Op-Ed

AUSTIN, Texas -- Food fight! Here's a beauty: to vote or not to vote, to favor or not to favor the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill?

        Theoretically, everybody's in favor of a plan to help senior citizens with prescription drug costs, which are truly appalling. Many seniors literally have to choose between their meds or food. Everyone agrees it's awful -- the question is whether the bills currently in the House and Senate are actually an improvement.  

       Those of you who make up your minds based on the if-he's-for-it, I'm-against-it method (quite a few people seem to be doing that these days) are in deep doo-doo on this one. True, Ted Kennedy is for it, and The Wall Street Journal is against it. On the other hand, the White House is for it, and pretty much everyone on the left except Kennedy is against it. The press is helpfully wringing its hands and announcing, "This is soooo complicated."

Early summer has brought a flurry of public discussion about a topic previously confined to political margins -- the possibility of impeaching President George W. Bush. The idea is still far from the national media echo chamber, but some rumblings are now audible as people begin to think about the almost unthinkable.

A few generations of Americans are apt to view impeachment as an extreme step. One factor has been John F. Kennedy's widely read 1956 book "Profiles in Courage," which captured a Pulitzer Prize. The book devoted a chapter to lauding Sen. Edmund G. Ross of Kansas, whose "not guilty" vote prevented the Senate from convicting an impeached president, Andrew Johnson, on May 26, 1868.

In real life, Ross -- who promptly put the squeeze on President Johnson for a series of patronage appointments -- was hardly the idealist that Kennedy's book cracked him up to be. But the chapter's melodrama popularized a negative image of impeachment.

            AUSTIN, Texas -- My, my, my, the great Iraqi Gold Rush is on, and who should be there at the front of the line, right along with Halliburton and Bechtel, but our old friends at WorldCom, perpetrator of the largest accounting fraud in American history.

            WorldCom, shortly to become MCI, has been given a contract worth $45 million in the short term to build a wireless phone network in Iraq. I learned via The Associated Press that Washington Technology, a trade newspaper that follows computing-related sales to the U.S. government, "found WorldCom jumped to eighth among all federal technology contractors in 2002, with $772 million in government sales." And that is only counting the deals in which WorldCom is the primary contractor. It is actually getting much more as a subcontractor.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Watching some dipstick the other day on Fox News carry on with great certainty about Hillary Clinton and her evil motives -- and I don't think this guy actually spends a lot of time tete a tete with Mrs. Clinton while she reveals her deepest thoughts to him -- I wondered, "Lord, when are these people going to get over it?"

            I think the answer is never, because most people have a very hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged. I know that's sort of counterintuitive, but think about some of the bad divorces you have known. When we have done something terrible to someone, we often need to twist it around so it's their fault, not ours.

            So we continue to suffer this deformity in our public life because of what Sid Blumenthal calls "this perverse episode," the scoundrel time.

In a democracy, leaders must earn and retain the public's trust. No matter how loudly those leaders proclaim their dedication to fighting terrorism, we must not flinch from examining whether they are trustworthy.

On March 17, 2003, in a major address to the American people, President George W. Bush declared: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." On April 10, in a televised message to the people of Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair said: "We did not want this war. But in refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam gave us no choice but to act."

Before and during the war on Iraq, we heard many other such statements from top officials in Washington and London. Ostensibly they justified the war.

LONDON -- The people of Britain and the United States are living in parallel, yet substantively different, media universes. Bonds of language and overlaps of mass culture are obvious. But a visit to London quickly illuminates the reality that mainstream journalism is much less narrow here than in America.

One indicator of a robust press: Nearly a dozen ideologically diverse national daily papers are competing on British newsstands.

Granted, the picture isn't all rosy. Tabloids feature lurid crime headlines and include exploitive photos of bare-breasted women. Several major newspapers reflect the distorting effects of right-wing owners like Rupert Murdoch (who has succeeded in foisting the execrable Fox News on the United States). And the circulation figures of Britain's dailies show that the size of press runs is inversely proportional to journalistic quality, with the Sun at 3.5 million and the Daily Mail at 2.3 million -- in contrast to two superb dailies, the Guardian (381,000) and the Independent (186,000).

AUSTIN, Texas -- In the "physician, heal thyself" department, please note the response of White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer to a bulletin from North Korea that said: "The intention to build up a nuclear deterrent is not aimed to threaten and blackmail others, but to reduce conventional weapons. North Korea hopes to channel manpower resources and funds into economic construction and the betterment of people's living."

Fleischer piously replied: "Perhaps from this glimpse of North Korea acknowledging that its own people suffer as a result of North Korea's policies, it will help North Korea to now make the right decisions. And the right decisions are to put their people first, to feed their people, to get health care to their people ..."

AUSTIN -- Remember the guy in "The Graduate" who tells Dustin Hoffman, with heavy emphasis, "Plastics"? This column is sort of in the same vein. Psst, kids, there's money in wind. If I were a fresh graduate looking for something useful and profitable to do with my life, I'd sure take a close look at windpower.

            The American Wind Energy Association recently met in Austin, and danged if there aren't over 500 businesses involved, and vendors with high-tech booths and all that good trade show stuff. As they say on Wall Street, there's been "solid growth" in the wind biz. Naturally, the United States is lagging behind Denmark, et al, but even so, this thing is ginnin'. This will be huge.

            According to the Wind Energy Association, they expect the industry to grow by 25 percent in 2003, moving from the current production of 4,700 megawatts to 6,000 megawatts (enough to serve 1,500,000 homes).

            AUSTIN, Texas -- "I said you were a man of peace. I want you to know I took immense crap for that." George W. Bush, diplomat extraordinaire, to Ariel Sharon, The Washington Post, June 3, 2003.

            The effort to find peace in the Middle East is something on which all Americans can support the president, whether we think he knows what he's doing or not. He has recently been getting some criticism for letting his religious beliefs into the process. According to the New Yorker, he told Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: "I think God loves me. I think God loves the Palestinians. I think God loves the Israelis. We cannot allow this to continue." This is good news: It seems to me Bush's attention span is longer and more focused when his religious convictions are involved.

  By now, millions of Americans are sick and tired of the spam that's flooding their in-boxes with unwanted e-mail messages -- mostly offering products, services and scams that tell of big bargains, implausible windfalls, garish porno and dumb scenarios for bodily enhancements. In 2003, we're routinely slogging through large amounts of junk e-mail.

     These are aggressive advertisements that won't quit. They're doing a lot to pollute the Internet environment.

     Various technological and legal remedies have been developed. Filters on e-mail programs can screen messages. Some servers try to limit mass e-mailings. Legislators propose crackdowns on spamsters. But many of the proposed "cures" are apt to damage cyberspace more than improve it.