Duty to Warn

My nomination for Man of the Year in 2005 is Patrick Fitzgerald. Anyone who could flush out a sleazy journalist like Judy Miller and toss her in jail without blinking an eye gets my vote. More significantly, though, it was only after Fitzgerald’s tenacious investigation that the media woke from its stupor and discovered that the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity was more than just another Washington scandal – which is where they seemed happy to leave it. So we began reading about – get this now --possible attempts by the Bush administration to dissemble, deceive and distort, as they “fixed the intelligence” to sell the Iraq war to Congress and the American people. It’s clear that Fitzgerald’s dogged efforts had that hard-to-define tipping effect, where what had been obvious all along, but was being ignored for lack of momentum, suddenly gets new life.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The governor of Texas is despicable. Of all the crass pandering, of all the gross political kowtowing to ignorance, we haven't seen anything this rank from Gov. Goodhair since, gee, last fall.

Then, he was trying to draw attention away from his spectacular failure on public schools by convincing Texans that gay marriage was a horrible threat to us all. Now, he's trying to disguise the fact that the schools are in freefall by proposing we teach creationism in biology classes.

The funding of the whole school system is so unfair it has been declared unconstitutional by the Texas Supreme Court. All last year, Perry haplessly called special session after special session, trying to fix the problem, and couldn't get anywhere -- not an iota, not a scintilla of leadership.

Instead of facing the grave crisis that may yet result in the schools being closed down, Perry has blithely gone off on creationism -- teach the little perishers the Earth is 6,000 years old, that people lived at the same time as dinosaurs and who cares if the school building is falling apart?

What do we make of the President boldly proclaiming that he has “spy powers?” Does he have X-ray vision too?

When he and his cronies crawl up into Cheney’s bunker with the sign on the door “He-man Woman-haters Club. No Girls Allowed (except Condi),” do they synchronize their spy decoder rings and decide what new absurd folly to unleash on the world?

Illegal invasion of Iraq, suspending writs of habeus corpus, secret CIA torture dungeons, or election rigging? Most people outgrow such childish games and fantasies by the time they’re ten years old. And by age twelve, most understand that the President is not a king. Or a dictator. That U.S. citizens have inalienable rights.

That there are such things as search warrants. If the executive branch of government is going to conduct surveillance on the American people, they have to get a warrant from the judicial branch specifying what they’re looking for and the reasons for the search.

A town hall forum hosted by Congressman Jim Moran and featuring Congressman Jack Murtha packed a large room in Arlington, Va., Thursday evening, and filled an overflow room, and had to turn away another 500 people. The media was well represented.

Both Moran and Murtha spoke strongly in support of ending the war as quickly as possible and pulling all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Murtha complained repeatedly that the Bush Administration contributes only "rhetoric" and no "substance" to this debate.

"Sixty to eighty percent of Iraqis want us out," Murtha said. "And 45 pecent say it's justified to kill Americans. The State Department's own polls say the same thing. It's time to let Iraqis take over this effort. Let them solve their own problems, as we did in the revolutionary war."

"A number of senators running for president called me," Murtha added. "I told them there were two policies. One is redeployment. The other is the President's 'stay the course.' And they're in between. I told them they're missing an opportunity to show leadership. They're so hesitant to take a position."

Next Monday the mail will stop, the banks will close, and schoolchildren will delight in an extra long weekend all in honor of Martin Luther King, a man whose legacy the lessons of which Americans seem slowly to be forgetting.

Network news programs will show footage of King "the slain civil rights leader" telling the world from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 of his dream of racial harmony. Viewers will be reminded of King the great and nonviolent warrior fighting Bible in one hand and Constitution in the other against desegregation and for voting rights in Jim Crow Alabama. And the obligatory sixty-second homage to this great man on his national day will conclude with the familiar images of King lying dead on a motel balcony in Memphis.

With Ariel Sharon out of the picture, Benjamin Netanyahu has a better chance to become prime minister of Israel.

He’s media savvy. He knows how to spin on American television. And he’s very dangerous.

Netanyahu spent a lot of his early years in the United States. Later, during the 1980s, he worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and then became Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. By the time he moved up to deputy foreign minister in 1988, he was a star on U.S. networks.

The guy is smooth -- fluent in American idioms, telegenic to many eyes -- and good at lying on camera. So, when Israeli police killed 17 Palestinians at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in October 1990, Netanyahu led a disinformation blitz asserting that the Palestinians were killed after they’d rioted and pelted Jewish worshipers from above the Wailing Wall with huge stones. At the time, his fable dominated much of the U.S. media. Later even the official Israeli inquiry debunked Netanyahu’s account and blamed police for starting the clash.

AUSTIN -- We live in a great nation. The police blotter of the Mill Valley Herald in California informs us that the constabulary there had to be called out on account of a citizen "dressed like a penguin" who was "standing on a street corner playing a ukulele." Makes me proud to be an American.

What does not make me proud to be an American is a specific twist in the Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay scandal -- in fact, this makes me want to urp despite the fact that I have a strong stomach when it comes to political corruption. Practice, practice, practice, that's what Texas provides when it comes to sleaze and stink. Who can forget such great explanations as "Well, I'll just make a little bit of money, I won't make a whole lot"? And "There was never a Bible in the room"?

The minority of Americans who support the war largely do so out of a sense of responsibility to Iraqis.  They favor reconstruction and restoration as well as ongoing occupation.  And most of the majority who favor ending the war support the financing of reconstruction, which – after all – costs less than war.  Reconstruction seems to be something we generally agree on.

Of course, very little reconstruction has been done or appears likely to be done, and recent reports are that the Bush Administration doesn't want any more money for it – having spent most of the money already allocated for reconstruction on other things.

So, I was disgusted to see a website called www.nationalreferendum.org promoting rebuilding New Orleans with payments from Iraqis.  We invaded their country, killed 100,000 people, left the place a wreck, and neglected our own cities – so they should pay us?

It gets worse.