Op-Ed

He's getting quite creative, this coy former vice president of ours. When asked if he's running for president in 2008, Al Gore devises every possible answer to throw his questioners off the trail: "I have no intention of running." "I have no plans to be a candidate for president again." "I don't expect to run." "I can't imagine any circumstances in which I would become a candidate again." "Politics is behind me." Every answer, that is, except the one that has any meaning: "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve." That was the unequivocal answer famously given by Civil War-era general William Tecumseh Sherman when asked about his presidential aspirations upon retiring from the Army in 1884. Sherman, unlike Gore, left no doubt of his "intention."

"I haven't made a so-called Sherman statement, because it just seems unnecessary, kind of odd to do that....but that's not an effort to hold the door open. It's more the internal shifting of gears," said Gore in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

I just read an excellent book from http://www.endthewartour.org  called "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military."  Personally I was never attracted to the military because I could never stand having anyone tell me what to do – well, and because I had parents who helped me find other options in life. 

The military glorifies the giving and obeying of orders as somehow something good for its own sake, something called "discipline" or "character."  I can't judge whether I have either of those things, but I do know the last place I would ever have thought to turn for a career was an institution in which I would have had to do what a bunch of mean bastards said to do simply because they said to do it.  That wouldn’t have worked.  I'd have ended up a conscientious objector even in peace time.

Have you ever heard someone try to argue that the Iraq War was a mistake but that now the proper course is to continue the mistake a bit longer or to carefully end it in a long and complicated way that could take months or years?  Have you ever wondered how such a position, if examined in detail, could possibly make any sense?

Wonder no more.  Such a position, in various forms, actually makes no sense.  In fact, such a position requires a stunning degree of illogic.

There's an important book at http://www.endthewartour.org called "Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal" by Anthony Arnove.  The book has a Foreword and an Afterword by Howard Zinn, who in 1967 published "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal."  Arnove's book is important because it refutes all the major claims against immediate withdrawal.

Arnove begins with some historical background, and then lays out an overwhelming case for the following points.  I'll list them here, but you'll need to read the book (it's only 100 pages) for the arguments:

I’ve been thinking about Tariq Aziz a lot since the New York Times printed a front-page story on the former Iraqi deputy prime minister in late May. A color photograph showed him decked out in what the article described as “an open-necked hospital gown, with a patient’s plastic identification tag on his wrist.” He looked gaunt.

The last time I saw Aziz, at a Baghdad meeting two months before the U.S.-led invasion began, he was still portly in one of his well-tailored business suits. If Aziz was worried, he didn’t show it.

Now, he’s playing a part that U.S. media seem to relish. The Times headline said “Hussein’s Former Envoy Gushes With Adulation on Witness Stand,” but to sum up the coverage it might have just as aptly declared: “How the Mighty Have Fallen.”

AUSTIN, Texas -- Thank goodness the Republicans are around to tell me what to worry about. The flag-burning crisis -- here in Austin, there's that pall of smoke rising from the West every morning (it's from an area called Tarrytown, where they burn hundreds of flags daily).

You didn't know hundreds of flags were being burned daily? Actually, you can count on your hand the number of incidents reported over the last five years. For instance, there was one flag burned in 2005 by a drunken teenager and one by a protester in California in 2002. This appalling record of ravishment must be stopped. You're clearly not worried about what matters.

Gay marriage, now there's a crisis. Well, OK, so there isn't much gay marriage going on here in Texas. None, in fact. First, we made it illegal. Then, we made it unconstitutional. But President Bush is all concerned about it, so I guess we have to alter the U.S. Constitution.

Gus and Captain Call (of "Lonesome Dove" fame) will be an item -- with who knows who waiting in line right after them.

That "perfectly safe" mushroom cloud that was supposed to rise 10,000 feet over the Nevada Test Site this month will have to remain a mere gleam in Donald Rumsfeld's eye for the time being.

The security state, which had planned to jump-start its WMD program with a supposedly conventional explosion large enough to mimic the effects of a small nuclear weapon, has run smack into the ghosts of its own fraudulent past. The citizens downwind of the test site, the furious sons and daughters of the victims of earlier testing and earlier lies, have forced the government to regroup.

A serious legal challenge in U.S. District Court and general outrage among the locals - the largely conservative residents of Nevada, Utah, Idaho - have complicated the plans of the Departments of Energy and Defense to set off a major above-ground explosion at the site, the first since 1962, without public input or even a legitimate environmental impact statement. The big bang known as Divine Strake, a 700-ton concoction of ammonium nitrate, fuel oil and God knows what else, is on indefinite hold.

Editor's Note: Founding editor of the Free Press, Steve Conliff died today, June 1, of cancer. His alternative and underground writings pre-date the founding of the Free Press in 1970. Conliff had just compiled the first seven volumes of the Free Press for an anthology book project for CICJ Books. We will get his work in print as soon as possible. Our condolences go out to his wife Suzie Bird-Conliff and his family, particularly his son Byron who has worked closely with the Free Press this year. The following article is re-run to highlight one of the reasons Conliff is a legend in this town. Yippie, what a great life!

Steve Conliff's website

Read Steve's last remarks to the Free Press Awards Dinner

On pies and Rhodes
May 1, 2001

AUSTIN, Texas -- So, Haditha becomes another of the names at which we wince, along with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and My Lai. Tell you what: Let's not use the "stress of combat" excuse this time. According to neighbors, the girls in the family of Younis Khafif -- the one who kept pleading in English: "I am a friend. I am good" -- were 14, 10, 5, 3 and 1. What are they going to say? "Under stress of combat, we thought the baby was 2"?

"We have a Haditha every day," said Muhanned Jasim, an Iraqi merchant. "Were (those killed in Haditha) the first Iraqis to be killed for no reason?" asked Ghasan Jayih, a pharmacist. Well no, but we Americans don't count collateral damage unless we're forced to. We prefer to ignore collateral damage, especially if they're under 5.

People who are concerned about the state of the U.S. news media in 2006 might pause to consider those who have lost their lives in the midst of journalistic neglect, avoidance and bias.

We remember that while TV and radio news reports tell the latest about corporate fortunes, vast numbers of real people are struggling to make ends meet -- and many are in a position of choosing between such necessities as medicine, adequate food and paying the rent.

We remember that many Americans have lost their limbs or their lives in on-the-job accidents that might have been prevented if overall media coverage had been anywhere near as transfixed with job safety as with, say, marital splits among Hollywood celebrities.

We remember that the national and deadly problem of widespread obesity is in part attributable to constant advertising for products with empty calories and plenty of fat.

We remember that despite public claims by tobacco companies, the ads that keep trying to glamorize smoking continue to lure millions of young people onto a long journey of addiction to cancer-causing cigarettes.

"We fought the good fight," Jeff Skilling said, standing strong after he and "Kenny Boy" Lay were convicted of defrauding Enron stockholders. But what an odd choice of words. I suppose Joachim von Ribbentrop and Attila the Hun could say the same thing, but fighting to stay out of jail is a small imperial dream. Skilling and Lay did authorize blitzkrieg-worthy raids on West Coast utilities, where Enron traders bragged about stealing from "grandma Millie," and jamming their $250 a megawatt hour power "right up her ass." And Enron did conquer the venerable Portland General utility, then leave it a hollow shell-I met a woman who'd lost her entire retirement. So maybe those were the fights Skilling referred to. But these opponents barely put up a struggle.