the defeatists!

Why are we in Vietnam Again? Where's Norman Mailer when you need him"

  When I was a kid, the writer who influenced me the most was Norman Mailer. I read everything, a lot of which was pretty insane, but most of which was brilliant, if hard to understand. Mailer was a pretty weird guy. If Hunter S. Thompson was a voice of a generation, Mailer was both precursor and ghost. Mailer, Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote are all credited as founders of New Journalism, but it's safe to say that Mailer got there first.

In many ways, Hunter's preoccupation with sex, drugs, violence, war and politics mirrored Mailer's but with a couple of differences. Hunter was a screw-up draftee in the early 60s, in the Air Force working on the base newspaper; Mailer was an academic wunderkind, entering Harvard at age 16 and graduating with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1943 when he was drafted. He had some intent to gain a deferment, contending that as a writer he was essential to the war effort; the draft board looked askance at that nonsense, and off he went to Fort Bragg and then on to the Philippines, as a grunt-screw-up.

 He talked in one of his books, Advertisements for Myself, about joining the Army because he wanted to write the Great American Novel about the war; since he spent most of his tour as a cook, he listened to a lot of stories from people who got shot at regularly which is an education in itself. He went on a few patrols, and did what he was told successfully enough that he didn't get killed and didn't end up in the stockade and left with all parts working and a Combat Infantry Badge. He took his GI Bill and took off to study literature at the University of Paris. So, drafting him spared us the possibility of flying in a plane designed by Norman Mailer... another victory for the GI Bill.

He then wrote one of the Great American Novels about World War II, The Naked and the Dead. There were a lot of contenders for that title, and I don't think it's really been awarded -- they're all fairly hard reads today, be it Here to Eternity or The Thin Red Line or Mailer. However, as you read them and pick up later books, you find that, with the exception of Gore Vidal, who was really writing about something else entirely in Williawah, the experience was such that those WWII authors were constantly rewriting that novel no matter what they were writing about.

Writers, poets, filmmakers and other veterans of war who reflect on their experiences are prone to that -- Tim O'Brien's, If I Die in a Combat Zone, is a great example from Vietnam. I expect we'll see a lot of similar stuff from Iraq and Afghanistan. Mailer summed it up in Advertisements for Myself, saying that, “The army gave me but one lesson over and over again: when it came to taking care of myself, I had little to offer next to the practical sense of an illiterate sharecropper."

If you read my pal and occasional editor Gordon Duff's occasional reflections on his Vietnam experience over at Veterans Today, , you get the same feel. Gordon was a Marine infantryman, and while I suspect he wouldn't trade the experience, he would have gladly avoided it. Starvation, disease, stupidity and ignorance -- by superiors, peers and the whole damned world at times -- has an impact on a man. My military career was gentler in a lot of ways, but when people ask me about my life choices, I point out that I'm probably not the best one to ask for advice -- after all, my Phi Beta Kappa in philosophy from Holy Cross got me a rucksack, a rifle and a toothless guy from Georgia yelling at me to get my ass down. I claim no moral superiority based on that or accept no inferiority.

What it did for Mailer, Hunter, Gordon, O'Brien and everybody who did these things was provide a framework that what happened before doesn't quite fit, and what happens later gets strapped on, like an extra appendage or primordial tail. I understand the world from the point of view of 0300-0600 guard duty in Germany at an isolated Army Airfield during the height of the Bader Meinhof activity. The weather is dark, the terrain unknown, and what the hell am I supposed to be doing? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What's that noise? Terrorists or a stray dog?

Norman Mailer spent the rest of his life figuring out the answer to those questions, and to say he was an exceptionally screwed up dude as a human being is perhaps understatement. He saw his competition with other writers as competition; he saw it all as a fight card and he saw himself as the favorite. There were some great writers in those years, 60 years ago or so, and he had some pretty amazing competition. But, he also brought the whole "essayist/journalist/critic thing to his work."

His most famous and influential piece of writing, after The Naked and the Dead is probably The Armies of Night, his account of the first big anti-Vietnam protest march to the Pentagon. So, he was immersed; my first exposure was Cannibals and Christians, his journalistic record of the post Kennedy-Johnson years. I suspect that it was about a 12-way draw between writers, all on points.

In 1967, Mailer decided to engage in some root cause analysis, sort of.... in a novel about a rich Texas kid and his father and friends who go off to Alaska to hunt bears. In Why are we in Vietnam, he used the bear hunt as an allegory for the rationale behind the Vietnam War; while I think it doesn't work so well for Vietnam, I think it really works for Iraq and Afghanistan. Going to shoot a Kodiak bear from your wealthy neighborhood in Dallas is hardly a good substitute for war, but it is a real macho thing to do. Until it isn't and it's just a godawful mess but with no reason and no worthwhile outcome.

A lot of artists in the 60s used allegorical approaches -- Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant can be seen as one long allegory. He says so in fact, that "That's not what I came to tell you about; I came to tell you about the draft." Mailer doesn't mention Vietnam at all in the book, except for the title. If it seems dated, get a copy and black out Vietnam and write in Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran or just pick one. It'll work.

I am a child of the 60s, and I'm using allegory to approach a complicated or simple question. Assuming we lost, why did we lose in Afghanistan. (How can you lose something you never had?) Thursday's edition of Foreign Policy had a piece by Jim Gourley and Tom Ricks. Ricks is acting as the Obi Wan Kenobi of a lot of journalists who find our involvement in the past 14 years of unpleasantness irritating at best, and absolutely awful most of the time; he is no longer with the Washington Post and writing for and as himself. Gourley is a "former Military Intelligence Officer and journalist", who writes about military affairs and extreme sports. The irony is apparent there; his latest book is about the Ultraman Marathon in Hawaii. They pose the question this way: In 500 words or less, why did we fail to render our enemies — those people who actively participated in open hostility against our forces — powerless? Gourley based that question on what I consider possibly the right source but the wrong emphasis. The quote from Clausewitz is from the first page of On War: “Force, that is to say physical force because moral force as no existence save as expressed in the state and law is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless.”

Now, I am of a different opinion and am not sure if this is the right question. I believe that besides "getting bin Laden" and "teaching the Taliban a lesson", we had no reason for invading and staying in Afghanistan other than the Bush Administration had to do something, and attacking Iraq wasn't something that could be done with a couple of airborne battalions and Special Forces Operators. After that, the fall of the Taliban and the whole Tora Bora issue -- we could have declared victory and left.

But, there had been not so much mission creep as rationale creep... driven in large part by the "need" to get work for the special interests propping up the various administrations in the USA, the UK and so on. In other words, Afghanistan was a violation in much the same was as Iraq of the Powell doctrine: to not commit US Forces without a defined objective, without overwhelming force and without an exit strategy.

But, that's my position. What do you think? I'm asking the questions: Why do you think we are where we are in Afghanistan and what should we do next? And, how? Post comments here and I'll summarize them and see what trends if any emerge. Possibly, we're as confused now as everyone in the Bush Administration was.

I've already published this at Vets Today and have had a number of pretty interesting and thoughtful replies. I hope to get at least a few from this forum. For the sake of Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson, sitting in heaven drinking tequila and smoking opium while taking pot shots at passing angels with a .50 cal pistol, I'm really curious about what you might think. 

Paul Ryan, Gombeen Man Apologist and Irish Amnesiac

 

 Behind a web of bottles, bales Tobacco, sugar, coffin nails, The gombeen like a spider sits,  Surfeited; and, for all his wits, As meagre as the tally-board, On which his usuries are scored. —Joseph Campbell, The Gombeen Man   This is a great day to be Irish-American. Barrack Obama is of Irish descent, which I suspect might bother a large number of his critics almost as much as his Kenyan ancestry. Joe Biden is of Irish descent, and embodies the stereotypical Irish post Tammany East Coast Irish politician. On the FOX right, pundits Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity show that we have an exceptional capability to kiss the ass of the establishment while on the progressive left, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes and Alex Wagner (Half Irish, Half Burmese!) show that we can still be critical, and open to more inclusive approaches. Ireland won the Six Nations, and Brian O’Driscoll was reduced to tears as a result. O’Driscoll is the greatest Center and possibly player of his generation of Ruby players, and is retiring this year…so far.

And, then there is Paul Ryan, our national Gombeen man.  Sigh. Paul Ryan is a weasel. His family was in construction and remains there; he’s wealthy on his own and has been, even though his mother thought nothing of signing up for survivor’s benefits for the family after his father died…and, she shouldn’t have. That’s the idea behind social insurance; you pay into the system and you draw benefits from it. Everybody who draws wages earns it for his family. What makes the Ryan thing obnoxious is that he now spits at the whole concept…entitlements are anathema in his world, things to be cut down and treated like leeches on the body politic.

 

Those F*CKING GANGSTERS 

Those F*CKING GOMBEEN MEN, SCHEISTER,CON-MEN GANGSTERS They've ruined the country , they've ruined the people and they took away the future of any young person in this country They should be in F*UCKING Jail This song tells the story of the whole F*UCKING thing , BANANA REPUBLIC—Bob Geldorf  

Of course, we did pay for them – Social Security is paid for; pensions are deferred earnings. There are demographic pressures, but those seem largely based not so much on population decline as on income inequality and a progressive tax system that has rapidly become regressive.

It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.--Brendan Behan

\ Mr. Ryan was a right wing bonbon tossed to the Republican right by Mitt Romney and his handlers. Since no matter what amazing nonsense he of the perfect coif and big teeth and dancing horse tossed to the crowd, he was still considered a “Moderate Republican” – whatever the hell that is, Abby Huntsman, maybe? – and Ryan was intended to shore up his bona fides as a supply side, budget-hawk, small government slasher of the true Freddie Kruger style. He’s a Laffler curve type of guy who realizes that the true drivers of the economy and success are the rich, and those who work for a living are just drones. Venture capital man; if you blink at the cost of a bottle of wine or an elevator for your cars, you’re just not getting it.

Well, there are some serious problems with Ryan. Besides being factually wrong, he’s a hypocritical, treacherous bastard with a Eddie Munster haircut. There is a pattern to the immigrant experience, and the Irish have mirrored this quite well; in fact, the Irish are the model of this pattern at certain levels. The Kennedy’s are a good example – first generation in the Potato famine, followed by Pat Kennedy who ran a bar and was involved in the Irish political machine, then his son Joe who went to Harvard and resented being snubbed by the WASPS and then  Joe Jr.,Jack, Bobby, and Ted who could charm and woe the Protestants and such but never forget what they were and where they came from. The pattern deviates when the political machines driving the local politics were Republican and the Irish just sort of joined in. Then the Irish worked harder to forget where they came from, and adopted the patterns of behavior and political judgment that betrayed the Irish reality.

No immigrant came to the United States because they just thought it was a nice day to go on board a coffin ship and take a sea voyage. They did it because they wanted to leave some level of oppression – religious, economic, ethnic or intellectual. In the case of the Irish, they left behind all three. You would expect those of us who come from those roots to respect the traditions that led to the journeys of our ancestors. You are right in slightly over 50% of the population; you are wrong in slightly less. However, the hopeful 50%--plus tend to not be so passionate; the pessimistic 50%--minus are permanently aggrieved. They have a scarcity mindset – they don’t have enough and somewhere someone is getting something that they themselves are not getting, and there isn’t going to be enough. The more optimistic approach, the Democratic approach, is that there is plenty for all if we distribute it better.     I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer – Brendan Behan  I have no inking nor do I really care whether the Ryan family made its way here in Black 1847 or in the crackdown on the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Sein Fein or following the defeat of Father Murphy and the Pikes in 1798. The fact is that Ryan espouses a philosophy long discredited by its practice particularly between 1846 and 1852 or so, when the potato blight destroyed the Irish sustenance while the country exported millions tons of food to England…Ireland was the English Industrial Revolution’s breadbasket, you see, and the absentee English landlords believed that their tenant farmers should live only on potatoes and similar poor man’s grub. Cuts of meat so old and tough and discarded as to require soaking in brine for weeks so as to be edible, some cabbage perhaps, root vegetables – hence, corned beef and cabbage and the obsequious New England boiled dinner of boiled protein, boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, some root vegetables, boiled until as Dennis Leary describes it, “you eat it through a straw.”

Coffin Ship Memorial Croagh Patrick, Eire

 Brendan Behan, the poet, playwright, author and IRA soldier who wrote Borstal Boy and The Quare Fellow often cited the story of Queen Victoria who donated five pounds to Irish famine relief and then donated five pounds to the Chelsea Dog and Cat hospital because she did not want to be seen as favoring the Irish. On the BBC on Sunday evening, “Ripper Street” portrayed a MP in his club babbling that the “Irish were blacks turned inside out…” to applause.

In much like Isiah crying out in the wilderness, the Liberator, Daniel O’Connell told the House of Commons in 1847 that “Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. I solemnly call upon you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that a quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief.  O’Connell underestimated the impact because while 1 in eight died, 2 in eight emigrated. So, thank English disdain and neglect for the Irish populations in the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.  

Timothy Egan in his column this weekend “Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia” puts Ryan in an ethnic and valid historical perspective. Eagan points out that while the English lasiez-faire, Malthusian approach to genocide by the stuff, Victorian-Anglican establishment doesn’t equate to the modern US conservative attempt to dismantle the safety net and poverty programs in this country, there is a certain resemblance because they have the same roots – a misreading of Adam Smith, a misunderstanding of social dynamics and the desire on a large part of humankind to blame others for their problems while regarding those happy accidents of birth to be earned. Egan is scathing.

In advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries. A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence…The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”

What was a tired and untrue trope back then is a tired and untrue trope now. What was a distortion of human nature back then is a distortion now. And what was a misread of history then is a misread now. Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he said last year during a forum on immigration. BUT with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish died — one in eight people...

“The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine,” wrote the fiery essayist John Mitchel, whose words bought him a ticket to the penal colony of Tasmania…

As Ryan has started his earnest if hypocritical, ingenuous and ignorant poverty tour, a number of commentators have pointed out that his numbers and estimates are as ludicrous as his budgets and deficit projections. Ryan knows what he thinks he thinks, and damn the facts. It’s interesting because the economy has to add up somehow or another. And saying that gaps and problems and shortfalls will be made up by “American exceptionalism” or the “market dynamics” is absolutely absurd.

That basic, blind love of absurdity drove the economic theory of the Bush years, of course: Greenspan, Cheney et al looked at the ten year budget projections, observed a growing surplus and cut taxes a lot. And then started a war and then another war…of course, the further out the budget projection or any projection, the less likely it becomes in direct relation to how optimistic it is. A pessimistic projection may not come true if we decide it’s unacceptable and decide to do something about it; but if everything is beautiful, well, what’s to do about nothing, ehh?

In addition to the hypocrisy and rejection of history while claiming his Irish roots give him some legitimacy in the discussion of poverty, Ryan’s comments are also a dog whistle. Talking about entitlements is a way of talking about minorities; we all know this. Ryan somewhat illegitimate wonk reputation depends on seeming to be all about logic and numbers and reality; in fact, his routine is taken up by racist troglodytes as a way of slapping at the poor, the hungry, the undereducated. It’s their fault they…don’t live in Scarsdale?

The anger at the school lunch program that is being touted by so many on the right is absurd. In the old days, farm subsidies supported the school lunch program by providing subsidized food to schools. In poor communities, a hot breakfast and lunch may be the only full meal the child gets. By demanding that idiocies like the spiritual enrichment of knowing mom stuck a couple of pieces of bologna and some stale bread into a bag for you as opposed to the hot spaghetti and meat sauce being offered by the lunch program is mindboggling. This is not even Malthus, this is Oliver Twist and the workhouse…  

“When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.” ― Brendan Behan

In appealing to the racial dog whistle, Ryan betrays his Irish heritage in another way. Now, we Irish bow to no other country in our own xenophobic and racist approach to other cultures, ethnicities and faiths. As ignorant and racist clowns go, we have produced some great examples. But, a significant portion of us, possibly most, have accepted that we’re all god’s children and she expects us to be good to each other.

Our clannishness and callousness proceeds from 800 years of English exploitation and imperialism. We should recall that the Irish and highland Scots and Welsh as well were seen as sub-human scum with the equivalent of “weighing 100 pounds and having 30 inch calves from carrying bales of marijuana.” I’m sure Ryan has done his gym time this morning and has a nice green tie and maybe socks as well. Possibly some Donegal tweed…and is very satisfied with himself.

We can do a helluva lot better. Erin Go Braugh and Up the Republic!

Some of them were fugitives from a Jackson Brown Song

The class warfare issue: my working theory is that wealthy individuals bought themselves a radical right party, believing — correctly — that it would cut their taxes and remove regulations, but failed to realize that eventually the craziness would take on a life of its own, and that the monster they created would turn on its creators as well as the little people. And nobody knows how it ends. --Paul Krugman

I seldom agree with Congressman Pete King (Republican, County Antrim...err, New York) about much of anything. Certainly, we both have the Irish ability to prevaricate which enables him to see a difference between the Provisional IRA and al Qaeda or Hamas that really doesn't exist. Seriously, Franz Fanon could have written about Falls Road as opposed to Algeria, and same story. So, King's advocacy for gunrunners and money launderers for Green Power while absolute condemnation of anything pro-Palestinian or prop-Arab is interesting. Since I stopped drinking 23 years ago, it's harder for me to do that. I just run out of patience with my own bullshit.

 

Fortunately for the Republicans, John Bohener hasn't quit drinking. So he's able to babble insanely and push a legislative and economic agenda he doesn't believe in for a bunch of clowns he probably despises surrounded by a team he doesn't trust and NOT HAVE HIS HEAD EXPLODE! Fortunate for the Republican party in the short term, but bad for the country and the Republican party in the long run.  But, with Guinness and Bushmills as opposed to Chardonnay comes clarity and Pete King has long since reached the point of cognitive dissonance and his constituents are probably telling him to knock off the crap and get something done. No Republican seat in downstate is a safe seat; to be successful, you have to understand people and compromise and the art of getting things done. So Pete King has a pretty good tether to earth and reality. Louis Gomert and Michelle Bachmann, not so much.  So, he finds himself in something like the position of Lot in Sodom, trying to find a few more just men in the Republican Caucus. Good luck with that: 

“We can’t be going off on these false missions that Ted Cruz wants us to go on,” King continued. “The issues are too important. They’re too serious, they require real conservative solutions, not cheap headline-hunting schemes.” 

If you've been reading my rantings for any period longer than, well, this you know that I am a skeptic about most things but a firm believer that the rich and hyper-rich who are paying attention have pretty consciously been engaging in class warfare for decades. Paul Krugman's and Ezra Klein's analysis is spot on in this case. The question really is how'd we get here...and I suggest listening to  The Talking Head's for the ontological answer. Or, Google the Senate Chaplain's Barry Black's opening prayer yesterday. As Alex Rogers commented at Swampland, Time Magazine's Washington Blog, 

For some, at least, the only thing left to do was pray. “Eternal God, our ever present help in trouble, as our nation stumbles toward a seemingly unavoidable government shutdown, keep our lawmakers from sowing to the wind, thereby risking reaping the whirlwind,” prayed the Senate chaplain Barry C. Black on the floor before the vote. “Remember that all that is necessary for unintended catastrophic consequences is for good people to do nothing.”

 

Well, they certainly didn't do nothing. Rather, they kept doing the same thing, and frankly, it's hard to pick out the most egregious, disingenuous piece of bullshit spewed by the Republican conference. I particularly like the idea that the President wasn't willing to negotiate. WE'RE IN THIS MESS BECAUSE THE PRESIDENT REFUSED TO ACCEPT THAT THE REPUBLICANS IN THE HOUSE AND SENATE WERE INCAPABLE OF NEGOTIATING IN GOOD FAITH.  If you have the patience for it, review the legislative history of the Affordable Care Act and the various budget issues over the last couple of years. I think in Barack Obama we are looking at the second coming not of Abraham Lincoln but of Woodrow Wilson. He's a reasonable man dealing with irrational people who are less interested in doing what's right for the country than in avoiding their "Base's" anger and primary action. Absurd. Wilson's ultimate failure was due to his inability to realize that some people won't see reason; Obama's history is yet to be inscribed, but I suspect that he'll have a similar fate.

I particularly like the R's decision to strip themselves and the Executive's employees of health insurance in supposed solidarity with what the American people are going through...despite the fact that there's a huge difference between the situation of the folks affected by the insurance coverage of the Affordable Care Act and the people who work for the Executive and Congressional Branches of Government. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, doesn't really have anything to do with the members of Congress or their staff...They Already Have Employer Provided Health Care. This is grandstanding by plutocratic jerks and while nothing will come of it, the staff of the Republicans on the Hill should start sending out resumes now. Just what K-Street needs, more lobbyists.

I'm also enjoying the coverage of the stench of booze on both sides of the aisle; however, it seems like the Dems wait until the bill is actually passed and something is done. (It's also possible that the media is trying to be "fair and balanced" damning both sides. ) Well, now we know...for sure. Wouldn't you love to get a urine sample result from Michelle Bachmann? A breathylizer reading from Boehner?

Clarity in all it's glory...

  Now, certainly there will be peace in our time in the Middle East[/caption] A reader of the Financial Times which I will occasionally read whenever I get a chance particularly if Martin Wolfe is writing that day, provided the world today with the perfect explanation of the Middle East.

A Short Guide to the Middle East

Sir,

Iran is backing Assad.

Gulf states are against Assad!

  Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood.

Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi.

But Gulf states are pro Sisi!

Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood!

Iran is pro Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood!

Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the US!

Gulf states are pro US.

But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi.

And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states!

Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day.

Mr KN Al-Sabah, of London, SW1

There, that's all perfectly clear. What could possibly be the problem...

 

 

Sometimes the only question is, did anybody do anything right?

Failure of Leadership with Lots of Unexpected Consequences

I have been relatively quiet on Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden because I am very conflicted about what to think. Like a lot of folks who are reading this, I’ve had the clearance and the access and I remember the oaths I swore and the penalties. A lot of stuff then was pretty silly, but the primary reason for the BURN BEFORE READING stamps was fairly simple – releasing the information would reveal the source. Since I had a kind of obscure specialty for a while, I can recall being dragged out of the Fort Clayton Golf Course Bar by a CW4 who had been one of my students to read traffic that came in as HOTHOTHOT and reading, shaking my head and pointing out the problem. It was pretty funny, the chief went back and bought me another beer and we howled. But, I still can’t talk about more than 20 years later.

Nor would I. Someone got some information they probably should not have had and passed that along to someone else who somehow got it to someone else. The fact that in that chain of someone’s was probably a source just like Bradley Manning or Mr. Snowden is irrelevant. I don’t need to get cheap laughs. However, if you have a SCIF handy, read me back on and I’ll tell you the story.

So, you don’t talk about what you know. I taught at the INTEL School and that’s where I learned my SKIF etiquette but that training started a lot earlier. A boss of mine was reading one of Kissinger’s books where it referenced the clearance that he had, and the boss went ballistic – some things are incredibly sensitive even if you don’t care why. Henry the K didn’t care about a couple of 10000 grunts and a couple of 100000 Vietnamese and Cambodians or so; why would he care about something silly like the name of an access? The boss’ boss came in to talk to us about it, and said that “We are held to a higher standard.” You put on the uniform and you are held to a higher standard.

On the other hand, the stuff that Manning leaked through International Man of Mystery Julian Assange was primarily battle journals. In other words, the old DA 1594s or whatever they are calling them now, some SITREPs, some raw SPOT Reports and so on. He was a computer geek and a very junior Intel Analyst. He plotted stuff on maps. If he had access to a lot of highly classified stuff, that was really stupid.

But, the material is pretty damning. We were in a war that we should not have started, fighting a professionals’ war against the people – with the exception of the Kurds, at one time or another we were fighting everybody while they consistently were and are fighting and killing each other. We don’t get the culture, the religion, the climate the history. We still don’t, but that last time worked out so well that there’s really no reason not to do it again. I just don’t see a statue of Tommy Franks in the future of West Point.

Manning was getting a view of how silly that was, how insane, how brutal and how fruitless. I don’t know what motivated the guy. But, I do know that most of what he revealed was probably vastly over classified. And then we get to another problem, one that I realized last night at dinner with my wife who in her Army incarnation was a Documents Custodian in a Brigade S2 in Europe.  The coin dropped; she worked as a civilian for DOD and DOT and I had been a contractor. Guess what – no way if any current security procedures were being adhered to could Manning have gotten the stuff he had to Wikileaks. We’re not discussing a highly trained intelligence operative here, we’re talking about a pretty flakey private in a combat zone., who appears to have been violating every principle of handling sensitive and classified material in the book; according to Wikipedia he told one of his biographers that he smuggled the stuff out on his data card.

When the coin dropped, I dropped my sandwich. My wife at best tolerates my jousting with windmills, but this one bugged her as much as it bothers me. This should not have happened. And it did – and it was not Manning who was the weak spot, but the supervision and leadership that let him do whatever misguided and deranged crap he did.

Manning was on a secure DOD/ Army system, in a sensitive compartmentalized intelligence facility (SCIF) of some sort and he was able to download highly classified materials to either thumb drives, data cards or CDs. The military banned all that stuff on its computers prior to the kid's enlistment. While it might be possible to cheat if you were on night shift in a CP someplace with just a normal Army computer and nobody checking on you, in a SCIF there are a lot of people checking on you usually. When you enter the SCIF, you are subject to search; brief cases, backpacks and similar things are checked as a matter of course. HOW THE HELL DID HE BREACH THE BASIC IT SECURITY AND THE PHYSICAL SECURITY PROTECTING THIS STUFF? This is a serious concern. Certainly, the officers and NCOs running the place should be investigated for either complicity or negligence or both. If they say him with a CD, they needed to act immediately; if they saw him with a data stick, ditto. Slipping a micro into a slot would be really disturbing. Either they didn’t care, they allowed it to happen or they just didn’t bother to watch this obvious candidate for Soldier of the Millenniums. Somewhere, SGT Morales is crying.

The fact that somehow this kid had access to TS and higher should bother a lot of us. Did DOD not investigate the guy prior to the granting of the clearance? Was there no interview? How did he keep the clearance after reprimands? WHO GETS REPRIMANDED FOR ASSAULTING AN OFFICER? Maybe some hard corps grunt dealing with the problems of cooling down after a fraught mission and being asked some silly crap; but, this guy was a REMF. There's a lot to be concerned about here, but Manning's actual leaks are the least of it. He was a computer GEEK and gee, the Army needs those for places like Fort Meade and various Field Stations. Was he in a Field Station? No, he was in the SCIF in a Forward Operating Base in Iraq. The Army knew he needed help; they were going to discharge him during Basic for unsuitability. Instead of washing him out, they sent him on to AIT and he got a TS/SCI clearance. The unit wanted to leave him behind instead of taking him to Iraq but they were short analysts so...  Where the hell were the Counter-Intelligence people who were supposed to be there? He was acting out all over the place in all sorts of ways…and nobody noticed until a hacker reported him? Seriously.  In a combat zone, prior to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the guy was openly gay, disrespectful and out of line.

Now, many years ago there was an Army Security Agency analyst we’ll call Randy. Randy was at Field Station Augsburg and was very, very gay. Openly gay. Blatantly gay. He cross-dressed and hung around the Bahnhof according one guy who knew him. Nobody cared, he was really good at his job. The MI community was always very tolerant of a lot of deviance, up to a point. One story had the Politzei catching him at the Bahnhof along with the MP liaisons and there he went. How do I know the story is true? One of my officer students at the INTEL school told me about him; then others told me about him; and then, when I was facilitating course with the Warrants and the subject of stress and reactions to it was on the table, one of the Warrants started saying that none of that was problem in the old ASA, none of their soldiers had issues and this was a waste of everyone’s time to consider. “Chief,” I asked, “Were you ever in Augsburg?” “Yeah, Sarge, I spent most of my enlisted in Augsburg.” “Chief, did you ever know a guy named Randy?” Silence…followed by laughter. “Oh hell, Sarge, Randy was my squad leader…” “Were the stories true?” “Oh Shit! You had to be there…”

So, yeah, Manning is guilty of a lot of stuff. However, given the obvious questions and the way the guy was treated while awaiting trial -- Marine Stockade as opposed to Army Stockade? Solitary confinement because he was suicidal? Naked? -- make me think that justice could be best served in his case by sentencing him to reduction to E-1, a Less than Honorable Discharge, and a couple of years in Leavenworth. I'd actually prefer the reduction, a General Discharge under Honorable Conditions and time served. 

And then, the Army needs to start asking some hard questions about what the hell happened to common sense and adherence to basic procedures safeguarding materials. Manning's Chain of Command needs desperately to have a bunch of their careers ended so they can move on to their true calling of asking if you want paper or plastic. If they'd been doing their jobs, this wouldn't have happened. Everything about Iraq that went bad, down to the way we found out a lot about it was due to a failure of leadership at a really existential level.

I’d also like to turn to the helicopter footage that has gotten so much attention. Why would that have been TOP SECRET? I wonder why it would have been more than CONFIDENTIAL – where was the serious harm to the nation in that footage? It was sad, tragic, reflected poorly on the rules of engagement and all the nonsense we’ve been told about how carefully precise everything is on the digital battlefield. It’s not, and we know. Reuters knew the stuff existed and asked for the material. They submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and were rebuffed. The FOIA request should have been granted, with some redaction, and then de-classified.

Soldiers in combat cause collateral damage. Soldiers in combat do a lot of things to block the horror. We know that. But, the American people need to know that. They need to have their noses rubbed in it so every time some yahoo decides to start demanding we go off to some war some goddamned place, there are no surprises. Bradley Manning broke the law, broke his oath as a soldier and did it irresponsibly and almost blithely. No Luther-Ellsberg existential “Here I am, I can do no other…”anguish there. But, he needed help, guidance and the attention that soldiers, especially weak soldiers need and deserve all the time, not just in combat.

I had soldiers like Manning. Any NCO or Officer who led troops had to deal with people like Manning. Too smart for their MOS, too smart for their duties, not fitting in, not a lean mean fighting machine – just a kid who needed his ass kicked and his shoulder patted. Instead, he was ignored, not mentored, not helped and this is what happened. I had 200 soldiers in my last company, and I knew all the flakes and made a point of watching them. I didn’t bully them, I didn’t berate them, and I sought ways to help them grow and adapt. I know my last company was at Fort Lewis and this was in Combat. I don’t care; the way you operate in garrison is the same way you need to operate in the field. If you take care of you soldiers, they’ll amaze you when the chips are down. If you don’t, well, this is what happens.

Manning appears to have had other problems. He lived an openly gay life prior to enlisting in the Army. While If you can salvage a marginal soldier, you might create a superstar. But if you can’t, and it appears his chain of command had figured out he wasn’t going to hack it, you don’t take them Iraq, you don’t cut them slack for acting crazy, you don’t look the other way. You get them out of combat, away from the unit and let the psychiatrists and JAG determine what needs to happen next. YOU DON”T SHOVE THEM IN A POORLY SUPERVISED SKIF for fifteen hours a day. But, “ Farrell, we were short analysts in the worst way”. To which I can only respond, “Yeah, and look what that kind of short term thinking got you.”

 

 

 

 

 

Mighty long way down a dusty road all the way to the abyss...

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan largely because they were totally frustrated with their client state's inability to do just about anything that they expected them to do. The people of the former Soviet Union are still suffering the impact of that decision. Russia is still engaged in the continuing kerfluffle in the Caucasus but that at least seems consistent. Chechnya is a small scale version of Afghanistan but Russia has all the cards; we're not arming the Chechens, and the various Islamic cash cows have avoided providing a lot of support beyond prayer and some limited humanitarian. Part of that has to do with the global war on terror's chilling effect on dissident elements in various Islamic nations; part of it has to do with the fact that the Chechens have proven themselves to be basically threats to anybody they don't like very much.

 

One would have thought that after the almost 12 years of war in Afghanistan with the ongoing unmentioned conflicts in Somalia and Yemen and watching the emerging religious cleansing in Iraq, that we'd have learned to not get involved in another Islamic intramural cluster in Western Asia. The old saw about not getting involved in a land war in Asia really is about the continent of Asia, not just the parts we've already had our asses kicked in. Like it or not, global power projectors, none of our land wars in Asia have turned out well. At best, we've had a draw in Korea lasting almost as long as I've been alive; I guess the Boxer Rebellion turned out ok, and of course, there was Vietnam...But now the US has decided that the Syrian government has crossed a red line and used chemical agents. This horrible crime against humanity that supposedly killed about 200 people in multiple attacks will not stand. (Give me a squad,  some .50 cal sniper rifles, Mk19 Automatic grenade launchers, some mortars, some M2 machineguns, a lot of bullets and maybe some close air support -- all of which the Syrians have or at least have the equivalents--and we'll deliver a helluva lot more than 200 casualties if you give us a village or six to take out, if we were the types of guys who slaughter civilians. The Syrian Army doesn't have that squeamish ethical reserve that we have. 

 

 McCain and Co. are all in on doing more in Syria and have been for a long time. In fact, the White House let him know that they had decided to start arming the rebels and he went on the Senate floor before the either the President or the White House could make the announcement to complain that the offer of aid was obviously insufficient and we need a no-fly zone and a CAP. Hard for me to see much of an up side, given that once again, they're all evil bastards and whatever we do will turn out wrong. On one side, we have the Assad regime which is a totally awful bunch of psychopaths assisted by Hezbollah another total bunch of psychopaths and funded by the Iranians whose government is almost but not quite in the North Korean government mode of batshit insane. Yeah, anything might be better -- until we look at the rebels, who are a hodgepodge of factions and elements who are opposed to the Assad control because of tyranny and evil and...oh yeah, the Assad family is Alawite, a Shiite sect that is a minority in Syria but seized power back in the day as part of the Baathist movement under this Assad's dad. If you recall the Sadr clan in Iraq fondly, then you'll love the rebels because they represent the mirror image of the Shiites in Iraq. In Syria, the Sunnis are the majority and they've been jerked around unconscionably by the Shiites under the Assad family. So, there are people who are opposed to the regime because the regime is bad and they want to do better; and, there are people who just want to kill the Alawites.

 

I've been out of the Army for 16 years and seldom worked in my original MOS during it. However, I remained really good at the technical aspects of it, and was in fact distinguished graduate of my advanced course where we focused largely on the technical stuff. I was an expert on Chemical, Biological and Chemical weapons. We did a lot of experimentation with chemical weapons in places like Toole and Dugway, and we have a really good idea of how the lousy things work. So, the news that the Syrians have chemical weapons wasn't surprising to me bu the news that they had used them was pretty surprising, and the way that they've been employed is really weird. They appear to have used them in isolated attacks against small targets with very light casualties resulting. I'd like to know more, just from a student of stupid ways to fight bad guys point of view. The news that they have managed to inflict 150-200 casualties in a war that has killed 93000 people so far with Saran Nerve Agent is absolutely dumbfounding. If some dipshit told me he  could take out 200 people in a single attack with nerve agent, I'd refuse to waste the rounds. That simple -- the casualties aren't worth the effort of issuing and safeguarding the munitions or of the bad press resulting in the US now announcing it will arm the rebels while John Napoleon McCain demands we do more. You terrify the rebels, maybe; but you really piss off the Israelis and the Turks and Europe and we've got that red line rhetoric hanging out there. Assad may be a lousy dentist and sit at the head of a politic0-criminal gang of thugs, thieves, torturers and sociopaths; but, he is not stupid. Pissing on the US is just not a great idea because, well, we've been feeling testy lately.

Iranian Soldiers in Iraq-Iranian war in Chemical Protective equipment.

So, who'd be dumb enough to do this? I am not an advocate of everything that happens has a false flag aspect, but I'm pretty open to the idea in this case. The use of the weapon really makes no sense. But, for Israel or Iraq or the Rebels, it makes a lot of sense. There is another possibility, that these numbers are based on the number of people who had their blood tested and showed some sign of a lack of acetyl-cholinesterase, the cause of casualty with nerve agents. There have been multiple attacks and 200 deaths is just not something worth doing; but, 20000 might be worth it. The Islamic reqirement to get bodies buried as soon as possible really works against any scenario of heaps of dead bodies to check; if I wanted to mazimize casualties, I'd have used a persistent agent, VR55 or VX. You have something like motor oil hanging around and in the case of VR55 actually producing significant amounts of vapor casualties as well as contact casualties for anyone who gets a drop on bare skin. There's no upside in a war like this to using an aerosol agent unless you're just using it stupidly out of sheer anally fixated evil stupidity. Which is certainly possible, given the nature of the players in this snake rodeo.

The geo-political aspect of this are pretty obvious -- we need to do something different than rush into the Syrian goat rodeo with all the gusto of a starving middle linebacker going to an all you can eat ribs dinner. My thought is that we take the old Churchillian description of the area as correct, a collection of tribes with flags, and act accordingly. In this case, we need to be very careful about strategic interests of ourselves and our allies. And we need to be very conscious of what looks like a resurgence of the Islamic civil war between Shi'ia and Sunni. There is a belt of Shiite power running from Iran through Iraq to Syria; in Syria, however the balance of population shifts from predominantly Shiite to predominately Sunni. Long range goal for a peaceful solution would probably involve a people and land swap; that probably won't happen, but if the Sunni in Iraq were to move to Syria and the Alawites from Syria to Iraq, then the problem of minority majority would be eliminated. 

I'm not sure who is most deserving of aid here -- probably Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon for having to deal with the refugee problem. It would be interesting to have the new Sunni state of Syria declared a demilitarized zone under UN protection, but that probably can't happen. And, I suspect the Iraqi Sunni and the Syrian Sunni would have plenty of conflict; the Alawites and the more traditional Shiites of Iraq and Iran would probably have issues. Probably just degenerate into constant civil war regardless of what we do. 

Ireland found some peace after 800 years, but largely because both sides were stuck with an outside mediator they had to trust and to whom they had ties. More importantly, the people of Ireland, especially in Ulster, were sick of fighting, the British were sick of fighting and the people -- the sea in which the IRA and the Orange paramilitaries swam to steal an allusion from cousin Mao -- were desperate for an alternative. In the great clash of Islamic sects, the people respond to the demagogues and the demagogues are even warmed up yet. So, we need to assist Turkey and probably Jordan, and actively quarantine this area of conflict. That would be our strategic interest. I suspect we won't do that, but the idea of US forces, even if primarily Air and perhaps Naval getting involved with a proxy war with Iran -- because of the Shi'ia versus Sunni thing, the financial and weapons support of Iran and the involvement of Hezbollah -- is just not a good idea. 

Or, we can get involved in another land war in Asia. It worked so well the last time...After all, if you've done something multiple times with lousy results, doing it again has got to be a good idea. 

 

Problems and perspective at the Karma Bar and Grill

If you watched the HBO series “Rome,” you saw a re-enactment of Julius Caesar’s triumph of 46 BC: Caesar riding in a golden chariot, his face painted red, dressed in purple and white robes, a slave holding a wreath over his head. If you had looked up an explanation for this uncanny garb, you would probably have been told: the red paint was there to imitate the red-painted face of the statues of the god Mars; the robes were those of Capitoline Jove; and the slave was to whisper in his ear, “Remember thou art mortal.” 

  There's a combination of schadenfreude and sadness at the Petraeus affairs. A lot of us here know people like the folks involved here, and the problems are basically the fact that we're all human. Too human, maybe. The resignation is a shame in some ways, but in others probably not...it's a distraction, and the timing is pretty awful in that regard. While the beltway press pursues the latest shiney  object, well, who knows what nefarious things will go bump in the night.

Here's the thing that bothers me --There's another problem with this. The affair occurred in Afghanistan while Petraeus was the commanding general. Adultery is a serious violation against the UCMJ. In addition, sexual relations in the combat zone -- and under his desk in Kabul or at that monster base we've got outside Kabul -- certainly qualifies as a combat zone. Soldiers are routinely disciplined for this behavior, and this guy probably signed off on a few court martials and other punishments for this during his career. Fun facts to know and tell about generals -- when they retire, they really don't retire. And, this is definitely contrary to good order and discipline. I would expect that some disciplinary action on the Army side would happen for the affair. Possibly just a letter of reprimand or a fine; possibly a reduction in rank to the last rank at which he served honorably, which was 3 stars. Will be interesting to see what, if anything happens with this one... Of course, Ms. Broadwell was an Academy Graduate. It's interesting to ponder whether or not she retained a reserve commission; if so, an investigation by the Army could conclude that in addition to adultery, there was a violation of the fraternization policy. Basically reflects very badly on his judgement, and he is very clear about that in his resignation. Good for him by the way, and good for her in that she's handling this like an adult.

 But, the teenage crush aspect of it is kind of amusing. He gets to be head of the CIA, she decides to end the affair and he pursues her. Sends her dirty emails supposedly and generally acted like a 19 year old boy.Sheesh...

 I have an odd take on marriage these days. I think we just live too long these days for marriage to work. The fact that Clem and Elma were married for 77 years always elicits the "Cute, oh, they're so cute response." Not from me -- I've been married for 36 years, and frankly, it's a habit and an economic arrangement. We're fond of each other, but except for NCIS and baseball don't really share very much. Petraeus spent most of the his time since November of 2001 either deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq or getting ready to go -- his wife had a life, his kids are grown and GUESS WHAT! They'd been married for 37 years after getting engaged when he was in the Academy. Not an inevitable thing, but the seeds are there. I'm not making excuses for the guy, by the way -- I don't consider the affair particularly heinous, but the hypocrisy and silliness make you wonder. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. But, I can say that I never let any nuttiness about who was sleeping with who turn into persecution or prosecution when I was in the Army in leadership roles, and stopped more than a few puritanical witch hunts. But, if he ever signed off on a 15-6 for a court martial for any sexual relations issue, he's probably getting a payback in the old Karma Bar, Grill and Continuous Soiree.

 Supposedly he was pretty unpopular in the CIA as a know-it-all, outsider, Army guy. Not terribly surprising in a way -- and I never did get the idea that he'd be a great president. Intellectuals and generals have at best a spotty record as President. Washington, Jackson...and Zachery Taylor? Rutherford B. Hays? William Henry Harrison? Woodrow Wilson? Herbert Hoover? Jimmy Carter? Ike and Jefferson are the only ones I can think of to really set the world on fire...or in Ike's case despite the jingoist paranoia of the age, to not set the world on fire.  I generally don't have a lot of issues with generals, except if you want to talk about being out of touch with the American people, lots of them are so far removed that, well, they tell young people in good physical condition living in extraordinary stress that having sex is a bad idea. And, frankly, the whole counterinsurgency thing was vastly overrated. The Iraqis figured out that we were going to leave and this was a good way to get us out of there earlier. We basically bribed the militias and let the Shiites take over the country. And left...Afghanistan was never going to work, and the smartest thing to do is draw down quickly but not in a panic and leave. Most soldiers with an actual appreciation of history always saw that war as a mistake. Best thing to do with Afghanistan unless you're willing to kill 3/4 or so of the populace like the Moguls did is to bribe the bastards to stay in their cages and retaliate massively when they stick their heads out. And, I know a few Afghanis and I like them. But, substitue opium for moonshine, and they're hillbillies with Korans.

 Petraeus got out of there with his reputation intact because of the Gates-Panetta transfer and the fact that the Rs couldn't oppose his nomination. Logical move on the part of the Obama Administration. But, unlike Colin Powell, Petraeus was not a general with a lot of political experience. He was a light infantry guy, and while not as crazy as a Special Operations Guy like McCrystal, he wasn't used to the corridors of power. Check out his Wikipedia entry and look at his career. His high and mighty assignments were with soldiers. He's a dirty boots kind of guy.

In fairness, he is an extraordinarily bright guy - Princeton PhDs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy don't come easily -- and had a great reputation as just a helluva soldier as a brigade and division commander. And, in the Infantry you don't get stars by being a total prick and incompetent. You can be either -- most aren't -- but the total douchebags are rare. Tankers are different -- all the noise warps their heads. Special OPs guys have a tendency to be outlaws in a lot of ways. But in some ways this is a shame, in some a gut check for the Army , and in some just irony. And yeah, "the powerful are in fact people" realization is important.

 

Dear god, get the idiots to stop shouting!

Persona aside, I tend not to pick fights over politics with strangers. If they’re saying things that are totally batshit, well, I probably will not be able to convince them otherwise and the sake of argument is to convince the other person. If I want to just babble insanely, I can do that in the bathroom; or, on a blog. Why risk the aggravation?

However, a few weeks ago I was sitting with my wife who has added macular degeneration to colon cancer as reasons to be happy for modern medicine or to curse getting old. Or both – it’s a fine line. However, we were waiting to see the ophthalmologist and the inner waiting room was filled with seriously old people and on a big screen TV they were showing FOX NEWS. I almost didn’t go in but decided that was stupid. She needs my support and so on and so on. Well, the gentleman sitting next to me was in his 70s and both he and his wife were there for some cataract work and possibly some Lasik. All covered by Medicare, which is a great program and should have been extended for all. Of course, the insurance companies and other interests including big Pharma would have gone bat shit. However, given what happened in 2010, how much worse could the whole Tea Party thing have been? Anyway, the guy started talking about how Obama was looting Medicare to pay for Obamacare and…and I couldn’t take anymore when he started in on the deficit. “Sir, like me you’re old enough to do the arithmetic yourself; do it.” I then enumerated the factual errors behind nonsense. The only medical benefit not paid for through taxes or deductions in any program – Medicare, Medicaid or Obama care is the cost of the prescription drug benefit. That simple. Want to know why we have a deficit? Two wars, unpaid for prior to 2010; a galloping bureaucracy called Homeland Security also largely not paid for; tax cuts with no offsets based on the absurd idea that a budget surplus projected over 10 years should result in massive reduction in tax cuts in year ZERO. The conversation was civil, and the guy listened. I’m sure I’ve figured in some local Bircher conspiracy theory, but what the hell…

I do not find that metaphorically shooting fish in a barrel puts me in the same league as Hemingway’s Fisherman; arguing with this guy didn’t make me the equivalent of Patrick Henry or Clarence Darrow. I decided to drop the proselytizing. However, on the next visit, I refused to go back in that room if that was on TV. My wife was grateful because it was making her angry to. One thing the two of us are not about to complain about is health care that we have – the health care available to others, on the contrary, deserves nothing but condemnation. Not the medicine but the absolute BS that surrounds it.

So, last night we went to dinner at a place I haven’t been since she was in the hospital. Owner had our table, and she made some sly digs about not having seen me lately; after the second one as she bent over to refill my tea, I said, “I got the digs…it’s ok.” Which elicited a laugh. Nice place. Anyway, it was a little louder than usual and people were raising their voices a bit so I felt like I was in the conversation at the next table, where this braindead idiot started accusing Candy Crowley of having set up Mitt Romney, that she and the President were in on it and how else could she have known what the President had said about the Benghazi attack being an act of terrorism? This time, the argument would have been unfriendly and impolite and would have probably included language my young lady friend the owner would not have wanted in her semi-upscale Bistro. Then the fool started in on Voter Fraud. Then, they left…so, no political homicide last night by Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes.

THIS IS NOT GOOD FOR MY KARMA. IT IS NOT GOOD FOR MY BLOOD PRESSURE. IT NEEDS TO STOP. I AM SOOOOOO COMPLETELY READY FOR WHAT SEEMS LIKE A FOUR DECADE ORDEAL TO BE OVER!

 

Dr. Dennis Leary, author, Bon Vivant and Worcester native who did not go to Holy Cross wrote a classic piece of American poetry entitled “Life’s Gonna Suck”. That’s kind of the way I feel about this election – regardless of what happens, life will continue to suck for most of the world and actually, compared to what the potential situation was compared to what is, for most Americans. I feel grateful, of course, that this isn’t Darfur, or Bosnia, or Syria or Ukraine or Mogadishu or Mumbai or any number other locations, hell holes to havens, Nigeria to Norway and beyond. But, while I try to stay based in the reality world as opposed to imaginary world loved by Karl Rove and the Republicans, every now and then I’m overwhelmed by the desire to have things actually be good for once. Truth, justice, freedom, fairness, great schools, great infrastructure, the babies well fed, the young educated and optimistic and the old warm and secure. And, despite my laughter at my Defeatist and Malcontent brothers and sisters over their disappointment with the Obama Administration to actually, you know, what for what it believes in, I envy them this – they aren’t willing to be satisfied with a quarter cup of satisfaction and a promise of tomorrow. So, I am pretty sure that whether Romney pulls it out, Obama bitch slaps him, or fuck it, Gary Johnson somehow, in some universe is going to win, life will continue to suck. More with Romney, less with Obama but still gonna suck.

I’m not the only one who believes this. Muy Amor Maureen Dowd, for example, finds the idea of contrast between Obama and Romney less stark on the human level. Romney, like Obama, is probably a great father. He’s probably good to his wife. He probably doesn’t go down and poison pigeons in the park. He’s got no reason to be president except that the Republican party is bankrupt of leadership and it’s his turn using what seems to be their system of nominating in the next general the guy defeated in previous primaries, based on the idea I guess that candidates need to age, like fine wine or really foul cheese. But, they’re not that different in some regards –

Much was made of the alpha tone of the second presidential debate. But it was more like a parody of alpha, a couple of pampered, manicured Harvard princes kicking up “gorilla dust,” as Ross Perot calls it. In a truly commanding performance, you don’t jab fingers, invade space, bark interruptions. Obama put aside his disdain for jousts and woke up from the “nice, long nap I had in the first debate,” as he wryly said at Thursday’s dinner. But he was overcompensating for the first debacle, and he still didn’t have a vision or memorable zingers or a knockout punch for a rival who hides in plain sight. Obama’s contempt for Romney gleamed through as Mitt got all O.C.D. with Candy Crowley about the rules, and rambled on about his weird retro worldview, where women in binders have to bound home to make dinner, where the problem of too-easy access to assault weapons could be helped if, gosh, we just tell “our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone.”

The problem is that Romney doesn’t really care about governing, he cares about being elected. I envision him winning, turning domestic policy over to Ryan and foreign policy over to Paul Wolfowitz or someone of his ilk and then spending his days at one of the various Eastern, Western, Mid-Western, Mid-Eastern White Houses he’ll have to have. One with a ring where Ann can use her service animal, the Horse who shall not be named, who will be taken care of at taxpayer expense because, after all, the Horse is a service animal. You know, I still people with service animals like Vietnamese Potbellied Pigs and Ferrets kind of odd…(Meet Jake, my Service Animal Python?) But, a horse?  After all, he’ll need to visit the Mormon Tabernacle frequently to be applauded; he’ll need to ride up and down in the elevator so he can exercise his cars in California and then there’s boating in New Hampshire and petting his money at Bain Capital. The dude will be busy.

Now, Maureen Dowd points out that Obama really isn’t that interested in politics; the things you have to do to get elected or re-elected either irritate him or amuse him wryly. He’s interested in actually governing; and, he has problems with people who think they are entitled to office because of their royal status (Bush, Republican Royalty: McCain, Navy Royalty; Romney, Mormon Royalty.)  Being very much an actual self-made man, he doesn’t get the idea of having power solely to do what, exactly.

There’s a famous quote from Jack Kennedy about a formal dinner at the White House for the American Nobel Winners. Now, JFK appears to have actually enjoyed the social aspects of politics and the give and take of what you need to do to get elected as well as govern. He was friends with people like Barry Goldwater; he liked going to state dinners; his sense of humor was generally directed at himself or at the pretensions surrounding him, the White House or personalities. In his speech to honor the laureates, Kennedy said, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together in the White House -- with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." Same sensibility, different attitude toward the process that got him there. He appreciated the irony but reveled in it. Consider these other quotes:

 "Those of you who regard my profession of political life with distain should remember that it made it possible for me to move from being an obscure lieutenant in the United States Navy to Commander-in-Chief in fourteen years with very little technical competence."

"Politics is an astonishing profession. It has enabled me to go from being an obscure member of the junior varsity at Harvard to being an honorary member of the Football Hall of Fame."

If President Obama had really wanted to nail this, he would have quoted another JFK line continuously since taking office and finding out what a debacle he had inherited. "When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were." (May 27, 1961)

Now, the interesting thing is that should the undesirable unthinkable happen and we wake on the morning of the day after election to find Jackbooted Mormon Missionaries parading through the streets demanding our allegiance be demonstrated by listening to them preach, taking a copy of their book, and letting them do our dishes and wash our windows, things will be a lot better than Romney, Ryan et al have  been claiming. The economy could be better—Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and hell, Martin Wolff over at The Economic Times and anyone with half a brain can explain why. But, my dad was very clear with me 35 years ago or so when he said, “Nothing happens in the economy until somebody buys something…” Car elevators aren’t quite the same as 35 people buying cars; a $500 dollar bottle of wine is not the same as 80 people each buying a $5 bottle of wine. Keynes explained this, and it continues to ring through. Get a lot of people buying lots of stuff, that will increase demand which will increase jobs while business works to fill inventory.  As there is more money flowing from more sources, there will be more innovation in things like logistics, design, efficiency and effectiveness. (Different things, by the way. It’s most efficient to put 100 kids in a classroom with one teacher – it just isn’t effective at all. ) If the demand is for luxury good, there is no multiplier. Well, unless the Romney-class is buying Ford Focuses and Sharp TV sets at an exponentially greater rate than they are buy Bugattis and factories in China, giving more money to the rich will in fact depress the economy futher.

The main point, however, is that the Romney team is willfully, nakedly, distorting the record, leading Ms. Reinhart and Mr. Rogoff — who aren’t affiliated with either campaign — to protest against “gross misinterpretations of the facts.” And this should worry you.Look, economics isn’t as much of a science as we’d like. But when there’s overwhelming evidence for an economic proposition — as there is for the proposition that financial-crisis recessions are different — we have the right to expect politicians and their advisers to respect that evidence. Otherwise, they’ll end up making policy based on fantasies rather than grappling with reality. And once politicians start refusing to acknowledge inconvenient facts, where does it stop? Why, the next thing you know Republicans will start rejecting the overwhelming evidence for man-made climate change. Oh, wait.

As Krugman has pointed out repeatedly, this is not rocket science, although rocket science would do a lot for an economy in Florida and Houston and Shelby Mississippi and California where there are a lot of out of work rocket scientists, engineers and blue collar folks. But, it is a variation from the Gospel of Reagan economics and therefore a lot of people will run screaming from the room that the idea is unclean. Barrack Obama doesn’t get this – he’s a rational man who may have lived a chaotic youth but has no affinity for chaos. He thinks rational people should work from agreed reality, not fantasy. In comparison to his clown-college opponents Obama wants to be a philosopher king. Well, the track record of philosopher kings isn’t all that great –Doing policy that is meaningful demands realizing that he’s a political entity and has to do the things he doesn’t like that seem unworthy of the office. Mitt Romney wants an ascension, not accepting that he’s not going to have any room to move and will be merely a ceremonial figurehead.

The news that there may be an agreement in principle for the Iranians to sit down directly with the US and negotiate the nuclear question is fascinating to me; Romney is a salesman, Obama is a Wilsonian figure. Romney will be all about the deal and any deal will be a great deal; Obama will want a deal but he’ll want a decent deal that’s reasonably fair to all the stakeholders. Certainly there are enough of them in the equation – if you’re in the same time zone as Iran, you’re invested in the outcome of those talks. Who gets the better deal – the guy who’ll be desperate to prove he’s worthy of being president and knows nothing about foreign affairs except for what John Bolton tells him; or the guy who channels Lincoln and selected his greatest rival to be secretary of State but is super-willing to assume good faith on the part of people who can’t spell it.. Of course, the White House now says that there will be no talks soon…I’m not sure that has any meaning anyway, given the glacial way in which US-Iran relations have staggered along since 1979.

The news that there’s been another mass shooting, this time in Wisconsin in a Spa is somewhat intriguing at this point despite being a run-of-the mill domestic violence case gone even further off the tracks. Obama has never, to my knowledge claimed to have anything to do with guns as an individual; Romney has claimed to be a life-long hunter shooting “varmints.” Of course, this example of wanton murder and excess is undoubtedly due to…what, exactly? Violent video games? Birth control? Abortion? Poor childhood nutrition? Lack of social services? Jobs? Depression? Fear? Socialism? At the end of the day, there is no one explanation for evil, but my guess is that abortion and birth control issues are pretty remotely connected, unless the guy shot up a Planned Parenthood office. But one thing that I do know is that if guns are less available, it will be harder for OCD people to fixate on them because they’ll be harder to get. In this case, it turns out the guy had a restraining order filed by his wife, was under orders to stay away from her and to not possess firearms. Yet, there he was.  Certainly in Scott Walker’s beloved Wisconsin there are enough laws to control domestic violence and it has to be the fault of the unions somehow, right? No. Not enough cops, not enough controls and too easy to get guns. Be interesting to know where he got the gun – guns show at a church; from someone at a parking lot? His mother?

 

 

Walking the walk as opposed to being full of shit...

When it comes to the Vatican’s crackdown on women religious, I believe it’s time to declare that for the purpose of this struggle:we are all nuns…if you can spell Catholic, you are probably asking: how dare they go after 57,000 dedicated women whose median age is well over 70 and who work tirelessly for a more just world? How dare the very men who preside over a Church in utter disgrace due to sexual misconduct and cover-ups by bishops try to distract from their own problems by creating new ones for women religious?--     Mary E. Hunt, Theologian, Catholic Activist and Academic

I don’t really have a dog in this hunt anymore;  as an anti-theist who has reached the conclusion that the only way there could be a god would be if God was a very arbitrary and angry teenage girl named Tiffany who was primarily interested in Justin Bieber and whether or not her jeans make her ass look fat, I’m not a logical choice to defend the various orders of Nuns from the Holy See. Except, of course, that I remain a cultural Irish Catholic and a recovering victim of 16 years of Catholic confinement, most of which was largely under the attentions of the good Sisters of St Joseph and then of the good Sisters of St Francis. And, I have to admit, that the Sisters provided more encouragement to me than anyone else did. In many ways, the various orders of Catholic nuns were instrumental in most of what’s good in terms of Catholic teaching and social justice. The priests generally got all the “press” but while Father Damien gets the historical kudos for the colony at Molokai, the good sisters of the third order of St Francis – the ones who taught me from 4^th through 8^th grade – provided the nurses and the necessary assistance to make the leper colony actually work. At present, and one of the primary distractions I have been dealing with this past month, my wife is recovering from a colon resection at St Mary’s Medical Center which is managed jointly by an order of Christian Brothers and the Sisters of St Joseph of Orange, a spinoff of the Order of St Joseph that taught me how to read and cipher and make marks on paper. Now, Nuns seemed arbitrary and overwhelmingly dictatorial to a lot of Catholics over the decades. But, beginning with Vatican II, the number of nuns has steadily decreased. Those who have maintained their communities are primarily involved in social and medical work and advocacy as well as in education and foundations. I find them very admirable; in fact, I think we can say with a certain degree of certainty that Sister Mary Twinkle Toes has long since vanished from the scene, and has been replaced by what was really always there – smart women who were dedicated to a cause and a belief in caring for others and trying to live the gospel as they understood it. So the current nonsense by the Catholic hierarchy to try and “discipline” these women or drag them into compliance is a really difficult piece to justify. Nicole Brodeur of the Seattle Times does a good job of laying out the story as does Ms. Hunt. The Conference of Women Religious, basically the American Nun equivalent of the NCAA, isn’t doing what the bishops want them to do. The Sisters aren’t complaining about abortions, god, guns and gays and contraception. They’re arguing about the need for more attention to health care, poverty, education, hunger, the environment. Who the hell do these women think they are? Uppity bitches…They need to get back in their convents and bake some more wafers, say some more rosaries and iron some more Albs. Andrew Sullivan has an interesting piece on this; I find it interesting that Drew has moved from a Republican apologist to someone to the left of, well, me on a lot of things. It actually gives me hope – people like Andrew Sullivan and George Will are really too smart to go along with that right wing crap as presented these days.  Of course, I say that conscious that Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene had no public complaints and that Teilhard de Chardin remained loyal to church and order despite intellectual persecution and religious toment.  Sullivan wrote in an article in the April 2 edition of The Daily Beast  that The Catholic Church’s hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. I don’t know what greater indictment of a church’s authority there can be—except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others’ sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention. I am no fan of abortion, but at the same time, since I could never bear a child myself don’t really think that I should have a say in the decision of a woman to terminate her pregnancy, and if that termination occurs, then it should probably be under the most humane and medically safe conditions possible.  The subject to my mind is open to debate, but contraception provides an alternative more palatable than unfunded orphanages and foundling homes or back alley abortions or the type I’m hesitant about. The good enough is enemy to the good, but the perfect is enemy to the good as well. I also have come to a position which for an ubermale old soldier and Holy Cross Grad is perhaps odd – but, I really don’t care about homosexuality.  Hell, I’ve had close friends who were gay and lesbian and they never threatened me in any way, except possibly in college with a forcing bid in bridge.  Their sex lives don’t interest me --Not my business, not my concern. Now Pedophilia is my business as a citizen of the civilized world who believes that we have a duty to protect those unable to protect themselves; the abuse of power is my business, as a guy sworn to uphold the constitution and to uphold the gospels. I’m a not a priest, or a minister, or a theologian or a Catholic anymore. But, I was confirmed, and I did swear an oath to do that. Since I feel very comfortable with the parts of the New Testament that are not batshit crazy, like Jefferson, I think it’s something I can and should support as the basis for the way we treat each other. There are a lot of things in the New and Old Testament that are batshit crazy. They deserve to be treated with the same respect we treat Gilgamesh. Interesting, but not really instructive. But, the things that in the New Testament are real are certainly more direct and as articulated in the traditions of Catholic Social Justice and the Social Gospel as preached by folks as diverse as Reinhold Niebuhr and Dorothy Day, more applicable to our lives as human beings responding to St Augustine’s imperative question of “How then shall we live together? “ than any other approach, tradition or set of concepts floating around. The princes of the Church pay lip service to this and then focus on issues tangential and to do with their own power. It lies in the Sisters, the priests who defend them and the poor, the orders of nuns, priests and brothers dedicated to serving the poor, the destitute, the abandoned, the condemned to live that code. Jesus knew about homosexuality; it was not only a subject of condemnation in Leviticus but was a pretty common practice in the ancient world. He didn’t have anything to say about; he didn’t have a lot to say about sexuality; he did say a lot about love, and care, and concern for others. While I’ve seen articles that indicate the author believes that the Sermon on the Mount is like some Delphic statement or Sybilline book filled with ambiguous and confusing stuff, it’s really  not. Nor is there a lot of room for argument over what the many parables about the virtues of the poor and the need to help them. Yes, Judas complains that the oil used by the repentant hooker to tend to Jesus’ feet should have been sold to raise money to feed the poor, but Jesus’ response “The poor are always with us” seems pretty obvious to me. Leave her alone, she’s trying to do what she thinks is right and it harms no one, while doing her soul good. Judas, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Rich, the Bankers, the Moneychangers, the Tax Collectors who cheat the poor get a lot of the back of Jesus’ hand…or, as Maureen Dowd put it in her column on Sunday, a sharp rap across the knuckles.  The Bishops and the Church Hierarchy joined the plutocracy of wealth and power when Constantine took over the rule of Rome and decided that everybody would be a Christian…or else. The Bishops have always sought that kind of ecclesiastical power; the Richelieus, the Borgias and the rest of the figures in Catholic history along with the Pat Robertsons, Ian Paisleys and Benny the Rat provide cover…Jesus has damn all to do with organized Christianity. I’ve written of this before, of course, but I remember talking with a parish priest in College Station 20 plus years ago who spent his vacations in India, working with Mother Teresa. He told of being there when a journalist asked her, “How can you expect to win?” and she replied with a smile, “It’s not about winning.” I expect that the good Sisters will continue to do what they are doing, ignoring the hierarchy when they can and doing what they think is right. And, in focusing on doing good instead of telling the world, that they are good and holy  and everyone should listen to them, they show what should have been Catholicism in practice. And sadly, is not and never has been. We probably should reflect that on Easter morning, the Apostles, those first Bishops led by Simon Peter, the first Pope, were hiding or trying to get out of Jerusalem as quickly as possible. Mary Magdalene and probably Mary and Martha were on their way to the tomb to anoint and care for the body, trusting that God would convince the soldiers, Roman soldiers, to move the stone aside so that they could tend to their duty…not because they had to, but because it was the right thing to do. Odd, but in a way, both bishops and nuns are fulfilling their roles in Christian tradition. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ve known Mary Hunt for over 45 years, and have followed her career with interest and occasional snark. We met as sophomores in the diocesan high school where we haunted the halls and occasional classrooms, identified by some of the good sisters as the “brilliant and obnoxious one” (Mary) and the“brilliant but erratic one,” (me.) I concede her brilliance and I guess I accept my erraticism. We agreed about a lot of things, disagreed about a lot and took very divergent paths. I have a lot of respect for her, and she’s an interesting person and author. And, probably still consistently obnoxious to people in authority. Go for it, dear.)

Allen West climbs the shit pile of historical disgrace and crows about it

 

One of the benefits of the profound ignorance of a large swaithe of the American people lies in their inability to recognize irony. So, when a first term member of congress who is probably looking at being a one term member of Congress pulls something out not from the Karl Rove playbook but the Joe McCarthy playbook, people will miss it. Our political discourse has skipped self-satire and gone straight to slapstick. As Gibbs rule number 7 puts it, "when you lie, be specific."  Allan West, Congressman from Mesron and Florida, is now trying to win a redistricted, largely Democratic district by railing against the Democratic Progressive Caucus as "Communists' announcing that he's "heard that 80 member of congress are communists." You see, the American Communist party, the old Gus Hall powerhouse, has said that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is reasonably close to endorsing their goals. (In the spirit of full disclosure, this website endorsed Gus Hall for President in 2008. Mr Hall died in 2000)I'm not sure what those could be, since the Communist Party of the USA was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics which...no longer exists. Well, the language is degraded by more than West's blathering, but come on. Read something written by somebody not John Birch or J. Edgar Hoover that explains what Communism is as opposed to what you think it is...a vague threat to take your guns, your government health care, your government pension and your government roads, schools, infrastructure and pollute your precious body fluids while letting your children run wild having abortions and contraception and stuff. Dude, Democrats are to Communists in much the way that the Republicans are to the Freemen of Montana.

West also babbled that Barrack Obama is afraid to debate him. Really?  Loudmouthed first termer thinks that the President of the United States should get on a stage in South Florida and debate him?  Seriously, if the President has a few spare minutes to waste on West, he should devote it to shooting some hoops with his secret service detail or giving Bo a bath with the girls. Total lunacy... Seriously, the man is a deranged, meglomaniacal dweeb and needs to be kept in government cusody to protect himself and his loved ones from his next over the top appearance or action. 

Now, as I listened to the video (let's hold the musing on that trope for another time), I got the sense that a good number of Mr. West's constituents were laughing at him. It's possible that this is gem came out not so much as a Michelle Bachmann unsolicited bit of insanity as a response to poking the bear. West is not exactly known for reasoned discourse, a sense of balance or proportion and measured response to provocation. 

Now, the guy could have been court martialed for war crimes instead of being given a slap on the wrist and allowed to retire -- should have been court martialled for war crimes, since he fired a pistol at a prisoner of war in order to make him provide information -- and has disgraced the nation ever since. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in Army; he was in a command position in combat; and he ended up relieved of command and given the opportunity to retire -- which he took. I think West is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of an incredible magnitude and should be treated with respect for his service, compassion for his condition while being protected from himself and his demons. Well, Gulf I gave us Timothy McVie; Gulf 2 is giving us Allan West, Republican congressman from Florida. 

This is where the Republican leadership needs to step up, get West under control or expect a far rougher response than the sort given so far. This is pretty funny, actually. "Chellie is a Democrat, a farmer and a Lutheran but no, she is not a Communist," said Willy Ritch, spokesman for Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), also a vice chair of the caucus." 

(Note: In the spirit of full disclosure, and as a one-time student of Luther and the Protestant Reformation, I should point out that Luther had some commie-pinko-tendencies prior to the Peasants Revolt. The whole concept of grace in the Pauline-Augustinian-Luther tradition has  a pretty strong egalitarian twist to it. But in general, in Wisconsin, yeah equating Lutheran Deomocrats to Communists is like equating Allen West to Allen A' Dale, which I guess would make Boehner Robin Hood and Cantor Little John.)

As that great American political commentator Bugs Bunny would put it, "What a maroon!"