DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

I walked into the candidate forum at Joelton Church of Christ thinking I had already made a pretty clear choice about who to vote for, but, by the time I walked out, I was no longer so certain. I am impressed by Ken Jakes’ passion and commitment, while I still appreciate Lonnel Matthews, Jr.’s grasp of the wider picture and his youthful enthusiasm.

The meeting began with a prayer, with the Church of Christ host proudly announcing that both candidates are “saved in Christ,” and so, happily, that was not an issue. Gee, when Christians talk about elections in Islamic countries in which both candidates vow to uphold sha’ria, they question the diversity of the electoral field; but they see conformity to their values as an asset. Cultural relativity, anyone? So, my original thought that Lonnell, as a music promoter and a “Beattles” fan, was a more secular candidate than Ken was, if not wrong, at least not as right as I had thought.

The crowd of about seventy was mostly white, and a little lost in the vast basketball court on which we were meeting. At the beginning, there were a number of at-large council runoff candidates in the crowd, and I had hopes we might be hearing from them, but after introducing themselves and shaking a few hands, they faded away. (Megan Barry did not seek me out; I guess she figured she had my vote and didn’t need to be seen in public with the likes of me—I understand, Megan, and you’re forgiven!)

The structure of the forum was that the candidates introduced themselves, took turns answering pre-submitted questions, and then took questions from the audience. It quickly became apparent to me that there was not a lot of disagreement on the issues. The main question was which candidate would do a better job of representing the community, but underlying that I heard several subtexts, things that weren’t talked about directly but only referred to, or perhaps mentioned in passing but not gone into deeply on the spot because that wasn’t what we had gathered to discuss.

One major issue was trust. Brenda Gilmore had been the council rep for this area, and although she originally won in spite of being a black in a predominantly white district, the people of Joelton were no longer so happy with her, for two major reasons that I have been able to uncover. First, she advocated an unpopular redistricting after the 2000 census; and second, as one of her last acts before leaving for the state legislature, she had pushed through rezoning for a subdivision in Joelton that went against the town plan, the metro planning commission’s recommendation, and the wishes of local residents. Ken Jakes had gotten active in the struggle (apparently successful) to reverse this decision, and that was what had led him to run for the council seat.

The redistricting plan was pushed as a way to create a “minority/majority” (i.e., black majority) council district, but many people in Joelton saw it as a gerrymander that eviscerated a citizen coalition that had been successfully keeping development down, if not out, in the northwest quadrant. White’s Creek, between Joelton and Bordeaux, is now part of the third district, which is predominantly centered in Madison, which is not part of our neighborhood. White’s Creek has been opened up for development.

Another aspect of the trust issue is the question of endorsements and allegiances. I discovered at this meeting than Ken Jake’s lack of civic group (i.e., PAC) endorsements was intentional on his part. These endorsements come with financial donations, and we all know that with financial donations comes the expectation of access. Ken Jakes wanted to make it clear that his only allegiance was to the people of his district, and he claimed at one point in the debate that 90% of Lonnell Matthews’ contributions had come from outside the district. “People tend to vote to please their campaign contributors,” he said, implying that Matthews would put the Nashville Business Roundtable and other pro-development groups ahead of the wishes of the people of the district. Not taking corporate money is a fundamental plank of the Green Party, and here Ken Jakes had sussed it out it all by himself. I was impressed.

Lonnell said in his defense that he had made it clear to the donors that his first allegiance was to the people he would represent, and also said that he had discovered that campaigning was a lot more expensive than he had expected. He has rented several prominent billboards in the district to remind people to vote in the runoff election. There are 10,000 voters in this district; only about 3500 of them participated in the first election, and the odds are that fewer will vote in the runoff, so pumping up turnout is essential to winning the election.

A key perception that cropped up in many forms through the debate was the view that northwest Nashville is pretty much ignored by the city. Bordeaux has the landfill, and Joelton is in the general services district, which by law does not receive the same attention from Metro that more centrally located parts of the county attract. Joelton doesn’t have a community center building or city trash pickup, and its water distribution system is straining to keep up with what development is occurring, but there hasn’t been enough development for this to crop up on Metro’s “to-do” list. Meanwhile, because it is part of metro Nashville, tax rates have gotten high enough to effectively prohibit anyone from farming for a living, residents told me after the meeting. I agree that there is something wrong with a tax structure that makes it difficult for an individual of average income to own a large tract of undeveloped land.

The general sentiment of those attending the meeting seemed to be that Joelton and the other rural parts of NW Davidson County should have their own council seat, and that Bordeaux should be merged into a more urban district that shares its concerns. Lonnell Matthews defended the diverse nature of the district, saying that this made it a microcosm of the city and that we ought to work it out here to show the rest of the city how it could be done. It’s three years until redistricting time, so we’re going to have to make the best of it.

One subtext of this officially nonpartisan race is that national politics are not an issue, although what is happening locally is not separate from the rest of the world. I tried to bridge this gap with a question that went something like, “How do you see this district fitting into the greater context of Tennessee, the United States, and the world?” Ken replied that global warming is a fact and we are going to have to deal with it, but we should not get stampeded into doing things that do not make good business sense.

Lonnell was more expansive on the topic. He promoted ideas like local farmers’ markets, (not to mention local farms!) and better public transportation, and concluded by saying “we have to be smart about the earth. If we don’t pay attention, it might not be here much longer.” I liked that.

Mauna Crabtree of Joelton.com came at my concerns from a different angle when she asked the candidates their vision of the first district in twenty-five years. Ken Jakes said he was concerned that there would be nothing recognizable left, that the whole thing would be paved and developed and be indistinguishable from the rest of Nashville. Lonnell reiterated points he had made earlier in the evening about making sure developers bear the cost of any infrastructure upgrades they incur in the community—wider roads, bigger water lines, more schools, for example—and said he would do his best to make sure there were no loopholes in planning documents.

My own opinion is that what will be going on twenty-five years in the future is as incomprehensible to us as a butterfly’s wings are to a caterpillar. I can only pray that the change we go through is that positive, aesthetically speaking, but I’m not sanguine on it. It could be more like the change from a maggot into a fly, or—to be direct, the transition of a culture into chaos, and I’m scarcely more prepared to deal with that than either of the two candidates who are asking for my vote.

So, I’m back up in the air again. Ken Jakes says he never wants to be considered a politician, and I like that sentiment. Lonnell Matthews, Jr., on the other hand, may be aiming for a career in politics. He was a student co-ordinator for the Dems during his years at TSU, and helped get a record number of students to vote in the 2000 election—not, alas, that it did any good. But I’m not that strongly prejudiced against career politicians, as long as they truly serve the interests of their communities and not the special interests who all too frequently bait and hook them. Sorry, Lonnell, but that PAC money thing kinda bothers me.  It may be innocent on your part, but it clashes with my principles.

I’m not up in the air on the other elections coming up next week. Non-politician Karl Dean is being badly battered by a desperate career politician and will need all the help he can get to win his campaign. Bob Clement never had an original idea in the whole time he served in the US Congress, and has shown me no reason to believe he’s got any now—his campaign even admitted that his “original ideas” gambit was intended to take “ideas” out of the campaign. He’s running for office because he doesn’t know what else to do, and I hope the people of Nashville have the sense to give him time and space to figure out what else to do, instead of turning our city over to him. I think he needs to go cold turkey on the public trough. And I’m still gonna “plunk” for Megan Barry and Jerry Maynard, but hey, you make up your own mind, OK?

The only other comment I have on this race is that we would not be going to the considerable expense of having this runoff election if Nashville had adopted instant runoff voting. a system in which voters rank candidates in a multicandidate race in order of preference. F’rinstance, in the Mayor’s race last month, I would have voted for David Briley first, then Karl Dean, then Howard Gentry. Since Briley came in last,more or less, my vote would then go to Karl Dean. If there were no clear winner from the first round, the candidate who came in last in the second round (Buck Dozier, for example) would be eliminated, and the second choices of those who voted for him would be counted. And I have a feeling that would have handed the election to Bob Clement. Oh, well.

music: James McMurtry, “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore” free download of song here

My friend Bernie is making trouble again.  No, he’s not having to be a marijuana martyr, thank goodness.  The DOJ appears to be too tied up in knots over Mr. Gonzalez’ departure to trifle with small change like Bernie at this point, especially since it’s starting to emerge that their prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was directed by Karl Rove. Siegelman was taken from the courtroom in chains and is being kept in prison pending his appeal, which is highly unusual in political bribery cases.  Both these directives came from the benches of Bush-appointed judges, and the whole thing appears to be a politically motivated slapdown of an up-and-coming Democratic politician, especially since the DOJ ignored much larger illegal contributions to Alabama Republicans.  Gee, I thought they only jailed opposition politicians in dictatorships…..but, I digress.

Bernie, although deprived of his right to vote due to his marijuana conviction, is working to make sure that those of us who can vote get our votes counted right.  To this end, he wrote the following letter to the Nashville Tennessean on August 20, which I will take the liberty of quoting in its entirety, because it’s so well written.  Apparently, Nashville’s newspaper of record had been asking its readers for story ideas.  Here’s Bernie’s letter:

Mr. Silverman,

All of us appreciate your willingness to solicit comments and suggestions from your readership regarding issues of government improprieties, inefficiencies and insufferable ignorance that require immediate remedies. I am writing to reiterate a concern that many of us have written the Tennessean about for the past 2+ years, a concern that has only deepened in that time. The concern has to do with the inordinate influence over our election officials that electronic voting machine vendors hold and (most likely as a result) why the national concerns over the sanctity and security of our voting systems have obtained no traction here with our TN officials.  Again, this is certainly not a new issue but it is one that is heating up nationally and placing Tennessee in the worst possible light. We need relief and your paper’s attention to the relationship between vendors and our election officials is one way to pursue that relief.

Here are some of our concerns:

1) Brook Thompson, the TN State Election Coordinator, is the only state election official serving on the Board of Directors of the Election Center, a group founded with start-up funding by the voting machine companies which continues to promote nonverifiable voting systems that are now being rejected nationally. As other states have returned to more verifiable voting systems and/or have initiated ethics requirements for their public officials, those states’ officials have either voluntarily severed their involvement with the Election Center or have been forced to do so. Not so with Tennessee. Indeed, Mr. Thompson requires that our county election officials attend an indoctrination session run by the Election Center as part of their certification process and he has invited R. Doug Lewis, the Election Center director, to speak at many meetings of the TN Association of County Election Officials (TACEO).

2) TACEO itself deserves serious investigation. This organization is ostensibly composed of county and state election officials, but it also includes members from the voting machine companies, has its meetings heavily underwritten by those vendors and generally discourages citizens from attending their meetings where entirely public business (the business of administering our elections) is discussed. When a group of us asked to attend the TACEO meeting in Memphis two years ago, we had to pay over $2,500 to attend. While there, we witnessed the vendors wining and dining our election officials shamelessly, and we heard (from the podium) statements that these officials could accept anything the vendors had to offer re: gifts without violating state ethics rules since these county election officials are appointed and not elected.

3) As I mentioned in the heading to this message, Tennessee is now considered to be one of the eight states whose elections are most insecure and most unverifiable as a result of the decisions (heavily pushed by Brook Thompson) to invest the $25 million in federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) funds that Tennessee received for touch-screen machines without any sort of paper record of the votes cast. At present, 93 of Tennessee’s 95 counties use nonverifiable touch-screen machines. In the 2006 election, our group documented problems in about one in every six TN counties related to this equipment.

However, a current effort by the U.S. Congress to amend HAVA to require voter-verified paper ballots — an effort that would provide federal funds for TN to correct our serious mistakes in judgment the first time around — is being aggressively opposed by Brook Thompson and his boss, Riley Darnell (as they also oppose bills in our own state legislature to require voter-verified paper ballots). If TN is considered nationally to be one of the eight worst states for voting security AND the feds are willing to give us money to correct our mistakes, why on earth would our state election officials oppose that? (The reason they say they oppose this effort — that there would not be enough time for our counties to purchase new equipment before the 2008 election — is patent nonsense since these same officials gave our counties less time to purchase equipment in 2006 with HAVA funds than is still available before the 2008 elections, a delay in 2006 that we think helped support the push to encourage purchases of nonverifiable voting equipment.)

While our election officials continue to stone-wall any remediation of the serious errors which they are responsible for creating, what new evidence has emerged to support the Tennessean taking on this battle alongside the scores of TN voters concerned about the safety of our franchise? Here are a few things you should know about:

1) A recent analysis by computer scientists at Florida State University of the ES&S iVotronic voting equipment has revealed a serious security problem that would allow a single person to introduce a virus that would change the outcome of elections conducted with this equipment. Seventeen TN counties (including Davidson) use this ES&S equipment, but we have been unable to get our local and state officials to pursue any action to remedy this security issue.

2.The California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, has recently de-certified all nonverifiable voting equipment in that state and has imposed a series of stringent requirements that must be put into place before this equipment can be considered for re-certification.

3) A review of the business practices and ethics of voting machine companies conducted by the state of New York has determined that these companies lack the basic business performance track record and professional ethics required to do business with that state. Consequently, New York has opted to continue with its existing voting systems rather than use federal HAVA funds that would coerce them to do business with voting machine companies which do not meet that state’s standards.

4) As a result of the California action, the Attorney General of the State of Kentucky has ordered that our neighboring state’s decision to purchase nonverifiable voting systems be re-examined and he is considering bringing legal action against those companies.

5) At least two California counties are now considering action to demand their money back from the voting machine companies because of false and misleading representations of that equipment.

6) Finally, when Davidson County decided to purchase the ES&S iVotronic equipment, our county election commission was assured that this equipment was made in America. A recent investigative report by Dan Rather showed that this equipment is manufactured in the Philippines and that the primary quality control method used there was to shake the equipment to see if any loose screws could be detected bouncing around inside the equipment.

SO, what should the Tennessean do from here? Our first suggestion would be to send a reporter to tomorrow’s monthly meeting of the State Election Commission.  We will be there to discuss all of the issues listed above and we think that you will learn a great deal about why we are in the precarious position we are in by observing the actions of this commission. We would also be happy to discuss our concerns with your reporter after tomorrow’s meeting or at any time that is convenient for you.

These issues continue to illustrate the most important concerns we have for the sanctity and security of how our state–how our nation–transfers the “consent of the governed” through elections to create the legitimate underpinnings for all our governmental systems. Continuing to allow our state’s election officials to both share a bed with the voting machine companies and to dictate how we should conduct our elections from that cozy platform is a recipe for disaster.

We sincerely hope that the Tennessean will take this issue on. There is more than enough “dirt” to fill any investigative series that you decide to pursue. Thank you for your attention.

Bernie Ellis

Well, gee, he just about wrote a series for the reporter, didn’t he?  What kind of response did he get?  Zip.  No reply, no reporter at the state election commission meeting,   Guess it just didn’t have that multiracial, feel-good thang that Gannett believes sells papers.  But hey, Bernie, citing Dan Rather?  Everybody knows he’s been discredited.  Just like Don Siegelman.  And you.  Good job, Karl!

The meeting, held in the absence of the Dark Lords Brook Thompson and Riley Darnell, actually went pretty well, Bernie tells me.  He’s not the only one concerned about the accuracy of our voting procedures.   But, without the Tennessean there, it was all under the public radar. So, Bernie wrote another letter, and here it is:

Dear Mr. Silverman,
I sent (you a letter) almost two weeks ago, and have received no response. Since sending you this memo, more states (Colorado, Ohio and others) have put a halt on any purchases of new voting equipment and are demanding answers from the voting machine vendors about the security and verifiability of their equipment. Meantime, we here in Tennessee sit under shade trees and spit watermelon seeds at our bare feet. Ah yes, ignorance (nurtured by a quiescent media) is surely bliss. Until it isn’t.

We continue to meet with state legislators working to pass a bill requiring a voter-verified paper ballot in Tennessee, and they say that media attention to this issue would be very helpful. They are embarrassed that TN is considered to be one of the eight stupidest states in the US for squandering over $25 million in HAVA funds for nonverifiable touch-screen machines made in the Phillippines and “inspected” by shaking the equipment vigorously to hear if there are any loose screws inside. I keep reassuring the legislators that TN still does have a functioning media. Am I right or just suffering from nostalgia for the country (and the Fourth Estate)I once knew and loved?

That’s for you to know and the rest of us to find out. Soon, I hope. Please respond to this second mailing, one way or the other.   Bernie Ellis, Organizer, Gathering To Save Our Democracy

And what did Bernie get back from this plea?  I will quote you Mr. Silverman’s response in its entirety:
“We will take a look at the issues you raise in the email.  Thanks”

What enthusiasm, eh?  Leads me to suspect that if one were to shake the Tennessean vigorously, or even Mr. Silverman himself, one might hear the sound of quite a few loose screws.  Or maybe he was just being terse, like Ernest Hemingway.  I’m waiting to find out.  But I’m not holding my breath.

music:  Will Kimbrough, “Act Like Nothing’s Wrong”

Our Truth in Strange Places Award this month goes to US Senator Harry Reid, who vowed to “use every means at my disposal” to stop plans to build three coal-fired powerplants in Nevada. Last month, after a speech in Reno, Reid said he was opposed to new coal-fired plants anywhere. “There’s not a coal-fired plant in America that’s clean. They’re all dirty,” Reid told reporters after speaking at a conference on renewable energy. He said that the United States should turn to wind, solar and geothermal power in an effort to slow climate change. “Unless we do something quickly about global warming, we’re in trouble,” he said.

Well, I hope he has more success on this than he’s had stopping the Iraq war or the Bush junta. Good luck, Harry, you’re gonna need it. And thanks for not being a pimp for nuclear power.

I also feel a need to give a “Misplaced Priorities” award to all the Republicans calling for Idaho Senator Larry Craig to step down. Now, I kind of agree with them. I think that anybody who is so neurotically compulsive that they need to have anonymous sex is too nutty to make important decisions for this country. Not that it should be against the law, just that it should limit your access to decision making. I want to make it clear that I have nothing against two people who happen to have the same plumbing having a deeply significant, intimate, long-term, legally-recognizable relationship, and I don’t think your partner’s plumbing should bar you from higher office, but sex with strangers in airport bathrooms to me indicates underlying neurosis that is crying to be dealt with.

The other thing about that is that here we have a guy who voted for everything Bush stands for—Patriot Act, Iraq War, bankruptcy limits that have made it impossible for people with major medical debts to escape them, the Defense of Heterosexual Marriage Act, denying habeas corpus, torturing Muslims, you name it, and none of that was too much for the people of Idaho, but go for a ding-dong break between flights in Minneapolis, and you’re toast! Talk about misplaced priorities!

Meanwhile, somebody has bet billions on a major stock market collapse this month, and somebody—maybe the Chinese—is starting to dump tens of billions of dollars in US Treasury Bond holdings, both signs that what’s left of peace and prosperity in this country may be about to vanish like a rabbit snatched by an owl.

In the Arctic ocean, an area of ice twice the size of Great Britain disappeared just over the course of the last week. In my neighborhood, whole hillsides of trees and underbrush have wilted, dried, turned brown, and died. My thermometer registered 107.9 F before things finally started cooling down a little. Is this an anomaly? Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Or is it going to get worse? We don’t know. We just don’t know.

music: Frank Zappa,” Jezebel Boy”

In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last month, Mr. Bush invoked the killing fields of Cambodia and the boat people of Vietnam as reasons why the United States should stay in Iraq, implying that our withdrawal from the struggle in Vietnam was a failure of American nerve that cost more lives than would have been lost had we somehow “stayed the course” in Southeast Asia. “there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left,” he said. To him, there’s a legitimate debate. To me, debating the Vietnam war is about as legitimate as the debate about global warming—or gravity, or whether the earth revolves around the sun. There’s the facts, and then there’s the dogma of the First Church of Perpeptual Denial, aka the Republican Party. Their stance on these issues and Senator Craig’s pathetic statements in his own defense differ in content, not quality.

Mr. Bush’s linkage between Iraq and Southeast Asia falls apart quickly when subjected to the tests of history and good sense. Actually, there is linkage, but as we will see, it is just the opposite of what he proposes.

First, the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the resultant “killing fields” stemmed from the Kissinger-Nixon secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, which decimated the country when it was officially neutral in the struggle in Vietnam, and motivated its people to back the Khmer Rouge, who had little popular support until US bombs began to fall. The US dropped more tons of bombs on Cambodia than all the Allied nations combined dropped on all the Axis Cforces during all of WWII. Two and three-quarter million tons, five and a half BILLION pounds of explosives, on a country the size of Tennessee. For some reason, this did not make them like us. These days, we keep hearing rumors of massive “surgical air strikes” on Iran. For some reason, what did not work then is expected to work now.

What is more, is that, even after the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime were exposed, the US covertly supported them, even to the point of backing the Khmer invasion of Vietnam that proved to be their downfall. After they were overthrown by the Vietnamese and had become a marginal guerrilla group, the Khmer Rouge were still supported by the United States, which backed their claim to Cambodia’s UN seat until the early nineties. Gee, didn’t we create Al Qaeda in the first place and support them ’cause they were anti-Communist? Huh?

So much for US withdrawal from Vietnam leading to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. We can state pretty conclusively that it was just exactly our involvement, not our withdrawal, that caused the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Oh yeah, did I mention that part of the rationale for the US’s genocidal attack on Cambodia was to “provide cover” while we withdrew our troops from Vietnam? Hey, let’s just kill these innocent Cambodians, Iranians, Lebanese, Syrians, whoever, on our way out! The beatings will continue until morale improves! But, I digress…..

Second, the situation in Vietnam was generated when the US, which initially supported Ho Chi Minh, rejected his overtures after WW II and chose to back continued domination of Vietnam by the French. We demonized Ho, who quoted the US Constitution in his inaugural address in 1945. The US saw things in black and white, Communist/antiCommunist terms, and so preferred colonial dominion to a friendly independent. We ended up with neither. If not for American intransigence, there would have been a different outcome in Vietnam: no war, no boat people, no re-education camps.

The US committed over half a million troops to South Vietnam, which had a population of about sixteen million at the time. So now, a third that many US soldiers (half that many, if you count all the mercenaries) are supposed to try and control half again that many Iraqis, 24 million, while traditional military wisdom (which has proved to be right about this one thing, anyway) states that you need at least a ten-to one advantage over a guerrilla force in order to effectively combat it. This would have taken a million troops in Vietnam, a force the US couldn’t muster, and our current level of troop commitment in Iraq is already straining the army without getting the job done—leaving alone for the time being the very important question of whether the job should be done. And sure, not all Iraqis are insurgents, but opinion poll after opinion poll indicates that most of them want the US out of their country. Is Mr. Bush teaching the Iraqis his version of “democracy” by ignoring this? It would seem so.

Now, as for the boat people and re-education camps….. There are already Iraqi “boat people”–four million Iraqis —a sixth of the country–are refugees. due to Mr. Bush’s misguided attempt to seize Iraq’s oil resources. If Iraq were an island, they would need boats and be more obvious, but as it is, about two million people have slipped quietly over any border that will let them through, figuring it’s better to live with hardship in Syria or Jordan or Iran than it is to die in Iraq. Another two million have fled hostile neighborhoods or towns that have been the subject of US “pacification” efforts, like Fallujah, but stayed in the country. As in Vietnam, it is apparently necessary to destroy Iraq in order to save it. And re-education camps? Can you say “Abu Ghairab,” boys and girls? Can you say “extraordinary rendition”?

Now, that’s not to deny that, when the US withdraws from Iraq, there will not be more people fleeing from just about any regime that comes to power, and that’s not to say that whatever government forms in Iraq when the US leaves is likely to have an ideological agenda that will cause it to behave intolerantly towards some of its citizens. However, the fact that the Bush junta broke it in the first place is not a reason to allow them to stay there and continue to smash it into dust, not incidentally trashing the US economy and civil society in the process.

And no, Mr. Bush, we do not pull out and leave a power vacuum—we ask Iraq’s concerned neighbors to form a Muslim peacekeeping force that will be respected rather than resisted by the people they are policing. And since it’s our mess, we pay for it, at least in part by confiscating all the inflated profits your friends at Haliburton and other such pirate outfits have made at the public expense. Then, if we’re not in Iraq as a target, things might just calm down enough to solve.

Another purported parallel is “we have to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” In the Vietnam era this was known as “the domino theory.” It never happened then. These people want to be left alone. They do not want corporate American culture and its attendant economic religion. If we leave them alone, they’re not going to come over here and stir up trouble. If we leave them alone. If. If. Can the ravenous beast of corporatism be contained?

Since I started writing this, a new Bin Laden video has appeared (from the bowels of our own black ops gang, for all I know), prompting Mr. Bush to boast about how we are fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq. Gee, when Saddam ran the country, he kept the fundamentalists at bay, but now that we’re there….. Kind of like the way we opened the door for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Heckuva job, Georgie!

The last comparison between Vietnam and Iraq is Mr. Bush’s own conduct, which is similar in both cases. In both cases, he has let others be the ones to fight and die. The same goes for Mr. Cheney. Two greater bullies and cowards have not been seen on this planet since Stalin choked to death while his aides cheered or Hitler took his last piss on Eva Braun.

So, as I said, there are parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, but not the ones Mr. Bush claims to see. The parallel is that the US created both messes, all the while acting like it was somebody else’s fault. We did very little to clean up our mess in Southeast Asia. People there are still dying from land mines and unexploded bombs, and birth defects and cancer from our massive defoliant campaign continue to harm people who weren’t even alive when that war was fought. Let’s hope we can do better than that when we withdraw from Iraq.

And lastly, Mr. Bush, will you and Mr. Cheney please finally admit that you have run this country totally into the swamp, aka a quagmire, and moot the whole impeachment debate by just resigning?

Another world is still possible.

music: Incredible String Band, “The Half-Remarkable Question” lyrics only