Faith-Based War

The following article from antiwar.com. is very insightful. Bush's mistake is to keep harping on Democracy as a necessity of life as opposed to basic human rights. It is human rights that are what's key, not any specific mode of governing and those rights must include a guarantee that a person will not be tortured.

Faith-Based War by Patrick J. Buchanan 10/19/05

"This is a very positive day … for world peace," said President Bush, following the referendum on a new Iraqi constitution. "Democracies are peaceful countries." Considering that Iraq is perhaps the least peaceful country on earth, the statement seemed jarring.

It should not be. For it reflects a quasi-religious transformation in George W. Bush – his political conversion to democratism, a faith-based ideology that holds democracy to be the cure for mankind's ills, and its absence to be the principal cause of terror and war.

In the theology of a devout democratist, if Americans will only persevere in using their power to convert the Islamic world, then the whole world, to democracy, we will come as close as mankind can to creating heaven on earth.

As Bush said in his second inaugural, "So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Speaking two weeks ago to the 20th birthday conclave of the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush recited the true believer's creed: "If the peoples [of the Middle East] are permitted to choose their own destiny … by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end."

The president was seconded by Vice President Cheney on CNN: "I think … we will, in fact, succeed in getting democracy established in Iraq, and I think that when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency."

Upon this faith Bush has wagered his presidency, the lives of America's best and bravest, and our entire position in the Middle East and the world. But as the Los Angeles Times' Tyler Marshall and Louise Roug report, U.S. field commander George Casey is skeptical that any election where Iraq's Sunnis are dispossessed of preeminence and power will ensure an end to terror. It may, he warns, bring new Sunni support for the insurgency.

Also challenging the Bush faith is Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at RAND. He cites Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Northern Ireland as countries where democracy has failed to end political violence.

Nathan Brown, a Mideast expert at the Carnegie Endowment, agrees: "The democratic process as it has worked so far [in Iraq] has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency."

But the most sweeping challenge to President Bush's faith-based war comes from F. Gregory Gause III in Foreign Affairs. Writes Gause: "There is no evidence that democracy reduces terror. Indeed, a democratic Middle East would probably result in Islamist governments unwilling to cooperate with Washington."

In Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, it is anti-American Islamists who seem positioned to seize power should it fall from the hands of the authoritarian rulers the National Endowment for Democracy and its neoconservative allies seek to destabilize and dump over.

If Gause is right and Bush wrong, the fruits of our bloody war for democracy in Iraq could mean a Middle East more hostile to American values and U.S. vital interests than the one Bush inherited.

That would be a strategic disaster of historic dimension.

Not only does democracy offer no guarantee against terror, writes Gause, democracies are the most frequent targets of terror. Not one incident of terror was reported in China between 2000 and 2003, but democratic India suffered 203. Israel, the most democratic nation in the Middle East, endured scores of acts of terror from 2000 to 2005. Syria's dictatorship experienced almost none. While Saddam's Iraq was terror-free, democratic Iraq suffers daily attacks.

Researching 25 years of suicide bombings, scholar Robert Pape found the leading cause was not a lack of democracy, but the presence of troops from democratic nations on lands terrorists believe by right belong to them.

The United States was hit on 9/11 because we had an army on Saudi soil. Britain and Spain were hit for sending troops to occupy Iraq. Russia was hit at Beslan because she is perceived as occupying Chechnya.

Democracy is thus no more a cure for terror than its absence is the cause. Osama has no moral objection to dictatorships. He means to establish one, a caliphate where mosque and state are joined, and sharia law is imposed without recourse to referendum.

As with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho, and Castro, so, too, with bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Such men seek absolute power and use revolutionary terror as the means to establish their dictatorships.

By January, we shall know whether Iraqi democracy is the antidote to terror Bush believes it to be. If it is not, he and we will have to face the grim consequences of his conversion to a utopian ideology in the name of which he pursued a potentially calamitous three-year war.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Please Let Our Soldiers Live

If anyone watched FRONTLINE last week, you know now that, although abortion may be legal, the Reich has imposed a mountain of legislation requiring poor women to jump through so many hoops that the end result is most can't get abortions.

Okay, there's one of two things we can do.

We can give in and admit the abortion issue, although already lost, is killing us and drop it as a progressive issue and then sweep every office in the country.

The right to life can then be reframed as a "right to life" for gays and lesbians, since that term will have lost its function on behalf of fetuses.

The other option is to keep allowing this issue to turn our nation over to callous conservatives who do far more damage beyond forcing poor women to bear children they cannot afford. Frankly, considering how Republicans hate and fear poor people, I have never understood why it is not Republicans who are not in favor of abortion, not as a humane issue of human rights for women, but as a way of getting rid of poor people.

But they haven't had to reveal that they really, the majority of them, don't mind abortion at all.

It's time to be as pragmatic as the Republicans and admit we're less fond of it then they, we were only trying to mitigate women's suffering and poverty.

But we're no longer doing that.

Abortion in this country, except for in a few states such as California, has become a mute issue. It's been taken away. The right is gone. We lost the fight.

It's just that no one except poor women, who of course have no voice, realizes it yet.

Making an abortion impossible to obtain would not be such a terrible abridgment of a woman's right to choose if she had choices other than raising her kid in poverty, living without health care, working for an obscenely low minimum wage, having no access to affordable day care so she can go back to school or get a good job (not some nightshift position at McDonald's) and had financial help in actually raising her kid other than the scourge of Welfare.

This is the hypocrisy of the Reich. They force you to raise children in poverty as they work to get rid of Headstart, schools, scholarships and foodstamps. They refuse to provide medical care for these kids, refuse to provide anything that would give them "a leg up."

Surely, if their God exists, and I mean the hell fire and brimstone one that they threaten everyone else with, they will be first in line for the pitchfork, based on their stunning hypocrisy and how they are so intent on punishing poor women, and women in general, for having sex.

What's next? Stoning?

Oh, these "Christian" hypocrites wouldn't do that, at least not unless they're also going to start building workhouses and orphanages a la Charles Dickens' world as well. For you know they don't want any responsibility for these children.

Do you know these groups go to abortion clinics en mass and say things like "Please mommy, I want to live?" over and over like a chant in these poor woman's faces?

I think it's time we began taking pictures of our soldiers to churches whose congregations support the war in Iraq and start chanting, "Please, brother, we want to live."

Take it to Washington and chant, "We want to live." But don't expect a permit for gathering. Expect to be arrested for standing up for the lives of real, living people.

Cindy Sheehan was.

It's only fetuses the religious and political Reich love. Probably because they can't vote, have no opinions and, as adults, can be convinced to fight unnecessary wars so people like Bill O'Reilly can live the fat life.

Speaking of which,I love this article from the San Francisco Chronicle by Mark Morford:

It's almost too easy. He's too easy a target, really, Bill O'Reilly of the casually toxic Fox News, too bloviated and too silly and too undercooked, and no one whose opinion you truly value or with an IQ higher than their waist size actually watches him with anything resembling intellectual honesty or takes anything he says the slightest bit seriously. You hope.

Especially when he, like Pat Robertson ranting about how gays caused Sept. 11 or that Dover, Pa., is now a doomed and godless hell pit, given how the town fired every single one the imbecilic, intelligent design-supporting Repubs from the school board, especially when Billy goes off his nut once again and essentially wishes al Qaeda would attack San Francisco, well, it is up to us to merely look at him like Shiva looks at a sea slug -- i.e., a moment of compassion for his regrettable incarnation -- and then laugh and shake our heads and move the hell on.

I mean, what else do you want to do? Allow him credence? Give his infantile words any sort of weight and import? Let him slither into your heart like a worm and fester and burn? O'Reilly is, after all, the Right's most self-aggrandizing blowhard, one who still vilifies France like a child who hates broccoli, one who has, next to Rush Limbaugh, perhaps the worst spin in all of media.

And he is one who now suggests that because San Francisco dared to ban aggressive military recruiting in our high schools so disadvantaged 18-year-olds won't be unwittingly sucked into the brutish military vortex so they can be shipped off to Iraq to die for appalling and indefensible reasons, al Qaeda should blow up Coit Tower.

What do you do with that? You laugh. Sure, file a formal complaint with the Fox network. Sure, demand that Billy be fired, which is a bit like demanding Ronald McDonald be canned from the McDonald's corporation for poisoning our children. Yes, you have to do it, even if such complaints come from someone like San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly, not exactly the poster child for tact and grace when it comes to political maneuvering.

But of course, it won't make one bit of difference. BOR is still Fox's cash cow. He draws big ratings, even here in the Bay Area. And even if O'Reilly's cultural relevance is tanking right along with the bad ship BushCo, he's still getting PR for miles out of the childish comment. Hell, you're reading a column about it right now, which means all those extremist right-wing inbreeding sites get to squeal "San Francisco in Uproar Over O'Reilly Comments," and grunt and revel in our displeasure. Ah well. It matters not.


Here's the takeaway, the only thing you need to know: Bill O'Reilly is a walking, snorting cautionary tale. For those of us who occasionally tread similar terrain of barbed political commentary (tempered, I hope, with satire and hope and sex and humor and fire hoses of divine juice), he is the Grand Pariah, the threshold, the Place You Do Not Want To Go as an intellectually curious human soul. He is the guy you can always look to, no matter how bad it gets, and say, Wow, at least I'm not him.

In a way, we should be grateful for O'Reilly and Robertson and Limbaugh and Coulter and their slime-slinging ilk. They live in those black and nasty psycho-emotional places, so we don't have to. They show us how ugly we can be, how poisonous and ill, so we may recoil and say, Whoa, you know what? I think I need to be more gentle and less judgmental and kinder to those I love. BOR works an inverse effect on anyone with a vibrant and active soul -- he makes us better by sucking all the grossness into himself and blowing it out via a TV channel no one of any spiritual acumen really respects anyway.

Hell, this very column has been known to wallow in political extremes too, often and regularly wishing fiery karmic pain upon Rove and Cheney and Dubya et al. for the humanitarian and environmental and moral hells they have unleashed upon our once-prosperous, gorgeous, diverse nation, and for the wars and the homophobia and the misogyny and the rampant lies and the unchecked ignorance of the workings of the human spirit.

But I would never go so far as to wish terrorists would blow up, say, Washington, D.C. Or Bill O'Reilly's personal fetish dungeon at Fox HQ in New York. I would never take a similar BOR tack and suggest that every red state that openly supports Bush and his miserable wars (and by extension, O'Reilly and his miserable worldview) should offer up their kid as a blood sacrifice to the Iraq War.

Check that: Maybe I would. Of course I would. But I would recognize the inherent silliness of it all, and the futility, and push it so far into satire that I'd suggest we also send in the NRA, and the Bush daughters, and Ashlee Simpson, and moreover I'd suggest they string up Karl Rove as bait because you know what Islamic extremists think of creatures both godless and porcine.

Conversely, BOR, of course, takes himself quite seriously, the inflation of his ego and speed of his rapid-fire fury matched only by the obvious deterioration of his heart.

But maybe that's not quite true. It has been rumored, somewhere, that Bill O'Reilly has a soul, that he was personally hurt and wronged by that sex scandal last year, that he's reasonably intelligent and that his almost comical lack of nuanced comprehension on the air and in his public persona, like Bush's mumbling incoherence or Condi Rice's apparent lack of the slightest hint of femininity, is a bit of a stage act, a dumb ruse that masks a keener intelligence, all designed to milk his bloviation for his bloody, mealy slice of fleeting fame. You may believe this as you wish.

It does not matter. What is clear is that BOR has made a Faustian bargain of the ugliest kind, taken on a worldview where there is no room for humor and light and sex and joy and grace, whereby he gets to unleash streams of rather appalling ignorance upon the progressive segments of the nation -- like, you know, cities that dare to encourage peace and nonviolence and a measured, respectful response to the world -- and he gets paid enormous sums and lives like an angry, sneering king, while the gods of karma can only sigh, and shake their heads, and wait.

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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.

Times: Put Darth Cheney Out To Pasture

The 11/8/05 editorial from the New York Times (cut and pasted below) is a model of objectivity. The Times calls for Bush to send Cheney on a three-year-long wild goose chase while Bush asserts his leadership, shows he's in control and crafts better policy.

Okay, do we laugh now or later?

In fairness, The Times is a conservative, rational publication that bases its opinions on facts in order to maintain its stature and credibility. It does not print opinions based on gut feelings.

I, however, can say what I like. I'm not bound by reputation. And my gut has told me this for a long time:

Bush isn't a leader and he's not in control. He wouldn't know good policy if God appeared to him and pointed it out. Anti-Christs Cheney and Rove tell him what to do, get his agreement on things they want to further their agendas and tell him - especially Rove tells him - how to present it to the American people.

Have you ever listened to Bush and gotten the feeling he doesn't quite understand what he's saying? That he doesn't quite grasp his own reasoning?

It's because he's the puppet, the rich boy along for the ride as a figurehead to play golf, fly in that big ol' jet and act important. He doesn't understand the ramifications of anything he's done or is doing.

I admire the Times. Usually they get it right. But just as Bush backed down on Rove and Libby, Bush is not about to tell the real leader of this nation - Darth Cheney - to spend his time attending funerals and leave policy formulation to him (Bush). If Bush did, he'd be totally at sea, because Bush is not a leader.

If someone doesn't tell Bush what to do, he doesn't know what to do. We saw that when he continued reading to gradeschoolers after he was informed of the attacks on New York City. He waited until someone came and got him and told him what he was supposed to do.

Bush has dropped the ball more times than the worst fielder. He's caused more suffering for more people than any President since Truman dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And, quite frankly, since we were looking at a potential minimum of another 250,000 dead GI's in trying to take over Japan in hand-to-hand combat (because Japan had no intention of surrendering, but fighting to the death of every citizen) Truman's actions were far more justifiable. Also, don't forget a key fact. Unlike the war in Iraq, we didn't start the war with Japan. Japan did.

Bush has, therefore, caused more STUPIDLY unnecessary suffering and death. And not just abroad in Iraq - where he's made that country into a nightmare - but here at home.

Just look at all the cuts to the poor. He's anti-union and seems in favor of killing the Middle class. Witness the increased bankrupcies. Look at the nightmare he's made of the schools, enacting legislation whose real agenda is to kill our public schools. Meanwhile teaching time is diverted to "test them to death" time.

Then look at all the bad policy decisions in regard to gutting FEMA and failing to prepare levees and coastlines for the predicted Category Hurricane that every expert said would destroy New Orleans whenever it struck.

The only explanations for the latter example in terms of all he's done and not done - other than stupidity, incompetence and callousness - is that there really has been a silent conspiracy in which certain powers were hoping for that "big one" to clear out all the slums and public housing.

So much of the suffering in this country and abroad that has occurred never had to happen. It's not so much God made, as Bush et al made.

So my prediction is we're looking at three more years of hell and there's no getting around it. Our country will continue spiraling further down the tubes while Bush/Cheney et al fight for tax cuts for the rich and torture for those detained.

Rome will burn while Nero fiddles and the world waits, straining at the bit, for a day in November 2008 when this fool and his callous and dangerous entourage will be turned out of office.

But you decide. Below is the Times editorial.

By the way, I still predict that, at the end of his term, Bush will pardon Libby and anyone else in his administration that's convicted of wrong doing. Look for him to pardon DeLay and Abramoff too, should either see jail time.

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November 8, 2005
Editorial
President Bush's Walkabout
After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.

In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.

It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.

The White House is in an uproar over the future of Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, and spinning off rumors that some top cabinet members may be asked to walk the plank. Mr. Bush could certainly afford to replace some of his top advisers. But the central problem is not Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary John Snow or even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. It is President Bush himself.

Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver - in great part through his own powers of leadership - a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.

The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration's most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions.

Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.



Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Bush: Leader for the 12th Century

Who would have thought that now, in the 21st century, torture would be something that people in this country would banter about quite easily, as though it's a game?

Yet, it's not a game to cause any person physical or psychological agony.

In fact, torture is completely unnecessary given the truth serums we have at our disposal. Heck, even laughing gas in a dentist's chair has always made me spill the beans about my life.

It is, therefore, disgraceful that President Bush, after labeling himself a Christian, has shown that he obeys none of Christ's teachings, but claimed to, to get votes.

For despite the fact that Forbes reported that U.S. authorities have confirmed that torture occurred (the acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, according to a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity), despite the documentation by the well-respected Amnesty International, and despite the wide-spread photographic evidence to the contrary, today President Bush issued this declaration today: "We do not torture."

He said this even as he fights his own Republican lead Congress to keep torture legal. The U.S. Senate passed legislation banning torture, yet both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are seeking an exemption for the CIA which maintains a network of prisons in eastern Europe and Asia - previously unknown - where terrorist suspects are held and, obviously, tortured.

If they weren't being tortured, why would this administration be seeking an exemption? The answer is obvious. They wouldn't.

So this President and Vice-President stand for torture.

And what message does this give our nation?

The first message is that President Bush is lying to us once again - as he did in his case for the war in Iraq - to further his own political agenda. The reason for this baffles Republican Senator Chuck Hagel who has labeled the President's position "a terrible mistake," adding: "Why in the world they're doing that, I don't know."

Of note, John McCain, who knows first hand why torture must be banned, has stated that "Our image in the world is suffering very badly, and one of the reasons for it is the perception that we abuse people that we take captive."

As Senator Dick Durbin said, torturing and degrading people in custody "is not what America is about. Those aren't the values we're fighting for."

But perhaps those are precisely the values that this administration - and those who voted for it wittingly or unwittingly - are for. They represent a certain callous mindset that is gaining popularity.

Note this story that serves as a barometer for where we are heading, as a nation:

The Mayor of Las Vegas, Oscar Goodman, has suggested that those who deface his city with graffiti should have their thumbs cut off on television.

He also advocates public whippings and canings.

And he is serious.

It is outrageous that we have reached a place where such a barbaric idea can be owned - and promoted - by a public official.

So what's next? Public stoning? It would fit in the package. Yet isn't that what we say we're against?

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[And the reason we're in Iraq? Isn't it because Saddam tortured? Guess not.]

Exerpted from Prayerforce Blog