A different story

Back to Saddam one last time, and his trial and death, and the strong possibility - indeed, the common-sense conclusion - that part of the point of the charade was to silence him.

Why else try him only for his earliest crimes when the later ones racked up the big numbers (and, incidentally, served so nicely as a moral cover for our own activities in Iraq)?

Our alliance with Saddam in his "foment war with Iran" phase is so well documented - who hasn't seen the photo of him shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan's special envoy, in 1983, for instance? - that there's almost certain to be something hideously compromising in the secret record, which an ex-dictator at large would surely have talked about and a real trial would have unearthed.

The headless Horseman of the Apocalypse

President Bush may be a headless horseman. But the biggest problem is what he rode in on.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a good name for it 40 years ago. “The madness of militarism.”

We can blame Bush all we want -- and he does hold the reins right now -- but his main enablers these days are the fastidious public servants in Congress. They keep preparing the hay, freshening the water, oiling the saddle, even while criticizing the inappropriately jocular rider. And when the band plays “Hail to the Jockey,” most of the grown-up stable boys and girls can’t help saluting.

The people who actually live in Iraq have their own opinions, of course. UPI reported at the end of December that a new poll, conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, found that “about 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than it is today.” Meanwhile, according to a CNN poll last month, 11 percent of Americans support sending more U.S. troops to Iraq.

Buried in a New York Times news article on January 9 was this

Jamaica today: the legacy of Michael Manley

I recently visited the Caribbean island of Jamaica to deliver the fifth annual Michael Manley Memorial Lecture, in Kingston. It was, for me, a wonderful “homecoming.” I first visited Jamaica back in 1983, when I spoke as the “International Speaker” at Manley’s People’s National Party annual conference. I became friends with Manley, who served as Jamaica’s Prime Minister from 1972 to 1980, and again from 1989 to 1992. After combating prostate cancer, Manley died in 1997.

Through our friendship I came to understand why Michael Manley became beloved by so many millions of people throughout the world. As a champion of the poor and disposed, as a visionary spokesman for the politics of social justice, Michael Manley continues to inspire all who struggle for a more democratic, egalitarian social order.

Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney makes the case for impeachment

As some people learned from the minimal and abusive media coverage, on December 8, 2006, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney introduced Articles of Impeachment (http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/ node/16230) against President George W. Bush, making him the 10th president of the United States to face such action. Of course, McKinney was on her way out of office and thus more willing to challenge the Democratic Party leadership by upholding basic Constitutional principles.

Fewer people are aware that Congresswoman McKinney on December 27, 2006, entered into the Congressional Record (pages E2253 - 2255) extended remarks on impeachment that merit our close attention. Why would she do such a thing on her way out the door with no chance of reintroducing her bill in the new Congress? For one thing, she clearly would agree with the response Congressman John Conyers gave to Lewis Lapham when asked what he thought the point was of publishing a lengthy report laying out evidence of Bush's impeachable offenses. Conyers' response was: "to take away the excuse that we didn't know."

Gerald Ford's failure of nerve

Compared with Nixon and the Republicans who followed him, Gerald Ford looks like the embodiment of Main Street decency and prudence. Ford’s judgment seems even better when we learn that he told Bob Woodward that the Iraq war was “a big mistake," concluding, "I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security." Ford’s words should give strength to all of us who’ve questioned the war and were attacked as unpatriotic in the process. They reflect well on his common-sense willingness to acknowledge discomforting truths. But because he’d told Woodward to keep the interview private until after his death, they don’t represent courage, but in fact a failure of nerve.

Celebrity carnage

"He spent the rest of the day working to pull the dead bodies of his family from the rubble of his home, finally reaching his dead son at 4:00 p.m."

- Human Rights Watch, in a 2003 report on the U.S. air war in Iraq and the campaign to execute Baathist leadership with high explosives

Saddam's execution last week was, for the war's apologists, a merciful respite from the chaos and humiliation of this catastrophe and a chance for one last swig of moral clarity - the Butcher is dead! the Butcher is dead! - which, in the Bush era, costs about a trillion dollars a shot.

Few in the mainstream media were willing to be party poopers and point this out, of course, or mention anything, in their pseudo-serious coverage of Saddam's career, about his long, complex involvement with the U.S. foreign-policy establishment going back to the Reagan administration, as both ally and extremely useful enemy.

The mystic voting hall: for the love of democracy

I am in the famous Mystic Pizza, in Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, where a young, unformed Julia Roberts grins from a fading movie poster. Out the window, the late November sky gathers cold, grey and moist, wanting to snow. Townspeople, bundled up, hurry in and rush out with sizzling pizza in boxes.

Against the wall, serenely oblivious, gold and silver and rainbow colored fish shimmer and wiggle and dart in the warm water of their tank. I recall my first time snorkeling, after running a terrible marathon in Hawaii. There I was, just a gal from Ohio, glimpsing creatures underwater so exquisitely beautiful and diverse and beyond my imagination that my eyes teared.

And now, on my walks through this centuries-old New England village, I pass an old, squat, one story red brick building. It sits apart from the surrounding three-story wood structures. No filigree porch or widow’s walk. Above the door a flaking brown sign states in white: Fourth District Voting Hall.

Democrats' open-mic press conferences

Unlike the previous majority party in Congress, the Democrats who take power today know their weaknesses.  They know they're not very good at the whole press conference thing where you're supposed to stand there and say something people care about.  So they've announced an open-mic policy. 

And it seems to be working.  It turns out that an ordinary person who's not been through our campaign bribery system and not agreed to a list of positions acceptable to Washington strategists is much more interesting to listen to than Rahm Emanuel.  Speaking at Congressional press conferences could become a regular stop for tourists of our nation's Capital as well as for locals who enjoy karaoke.

Congressman Emanuel had not been informed of the new policy yesterday, but we knew he'd appreciate it.  So, while he was in the middle of trying to impress employees of Disney and GE with his commitment to banning lobbyists from donating small islands to Congress Members except on weekends (or something), Cindy Sheehan livened things up by beginning a chant of

DE-ESCALATE, INVESTIGATE, TROOPS HOME NOW!

3,000 lights delivered to Rep. Marcy Kaptur

“Your constituents will no longer allow you to fund the warfare, to send our daughters and sons, or to participate in the death.”

On Friday, January 5, at 9:30 am, on the sidewalk in front of Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s office at 1 Maritime Plaza, members of the NW Ohio Peace Coalition will hold a news conference prior to delivering to her the 3,000 lights they held up along Summit, Jefferson, and Madison Streets on New Year’s Eve.  The lights were displayed to memorialize the 3,000 U.S. troops killed in Iraq to that date. 

Accompanying the lights will be a letter (below), written by Peggy Daly-Masternak and authorized by the NWOPC steering committee, explaining the significance of the 875-foot strand of bulbs. 

Greater than Warren Harding?

These days, a hefty slab of the teenagers alive in America will supposedly live to be 100 (presumably working till they drop to pay for the rest, jobless and dying from diabetes). Given the reproductive shadow hanging over America -- poor semen quality, cryptorchidism, impaired fecundity -- they won't have that many children, although the sparse litters will contain people likely to live to be 125, handing down horrible recipes for turkey giblet gravy to the next generation.

            In short, there'll be a lot of centenarians about, and the name Gerald Ford will mean absolutely nothing to any of them. You had to have been born in 1960 to have been 14 in 1974, hence even vaguely conscious of the genial interregnum between Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, over which Ford presided.

            Ah, the 1970s! More precisely, the mid-1970s, an interval -- from Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, to Jan. 23, 1977, when Carter installed Zbigniew Brzezinski as his national security adviser -- when people thought America might head down a different path.

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