Duty to Warn

"Sarah,  if the people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets  and lynched."
-- Bush 41 to reporter Sarah McClendon, Dec. 1992

It's an amazing thing. Doctors' offices in New York and Washington will likely be standing-room-only in a couple of months. I can see it now -- the look on a nurse's face when she asks the vacuous, target-eyed media twits when they are "due," and each one chirps happily, "May 25th!" As she comes to the end of the line, the nurse notices a slender, auburn-haired woman fast asleep, her lips slightly open in a half-smile. She is snoring gently.

Hesitating to awaken her, the nurse spies a blonde whom she recognizes as CNN's "White House" correspondent, Dana Bash, "What about her?" the nurse asks Bash, pointing to the woman. "Is she due on May 25th too?"

COLUMBUS -- The shock waves from Ohio Governor Bob Taft's no contest plea to four misdemeanor ethics violations have turned this state's politics upside down. They also have direct roots in the stolen election of 2004.

Ohio's "Mr. Clean" governor has been forced to admit he took gratis golf games and other insider graft and goodies. His tearful no contest plea led to a nominal fine where lesser public figures could have gotten substantial jail time. Taft faced up to two years in jail.

A spectrum of liberal responses to Cindy Sheehan has come into sharper focus.

The message is often anti-Bush... but not necessarily anti-war.

Frank Rich spun out his particular style of triangulation in the New York Times on Aug. 28. While deriding President Bush's stay-the-course stance, Rich also felt a need to disparage the most visible advocate for quick withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Putting down Sheehan -- and, by implication, the one-third of the U.S. public that wants all American troops to exit Iraq without delay -- Rich's column mocked "her bumper-sticker politics" and "the slick left-wing political operatives who have turned her into a circus."

Rich criticized "the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place." Yet, in effect, he was willing to help rubber-stamp continuation of the "misadventure" in the present tense.

The president, Rich lamented, "pretends that the only alternative to his reckless conduct of the war is Ms. Sheehan's equally apocalyptic retreat."

AUSTIN -- Seems like every year at the end of summer there's this sense of coming back from somewhere, whether we've gone anywhere or not. Whatever the summer pattern is -- a swim, the kids, a stroll --- it's as though we sort of blink and there's the world again, still there. Very much still there.

I suppose if you're George W. Bush, the world never does go away no matter how long you spend on vacation; it just sort of camps at the end of your driveway like Cindy Sheehan. Those of us who study politics and the media got to watch Cindy Sheehan being slimed by the right-wing attack machine -- hey, no free passes just because you're a mom whose kid was killed in Iraq. We also get to watch left-wing PR people exploit her grief, because you can't even be for peace without public relations anymore. This is The World, after all.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The trouble with deregulation is that it always takes some disaster like Enron before we realize there was a reason for the regulation to begin with.

We are about to repeat one of the huge mistakes of the 1920s and '30s because we have forgotten why PUHCA (pronounced Pooka) was instituted in the first place. PUHCA is the Public Utility Holding Company Act, passed in 1935, which prevents concentration of ownership of power plants. Both the House and Senate versions of the energy bill contain a repeal of PUHCA.

As Kelpie Wilson pointed out in article for Truthout, "For 50 years we have had reliable, cheap electric power that has allowed strong economic growth, and no PUHCA-regulated energy holding company has ever gone broke."

PUHCA was partially repealed in the '90s, and even that much deregulation was part of what led to Enron, Westar and other slight mishaps.

PUHCA puts utilities under strict regulation by both state and federal governments. It restricts ownership of utilities to public or private companies that are in the business of producing power.

What truly frightens governments sending their citizens off to war is mutiny or the threat of mutiny. It was soldiers shooting their officers and sailors pushing planes off aircraft carriers that prompted the Pentagon to run up the white flag in Vietnam. Along that same spectrum are draft resistance and the refusal to go to war. Already, amid the soaring unpopularity of the war in Iraq, they have had an effect. The Pentagon says the reserve system is in ruins.

Gold Star mothers like Cindy Sheehan could be leading sit-ins at military recruitment offices across the country and in the home district congressional offices of Democrats and Republicans. How about Sheehan moving Camp Casey from Crawford, Texas, to Sen. Hillary Clinton's offices in Washington or New York? Only this time the demand would not be for a meeting but for a reversal of HRC's pro-war position, which has her putting up a bill to increase U.S. forces overall by 90,000.

For a long time, the last refuge of scoundrels was “patriotism.” Now it’s “the war on terror.”

President Bush and many of his vocal supporters aren’t content to wrap themselves in the flag. It’s not sufficient to posture as more patriotic than opponents of the Iraq war. The ultimate demagogic weapon is to exploit the memory of Sept. 11, 2001.

The fourth anniversary will provide the Bush administration with plenty of media opportunities to wrap itself in the 9/11 shroud and depict Iraq war critics as insufficiently committed to defending the United States. A renewed attempt to justify the war as a resolute stand against terrorism is well underway.

Crawford, Texas - Celebrity bike champ Lance Armstrong joined President George W. Bush this weekend at the Crawford Ranch to celebrate the thirtieth day of the President's vigil against Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in action in Iraq.

Armstrong, fresh from his victory in the Tour De France, is seen here with Mr. Bush riding across the symbolic gravesite of Casey Sheehan, deceased Army specialist, son of the bereaved Mrs. Sheehan.

"We must stay the course," said a resolute Mr. Bush who vowed to "extend my vacation as long as necessary to accomplish this mission" and force Sheehan to give up her siege of the Western White House.

Armstrong set an upbeat tone when he said, "You know, I overcame cancer to become a hot-shot biker. It takes hard work and a belief in yourself that says, "Never give up, never say 'die.'"

The fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 will soon be upon us. There will be no one whose memory of that terrible blue-sky morning will rest.

Some will grieve for their personal loss, on that day or in the wars that followed. This is their day, these mourners, more so than it is ours. Someone they loved was robbed of life, far sooner than imagined possible.

The rest of us will, in our own way and time, reflect on the events of that day, and on what seems a lifetime of events since. Many will anger at how their grief was misled to war. Many others will swell with pride, for our troops, and for our president.

And in Washington D.C., our Defense Department will hold an “America Supports You Freedom Walk”, billed as “a tribute to the victims of September 11 and to the past and present military members who have defended freedom.” In “remembrance and support”, marchers will walk from the Pentagon to the National Mall, where, immediately following, country singer and songwriter Clint Black will hold a free concert, presumably performing his song “I Raq and Roll”.

The Bush administration may ratchet up the Iraq war.

That might seem unlikely, even farfetched. After all, the president is facing an upsurge of domestic opposition to the war. Under such circumstances, why would he escalate it?

A big ongoing factor is that George W. Bush and his top aides seem to believe in red-white-and-blue violence with a fervor akin to religiosity. For them, the Pentagon’s capacity to destroy is some kind of sacrament. And even if more troops aren’t readily available for duty in Iraq, huge supplies of aircraft and missiles are available to step up the killing from the air.

Back in the USA, while the growth of antiwar sentiment is apparent, much of the criticism -- especially what’s spotlighted in news media -- is based on distress that American casualties are continuing without any semblance of victory. In effect, many commentators see the problem as a grievous failure to kill enough of the bad guys in Iraq and sufficiently intimidate the rest.