Michael Mukasey, the president's nominee for attorney general, is a very dangerous man. His predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, was an incompetent buffoon, a hack from Texas who launched the campaign to turn the country into a military dictatorship in his "secret" memos ridiculing the Geneva Conventions.
I am ashamed for America. Note carefully that I do not say I am ashamed of America. Despite all its inherent flaws and all its tragic mistakes, the United States stands, however incompletely and with whatever imperfections, for the highest standards of freedom and democracy that the world has yet known.
Wednesday,
October 17,
2007
Will we fall
for war vs.
Iran?
It would
appear,
according to
news
reports,
that the
hard-liners
in the Bush
administration,
led by the
vice
president,
are pushing
for a war
with Iran.
The tactics
are the
same. Once
you've
played the
fear card to
start one
war, the
second time
is easier.
U.S. needs
to get back
on track
A nationally
syndicated
columnist
has recently
urged that
Americans
forget about
9/11, become
adults, and
"get back
our groove."
Thomas
Friedman is
the senior
columnist at
the New York
Times and
hence de
facto the
most
important
columnist in
the United
States. That
he
disapproves
of the 9/11
cult makes
it official.
As America's
uber wise
man, he has
certified
that the
national
obsession
with the
World Trade
Center
attack is a
sign of
weakness and
fear. Yet in
the
marvelous
Yiddish
phrase,
"Already,
all right,
enough!"
Why are there no
war crimes
trials?
I've watched two
episodes of Ken
Burns' "The
War." I don't
think I'll watch
any more. It was
young men of my
generation who
fought those
battles. The
kids killed on
Guadalcanal or
storming Monte
Cassino were
only a couple
years older than
I was. Nor will
I read the late
David
Halberstam's
book The
Coldest Winter
about Korea. My
friends died in
that winter
cold. War is
inherently ugly,
destructive,
horrible. The
lives of young
men are cut
short. Parents,
spouses,
friends,
children are
marked for life
by the losses
they suffered.
It is
astonishing that
despite the four
wars of the last
half century, we
Americans do not
remember the
horror. Instead
we blunder into
new wars,
blithely
confident that
it will be easy,
short and almost
bloodless. We
are always
mistaken.
Perhaps we don't
want to
remember.
There are times when American society tends to make major shifts. Polite people in polite society do not engage in certain slurs, certain nasty stereotypes. This does not mean that the prejudice against Jews, let us say, goes away, but it does mean that certain words are not used -- like the k-word. And certain stereotypes are indeed shared -- Jews are dishonest in business -- but only with those with whom you know you can get away with it. The n-word is absolutely forbidden, but you can whisper in the dark that blacks are too dumb to be NFL quarterbacks. Stereotypes about Catholics cannot be whispered in most contexts, but in certain faculty lunchrooms one can still hear -- quite out loud -- that Catholics just can't think for themselves. Italian stereotypes can still be celebrated in an immensely popular TV series.
Wednesday, September
19, 2007
Why won't Bush admit
mistakes?
Last week was a
strange one. The
commander in chief,
the president of the
United States, took
refuge behind a
military field
commander to achieve
credibility with the
American people.
Through constant
repetition of his
name, almost an
invocation, George
Bush built up Gen.
David Petraeus as
the man who finally
found a strategy
that would work in
Iraq. Because he
said it would work,
therefore, it had
worked.
Wednesday, September
12, 2007
Bush not swayed by
Iraq reality
Here's the question
that senators ought
to have asked
General Petraeus
(the current Colin
Powell):
Is President Bush able to distinguish truth from falsehood? Is he too caught up in the double-talk generated by his spin masters to grasp the difference? After reading his talk to the VFW last week, I think that at this stage of his presidency he is utterly incapable of honest communication with the rest of the country.
A church 'scandal' that
isn't
Now, as the poor
battered Catholic Church
tries to recover from a
bushel basket of
scandals, it must cope
with the Mother Teresa
scandal. Someone has
found the poor woman's
private letters in which
she confessed how weak
her faith and love
seemed. Spread around
the world by Time
magazine, the letters
are taken as evidence
that she was not the
saint we all thought she
was. On ABC Evening News
on Friday night, an
itinerant atheist
offered the opinion that
she was a hypocrite.
In the 1980s, the Reagan Era, an attitude slipped into the corporate world, especially with the young people who were pouring into the financial services sector: Greed is good! The purpose of a corporation is to promote the net wealth of the stockholder. CEOs should be rewarded for producing stockholder wealth by huge salaries -- more in a day or even an hour -- than their workers earned all year. Anything that was not against the law was virtuous so long as it made money. It was the old laissez faire notion that individual and corporate greed contributed to the general welfare of the economy. The maximization of wealth swept away the idealism of the '60s. Greed was now good.
Bush's cloak-and-stagger
folly
The president's comment that the CIA was just guessing is
spinless truth, for a
change. In fact, the agency
knew virtually nothing about
what was happening inside of
Iraq, and hence described
the worst possible case,
just as it was unaware that
the Soviet Union was falling
apart at the end of the
Stalinist era. The best
intelligence about the
Soviets was contained in the
books written at the time by
the reporters from the
Washington Post and the New
York Times.
''The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty. It makes no sense. It has to be reorganized and we should have done it long ago. Nothing has changed since Pearl Harbor. I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this. . . . I will leave a legacy of ashes. . . .''
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Will we betray our Iraqi
workers?
I see by the papers, as Mr.
Dooley used to say, that the
American ambassador in Iraq is
trying to obtain passports for
Iraqi members of the embassy
staff and isn't having much
success. The United States hires
Iraqis to work for them but does
not want its employees to have
an escape hatch when the end
comes. Homeland Security is
combing the list for possible
terrorists. It might be easier
if the department gave them
passports and then forced them
to live in the toxic house
trailers it has stockpiled for
Katrina victims.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Better bishops would be blessing
"How can the pope say that the
other denominations are
defective when American
Catholicism had to pay $2
billion because of predator
priests?"
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Immigration 'win' is no victory
The screaming mobs of
immigrant-hating nativists are
celebrating their victory over
"illegal" immigrants. Using the
cry of "no amnesty" as a
shibboleth, they have blocked
any opportunity for current
immigrants to gain American
citizenship, which used to be
the goal of "Americanizers."
They have also blocked serious
efforts at border defense, such
as the big wall that was to
stretch from the Ocean to the
Gulf, from sea to shining sea.
They have cut off their noses to
spite their faces when in fact
the 12 million "illegals" have
de facto amnesty.
Friday, July 6th, 2007
Caution
made JFK a great leader
"All war is stupid." -- John F.
Kennedy Although support for the Iraq
war diminishes daily, even among Republican senators, the neocons continue
to write articles about why "we" must stand firm. That's what neocons
do: They write articles and
memos. "We" have an obligation
to the Iraqi people, they tell
us. "We" must stand by them in
their struggle for "democracy."
"We" have a moral obligation to
continue the war...
Friday, June 29, 2007
Ethnic biases stronger than ever
As the 19th century turned into the 20th, Americans began to worry about the stability of their society and its culture. Strange languages were spoken on the streets, strange-looking people in strange clothes were shopping in our stores. Strange smells percolated in certain neighborhoods. Strange customs were appearing on strange holidays. These strangers were pouring into our country. They threatened our democracy, our way of life, our culture, our religious beliefs, our economy, our blood stock. Why didn't they stay in their own countries?
Friday, June 22, 2007
The vice presidency, John Nance Garner is alleged to have told his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson, isn't worth a bucket of warm spit. A lame-duck presidency isn't worth much more. While George W. Bush was traveling through Europe on what should have looked like a triumphal journey, back home, Republican senators were burying his immigration reform bill and the secretary of defense was confessing that he could not reappoint Bush's handpicked chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Does Bush comprehend that the public and Congress are repudiating him? His jaunty swagger on the shore of the Baltic Sea does not look like a man with his back to the wall.
Friday, June 15, 2007
An ending with
no meaning
I must confess a temptation to
complacent laughter at the
frustration of all ''The Sopranos''
fans at the conclusion of the
series. It was the most important
television project ever, comparable
to Don Quixote, Shakespeare, maybe
even St. John's Gospel.
Friday, June 8, 2007
Plan B is beginning to emerge -- the followup to the strategy of the "the surge," which is the current strategy. The president recently has been comparing the Iraq war with the Korean War. Both, he has suggested, are "long wars.'' The one in Korea technically continues, and American troops still are stationed there. Iraq also will be a long war. Some folks at the Pentagon whisper that the Army might start drawing down troops next year (just in time for the election!), but half of them or maybe only a third will remain in Iraq. Thus, there will be a timetable of a sort for withdrawing American troops, which will satisfy the public, but a refusal to give up, which will satisfy the president and his loyal followers.
Friday, June 1, 2007
Bigotry never goes away. When it becomes unfashionable, it goes underground and waits until a new hate group appears into which it can project its twisted sickness. Racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and anti-immigrant nativism are chronic infections in the American body politic. Rush Limbaugh singing the obscene tune ''Barack the Magic Negro'' is inviting prejudice and violence. However, for pure irrational rage, the current crop of nativists are some of the worst to come along since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s or those God-fearing Protestants who burned convents in Boston in the 19th century.
Friday, May 25, 2007
As the immigrant haters demolish the current version of "reform," the wise person tries to reflect on these three propositions:
Friday, May 18, 2007
Spain's history of sorrows
SEVILLE, Spain -- Flamenco music, particularly
the songs that accompany the dances (usually
sung by men) reminds me of African-American
blues: Both lament powerfully the sorrows, the
pains, the disappointment of life. The dances
are something like what the Irish step dances
might become if the Irish could reach a state of
abandon -- which, of course, we will never do.
The beating of the feet and the castanets
suggest a vitality that can never be snuffed
out.
Friday, May 11, 2007
History lesson on whom to trust
TOLEDO, Spain -- For a half millennium, give or
take, Christianity and Islam battled for Spain.
Some leaders of both sides believed that the
only good infidel was a dead infidel. Others,
however, on both sides practiced for long
periods of time a pragmatic tolerance from which
we might learn today.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Dispute over power of the church still reigns in
Spain
MADRID -- ''Why is everything new in Pedro
Almodovar's films?" I asked, "Schools, jails,
hospitals, apartments, offices?"
Friday, April 27, 2007
How Chicago can
lose its bid for the 2016 Olympics
Like
most Chicagoans, I believe that this city should
win the big prize in 2009 when they choose an
Olympic site. Only Rio can beat Chicago for the
beauty of its setting. The trouble with its
beaches is that large numbers of teens with
automatic weapons are up in the favillas waiting
for opportunities to terrorize the city. None of
the other contestants has a plan like Chicago's
to put all the venues within a fairly compact
area. Chicago is a fascinating and variegated
city despite the constant putdowns from New
York, which blew its opportunity to have the
Olympics.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Sexist, racism
hurt both students at Rutgers and Duke
Both
the women basketball players at Rutgers and the
men lacrosse stalwarts at Duke were victims. The
former were victimized by racism and sexism, the
latter by reverse racism and sexism. The former
were assaulted by a media culture which seeks to
tear down the barriers of political correctness
and the latter by paragons of such correctness
-- academic faculty and administrators. The
former were victims of their black skin and
their role as women athletes, the latter of
their white skin, thick necks and huge muscles
("farmyard animals," one Duke professor called
them).
Friday, April 13, 2007
Endless war, endless spin:
GOP keeps lying about Iraq
Most of us thought that the last election settled the Iraq
issue. The voters by a substantial majority
rejected the Iraq war. It now appears that Iraq
will be the focus of the presidential election
next year. In an exercise of political
legerdemain almost as ingenious as that which
launched this stupid, inept and immoral war,
President Bush has somehow reintroduced it as
the focus for political debate this year and
next year.
Friday, April 6, 2007
Protestants may yet find
excuse to delay N. Ireland peace
Ireland finally made it big in the American media last week:
front page in the New York Times and three
minutes on the evening news. Protestants and
Catholics had made peace in Northern Ireland.
The heads of both warring political factions sat
at a table with each other and made statements
about political cooperation. Finally, a conflict
that went back to Oliver Cromwell had come to an
end.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Bush team is adept only at
bungling
The Bush administration reminds me of Jimmy Breslin's comic
novel, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight.
The premise of the novel was what if you had a
Mafia gang whose members were incompetent at the
things that mafiosi are supposed to do.
Similarly, the Bush administration has often
shot itself in the foot because its key players
are not qualified for their jobs. They make a
mess of the job and are protected by secrecy; or
if that isn't possible, by spin.
Friday, March 23, 2007
U.S. attorneys need legal restraints
Years ago, a U.S. attorney said to me: ''We can indict anybody on La Salle Street we want. Maybe it would be more difficult to get a conviction, but we still have the power to ruin him.'' Justice Robert H. Jackson, one of the Supreme Court's greats in the 20th century, warned of the power of the federal prosecutor when he said that the power is enormous and easily perverted. ''The prosecutor,'' Jackson said in 1940 when he was U.S. attorney general, ''has more power over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America. That power must be shielded from politics and even from the Department of Justice.''
Friday, March 16, 2007
Searing attacks on religion
are wholly smoke
On March 4 there were two devastating attacks on religion in
major national media: the Discovery Channel and the
New York Times Magazine, both of which ought to know
better. The former presented a long (and dull)
program, ''The Lost Tomb of Jesus,'' which argued
that Jesus and his wife Mary Magdalene were buried
side by side in a tomb outside of Jerusalem. It
presented dramatizations of the loving couple with
their son Judah.
Friday, March 9, 2007
Betraying the truth
betrays the troops
I see by
the papers that Senators Barack Obama and John
McCain have been "dinged" by the "researchers" (mud
collectors and mud throwers) because they have
asserted that lives and money have been "wasted" in
Iraq. How dare they say that the lives of "our
troops" were wasted? Have they no respect for the
feelings of the survivors of "our troops''? Must one
maintain the illusion that these brave men and women
died for something important, like American freedom
or democracy or to prevent another World Trade
Center attack?
Friday, March 2, 2007
TUCSON -- This is a period when the American Catholic Church is as dry and dull as the Sonoran Desert. The hope and joy generated by the Vatican Council is dead. The separation between the leaders and the followers has grown wider. The former speak on many things; the latter barely hear them. The latter have created for themselves a Catholic identity based on the resurrection of Jesus, concern for the poor, Jesus in the Eucharist, God in the sacraments, and devotion to the Mother of Jesus; the former hassle them about secularization and relativism. To the repulsive sexual abuse crisis, one must now add the financial embezzlement crisis.
Friday, February 23, 2007
The collapse of the shah in Iran was the beginning of American troubles in the Middle East. The shah was "our guy," an absolute ruler who was secularizing the country and freeing his people from the shackles of religious superstition and obscurantism. It never occurred to our foreign policy thinkers and experts that the people of Iran wanted their obscurantism and old-fashioned religion. The American leadership did not see the ayatollah coming and was unprepared for the defeat of the shah. Educated as they were in the great secular universities, our foreign policy gurus did not have a clue about the importance of religion in Middle Eastern countries.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Be cautious about impeaching Bush
Impeach the president? Impeach President
Bush? We learned from the attempt to oust President Bill
Clinton that there are few rules for indicting and
convicting a president.
Friday, February 9, 2007
U.S. needs the strength to be patient
We are told that it is a time for
Americans to demonstrate courage, strength, power. We
must not accept defeat in Iraq and the "dire" (favorite
new word) consequences of failure -- such as region-wide
chaos in the Middle East. It is not clear who these "we"
are. Not the senators or columnists or editorial writers
who are calling on us for sacrifice. They are not in
combat themselves, they do not have children in combat.
By what right do they lecture those who do and those who
now perceive that it was the wrong war, carried out in
the wrong way?
Friday, February 2, 2007
You want to live in the White House? You can buy it for $5 billion! That's what the experts say the campaign of '08 will cost. It will be split between parties and within the parties and among candidates, perhaps $200 million, $250 million for the winning candidate.
Friday, January 26, 2007
The film "Babel" is vehemently anti-American. Directed by the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, it won the Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and a nomination for the Academy Award. American critics seemed to miss the subtle anti-gringoism of this brilliant ensemble movie, a kind of globalization version of last year's equally brilliant Academy Award-winner, ''Crash.''
Friday, January 19, 2007
The presidential address last week was pathetic enough to make one feel sad for the poor dear man, as they say in the old country. With little emotional affect he read a lecture about his ''new strategy,'' which was in fact nothing more than a new tactic, growled at Iran and Syria, threatened the Iraqi government, and promised that the United States would emerge the winner in Iraq.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Unjust Iraq war raises painful question: Why?
TUCSON -- I become angry every time I see a spread in a local newspaper of the recent military casualties. They are mostly young, their lives still ahead of them, victims of a stupid, unjust, criminal war. Many more have been maimed for life. I think of the suffering families, parents, spouses, children whose lives will be forever blighted by the pain of the death of someone they love.
Friday, January
5, 2007
Saddam execution is stain on
America
Americans cheered enthusiastically last week for President Ford,
who pardoned Richard Nixon. Simultaneously they celebrated the
fact that President Bush did not insist on pardoning Saddam
Hussein -- in fact didn't even think of it. Those who wanted
Nixon behind bars only wanted revenge. Those who wanted to see
Saddam attached to a rope just before he died were not seeking
revenge.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Catholicism absorbing Latino
culture
TUCSON -- The New York Times magazine last Sunday suggested that
American Catholicism is being ''Hispanicized.'' As usual, when
the subject is the Catholic Church, the "good, gray" Times is
tone-deaf.
Friday, December 22, 2006
God shows up where we least
expect
The film "Stranger Than Fiction" has the same structure as a
parable of Jesus. There is a hapless, clueless victim (Will
Ferrell), a powerful personage who can destroy him (Emma
Thompson, who is writing a novel about him in which he will die
at the end), and a "third man" (Dustin Hoffman) who urges her to
go ahead and kill him, it will be her greatest novel. Once she
finds out that she is God in his life, mercy and affection take
control of her and she acts like God. She sacrifices her novel
that he may live and find happiness.
Friday, December 15, 2006
Bush doesn't seem capable of
admitting his serious errors
The long-awaited report of the Iraq Study Group was dead on
arrival. It was designed as a proposal by a bipartisan
commission of wise men that would provide President Bush with a
way out of the Big Muddy into which he had led the country.
There was no particular reason to think that any of the major
recommendations would in fact change the situation in Iraq.
Friday, December 8, 2006
.
. . but if he does, he'd better be ready to face nasty
opposition
Should Sen. Barack Obama run
for president? It will be a tough call for the senator and for
those who admire and respect him personally. If he runs, he has
a good chance of winning because he represents what Americans
want in their president at this very troubled time in their
history, a man of firm principles but not an ideologue, a
moderate who can sympathize with his opponent's position, a
modest man with self-deprecating wit, a politician who tries to
bring people together instead of polarizing them against one
another.
Friday, December 1, 2006
Moral health tip to America: Stay out of draft
Rep. Charles Rangel
(D-N.Y.) celebrated the Democratic election victory by proposing
to renew the military draft. His oft-repeated argument is that
the draft would produce an army with social and racial equity.
White, college-educated young men and women would have to serve
as target practice for Shiites, Sunnis and other murderous
tribes in Iraq when they take time out from killing one another.
Friday, November 24, 2006
What is the point of Iraq deaths?
My mother used to
tell me when I was very young a story about the last American to
die on Nov. 11, 1918, at 10:59 in the morning. It was an urban
folk tale of that era, doubtless, though indeed there was an
American who was the last victim of the war. His death was
pointless, that was the sentimental irony of the story. But so
was the death of everyone else who died in that absurd, insane
mass murder. The "Great Powers" of Europe stumbled into the war
because of a toxic mix of arrogance and ignorance and couldn't
find a way out of it. Nothing was settled, the war went into a
recess to be renewed 20 years later with even more demonic fury.
November 17th, 2006
Latest disastrous plan: More GIs
to Iraq
Many of the wise
people in this country who supported the Iraq war at the
beginning now contend that the answer to the problem is to send
more troops to Iraq. Sen. John McCain says that 20,000 more
should be enough. Some of the military "experts" on television
are hinting that 100,000 more will do the job.
November 10th, 2006
Even the "born-agains" may have been part of the Democratic revolution last Tuesday. In its final pre-election poll, the New York Times, with its usual religious tin ear, presented but did not comment on a graph that showed this Republican "base" was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in its voting plans. While exit poll data is necessary to confirm this finding, it was a strong hint that the house of cards Karl Rove had created was falling apart.Friday, November 3rd, 2006
Why did the United States invade Iraq? The administration, still claiming to be "tough on terror," dances around in its search for a credibility-saving way out. Bloody bodies and great clouds of smoke appear every night on television. American casualties increase. President Bush no longer uses the words ''staying the course.'' He still seems to insist that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on global terror. The issue on this election eve ought to be: Why did we invade Iraq in the first place?Friday, October 27th, 2006
It would appear that two weeks before the election, President Bush may be revising the course as well as staying it. Perhaps this is the ultimate Karl Rove scam: We will stay the course until victory in Iraq, but we will set up "milestones" that will in effect be a schedule for withdrawal. We will have our cake and eat it too. After all, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself has said, Iraq belongs to the Iraqis; it's up to them to take it over.October 20, 2006
October 13, 2006
My Democratic friends are counting up the number of seats they're going to win in the election: 16, 20, 35, 50. I hate to disappoint them, but the Republicans will win in the sense that they will not lose. Democratic overconfidence, as American as cherry pie, happens every election year along about now.October 6, 2006
They eliminated the parish where I was baptized. They closed the church where I said my first Mass and took out the stained-glass windows. Now they've closed the high school seminary where I began my journey to the priesthood. I understand the need for such measures, but they've wiped out my past and it breaks my heart.
