Duty to Warn

For the third time in  US history, the wife of the president must step forward and assume the powers of the office. We therefore plead with Laura Bush to take over the reins of the White House at this most crucial and dangerous moment. Such a radical step is warranted when the president himself is mentally incapable of handling the job. It happened when Edith Wilson took over for her husband Woodrow, who suffered a stroke. It happened again when Nancy Reagan took over from her husband Ronald, who may have been in the preliminary stages of Alzheimer's disease. It has now happened again, as Laura Bush must take over from her husband George, who is clearly delusional and may be in a manic state involving alcohol, Xanax or other drugs.  

AUSTIN, Texas -- Q: What is the country most likely to supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorists?

A: Russia.

As he pushes ahead with war plans, President Bush is also exploiting the national preoccupation with the war by trying to pass a gigantic new tax cut. The Bush tax package includes $700 billion in new cuts, and a total revenue reduction of more than $2 trillion over the next ten years.* These cuts will primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans.

With the imminent start of war, we know this is a hard time to focus on anything else. But because you've been one of our most active members, we hope you can find a moment to make two calls today. The Senate vote on the Bush tax plan could come as soon as today, Tuesday, March 18th.

The AFL-CIO has generously provided a toll-free number. Please call both of your Senators now, at:

1-888-280-6279

If that number is busy, please call your Senators directly, at:

Senator Durbin
DC Phone: 202-224-2152

Senator Fitzgerald
DC Phone: 202-224-2854

Make sure the staffers know you're a constituent. Then urge your Senators to:

"Please OPPOSE the President's tax cut package. We simply can't afford it."

It’s time for U.S. citizens to demand that President George W. Bush’s cabinet invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment and remove him from office. By a majority vote of the cabinet and the Vice President, transmitted in writing to both the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the President may be declared “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Increasingly, journalists are willing to admit that the cognitively-impaired President may indeed be mentally ill.

What would drive a President who lost an election by over half a million votes to attack the arch-enemy of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, rather than to pursue the 9-11 terrorists in the Al Qaeda network? What would cause a President to ignore his generals, his own intelligence agencies, the major religious leaders of the world and the vast majority of the world’s people in pursuing an unnecessary and destabilizing war that is likely to plunge the world into chaos for the next hundred years?

dance contest
in the growing absence
of ceremony and ritual.

driven by icons and marketing
toward a state of apathy
we are faced with
way too many choices
many finding they are unable
to choose at all

as the storm clouds gather
an inhumane political agenda
falsely projected by those
who would divide and isolate us
from each other
and all of us
from the rest of the world

instilling fear.
those who would have
and use it all
continue encouraging us
to sit this one out
consistently inviting us.
to remain silent

in the growing absence
of ceremony and ritual.

let's dance.

As the possibility of a U.S. invasion turns into the reality of massive carnage, the war on Iraq cannot avoid confronting Americans with a tacit expectation that rarely gets media scrutiny. In a word: obedience.

When a country -- particularly "a democracy" -- goes to war, the passive consent of the governed lubricates the machinery of slaughter. Silence is a key form of cooperation, but the war-making system does not insist on quietude or agreement. Mere passivity or self-restraint will suffice to keep the missiles flying, the bombs exploding and the faraway people dying.

On the home front, beliefs are of scant importance. Antiwar sentiment is necessary but insufficient to halt a war. Much more is needed than expressions of dissent that stay within the customary bounds.

Daily media speculation about the starting date for all-out war on Iraq has contributed to widespread passivity -- a kind of spectator relationship to military actions being implemented in our names.

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!