Op-Ed

Simple acts and a little courage have worked wonders in the world.  Nonviolent people's movements won democratic reforms in Russia, booted the British out of India, resisted the Nazi occupation in Denmark, drove a dictator out of El Salvador and another out of the Philippines, ended Jim Crow, crushed Soviet power in Poland, toppled military regimes in Argentina and Chile, ended Apartheid, and brought democracy to the Ukraine.  George W. is no match for a force this powerful.

As powerless as we may feel in the United States right now, we have at our disposal the tools needed to end the war in Iraq and to impeach the criminals who began it.  The impeachment may have to precede the peace, but, in one order or the other, we can achieve these two goals.

Ok, so the vice president accidentally shot someone while on a hunting outing South of San Antonio, Texas. Accidents happen all the time, right? And besides, it's not like he offed someone during a liquor-store hold-up. So what's all the fuss about you ask? It's simple. It took the Bush administration almost 24 hours to issue any sort of statement about the accidental shooting which occurred 5:30 PM Saturday. The vice president of the United States shoots someone, even accidentally, and all we got was a statement released by the ranch owner, Katharine Armstrong, to a small town newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. It wasn't until Sunday afternoon that Armstrong called the paper. She did not notify the national media or the White House press corps. The vp's office commented thereafter.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas -- what's the fine for shooting a lawyer? -- and so forth. Dick-Cheney-shooting-Harry-Whittington is fraught, as they say, with irony. It's not as though the ground in Texas is littered with liberal Republicans. I think the vice president winged the only one we've got.

Not that I accuse Harry Whittington of being an actual liberal -- only by Texas Republican standards, and that sets the bar about the height of a matchbook. Nevertheless, Whittington is seriously civilized, particularly on the issues of crime, punishment and prisons. He served on both the Texas Board of Corrections and on the bonding authority that builds prisons. As he has often said, prisons do not curb crime, they are hothouses for crime: "Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants."

In the day, whenever there was an especially bad case of new-ignoramus-in-the-legislature -- a "lock 'em all up and throw away the key" type -- the senior members used to send the prison-happy, tuff-on-crime neophyte to see Harry Whittington, a Republican after all, for a little basic education on the cost of prisons.

Through former FEMA head Michael Brown's testimony last week in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearings we've learned of yet another case of Bushevik amnesia. Brown told committee chair Susan Collins (R-ME) that he sent urgent reports to White House officials on Monday August 29, the day the hurricane hit, that New Orleans' levees were failing and that there was potentially disastrous flooding already underway. The next day, Aug. 30, President Bush incredulously went before the press to declare that New Orleans had "dodged a bullet."

This prompted yet another chapter in the Ignorance is Bliss defense by the Bushies whenever they find themselves under attack. On the September 1 broadcast of ABC's Good Morning America, Bush said "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." But we now know he in fact knew beforehand. And as for his lack of knowledge until Tuesday that New Orleans was facing severe conditions, Brown called that "just baloney" and "a little disingenuous."

A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, Bill Scheurer realized that the nation's soul was in jeopardy. He saw George Bush on TV, standing in the rubble of Ground Zero, whipping the national grief into carte blanche for revenge. Behind him, as the death toll wavered, people held up a banner that screamed: 6,000 MORE REASONS TO KILL THEM ALL.

"That's when I said, 'We're in trouble,'" he told me the other day, describing the journey that has made him a standard-bearer for what has become perhaps the largest bloc of disenfranchised voters in the country: the war-disillusioned. Four-plus years into the Bush version of homeland security, with the blood and the lies seeping into the national psyche, with public revulsion at high simmer, Scheurer is poised to help the peace majority remake American politics.

The anger and horror so many of us have felt about the national direction since we went to war with the rest of the world has shockingly little political traction. No matter how many people oppose Bush's bomb-and-torture show, it continues, the system incapable of shutting it down. The loyal opposition blesses it with endless mush.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Once upon a time, in the middle of a nasty constitutional crisis in Washington, a most unlikely hero emerged -- a Texas lawyer from one of our state's notoriously discriminated-against racial minorities. Think how lucky we were.

It is one of the most famous sentences in all of American rhetoric: "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total." But what catches the eye today is the sentence that followed that famous declaration, the sentence that makes one so ashamed for Al Gonzales. Barbara Jordan's great, deep voice brought the impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon to an awed silence when she vowed, "And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."

Thirty years ago, this state could produce Barbara Jordan -- and now we send that pathetic pipsqueak Al Gonzales. Enough to provoke a wailing cry of "O tempera, O mores!" even from the depths of Lubbock.

AUSTIN, Texas -- I like to think that Republicans are having fun. They're such cards. What a wheeze, what a jape. Talking about energy independence in the State of the Union Address! President Bush said, "America is addicted to oil" and we will "break this addiction." Oh what a good trick to see if anyone thought he actually meant it!

I'm not going to embarrass the perennial suckers who fell for it by identifying them, but I assure you they include some well-known names in journalism. Boy, I bet they feel like fools, having written those optimistic columns pointing to how Bush had made a fine proposal -- cut oil imports from the Middle East by 75 percent by 2025 -- and people should take it seriously and stop dissing him.

In the House Leadership wars, Tom DeLay's gone, his protege Roy Blunt's been defeated, and the GOP's anointed Rep. John Boehner (OH) as the new face of the party. It's all about reform, right? Guess again. The new guy's no prize either.

According to the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), Boehner's record documents his support for measures that have run counter to the best interests of the vast majority of American Jews. As reported by the NJDC:

1. For School Prayer and Amending the Constitution: Boehner supported a school prayer amendment to the United States Constitution in 1997 (H.J.Res. 78), 1999 (H.J.Res 66), and 2001 (H.J.Res. 52); voted to permit school prayer "during this time of struggle against the forces of international terrorism" (House Roll Call Vote 445, Nov. 15, 2001); and voted to only allow federal aid to schools that allow prayer (House Roll Call Vote 85, March 23, 1994).

2. For Forced Religion in Anti-Poverty Programs: Boehner voted to permit taxpayer-funded anti-poverty programs to require aid recipients to join in religious activities. (House Roll Call Votes 16 and 17, Feb. 4, 2004)

Remarks prepared for World Can't Wait rally at White House, Feb. 4, 2006.

There are protests outside at least two houses today, the White House and Bush's luxury estate near Crawford, Texas. Bush can run, but he cannot hide.

He tries to hide behind fear, our fear. The only tool in his bag is making us afraid. We have to resist becoming afraid, but we have to be able to talk about the fact that Bush and Cheney have made us much less safe. They have turned world opinion against us. They have turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists. They have turned Afghanistan into a drug production kingdom. Terrorist incidents are up so dramatically that the Bush Administration no longer publishes those statistics.

For those impervious to the suffering of others, a dollar figure sometimes helps bring it home. Two honest economists have recently put one on the Iraq war, and in so doing shown a spotlight on the black hole in the center of our future.

If $1 trillion makes you gag, try $2 trillion.

The latter number is the "moderate," as opposed to the conservative, price tag that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes have put on the war, which they calculated by factoring in some - but by no means all - of its real costs, such as lifelong care for brain-injured U.S. troops.

The most outrageous deception in the selling of this war three years ago is not the claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or had links to al-Qaida, but the blithe assertion that the war could be fought for chump change; it was supposed to be pay-as-you-go, financed by liberated oil revenue. White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey was sacked for saying the adventure could cost the country as much as $200 billion; of course, the total, even by conventional calculation, has gone well beyond that.