Wendell Berry
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark a false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
*******
‘You’re the Top,’ by Tony Hoagland from Sweet Ruin (University of Wisconsin Press).
You’re the Top
Of all the people that I’ve ever known
I think my grandmother Bernice
would be best qualified to be beside me now
driving north of Boston in a rented car
while Cole Porter warbles on the radio;
Only she would be trivial and un-
politically correct enough to totally enjoy
the rhyming of Mahatma Ghandi
with Napoleon brandy;
and she would understand, from 1948,
the miracle that once was cellophane,
which Porter rhymes with night in Spain.
She loved that image of the high gay life
where people dressed by servants
turned every night into the Ritz:
dancing through a shower of just
uncorked champagne
into the shelter of a dry martini.
When she was 70 and I was young
I hated how a life of privilege
had kept her ignorance intact
about the world beneath her pretty feet,
how she believed that people with good manners
naturally had yachts, knew how to waltz
and dribbled French into their sentences
like salad dressing. My liberal adolescent rage
was like a righteous fist back then
that wouldn’t let me rest,
but I’ve come far enough from who I was
to see her as she saw herself:
a tipsy debutante in 1938,
kicking off a party with her shoes;
launching the lipstick-red high heel
from her elegant big toe
into the orbit of a chandelier
suspended in a lyric by Cole Porter,
bright and beautiful and useless.

There are some individuals who are extraordinary human beings — talented artists, intelligent thinkers, articulate speakers, passionately responsible citizens. Tim Robbins is one of these. (Of course, I also have to note that he also has the smarts to team up with “older/wiser woman” Susan Sarandon.)
The following is excerpted from his April 15th address to National Press Club”
For all of the ugliness and tragedy of 9-11, there was a brief period afterward where I held a great hope, in the midst of the tears and shocked faces of New Yorkers, in the midst of the lethal air we breathed as we worked at Ground Zero, in the midst of my children’s terror at being so close to this crime against humanity, in the midst of all this, I held on to a glimmer of hope in the naive assumption that something good could come out of it.
I imagined our leaders seizing upon this moment of unity in America, this moment when no one wanted to talk about Democrat versus Republican, white versus black, or any of the other ridiculous divisions that dominate our public discourse. I imagined our leaders going on television telling the citizens that although we all want to be at Ground Zero, we can’t, but there is work that is needed to be done all over America. Our help is needed at community centers to tutor children, to teach them to read. Our work is needed at old-age homes to visit the lonely and infirmed; in gutted neighborhoods to rebuild housing and clean up parks, and convert abandoned lots to baseball fields. I imagined leadership that would take this incredible energy, this generosity of spirit and create a new unity in America born out of the chaos and tragedy of 9/11, a new unity that would send a message to terrorists everywhere: If you attack us, we will become stronger, cleaner, better educated, and more unified. You will strengthen our commitment to justice and democracy by your inhumane attacks on us. Like a Phoenix out of the fire, we will be reborn.
And then came the speech: You are either with us or against us. And the bombing began. And the old paradigm was restored as our leader encouraged us to show our patriotism by shopping and by volunteering to join groups that would turn in their neighbor for any suspicious behavior.
In the 19 months since 9-11, we have seen our democracy compromised by fear and hatred. Basic inalienable rights, due process, the sanctity of the home have been quickly compromised in a climate of fear. A unified American public has grown bitterly divided, and a world population that had profound sympathy and support for us has grown contemptuous and distrustful, viewing us as we once viewed the Soviet Union, as a rogue state…..
And he finishes with:
We lay the continuance of our democracy on your desks, and count on your pens to be mightier. Millions are watching and waiting in mute frustration and hope – hoping for someone to defend the spirit and letter of our Constitution, and to defy the intimidation that is visited upon us daily in the name of national security and warped notions of patriotism.
Our ability to disagree, and our inherent right to question our leaders and criticize their actions define who we are. To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the news media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our democracy’s defeat. These are challenging times. There is a wave of hate that seeks to divide us — right and left, pro-war and anti-war. In the name of my 11-year-old nephew, and all the other unreported victims of this hostile and unproductive environment of fear, let us try to find our common ground as a nation. Let us celebrate this grand and glorious experiment that has survived for 227 years. To do so we must honor and fight vigilantly for the things that unite us — like freedom, the First Amendment and, yes, baseball.
Hey, Ronnie Reagan got himself elected president, and he wasn’t half as talented, smart, articulate, intelligent, or brave. I wonder if Robbins ever thought about running. Susan Sarandon as (unmarried) First Lady. Now there’s Crone Power!

Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us,” said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organized by Conference Board (news – web sites).
“And if they don’t, they can go straight to hell.”
The Democratic former president, who preceded George W. Bush at the White House, said that sooner or later the United States had to find a way to cooperate with the world at large.
“We can’t run,” Clinton pointed out. “If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal….
“Since September 11, it looks like we can’t hold two guns at the same time,” Clinton said. “If you fight terrorism, you can’t make America a better place to be.”
Clinton said that if he were at the White House right now he would scrap a 726-billion dollar tax cut proposal made by the president in January to stimulate the flagging economy.
Read the whole article.

Now, here

I have a craving for oranges lately. Oh, you do too? Don

Most of my career as a writer was spent spinning what other people wanted to communicate into more clear and engaging prose. My biggest challenge always was to get those people to define what they really meant by terms that they used that I was expected to incorporate into whatever I spun. Lots of people use the word

No, that’s not an affirmation. That’s an accusation. America is continually proving just what a bully we are.
….. thousands of Iraqis protested that they did not need American help now Saddam Hussein had gone. “No to America, No to Saddam,” chanted Iraqis from the Shia Muslim majority long oppressed by Saddam, who is from the rival Sunni sect. Arabic television networks said up to 20,000 people marched.
At talks that began after a delay, skepticism ran deep among groups united by little more than joy at Saddam’s fall and unease at getting too close to Washington.
But are our leaders listening? Of course not.
Speaking of listening to people that should (or shouldn’t) be listened to, myrln reminds us:
If Paula Zahn is a journalist (a wholly unsubstantiated assumption, I know) rather than an informal Israeli cheerleader, then why doesn’t she insist that an Israeli minister (preferably Sharon himself) be booked on the show to answer the same questions she put to the Syrian minister today? Her bias is always evident, and it diminishes CNN’s already questionable credibility.
Perhaps she could also ask if it’s true Israel is looking for an oil pipeline from Iraq which must route through Syria, and how much that influenced the US invasion of Iraq and the current accusations against Syria. Oh, wait, you can’t do that because the invasion wasn’t about oil. Dubya said so, and you guys believed him.
Oh yes, bully, bully for us:
At least 10 people were shot dead and scores wounded in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, a hospital doctor said, with witnesses claiming US troops had opened fire on a crowd after it turned against an American-installed local governor.

By the time a post has more than 10 Comments, the only people reading them are the ones who are adding theirs to the others. Yet, I find that some of my writing that states my positions most clearly are the ones I put in my Comments. I think it has to do with the fact that Comments become real conversations. Not real-time conversations, but thoughtful exchanges nonetheless. So, I’m repeating here some of what I wrote as Comments here:
Using [Jessica] Lynch as some kind of catalyst for a discussion of violence toward women on the home front was a bit of a stretch. I see her more as a victim of our military system, which promises a better life for those who serve. Except first, they have to survive the service itself, and that’s the part that’s not empahsized enough.
The older I get, the more I realize that everything in life is a trade-off. You have to be careful to make sure that you understand what you’re trading off for what you think you’re going to get.
….we make our choices and we take our chances when it comes to women joining the military. (I wonder, though, how many women in the military really thought through the choice they were making.) There’s a lot of cultural conditioning that gets in the way of letting us do our jobs no matter what our jobs are. We’re often damned if we do and damned if we don’t. And the men who work with us (on and off the battlefield) often make it harder on themselves as well as us because they don’t know how to get past that cultural conditioning. (And, as I’ve said before — much to the annoyance of both males and females I know — they don’t know how to control their testosterone surges.)
So, my choice is just about always to go where I’m not expected to play by the rules that have been set up by men primarily. I just don’t expect them to really understand how I think, make decisions, get things done. If, by chance, they do, terrific. That means we’ll work well together because I’ll go out of my way to try to meet them half-way. Now, none of that would hold true in the military. It’s a man’s game all the way.
I operate from the perspective that males and females are equal but different. We are of equal value as humans and have the same potential to succeed as far as brain-power is concerned. We might work out problems using different thought and interpersonal processes, but our solutions to those problems will be just as exquisitely forumulated as those of men. Different, maybe, but just as valid, just as deliberate, just as well-constructed.
In general, we don’t have the level of brute physical strength that men have, and if we choose to give birth, we have the constraints of our biology. But those are — or at least they should be — minor obstacles to success in just about any area of intelligent human activity. Except, I think, the military. It’s really beyond me why any female would honestly want to be a part of all that phoney baloney machismo. It’s not that I don’t think we need a military, but it has to evolve into a horse of different color before I would consider it worth riding on into the sunset.

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood. I want to go out and take a walk. But I check my email first and start checking out the sites that my anti-war email pals are telling me about. I should get out and get some fresh air. But this stupid war…the stupidity of the stupid men waging this stupid war — holds me here at the keyboard, seething instead of sunning.
The truth is, I don’t want to hide in the sun. I want to keep shouting into the wind — which is what this blogging is, I know. But it’s war. It’s a war against everything I hope for and believe in. I’m not going to hide.
What I’m going to do is point you to some truths that need to be more broadly known, and they’re not being broadcast, at least not the way they should be.
Example 1:
Yesterday, Lawrence Eagleburger, who was US Secretary of State under George Bush Sr., told the BBC:
“If George Bush [Jr.] decided he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria and Iran after that he would last in office for about 15 minutes. In fact if President Bush were to try that now even I would think that he ought to be impeached. You can’t get away with that sort of thing in this democracy.”
The above quote is taken from a report on BBC television, but has so far not appeared on their Website. The quote is mentioned near the bottom of an article in today’s Independent. It is also referenced in today’s Mirror and Pakistan Tribune.
Example 2:
In the second of his dispatches from the million-dollar media centre at Qatar, Michael Wolff recounts how he angered the US right
Wolff:
But I was not a war reporter. I did not have to observe war-time propriety, or cool. I was free to ask publicly (on international television, at that) the question everyone was asking of each other: “I mean no disrespect, but what is the value proposition of these briefings. Why are we here? Why should we stay? What’s the value of what we’re learning at this million dollar press centre?”
What happens to him could have been taken right out of a movie script (except is was for real), including:
The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform – making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): “I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” And: “A lot of people don’t like you.” And then: “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” And too: “This is fucking war, asshole.” And finally: “No more questions for you.”
Example 3:
An emailed essay from a Daniel Patrick Welch, who points to this site, is a lengthy piece that pretty much covers everything I believe, but stated in a much more reader-friendly prose than mine usually is, including this:
And what is all this focus on civilian dead? I mean it’s horrific, of course–it’s the whole ball of wax, really. But soldiers aren’t people? When the tables are turned, the U.S. screams bloody murder if one of our boys is killed, TV up close and personals, etc. Enemy soldiers don’t have mothers? They can be blithely incinerated from 40,000 feet by fuel-air bombs and other weapons more horrific than anything currently banned–international law, thankfully for the Americans, hasn’t had time to catch up to the technology. I guess that undermining, bribing, and threatening pays off. Bush and Rumsfeld (dubbed Chemical Donald by a British columnist) even insist that we have the right to use nuclear weapons, or other gases only allowed for domestic crowd control.
and this:
The Stupidity Factor doesn’t appear to be evaporating any time soon. Many Americans are perfectly happy to have a “president” who is no smarter than they are–it’s not threatening unless you get on his bad side. …. I used to think that the monopoly corporations who funded Bush’s rise to power had picked wrong–and it may still be shown that they overplayed their hand. But my cynicism and despair have deepened in the past few months. What a coup (pun intended) to have picked a true idiot, a mean, drunken frat boy who does what he’s told and then some, sticking to it like a rabid pit bull.
And then there’s this eloquent and moving right-on-the-money piece by a mom whose daughter was arrrested for protesting:
Don’t all parents want the world for their children? Fellow parents, tell me, wouldn’t we do anything for them? To give them big houses, we will cut ancient forests. To give them the best education, we will invest in companies that profit from death.
To keep them safe, we will deny them the right to privacy, to travel unimpeded, to peacefully assemble. And to give them peace, we will kill other people’s children or send them to be killed and amass enough weapons to kill the children again, kill them 20 times if necessary.
We would do anything for our children but the one big thing: Stop and ask ourselves, what are we doing and allowing to be done? Frank and I go busily about, buying this or that, voting or not — on a small scale, in the short term, making things work for our children — forgetting that whatever is left of the world is the place where they will have to live.
What will our grandchildren say? I think I can guess:
How could you not have known? What more evidence did you need that your lives, your comfortable lives, would do so much damage to ours?
Did you think you could wage war against nations without waging war against people and against the land? Didn’t you wonder what we would drink, once you poisoned the aquifers? Didn’t you wonder what we would breathe, once you poisoned the air? Did you stop to ask how we would be safe, in a world poisoned by war?
I’m thinking about how I will answer those questions when my grandson is old enough to ask me. I will think about that as I go outside to walk among the long afternoon shadows.