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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: Apologies for the rerun, those of you who
have seen this elsewhere. I can offer in my defense only that I
think it needed a slightly larger audience.
"funny office suggestion box" "disagree give your life for your freedom of speech" "record cocks" "survey psycho-electronic technology" "who are some dictators?" "nography" "shoplifting in Minnesota" "inhaling Kool-Aid" |
09.23.2004
"Only those at the lowest rung of the ladder have so far been punished and the matter of what was actually happening within the interrogation rooms of Abu Ghraib has hardly been debated. The Iraqis know this, even if many Americans do not. Meanwhile the political damage to US interests in the world has been very great. According to the Schlesinger Report, 'There were five cases of detainee deaths as a result of abuse by U.S. personnel during interrogations...(t)here are 23 cases of detainee deaths still under investigation.' The words are blunt, though a writer less fond of euphemism might have put the matter even more plainly: 'American interrogators have tortured at least five prisoners to death.'" (Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books) A new report shows that law enforcement operatives performing security tests at American airports were able to smuggle weapons and bombs aboard with ridiculous ease (the weapons detection process was described as "bad enough", and bomb detection "absolutely horrendous"). I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that Bush decided from day one to fight the terror war on the cheap, insisting (against the opposition of people like Max Cleland, who paid for it with his political career) that the TSA branch of the new Department of Homeland Security be staffed with low-paid, unskilled, non-union workers. Additionally, all throughout the rest of the world, terrorism is at a global peak, with the number of incidents increasing every year since 2001. Everyone from the U.S. military command to the Senate to the people of Baghdad are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Iraq war was a poorly-planned, ill-thought-out, blindly executed mistake that is beginning to turn into a quagmire at best and a disaster at worst. Iran and North Korea are developing nuclear weapons if they don't have them already, and the tatters of our diplomatic corps sits on their hands. We respond to Islamist extremism by making the deportation of a washed-up pop star and a college professor a priority, suggesting that those who have accused the current administration of not knowing the difference between a normal Muslim and a fanatical terrorist have been right all along. We have no idea where Osama bin-Laden is or what he's doing, and the President, through smugness or indifference, doesn't seem to care. Of the two countries we 'liberated' from tyranny, one is largely back in the hands of tribal warlords, and the other's major export after oil is the decapitated bodies of foreigners. Israel is still locked in its stubborn, bloody-minded death spiral with the Palestinians. Our leaders champion us as the vanguard of democracy and freedom and justify the invasion of foreign countries as a step towards individual rights, and all the while we suppress voter rights at home and torture people to death abroad. And our Justice Department, after a high-profile campaign of racial profiling, mass arrests, civil-rights-trampling detentions and endless amounts of tough talk, is exactly 0 for 5,000 in terror convictions since September 11th. Bush is running on making America safer; it's essentially all he's got. The job market is flailing, and his tax policy is a disaster for everyone but those at the top (and worse still, the tax cuts, in conjunction with the deficits they've created, form a double-charged time bomb that will explode in 2006, with the full realization of the Alternative Minimum Tax, and again in 2010, with the expiration of the inheritance tax, no matter who's president by then). Uncertainty and fear are the rule of the day for the financial health of anyone who isn't already rich, so he can't really push the economy too hard. His social policies are divisive, prejudiced, and crude (and, as with all backlash politics, a mere distraction, centering on hot-button issues about which nothing will be done once the election is won). And his history of coming up with big-ticket, moon-shot accomplisments is embarrassing: a joke of an education reform policy, total inaction on health care, and a laughable non-starter of a plan to send men to Mars. Even his partisans complained after the Republican National Convention about the lack of vision, of ideas, of a sense of the future evident in his acceptance speech. All the President has to go on is security, which is the new word for defense, which used to be the new word for war. War on Afghanistan, war on Iraq, war on al-Q'aeda -- but how are we safer? How is he able to make the claim that America is stronger or more secure? The coffins of our soldiers come home at a faster pace than they did before the war 'ended' and the administration cheapened the lives of the hundreds who would subsequently die by hoisting the infamous 'MISSION ACCOMPLISHED' banner. Videos of severed heads show up on the internet with a frequency once associated with pop-up ads for 10x spy cameras. Nuclear proliferation has begun again, conjuring a creepy early-'80s flashback to the bad old days of Cold War fear and paranoia. Osama bin-Laden, the man who supposedly masterminded 9/11, is hardly even mentioned anymore; he's either been forgotten or he's sitting in a cell waiting to help the Republicans win the election, neither of which possibilities brings much comfort to troubled minds. Whoever perpetrated the anthrax attacks of 2001 that killed a handful of Americans and made millions more terrified to even walk to their mailboxes is similarly a distant memory, as immediate in our collective memory as Tamagotchis. And for all the ramping up of security we've supposedly done, for all the measures we've supposedly taken to protect ourselves, we've done it in a typically neo-conservative way, penching pennies where it counts to clear up room for extravagance at the top. Bush's terror funding budget is a twisted fun-house mirror of a program, providing more protection to Wyoming than New York and L.A. combined, and the color-coded terror alert system is a national punchline, good for little more than distracting the press when bad news about the administration might be on the way. Everyone I talk to of any political stripe seems to think that it's only a matter of time before we get hit again. Who is to be held accountable for this utter catastrophe which is being spun, Ministry-of-Truth style, into a glorious victory? How are we safer? Maybe I've missed some key victory against the forces of oppression, terror and indiscriminate murder. Maybe we took out a whole brigade of freedom-haters when I wasn't looking. Maybe the thousands of Iraqis we've killed were all right on the verge of strapping dynamite to their bodies and strolling into the nearest Hard Rock Cafe. But it seems to me that all our war president has really done is assume a lot of reassuring macho poses. And while there's a lot of words for people who talk tough but don't do anything to back it up, "President" shouldn't be one of them. |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "If you would attain what you are not yet, you must always be displeased with what you are." (St. Augustine) |