Op-Ed

DUBLIN, N.H. -- What a summer for national credulity fitness. My credulity gets a lot of exercise, since I cover Texas politics. Like Alice in Wonderland's White Queen, years of practice have enabled me to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. But here we are with a perfect feast of mind-bogglers, everyone's credulity stretching and straining in a giant national workout session.

            Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California. Well, sure, I can handle that one. Manna from heaven for political humorists of all stripes. I'm afraid the joke will begin to wear thin, however. I know we all like to make fun of California as the epicenter of nuttiness, but in fact that big, beautiful state is in terrible trouble. A $36 billion deficit is not amusing. Teachers are being fired, programs to help the most helpless -- the oldest, the youngest, the most frail -- are being cut.

Thought you might be interested in these two items:

*  The ombudsman at National Public Radio has written a piece that’s partly a response to a recent column I wrote about media attacks on Rep. Jim McDermott for going to Baghdad and questioning the veracity of President Bush. The NPR ombudsman’s piece is at: www.npr.org/yourturn/ombudsman/2003/030730.html

*  I was in a live debate on CNN today that included a discussion of the California recall and Iraq-related events. The transcript is posted at: www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0308/08/nfcnn.04.html

Best wishes,
Norman Solomon

CAMDEN, Maine -- Let us stop to observe a few mileposts on the downward path to the utter degradation of political discourse in this country.

            A recent newspaper advertising campaign by "independent" groups supporting President Bush shows a closed courtroom door with the sign, "Catholics Need Not Apply," hanging on it. The ad argues that William Pryor Jr., attorney general of Alabama and a right-wing anti-abortion nominee to the federal appeals court, is under attack for his "deeply held" Catholic beliefs.

            Actually, Pryor is under attack because he's a hopeless dipstick. That he also happens to be Catholic and anti-abortion has nothing to do with his unfitness for the federal bench. The only person I know who believes one's closely held religious and moral convictions should make one ineligible for the federal bench is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia argued last year that any judge who is opposed to the death penalty should resign, on account of it is the law.

AUSTIN, Texas -- There are messy-desk people and there are clean-desk people. I'm a major messy. About every six months, I am seized by a desire to Get Organized, so I start doing archaeological excavations into the midden heap on my desk. The result this time was a sort of time-lapse photography of where the country is headed.

            Going through stacks of old newspaper articles, speeches, reports, studies and press releases at a high rate of speed left one overwhelming impression: deception ... government by deception. I'd like pass along some of what I found without the usual journalistic standards of sourcing because I want to recreate the impression it all left -- rather like leafing through a book rapidly, catching sentence here and there. Leaving aside the missing weapons of mass destruction (hey, we found the oil), I found so many little things that fit the same pattern.

Freep Hero

Gregory Palast

Thank God for freedom of the press. At least it’s working in Britain. The Freep honors Gregory Palast, a British journalist, as its hero. Palast’s reporting on the Bush family finances, their staged CIA-style demonstration elections in Florida and Bush, Sr.’s worldwide intervention for western corporations which then results in kickbacks to Jr.’s campaign coffers, are better than anything you’ll read in the U.S. press. Of course, U.S. corporate conglomerates, their CEOs, CFOs, directors and officers are precisely the people that Palast has been outing in his articles for the London Observer and other media outlets. Check him out at gregpalast.com.

The Free Press Salutes

Governor Taft

The corporate Democrats who greased Bill Clinton’s path to the White House are now a bit worried. Their influence on the party’s presidential nomination process has slipped. But the Democratic Leadership Council can count on plenty of assistance from mainstream news media.

     For several years leading up to 1992, the DLC curried favor with high-profile political journalists as they repeated the mantra that the Democratic Party needed to be centrist. Co-founded by Clinton in the mid-1980s, the DLC emphasized catering to “middle class” Americans — while the organization filled its coffers with funding from such non-middle-class bastions as the top echelons of corporate outfits like Arco, Prudential-Bache, Dow Chemical, Georgia Pacific and Martin Marietta.

I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I’d rather not see my prediction come true and I don’t think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. If this thing turns into Vietnam simply because that man is too vain and arrogant to admit that Gen. Eric Shinseki was right when he said we would need “several hundred thousand soldiers” over there, I hope Rumsfeld rots in a hell worse than the one he’s making.

Now is not the time to stand back timidly hoping it will work out well in the end. The population of Baghdad is broiling through the 115-degree summer without electricity or water for much of the time. Given the background poverty and generally hideous conditions, the place is a major riot waiting to happen.

     We’re living in an era when news coverage often involves plenty of absurdity.

     That’s the case with routine U.S. media spin about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So, on the July 29 edition of NPR’s “All Things Considered” program, host Robert Siegel and correspondent Vicky O’Hara each recited scripts referring to a “security barrier” that Israel’s government is building in the West Bank. The next day, many news outlets -- including the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and The Associated Press -- also used the “security barrier” phrase without quotation marks, treating it as an objective description rather than the Israeli government’s preferred characterization.

            AUSTIN, Texas -- Oh great, now we have a bunch of Texas Democrats hiding out in Albuquerque (which is very difficult to spell), and I'm here holding the bag, trying to explain what this particular spate of lunacy in our state is all about. Spare me, Lord.

            OK, if I really have to do this deal ... see if you can think back to when you were a kid -- 5, 6, 7 -- and you were always getting blamed for something one of your siblings had done, or you didn't mean to knock over something but your old man whopped you for it anyway.

            The classic cry from the heart is, "BUT IT'S NOT FAIR!" Naturally, further on down the line, all of us experience some variant of John F. Kennedy's observation that "life is not fair." Exactly when, where and under what circumstances we give up on expecting life to be fair obviously varies from cancer to KIA to divorce to other of life's more malicious surprises.

In the glow of the Iraq war's initial military success, most American peace activists felt profoundly demoralized. Between the war's portrayal as a glamorous spectacle and Bush's seemingly overwhelming support, many who'd recently marched by the millions felt isolated, defensive, and powerless, fearing their voices no longer mattered.