Op-Ed

Listeners don't get much news these days if they tune into commercial radio stations. Coverage of national and global events is scant at best, while local news -- once the pride of many AM radio stations -- is now an endangered species. The remaining community news is usually the "rip and read" variety from wire services.

But let's give credit where it's due. In the United States, thousands of radio outlets are doing a good job of gathering one particular type of news. The coverage is often meticulous and dependable as stations devote substantial resources to providing reliable up-to-the-minute information: If you want the latest news about traffic, in all kinds of weather, turn on the radio.

Using an array of helicopters, mobile phones and other assorted information relay systems, radio stations keep listeners posted on vehicular fender-benders, glitches, snarls and alternative routes. Where I live, a local "all news" CBS affiliate -- owned by the giant Infinity broadcasting conglomerate -- hypes "traffic and weather together" every 10 minutes, round the clock. And the quality of the traffic reports is impressive.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Judge William Wayne Justice, the man who brought the U.S. Constitution to Texas for 30 years, is retired. That makes a lot of stupid clods happy, including most in the Legislature, since they have never forgiven Justice for desegregating the schools. But the rest of us lost a towering public figure, a man whose record on the bench is so magnificent and whose personal conduct is so irreproachable that he is, verily, a secular saint.

(That'll cause him to choke on his coffee. Modesty is one of his many virtues.)

I know it's a painfully obvious point, but if ever a man lived up to his name, William Wayne Justice does. His decisions have changed our racial relations, our prisons and our juvenile detention facilities, improved the ability of a poor man to get justice, and given us "one man, one vote" in our elections, and that's just a small part of the record.

Justice is so revered in the world of the law that as a designated iconoclast, I naturally feel called upon to puncture his reputation. Personally, I think his single greatest trait is the ability to listen to poisonous piffle with a straight face.

Ever since the U.N. Security Council adopted its resolution about Iraq on Nov. 8, American politicians and journalists have been hailing the unanimous vote as a huge victory for international cooperation instead of unilateral action.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was close to ecstatic. "For a brief, shining moment last Friday," he wrote, "the world didn't seem like such a crazy place." The United Nations had proven its worth -- by proving its value to Washington. Among the benefits: "The Bush team discovered that the best way to legitimize its overwhelming might -- in a war of choice -- was not by simply imposing it, but by channeling it through the U.N."

But if the United Nations, serving as a conduit of American power, is now worthwhile because it offers the best way for the United States to "legitimize its overwhelming might," how different is that from unilateralism?

AUSTIN, Texas -- Readin' the newspapers anymore is eerily reminiscent of all those bad novels warning of the advent of fascism in America. "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis was a bad book, and the genre shades off into right-wing paranoia about black helicopters, including the memorably awful "Turner Diaries." I don't use the f-word myself -- in fact, for years, I've made fun of liberals who hear the approach of jackbooted fascism around every corner. But to quote a real authority on the subject, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini.

Paul Krugman recently quoted "the quite apolitical website Corporate Governance, which matter-of-factly remarks, ‘Given the power of corporate lobbyists, government control often equates to de facto corporate control anyway.'" It's gettin' downright creepy out there.

The most hair-raising news du jour is about Total Information Awareness, a giant government computer spy system being set up to spy on Americans and run by none other than John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Osama bin Laden is back, and no one gives a damn? What is this??!! The White House spokesman announced, "This is about more than one man." The president now says it "really doesn't matter much" if bin Laden is dead or alive. This is the same president who promised to bring him back "dead or alive," isn't it?

Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post dismissed bin Laden as "a blast from the past." Well, that was a helluva blast, Howard, and I for one haven't forgotten it. I want that son of a bitch dead or alive, and I want him getting him to be this country's top priority in terms of enemies.

Maybe they're downplaying bin Laden because he's so hard to get. I can understand that. It was always more of a complicated international police operation than a matter of bombing poor Afghanistan. But we knew going in that it was "a different kind of war" and that we were in it for the long haul. The one thing I never expected was that we'd just drop the whole thing.

In a Sunday, September 17 Dispatch story, the paper sadly noted in their lead that “a spot on this top 10 list doesn’t necessary earn a university bragging rights.” What could the Dispatch be lamenting? OSU being named by Playboy as a “party” school? Hardly. It was, oh the shame, the fact that Mother Jones Magazine had listed The Ohio State University as one of the “Top 10 Activist Campuses.”

Hell, the Dispatch should’ve been proud that Buckeye students were ranked number 6. Sure beats last year’s 6-6 football team. The muck-raking magazine lauded campus activists for picketing and “successfully halt[ing] construction at Ohio Stadium for a day during the recent strike by the Communication Workers of America.”

The United Nations Security Council (UN) in all its pompous and hypocritical glory passed Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002. The resolution endorses unrestricted access by weapons inspectors to any sites in Iraq and “…warns Iraq that it will face serious consequences” for failure to comply. The next day 1200 anti-war activists rallied at the Ohio Statehouse, many pledging to refuse and resist, and some vowing to oppose this war by any means necessary.

And here’s the reason why: the one country in the world that Resolution 1441 is most applicable to is George Bush’s United States of America. Bush the Lesser, a victim of “dry-drunk syndrome,” told an invitation-only audience of Fourth Reich fanatics in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 7, 2002 that Iraq posed “clear evidence of peril.” That very same day, CIA Director George Tenet wrote a letter to Congress refuting everything that Bush had told his adoring Deutschlanders.

Imagine that you're at the ceremonial opening of a time capsule, half a century after some forward-looking Americans sealed it during a multimedia festival just before Thanksgiving 2002.

It's now late autumn in the year 2052. Gathered around a canister, the onlookers stare at the rusty container while someone punctures the metal top. Inside, through the stale air, they watch as symbols of early 21st-century media emerge from the past.

There's a desktop PC, a palm computer and a cell phone -- evidently selected back in 2002 to symbolize the high-tech achievements of the era. Now, as might be expected, those once-cutting-edge products look crude, even a bit pathetic -- kind of like an old black-and-white TV would have seemed to people at the turn of the century.

Also pulled from the dust are samples of long-forgotten movies and music videos: best sellers in their day. Someone cranks up a pair of ancient machines capable of playing videotapes and DVDs. The crowd is attentive. The faces of senior citizens betray the flickering of nostalgia; the young people cringe.

Freep Hero: U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV)

While most of the Senate Democrats sit idly by looking for their spines, Sen. Robert Byrd nearly single-handedly fights to protect the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights from the smiley-faced friendly-fascist assault by the Bushmen. Byrd also revealed on September 27 that government documents establish that the Reagan-Bush administration sent numerous shipments of biochemical agents to the government of Iraq. After U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said he had no knowledge of any U.S. shipments to Iraq, Byrd revealed that between 1985-88, the nonprofit American Type Culture Collection made eleven shipments to Iraq, with the government’s approval, of biological warfare pathogens. These include anthrax, botulinum toxin and gangrene. Also, between January 1980 and October 1983 the Federal Center for Disease Control shipped a variety of toxin specimens to Iraq including West Nile virus and Dengue Fever. The Center for Disease Control was forced to deny that the current outbreak of West Nile virus in the U.S. is linked to the shipments it made to Iraq.

Recently, U.S. President George W. Bush addressed your august assembly. Despite obtaining his office by what appeared to be a fraudulent coup and stealing the electoral votes of the state of Florida where his brother Jeb is governor, he did make one impressive point: “Our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions.”

The UN needs to realize that Bush’s statement is a Freudian slip – a self-confession about the real terrorist network that surrounds him in Washington, D.C.

On December 20, 1983, once and future Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Iraq to extend his hand of friendship to Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, then a private citizen was acting as a liaison for the Reagan-Bush administration. As we say in U.S. politics, they knew Saddam was a son-of-a-bitch, but we wanted him “as our son-of-a-bitch.” You know the history here – Somoza, Pappa Doc Duvalier, the Shah of Iran, Marcos, Franco. These are just a few of a long list of fascists and thugs employed by the U.S. to do its imperialist bidding.