Op-Ed

AUSTIN, Texas -- OK, sign me up for the Bush program. I'm aboard. Who else can we insult, offend, bribe, blackmail, threaten, intimidate, wiretap or otherwise infuriate? Getting the Canadians, who are famous for their phlegm, seriously mad at us took real work. Our latest ploy in that direction was to contemptuously reject their compromise that had a few more days' delay in it than the British-U.S. version. Then, when our version didn't fly, we decided on a few more days' delay ourselves -- without, of course, the contempt.

Then, to add to the festivities of "Let's Tick Off the Next-Door Neighbors Week," we started leaning on Vicente Fox of Mexico. Our ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, said: "Will American attitudes be placated by half-steps or three-quarter steps? I kind of doubt it." An unnamed American "diplomat" was quoted as saying it could "stir up feelings" here if Mexico voted against us, and does Mexico "want to stir the fires of jingoism during a war?"

AUSTIN, Texas -- After every military engagement, the Pentagon conducts a review to discover what they did right, what they did wrong, what worked and what didn't. It is an admirable tradition and one that needs to be copied by the profession of journalism.

According to a poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS, 42 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein of Iraq was personally responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center, something that has never even been claimed by the Bush administration. According to a poll conducted by ABC, 55 percent believes Saddam Hussein gives direct support to Al Qaeda, a claim that has been made by the administration but for which no evidence has ever been presented. President Bush has lately modified the claim to "Al Qaeda-type" organizations. This is how well journalism has done its job in the months leading up to this war. A disgraceful performance.

Ambrose Bierce, the 19th century cynic, once observed that war is God's way of teaching Americans geography. Going to war with the people in such a state, not of ignorance but of misinformation, is truly terrifying.

Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers."

The key word is "timely." Publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg's heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had already been underway for many years. But with all-out war on Iraq still in the future, the leak about spying at the United Nations could erode the Bush administration's already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council.

AUSTIN -- Texas, Our Texas, all hail the mighty state! Gov. Goodhair Perry has promised to use $10 million of state money to help map the bovine genome, the genetic code of a cow, a project to be carried out at Baylor and Texas A&M. Through a bureaucratic fubar, the Texas Department of Health failed to spend $12.5 million of the money it had budgeted to take care of the most desperately ill poor children in this state. Children with cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, spina bifida and heart problems were put on a waiting list -- 1,400 of them -- because the department thought the program was about to go broke.

As Clay Robison of the Houston Chronicle pointed out in a fine column, this should have been a no-brainer. Great, we've got 12.5 more than we thought we had for desperately ill children. Hurray!

Only in Columbus. A thoughtful peace resolution is put forth by Columbus City Councilperson Charleta Tavares -- and if she hadn't withdrawn it for lack of support on Monday, February 24 -- Columbus would have joined 109 other U.S. cities advocating a peaceful diplomatic solution to the Bush administration's planned slaughter of up to 700,000 Iraqis.

Chicago passed the resolution 54-1, Cleveland had no problem, but in Columbus, WTVN radio, offering all-the-Bush-propaganda-all-the-time, instigated a letter writing campaign to City Council against the resolution. Tavares called it the most ìuncivil" letters ever to flood into Council chambers. The opposition took their cue from the so-called ìpreppie rioters" who aided the Bush family in stealing the 2000 presidential election using threats, intimidation and outright violence to halt the vote count in Florida.

AUSTIN, Texas -- As we wend our weary way toward war, dragging the Turks -- whose price will be our betrayal of the Kurds (fourth time we've double-crossed Kurds, counting Henry Kissinger's triple-cross only once) -- it reminds me of the end of a bad election. Don't believe anything until it's over.

Now is the time we get Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti babies from incubators and other mind-boggling myths presented as reality. The Guardian is reporting this morning that the United States is wiretapping foreign delegations to the U.N. Security Council, and the worst thing about it is that no one is surprised.

You gotta hand it to America's mass media: When war hangs in the balance, they sure know how to bury a story.

After devoting thousands of network hours and oceans of ink to stories about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, major U.S. news outlets did little but yawn in the days after the latest Newsweek published an exclusive report on the subject -- a piece headlined "The Defector's Secrets."

It's hard to imagine how any journalist on the war beat could read the article's lead without doing a double take: "Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them."

AUSTIN, Texas -- When we need a laugh in grim times, we count on our Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Whoopi Goldberg of the Bush administration. This week, Ashcroft took time off from tracking down terrorists in order to bust 55 people for selling for selling rolling papers, pipes and other drug paraphernalia. Nice to see a man who's got his priorities straight.

Onward. Let's review the bidding on North Korea. "Review the bidding" is a bridge term for "how the hell did we get into this mess?" In 1994, the Clinton administration came to something called the Agreed Framework with North Korea, under which Pyongyang agreed to put its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods -- which can be easily converted into weapons-grade plutonium -- into storage, watched over by U.N. inspectors and cameras. In return, they were supposed to get two light-water nuclear reactors and economic and diplomatic relations.

AUSTIN, Texas -- You ain't no John Snow when it comes to pensions. Snow, our new treasury secretary, was CEO of the railroad company CSX Corp. and got a platinum parachute when he bailed. He gets $2.47 million a year for life in retirement benefits. This package was based on the premise that he'd worked for the company for 44 years, even though he'd been there only 25. Now that's creative accounting.

Plus, CSX decided to let him factor in the stock benefits he had received as regular income, instead of just salary, as is normally done. At the same time CSX was giving Snow this lovely deal, it was cutting the health benefits in its retirement plan for lesser workers. Since Secretary Snow is now in charge of pension policy at the Treasury, can we look forward to similar deals for ourselves? Nope, we're in the class that gets the cuts.

President Bush's disparaging remarks yesterday can be found in the headlines of the major cities around the world. This (in and of itself) works great and unexpected wonders as he and the people around him have very nicely legitimized the peace movement. Simple analysis would confirm that matters of irrelevancy simply present no reason for comment (not to mention formal comment with the full power of media at ones' disposal). This administration (in concert with British counterparts) have breathed beautiful life into a large and growing movement. We must seize the opportunities afforded. the nerves of arrogant and insecure leaders have been exposed the light of a common peaceful vision by many people who will not be dissuaded by a campaign of fear or efforts to influence public opinion by the dissemination filtered information to evoke false emotions. This phenomenon has moved the president to call for us to react with social conscience and should compel us to turn up the already searing hot heat as we advocate decency and peace.

Rarely do we receive such engraved invitations. I'm hungry, how about you? Let's eat.