Duty to Warn

SEATTLE -- What a gully-washer. What a frog-strangler. You ain't seen rain until you've seen record rain in Seattle. My wetness awareness has shot up thanks to this town. But next day, the sun came out -- and you could hardly tell the deluge had occurred.

            And so it is in our public life -- the finger of fate writes, and having writ, moves on, leaving today's horrendous scandal back there with the snows of yesteryear, while we all focus on The Latest.

            But there is one deception that will not go away. What happened to the weapons of mass destruction? "The intolerable reality is that they blatantly twisted intelligence information to fit preconceived policies," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. "They lied to promote public relations, from the Jessica Lynch ordeal to the president's campaign landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln --- and about what war would cost our country."

            "Before the war, week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

US Senator Robert Byrd, on the floor of Congress, on October 17, has explicitly compared the Bush media operation to that run by Herman Goering, mastermind of the Nazi putsch against the German people.

On the same day, the Associated Press ran a national story linking Prescott Bush to Adolf Hitler. The lead read: "President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power, government documents show."

That night, CNN ran a "streamer" on the bottom of its all-news programming confirming that "declassified documents show Prescott Bush connections to Nazi finance."

Stories reminding the public that the grandfather of George W. Bush and his United Trust Bank were cited by the US government in 1942 for helping Hitler under the Trading With the Enemies Act, have now spread widely through the major meda.

What's going on here? Are these stories linking Team Bush to the Nazis irrelevant? Mere partisan politics? Or do they indicate a growing public concern with what is actually happening in Washington?

My name is Michael O and I am a recovered alcoholic. I am also a progressive political activist. The two are not always compatible. It is a principle of personal recovery from the disease of alcoholism that I will cease fighting anybody or anything in order that I maintain the necessary level of spiritual serenity that keeps me from creating resentments and justifiable anger. Those two emotional states will lead me to drink. They are, as our experience has taught, the two most common emotional causes of relapses.

When I indulge in either of those two emotional states of mind, I am not rational. My perception is blurred by my own self-righteousness, which is driven by self-centered fear. That is not the right state of mind to live everyday life. Certainly not one by which to make decisions that affect all humankind. That is why I am writing.

AUSTIN, Texas -- What I like about the new radical, right-wing Republican takeover of this country is how easily they blow past all our defenses against deja-vu, they-all-do-it cynicism.

There you are -- thinking you're way too old and have been around this block too many times to suddenly up and evince moral outrage over a little callousness here or a dollop of favoritism there. Suddenly, you find yourself whomperjawed, outraged, stupefied with disbelief. A Girl Scout again, after all these years. It's enough to make me believe in that nutty fundamentalist theory about "secondary virginity," which claims you can become a virgin again even if you're not a virgin. I swan to goodness, these folks can indeed produce miracles.

My latest walking-on-water moment came whilst I was reading an Austin American-Statesman article about Brother Tom DeLay, now the second-most powerful man in America, right after Dick Cheney. It was a familiar story to those of us who follow DeLay (who is, he has said, hell-bent to "stand up for a Biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am.")

Midway through this month, a Wall Street Journal headline captured the flimflam spirit that infuses so much of what passes for mass communications these days: “Despite Slump, Students Flock to Ad Schools.” Many young people can recognize a growth industry, and the business of large-scale deception is booming.

     But if Madison Avenue makes us think of subliminal twists and brazen lies, then Pennsylvania Avenue should bring to mind a similar process of creating and perpetuating brand loyalty.

     “The Defense Department” is far from truth in labeling. But no player in Washington would suggest renaming it “the War Department,” any more than execs in charge of marketing Camels, Salems and Marlboros would advocate re-branding them with names like Cancer Sticks, Coffin Nails and Killer Leaf.

     As the department head, Donald Rumsfeld has gone through media ups and downs. Two years ago, he was riding high. Lately, his stock has dropped. Like every person, he’s expendable. Individuals are the easiest brand names to retire.

AUSTIN, Texas -- I'm a card-carrying member of The Great Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak kindly of Our Leader's record. As a group, we are making satisfying inroads on the best-seller lists, a merciful switch from the garboid right-wing cow-flops that have appeared there lately.

            Our points of view vary, our modes of attack differ -- some of us are funny and some somber -- but it continues to amaze me that there is so little overlap in what we have written. What's wrong with this administration is not a short list.

            Nevertheless, we are, one and all, being dismissed by right-wing media, with its unmistakable lockstep precision -- that everybody-singing-off-the-same-page that so distinguishes the right -- as "Bush haters." Not a radio call-in show goes by, not a right-wing host fails to mention (even when I try to pre-empt the charge) that I am "just another Bush hater."

Did bankrupt energy company Enron Corp. influence a controversial decision federal energy regulators made in November 2000, saying California wasn't entitled to more than $3 billion in refunds from power companies who allegedly gamed the state's wholesale electricity market?

About two dozen of the more than one million Enron emails dealing with California's energy crisis, recently released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, appear to make a strong case that the one-time high-flying energy company had some role in influencing the FERC decision three years ago--a major blow to California consumers and two of the state's investor-owned utilities that were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Utilities in California lost billions of dollars buying high-cost power on the wholesale market and selling it at a loss under a state mandated rate freeze.

It was in June that President Bush first began talking about “revisionist history”, a gambit that took some of us a little by surprise since he showed no previous signs of having read any history, revisionist or otherwise.   

  This was a little after he delayed the homecoming of several hundred American sailors by using their aircraft carrier to proclaim that the war was over.  But if the war was over, and the point was to be rid of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, why were no weapons of mass destruction found, not even at the sites the U.S. said it had identified? It was those who were impertinent enough to raise this question that the president accused of revisionist history.  

            There’s been a lot of revisionist history around lately, from the president, and from the Democrats who are trying to distance themselves from a war that they couldn’t support strongly enough less than a year ago.     

The unfortunate poor, uneducated, ghetto drug addicts get 25 years in “real jail”. People in real, chronic, severe pain that are tormented for life are in their own “society imposed jail” with no way to escape. And Rush Limbaugh gets to become a celebrity for getting caught, and turning his high powered Public Relations lawyers loose with the proper spin on Rush’s pitiful dilemma.  

CNN and many TV news reports have fallen far short on high quality reports by only reporting on Rush Limbaugh's side of his addiction problem.    

According to other sources Rush allegedly coerced and threatened his housekeeper to illegally obtain more than 4500 Oxycontin in 47 days. The implication from her is that he was in no apparent pain and was just a pill popper who liked the feeling (the rush) and didn’t mind risking being addicted.    

Now that California’s electorate has rewarded a dramatic recall effort, some sequels are likely elsewhere in the near future. It’s a good bet that political operatives in many states will try to learn from this fall’s Golden State extravaganza.

Media strategists were key to the recall drive that ended in triumph for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s savvy corporate backers. So, as a public service, here are some tips for any partisans who want a shot at spinning their way into recall history:

* Do your best to capitalize on smoldering resentments. Don’t bother to illuminate much about the actual underlying causes of social discontent. Try to use citizen outrage as bait to attract the support of talk-show hosts, pundits, ambitious politicians and well-heeled contributors.