While McCain walks in McNamara’s footsteps

The media spectacle that John McCain made of himself in Baghdad on April 1 was yet another reprise of a ghastly ritual. Senator McCain expressed “very cautious optimism” and told reporters that the latest version of the U.S. war effort in Iraq is “making progress.”

Three years ago, in early April 2004, when an insurrection exploded in numerous Iraqi cities, U.S. occupation spokesman Dan Senor informed journalists: “We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems.” Nine days later, President Bush declared: “It's not a popular uprising. Most of Iraq is relatively stable.”

For government officials committed to a war based on lies, such claims are in the wiring.

When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited Vietnam for the first time, in May 1962, he came back saying that he’d seen “nothing but progress and hopeful indications of further progress in the future.”

In October 1966, when McNamara held a press conference at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from a trip to Vietnam, he spoke of the progress he’d seen there. Daniel Ellsberg recalls that McNamara made that

On the state level: Access to local media threatened by Ohio Bill

As big media faces a more public-interest oriented Congress, some public policy battles are moving to state legislatures. Phone giants interested in entering the video market want to get rid of local franchising, the locale-by-locale permission to use public right-of-ways that cable companies have had to secure.

A community with enough foresight to take advantage of franchising--and Columbus, regrettably, has not--has been able to leverage Public, Educational and Government (PEG) channels with budgets to run them, to provide high-speed governmental and civic sector networks, to require services in low-income communities, and to generate other benefits, services and local income.

Tall tales and Tillman

Model perfect, pro athlete Pat Tillman was the poster boy for military recruitment. He gave up a lucrative NFL career to enlist in the Army and avenge the Sept. 11 Massacre.

            In a 2002 Wall Street Journal column, Reaganite Peggy Noonan compared the Army Ranger to "Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable and Tyrone Power in World War II." "It is good to see their style return," she gushed. "Markets rise and fall, politicians come and go, but that we still make Tillmans is headline news."

            Making Tillmans is still Page One news. But Noonan probably meant creation the old-fashioned way, through procreation and passing along family values.

            Yet, the Pentagon makes Tillmans, too. Actually, it reinvents them.

            When Cpl. Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, the Army resurrected him as a mythical hero. Tall tales were told of how Tillman went out in a blaze of glory against Taliban fighters April 22, 2004.

More potential 2004 election illegalities rock Ohio's Hocking County as Cleveland braces for a legal firestorm

As the third of four members of the Cuyahoga (Cleveland) County Board of Elections resigns under pressure from Ohio's new Secretary of State, additional potential illegalities in Hocking County have resurfaced with new weight against a GOP executive director already under serious fire.

The four members of the Cuyahoga BOE have been asked to resign by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat elected in November, 2006. Brunner has issued a stinging five-point complaint, much of which derives from the report done by U.S. Congressman John Conyers in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, and on reporting done at http://www.freepress.org/ and research by grassroots election protection activists.

Symbolism and duct tape

"The Army has yet to provide the family with a copy of the original narrative required by Army Regulation to support the award of the Silver Star."

The simplest truths bedevil chronic liars, even those with multibillion-dollar budgets. So as the family of Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinal football player who enlisted in the Army shortly after 9/11 and died as the result of friendly fire in Afghanistan three years ago, stand their ground with quiet dignity and insist only on a true accounting of what happened to him, I ponder the phenomenon of a society in a state of arrested development.

Who would have guessed that the war on terror and its vast supporting infrastructure — indeed, the whole conspiracy of militarism — depend at some core level on a 10-year-old boy in combat boots, pointing his toy gun at the air and making shooting noises? The Bush administration's war on terror is a children's crusade, or the facade of one: unsullied valor in the service of freedom.

Veto this

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is right to point Unitary Executive George W. Bush toward a copy of the Constitution.  The President (should Bush care to resume that legal role) is permitted to veto bills but not to write them.  In particular, the President cannot rewrite legislation after it has been voted on and before he signs it.  Nor can any member of Congress.

Bush's longstanding habit, of course, has been to rewrite laws after he signs them, by the use of "signing statements."  This is also completely unconstitutional.  And it is, I think, his most likely course of action with the "supplemental" war bill – assuming the Democrats don't weaken it.  He wants the money without delay, and he knows the Democrats and the media will avert their eyes from any signing statement.  However, he does not want the media to report that he signed a bill containing a withdrawal deadline – even an unenforceable one.  So, he may veto as promised.

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Ignore the pundits and bark louder

Someday the Democrats may learn an important lesson about the collective wisdom of the media in the nation's capital: On important questions of policy and politics, the Washington press corps is almost always wrong. They are full of firm opinions about everything from clothing, haircuts and marital problems to political tactics, but the safest course is to ignore their advice.

            At the moment, the most popular line among the certified pundits is that the congressional Democrats are too zealous in probing Bush administration corruption -- and specifically the apparent politicization of the federal law-enforcement system by the White House and the Justice Department.

            On television and in print, Washington's wise folk warn that if the Democrats insist on dragging Bush deputy Karl Rove up to Capitol Hill to testify about the purging of eight United States attorneys, the public will turn on them. These finger-wagging journalists insist that Democrats must "legislate" rather than "investigate."

War in Iraq

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Rover is not on the menu, Wilbur is, and Mahmoud just starved to death: "Another bacon burger, anyone?"

"If my competitor were drowning, I’d stick a hose in his mouth and turn on the water."
--Ray Kroc

"…a funny, jowly, canny, barbarous guy who lives in a multimillion-dollar condo on Park Avenue in Manhattan and conveys himself about the planet in a corporate jet and a private yacht. At sixty-seven, he is unrepentant in the face of criticism. He describes himself as a "tough man in a tough business"….."The animal-rights people," he once said, "want to impose a vegetarian's society on the U.S. Most vegetarians I know are neurotic.""

--Jeff Tietz’s description of meat processing magnate, Joseph Luter III (from his Rolling Stone article, "Boss Hog")

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