thoughts from a brokenSoldier

I know it has been a while since I’ve written, but hopefully I’m getting back into the swing of things because this article on HuffPost grabbed my eye today.  It has hardly been a secret that many Supreme Court justices in this nation’s history have been obviously prejudicial concerning race, but – at least since the Civil Rights Movement – they’ve at the very minimum had to conceal the overtly racist aspects of their personal opinions and public statements.  And for the most part, they have been able to do so.  Apparently, however, give the country a “conservative revolution” (ironically spurred by a product of that supposedly elitist den of liberalism, Hollywood), and thirty years later you have a Supreme Court slightly dominated by conservatives.  Add to that mix the following: one serving of the nation’s first black President, two gallons of the Fox News noise machine with Beck, Hannity, and O’Reilly, and just a dash of the subsurface racism so many in this country still harbor, and VIOLA!!  You now have the conditions that are ripe for certain Supreme Court justices to throw back all but the thinnest veil and display their bigotry to all.

In the article, Scalia discusses one of the most seminal cases in US Supreme Court history – Brown v. Board of Education.  Most in our country think this moment in our history was one of our best, a leap forward in our society that had been too long in coming and that was a step in the direction of healing the wounds of our past.  And since the nine Supreme Court justices are the ultimate arbiters of constitutional law in our system, one might think that a current justice discussing such a case would be doing so in an attempt to illuminate the history of the court and how it has been a heavy contributor to our nation’s progress.  But one would be very, very wrong.

Instead, Scalia chose to trumpet his disregard for the decision, even going so far as to say that he would have dissented in the decision.  To translate, Antonin Scalia – a current US Supreme Court Justice – stood in front of an assembly of law students at the University of Arizona and announced that he would have voted to keep the schools segregated and uphold the abhorrent “separate but equal” system.  Now, some of you might see this and take it as normal bigot behavior, but it is something altogether more sinister due to the reasoning behind his statement.

Using his "originalist'’ philosophy, Scalia said he likely would have dissented from the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared school segregation illegal and struck down the system of "separate but equal'’ public schools. He said that decision, which overturned earlier precedent, was designed to provide an approach the majority liked better.”

He is standing in front of law students, telling them that the schools should have been kept segregated because that’s the way the framers wanted it, and that’s the way it should have stayed – human rights be damned. 

One can only assume that Scalia also believes that since the framers made very clear their acceptance of slavery (see here for a very good discussion of the reasons the framers allowed slavery into the fold, and exactly why they did so), he believes that slavery should never have been abolished.  Following his “originalist” line of logic, he must also believe that African-Americans should still only count two-fifths as much as white men.  And, for that matter, I can only assume he would vote to deny women the right to vote.

But his brand of “originalist” bullshit fails to stand up to simple reason.  When the authors of the Constitution wrote the document, they recognized that their efforts were not exhaustive by any means, even considering the decreased number of issues facing them in comparison with the modern world.  As such, they also wrote an immediate ten amendments to their original document that we all know today as the Bill of Rights.  I mean, this is really all middle-school stuff, isn’t it?  And one specific part of Scalia’s statement betrays the fact that he knows all of this, and is simply intellectualizing his racist opinions to justify them legally.  At the very end of his statement, he addresses what he believes the impetus was behind the decision when he says (bold mine for emphasis): 

He said that decision, which overturned earlier precedent, was designed to provide an approach the majority liked better.

As a student and longtime practitioner of the law, he knows damn well that the justices behind that decision were not motivated simply by their desire to appease a demanding majority in the population, and his assertion of such is ignorant, dismissive, and stunningly disrespectful.  If somehow he does not know their motives, he can read the majority decision in the case, and then if his opinion isn’t changed, he can come right out and call those justices liars for concealing their true motive.  He also knows very well that in law, no precedent is immune to being overturned, provided the arguments for such are valid and compelling.  That is the very basis of our self-correcting system…you know, the same system Scalia has worked within for the better part of the last half-century.

But Scalia’s bigotry alone is not the worst piece of this pie.  What disturbs me is that he is making a very public show of demonstrating how to cloak your racism in legal terms, and he is doing so in front of future attorneys and justices.  Now, most of them (hopefully) can see the idiocy in his remarks, but it is guaranteed that there are some ears who heard those remarks and instead of hearing something ridiculous, they heard a how-to seminar.  And though Scalia splits hairs in trying to distinguish between “original meaning” and “original intent,” when it comes to the slavery and civil rights situation, there was no difference between meaning and intent – the intent behind the laws were motivated by hate, which was in turn propped up by huge secondary interests.  In the case of slavery, it was economic influence that was fighting against the abolition of slavery, and in the case of segregation and civil rights, the opposition was driven by political concerns of white politicians reluctant to relinquish any of their hold on the nation’s reins.

So I guess that’s where we’ve come to in the current political climate.  Boisterous protests abound among mostly white conservatives decrying the onset of, socialism, fascism, or communism (or whatever other code word they’re using for black this week).  Signs and comments comparing Obama to everyone from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot flood the cable media airwaves through protests, pundits - and even “news” anchors and reporters on Fox News.  And all this is happening after George W. Bush – a Republican president – flouted both the framers’ meaning and intent concerning basic rights and issues such as unlawful search and seizure, warrants for surveillance, and even the conduct of war, all in the name of “national security.”  So I guess it isn’t too much of a leap from that to hearing a current justice denounce one of the Court’s major decisions in support of racial equality in our nation’s history.  If I didn’t know better, I’d say that comments like this would get him in some very deserved hot water, but they won’t. 

And this is the very reason I laugh whenever I hear someone complaining about “liberal judicial activism.”  For the past twenty years, it has been the conservative justices on the court that have tried their hardest to complicate and undo the socially progressive decisions of the justices and Courts before them.

Is it just me, or does the far right-wing in this country have a monumental problem with projection?  Ah, a post for another day… 

I just watched The Daily Show, and had to post.  Stewart mopped the floor with Cramer, and it couldn’t have been more fun to watch.  IMO, it lived up to the hype, plus some.  Cramer got taken right down to the bottom - in effect begging to be let off the hook when he said "Okay, how about I try that?  I’ll do that."  Really?  Grovelling?

I loved it, and I fully plan to watch the unedited version as soon as they post it tomorrow.  They’re saying they had to cut about 8 minutes from the tape in order to keep it within the alotted time, so the rest should be just as good.

 

P.S. - Isn’t it a sad commentary to notice that this guy has been all over the NBC family of news shows, and Stewart was the first one to call him to the carpet for his obvious misconduct? 

UPDATE 10:17 CST: HuffPo has the video of the 2006 interview with Cramer & Wall Street Confidential that I cite below, in which he admits to blatantly and illegally fomenting the market to make money through the naked short-selling of stocks - and even recommending it as advice to hedge fund managers, calling those who are in the market for longer than a day "the moron longs"…which would be anyone that’s not a hedge fund manager, I guess.

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The Daily Show’s recent pieces on CNBC - and Jim Cramer specifically - are pure comedy gold, especially since they highlight everything that has been wrong with our financial system for the past couple of decades.  But on an absolute lark, I took the suggestion of a commenter on a site I frequent and looked into Deep Capture, a financial news investigative reporting blog that supposedly had more in the way of news on Cramer.  I soon found myself in the midst of a four-hour absolute readfest, and the piece-de-resistance was the bio article on Jim Cramer done by Patrick Byrne, Jim Cramer is a Complicated Man. 

(WARNING: That article, and probably this one, will take a while to read, but it is well worth the time, if you have it.)

Considering the litany of misjudgement and seemingly inexplicable wrong-ness Cramer has been caught in during the past days, weeks, and months of economic cliff-diving, I thought it might be a good idea to take a little time to see exactly who in the hell this guy was, where he came from, and why he deserved such an arrogant and self-serving motto like "In Cramer We Trust" being emblazoned across the screen of a supposedly professional financial news network broadcast.  SPOILER:  It did not disappoint…

Cramer started out, after graduating from Harvard in 1977, as a law student, but quickly turned to investing instead.  Apparently he came up right smack-bang in the middle of the tide of unabashed corruption we’re suffering the fruits of right now, because it doesn’t take long in that article to read and find out exactly how Cramer was able to make so much money so fast.  Here’s a hint - illegal.

Byrne first prefaces the info by giving us this gem from Byrne’s own schooling in the investment industry, from evidently more scrupulous mentors:

The first lesson I had in securities law was given me by Gordon Macklin, a revered figure within modern Wall Street history: he built NASDAQ, and was the Co-CEO of Hambrecht & Quist. I was fortunate enough to have Mr Macklin as a kind of Dutch Uncle to me from the time that I was a teenager until his passing in early 2007. When I was a lad I once asked Mr. Macklin, “Do companies ever do this-or-that in order to make their stocks go up?” Macklin replied, “There is one thing you need to know about securities law: anytime someone purposefully does something in order to make a stock go up or go down, he is doing something illegal. You can go to law school and study it for years, but that’s what it boils down to. You make bets on stocks, but you never purposefully make the price of a stock move in either direction. It’s manipulation. It’s illegal. That is the first thing you need to know about the stock market.”

Not long after giving you that little nugget, Byrne takes you into Cramer’s tutelage under his future wife, where he self-admittedly learned (from the woman he apparently calls the ‘Trading Goddess’ in his own book) his market prowess.  This is coming out of his own mouth (well, book actually - Confession of a Street Addict, 2002):

“Of course, she said. So what you had to do was make dozens of calls to brokers and analysts every day to ask them what they thought of stocks. She said you looked for situations where the analysts were growing more positive and you fed them positive information that you got from others. You pitted them against one another. You told them that someone else was going to upgrade. If you could be sure they were warming up to a story, or if you caught them on the phone before they told their sales forces that their earnings estimates were too high or too low, you might have something.

“Karen explained to me that the analyst game was a game of sponsorship. Analysts like to get behind stocks and bull them. You have to get in on the ground floor when they start their sponsorship campaign. If Merrill is the sponsor of a stock, it could be good for 5 points. If Goldman sponsored something, it could be good for 10. You want to buy something and flip it—sell it immediately—into the sponsorship. That’s the only sure thing on Wall Street.

“When I asked her how we could find out about all of these wonderful things when I was jut a little hedge fund manager, she said one word: ‘commish.’… Commissions, she explained, determined what you are told, what you will know, and how much you can find out. If you do a massive amount of commission business, analysts will return your calls, brokers will work for you, and you will get plenty of ideas to make money, on both a short- and long-term basis… Commissions greased everything.” (Confessions of a Street Addict, pages 51-52.)

I’ll not take all the surprises away, because that by NO means even scratches the surface of this cat.  The last thing I’ll add is another little nugget (from antisocialmedia) the further demonstrates Cramer’s indifference to complying with laws in the name of moola - again, straight from his own mouth in an industry-oriented interview with Wall Street Confidential…though he never, as you will clearly see, meant this gem to be for public consumption.  The entire thing is worth the read, but these bits are just so damn illuminating:

Cramer: So let’s say you take a longer-term view intraday and you say, “Listen, I’m gonna boost the futures, and then when the real sellers comes in, when the real market comes in they’re gonna knock it down and it’s gonna create a negative view.”  That’s a strategy very worth doing when you’re evaluating on a day-to-day basis.  I would encourage anyone who’s in a hedge fund to do it, because it’s legal.

Task: Right.

Cramer: It’s a very quick way to make money, and very satisfying.

Task: Okay.

Cramer:  By the way, no one else in the world would ever admit that, but I don’t care.

Task:  That’s right.  And you can say that here –

Cramer:  And I’m not gonna say it on TV.

Not gonna say it on TV?  Pray tell why not?!?!  But it gets better downpage…He actually comes right out and throws his hat in the crook ring.  After blatantly stating that you can’t "foment" the market by making contrived appearances of stocks’ fortunes, he says this:

Cramer:  You can’t create yourself an impression that a stock’s down.  But you do it anyway ‘cause the SEC doesn’t understand it.  That’s the only sense that I would say this is illegal.  But a hedge fund that’s not up a lot really has to do a lot now to save itself.  This is different from what I was talking about at the beginning where I would be buying the Qs and stuff.  This is just actually blatantly illegal.  But when you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you’re down, I think it’s really important to foment if I were one of these guys.  Foment an impression that Research in Motion isn’t any good, because Research in Motion is the key. So you would hit this guy and that guy when you would see an offering.  When you see a guy who’s bidding, you’d wipe out that guy very quickly.  What I used to do was call – if I wanted to go higher, I would take and bid, take and bid, take and bid.  If I wanted it to go lower, I would hit and offer, hit and offer, hit and offer.  I could get a stock like RIMM for maybe – that might cost me $15-$20 million annually to knock RIMM down.  But it would be fabulous because it would beleaguer all the moron longs who were also keying on Research in Motion.  We’re seeing that.  Again, when your company’s in a survival mode it’s really important to defeat Research in Motion.  You get the Pisanis of the world and the people talking about it as if there’s something wrong with RIMM.  Then you would call the Journal and you get the bozo reporter on Research in Motion, and you would feed that Palm’s got a killer it’s gonna give away.  These are all the things you must do on a day like today.  And if you’re not doing it, maybe you shouldn’t be in the game.

(Bold mine for emphasis)

I mean, he is talking to Wall Street Insiders and telling them how he openly and blatantly thumbed his nose at financial law!

I get it…If you’re not willing to break the law - ‘cause hey, the regulators are just too dumb to get it, so that means its fine - then you just shouldn’t be in the game.  Well, Mr. Cramer, what about the pensioners whom your advice just flushed down a fucking toilet?  I doubt they were "in" your "game," yet this orgy of naked short selling has put them a lot worse off than it has you, even though you had an embarrassingly influential guiding hand in the process.

Seriously, this guy still has a job at NBC?

McCain recently had a revelation on economic policy…

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19815.html

Of course, it did come in only after the man who defeated him for the White House tried to fix the problem his own party’s President caused during the debacle that was the first half of the TARP program.  Upon Obama asking for the Senate to release the second half, he - of course - voted No.

“We’re pouring billions and billions of dollars into (banks) with not only no improvement, but their stocks continue to plummet,” McCain says. “I think we have been pursuing the wrong strategy.”

Really?  The wrong strategy?  Methinks that somehow he still doesn’t see the light…

After years of suffering through discourse offered by the likes of William Kristol pronouncing the virtues and efficacy of President Bush’s militant policies concerning the Middle East, a curious and strikingly relevant fact struck me. 

I have served two overseas deployments, one in war-torn Bosnia in 2001 (I was there for 9/11, which was quite harrowing in and of itself), and my most recent combat mission in Iraq in 2005.  During the Bosnia deployment, I got my very first taste of personal experience in how armed conflict and military suppression can deteriorate both a nation’s prosperity and its citizens’ quality of life.  I did not think I would ever see anything that surpasses the despair and utter destruction such conflict forces upon our fellow humans, but my combat tour in Iraq in 2005 quickly dispensed with that notion.  In Bosnia, the effects of the previous hostilities were painfully obvious, from being shown sites where Serbian death squads rounded up Bosnian citizens, raped the women and murdered the men (even five years couldn’t erode the bloodstains from the concrete walls of one former factory I saw) in an attempt to homogenize the local area for their benefit, to discovering multiple mass grave sites where Bosnian citizens had been murdered en-masse simply for their existence, to riding along with my translator and having her point out her home, which had been gutted by bombing and mortar fire throughout her teen years.  Her relation of her experiences of the war made me realize that while children in this country grew up with sports, video games, and television, the children of Bosnia grew up with bombs, air strikes, mortars, and the constant fear of retribution from a militarily superior occupying force.  In Iraq, however, I witnessed firsthand the havoc such conflict wreaks upon people while it is actually occurring.  The aftermath of such brutality is horrifying, but seeing it happen firsthand is infinitely worse.

Even as an American soldier, well-equipped, well-protected in my base, and well-prepared to deal with such things, I still harbored an innate and inescapable fear of what the next hour would bring.  I cannot imagine the horror experienced by the Iraqi families that have to manage - somehow - to live with such fear day in and day out, especially without the solace that comes with knowing that you’ll get to leave at the end of a one-year tour of duty.

This brings me to the realization I mentioned at the top of this post.  Kristol and his ilk extol the benefits that this war and the policies enabling it have produced - the supposed safety and protection of our nation, the projection of American power as a tool for creating political and diplomatic leverage, etc… - without the slightest knowledge of, or seemingly even concern for, the effects such policies have on those living in the concerned areas.  They repeatedly spout the talking point that we "liberated" 53 million Iraqis, yet they have never actually seen these Iraqis’ quality of life with their own eyes.  Sure, some of them may have visited, but - like McCain and his "stroll" through a "safe" Baghdad market (all the while under the protection of aircraft and over 100 soldiers) - they had their conclusions readily prepared for delivery long before their ridiculously short trips.  Hell, I spent almost an entire year there before being evacuated, and even in that extended period of time I was only beginning to understand and appreciate the constant dread that plagues these families that have been trapped in the midst of this conflict.

While we may have freed Iraqis from the rule of a definitely brutal despot, the life they live now is still one that is filled with the ever-present fear that they will be caught in the crossfire of combat, or even worse - that they will be the target of such action, from either side.  (And before the neo-con faux-patriotism induces them to decry the suggestion that US forces would target Iraqi non-combatants, they need to realize that just as the umbrella of "national security" has facilitated the erosion of many of our long-standing civil liberties here at home, there also exist those in Iraq who will falsely inform on neighbors they either dislike or simply want removed from their community, and some such complaints are too readily accepted and acted upon without the confirmation that our due process would require, all in the interest of "security."  And lest they forget - I have seen such things with my own eyes and tried - in vain, sometimes - to stop them.  Kristol, on the other hand, only has experience in unjustifiably denouncing such assertions based solely on his idealistic belief that American soldiers just wouldn’t do that.  Such a belief is just another example of him projecting his own narrow views upon a community he knows nothing about.  Until Kristol himself dons body armor and steps into the combat zone, he has absolutely zero knowledge of what a soldier would or would not do when a possible threat arises that could very possibly - if justified - end their natural life.)  All other equivocations aside, that level of fear in Iraqis is immeasurably greater and more immediate than it was prior to our invasion, and that situation is a direct result of the failure of our Commander-in-Chief to accurately assess the consequences of his decision to drastically cut the size of the force to be used for the invasion and subsequent occupation. 

Instead of concrete experience, these neo-cons rely on ideological justifications for their ideas and actions that simply ignore the fact that every such action has a consequence, and many times those consequences are far more dangerous that the original threat.  They have never woken up to the bone-shaking concussion of a massive air strike and felt the internal consternation that such a thing ignites within you - even when you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the strike isn’t aimed at you.  They have never felt the impact of an IED exploding three feet from their body and had to deal with the physical and mental injuries that result - not to mention the disillusionment that goes along with returning from war only to have to fight your very own Army even harder in order to get the care you were promised when you signed up for service in the first place.  They have never had their home damaged - and in many cases, destroyed - by an errant US strike, only to be told that they will receive no compensation for their losses because the military asserts the damage was not intentional.  They have never had to deal with how they will make their living after their country descends into and is functionally destroyed by the kind of sectarian violence that erupted in Iraq due to the misguided policies of Bush and Rumsfeld that led to the significantly reduced force used for the invasion - even despite the warnings from many experienced senior officers, including the Army Chief of Staff GEN Shinseki, that such a course of action would result in our inability to control the resulting situation.  Instead of genuinely considering their concerns, those officers were ostracized and ignored, and either resigned or were subsequently marginalized and silenced.

In short, Kristol and those like him are essentially armchair quarterbacks, convinced that only their intellectual conception of how the world works is deserving of merit - a conception that has been proven utterly false by the past few years of horrific instability and violence in the war we have supposedly "won."  He doesn’t know the effects his ideological bent has on the actual human beings living with its consequences, and what’s worse is that he doesn’t seem to care.  He is far from contrite, but rather in his final NYT column asserts that the neo-conservatives that held the reins of our government for the better part of the last quarter-century actually bettered the world, going so far as to state the following:

Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.

It is typical of an individual like Kristol to attruibute any positive results to the policies he espouses while at the same time attributing any adverse consequences of those very same policies to the inherent flaws and impediments in the "real world."  And really, a fair amount to be proud of??  Seriously, I want some of whatever this guy is taking that is so obviously and drastically altering his perception of the harsh reality that those very politicians’ short-sighted policies have foisted upon us today.  I often find myself wondering what could possibly allow this obviously educated man to have such a willfully skewed view of his ideology’s effects on the rest of the known world, and then it dawned on me. 

He has never had to exit the comparably luxurious comfort of his own life to actually experience - not read about, hear about, or vacation in - the cesspool of consequences such ideas and actions have resulted in.  From his privileged viewpoint, these policies have been a success, and therein lies the lynchpin.  These policies have been wildly successful, in both financial and influential terms, for him and those around him, and that seems to be his main criteria for policy success.  Such a viewpoint betrays both an arrogant assumption of an understanding of the global condition combined with a willful ignorance of anything outside his scope of daily life, especially anything that contradicts his own beliefs.  Simply put, if it works for him, why should he - aside from simple human decency and consideration of the other - see any reason to consider such policies anything but a success?

It all just makes me glad that this functionally uninformed, ideological hack will have one less platform from which to project his idiocy and inconsiderate, self-serving ideas.  I’m all for the freedom of speech, but freedom to express your ideas does not automatically oblige major media outlets to sponsor and distribute them.

What will our generation look like to our descendants looking back on their nation’s history?  In the late 90’s – not too long ago – we had a great deal of our politicians up in arms about a President’s indiscretion with an intern, and our (Republican) Congress spent over 50 million dollars to try to impeach him for it.  Fast-forward less than a decade, and we have a President who has blatantly thumbed his nose at institutions vital to our nation, such as our right to privacy, the rule of law, our treatment of prisoners of war, the impartiality of national media, and the system of checks and balances that serves to maintain our government.  After all of that, much of it done overtly and without even a drop of pretense trying to hide it, we have leaders in Congress that have not seen fit to go through with the impeachment process despite the articles of impeachment being presented to them by one of their colleagues.

Fast-forward again, this time about 200 years, and we’ll have a society looking back and wondering why we were so ready to impeach a President for an instance of marital infidelity, while less than ten years later we stood by and watched the very next President plow through our most basic freedoms as a nation without bringing the same kind of action against him as we did against Clinton.

They say that every day you live your life, you’re writing a chapter in your life’s story.  That holds true for our nation, as well, though on a much longer time scale.  We wrote a chapter in the 90’s that told all who will look back upon it that we would definitely not stand for a President who shamed the office through personal indiscretions (by doing something a good many other Presidents also did – to include JFK).  And the very next chapter we wrote was one of angry inaction as a President repeatedly debased our very institution of democracy by systematically trying to  strongarm the Congress, politicize the Justice Department, stack the Supreme Court with political cronies, and expand the power of the executive office far past the bounds set forth in the Constitution - and in all those efforts he succeeded.  I, for one, am ashamed to have been a participant in this chapter of our nation’s history.

I worry – quite justifiably, I believe – that this period in our nation’s history will be seen in the future as one of the most prominent stains ever on our nation’s record of support for the rule of law and the government’s faith to the people that entrusted it to honestly and fairly execute its duties.  Only time will tell, I guess, but there is one thing that is certain.  The events that have transpired in the last eight years will remain a part of our history, regardless of what steps we take to both solve the problem and ensure such things never happen again.  As the old saying goes, you can’t un-ring a bell.  I just hope that the sounds of the hideous bells our government rang over the past eight years won’t drown out the good we must do in the very near future in order to right the ship.

I seriously hope that this column by William Kristol will be the one that really opens the nation’s eyes to the true toxicity of this chickenhawk’s ridiculous ideas and dangerous suggestions, especially considering the bullshit he offers up here:

One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning–and should at least be vociferously praising–everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.

 

In looking at William Kristol, one can see the reflection of all that has been wrong with our nation in the past eight years.  Besides being one of the preeminent architects of neoconservatism and the Bush administration’s preemptive war strategy, he is also one of the loudest Bush apologists in the media today (and a quite ineffective one, at that).  In his latest column, he goes so far as to suggest that Bush pardon those individuals involved in the illegal torture and warrantless wiretapping programs in order to reward them for their patriotic service and protect them from "demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points."  And on top of that, he even advocates awarding them the Medal of Freedom.  Someone should educate Mr. Kristol on the finer points of criminal procedure - it is not "politically inspired" action when a government seeks to punish those who broke the law of the land, especially when those individuals contributed to so much bloodshed and eroded so effectively the basic freedoms our nation was founded upon.

This guy never ceases to amaze me.  As someone who never spent one single second in uniform, he has never had to seriously consider what effects his ridiculous ideas have on those of us who do make the choice to serve.  Every time America tortures a detainee, it only increases the already deafening rage directed against us by those we’re fighting, and serves only to ensure that any captured Americans will receive even worse treatment.  Then again, I doubt Kristol would care about that fact in the least, since it will surely never be his ass on that line.  His praise of those agents involved in torturing detainees ignores the very real and sobering fact that we will never again be able to stand on the moral high ground provided by the Geneva Convention - which is the very ground upon which our global image as a benevolent nation has rested for so long.  Up until Kristol, Bush, and the other neo-idiots, our soldiers could rely on the fact that no matter what our enemies may do to our soldiers in captivity, they were part of a force that stood on firm moral ground and did not - under any circumstances - resort to the barbaric and unjust practice of torture.  Those days are gone.  We now have a generation of people around the world that see the United States as identical - morally speaking - to those other states that have participated in prisoner torture in order to gain beneficial information - reliable or not.

For Kristol to even suggest pardoning these people betrays the fact that he doesn’t view such torture or invasions of individual privacy as criminal or even mildly wrong.  He seems willing to trade liberty and privacy for order, security, and American hegemony across the globe - as long as it’s not his liberty or privacy that’s being taken away.  It is a theme that runs through all of his opinions, just as he was willing to trade blood for the subjugation of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein - just so long as it wasn’t his blood.  His style of faux-patriotism is exactly what is wrong at the top levels of our government, where true love of country and genuine sacrifice are replaced by blind consumerism and unquestioning obedience to those in power - which should, of course, be Kristol and his ilk.

Just as our nation will not be able to heal until it purges itself of the disastrous policies of the past eight years, the media will not be able to heal itself until it expels the toxic and self-serving William Kristol from any and every possible position of influence.

In short, Kristol has more than worn out his welcome on the national political stage, and should be relegated to the sidelines from here on out.  And while I’d never advocate removing anyone’s freedom to speak their mind, it would be nice if Mr. Kristol would do us all a favor and keep his ideas and assertions to himself in the future - the country would definitely be better off if he did.  However, considering the fact that I’m speaking about someone that possesses such a grossly inflated sense of self-worth and importance, I’m certainly not going to hold my breath.

If there is any mystery as to why McCain has remained so close in the polls despite his innumerable gaffes, his constant displays of self-aggrandizement and flaunting of his POW past as political capital, and his zig-zagging back and forth between the cones of his policy positions during this campaign, this article by Margriet Oostveen on Salon.com should clear it up a bit for you.

We are all influenced by the tides of public opinion, whether we admit it or not.  And the opinions expressed by supposedly genuine citizens in their letters to their local newspapers go a long way towards skewing the perceptions of what a collective community is thinking.  McCain’s campaign and his Rovian acolytes certainly know this, so it should be no surprise to anyone that they have mobilized shameless surrogates in this arena in order to project an image of popular support for their campaign.

This article is one that tells of a team of individuals whose job is to write fake letters - replete with lies and deception - to local editors in battleground states for the purpose of influencing the opinions of those voters who may not have made up their minds on their electoral choice.  While I am grateful for the author’s candor in writing this piece, it sickens me that anyone would actually do this.  From pretending to be a staunch supporter of the Republican ticket to falsely claiming an emotional connection to the sacrifices made by our soldiers and their families in order to pull on the heartstrings of those who actually are in that situation, no tactic is off limits.  This is the ultimate example of the ends justifying the means.

These people do not care that their efforts are intentionally false or that the wrong choice in this election will inevitably wreak havoc on our national situation - their only goal is to get their guy into the White House.  I simply cannot think of a single thing that is more un-American than this.

The author admits she pretended to be the mother of a soldier deployed to Iraq in order to draw like-minded individuals over to the McCain side. This not only offends me, but it also genuinely hurts.  As I have already made known, I was wounded in Iraq in September 2005 and was evacuated back home as a result.  Even considering the physical pain and mental torment I experienced - and continue to experience - as a direct result of my wounds and experiences in Iraq, the single greatest pain I felt throughout the entire situation occurred in November of that year.  I was at Fort Gordon’s Eisenhower Army Medical Center waiting to see my family for the first time since shipping off to war.  When they finally arrived, I was utterly heartbroken when my mother walked through the door and saw her only son confined to a wheelchair.  I saw the pain and sorrow in her eyes, and to this day I wish that I had instead waited until I was able to walk under my own power before seeing her.  I’ll never be able to get that image of my mother out of my mind, as I am sure she will never be able to erase the sight of me in such a condition from her memory for as long as she lives.  No mother should ever have to see her child like that. Period.

For someone to outright lie about something so emotionally traumatic for the sole purpose of political gain is beyond deplorable.  And it is made exponentially worse by the fact that this is being done for the benefit of a war veteran’s Presidential campaign.  If anyone should be above such dirty tactics, it should be a man who personally understands the damage such a thing can cause.

I will not even listen to platitudes asserting that he may not have known about this practice.  If John McCain, a former officer and leader, truly does understand the military and the way it operates, then he knows that a leader is responsible for the actions of his subordinates, regardless of whether or not he had an active hand in those actions.

This morning, I simply disagreed with McCain and viewed him as a self-centered political opportunist.  This evening, after reading this article, I personally dislike the man and harbor a burning desire to see him completely removed from his position of influence in our nation’s government.  This morning, he simply did not appeal to me as a potential leader of the country.  This evening, John McCain - along with his campaign - makes me sick.

In addition to Bush’s shameless willingness to prop up an active US Army General (GEN Petraeus) as a political bulwark in front of Congress to lend credibility to his mishandling of the Iraq war, this article is proof positive that this administration sees no area of our government as off-limits to the practices of politicization and manipulation.

If we can’t trust our own generals to execute their duties with integrity and do so free of the bias of political machination, we are headed down a dark road, indeed.  I came up as both an enlisted soldier and officer in the combat arms sector of our military, and I was trained to execute my duties using only my own judgement and good common sense in order to look out for the welfare of those soldiers under my charge.  I was raised in an Army that prohibits its members from expressing their personal political opinion while in their official capacity, and especially from allowing those opinions to affect or guide their job performance.  It pains me to see such a high ranking officer ignore that training, and such conduct causes direct and possibly irreparable harm to the military’s mission to be an unconditional and impartial defender of our Constitution.  If this kind of officer conduct is not immediately and effectively addressed and corrected, it will cause a great deal of harm to the institution meant to defend our nation, and that will leave us all at risk.

We all took an oath upon entering into the service to defend our Constitution from all enemies - foreign and domestic.  Any politician that encourages such deplorable conduct in the nation’s military officer corps definitely qualifies as such a domestic enemy, and any officer not willing to stand up and confront such politicization is not fit to wear the uniform.  This makes me sick.

I just got finished reading a piece from Johann Hari over on the Huffington Post that I think everyone should read before pulling that voting booth lever in November.  I’m not asserting that the article is unconditional truth, but the reasoning in the article - along with the well-documented purchase by Big Oil of one of our former Presidents (Warren G. Harding) in order to gain access to the Teapot Dome reserve in Wyoming - shows that the claim it makes certainly passes the common sense once-over. 

The article is worth reading and researching, and I encourage anyone reading this to do exactly that.

It tells of how the Teapot Dome oil field was being held in reserve for the Navy in the event that a national emergency arose, which quite obviously pissed off the oil companies chomping at the bit for access to such a large domestic reserve of crude.  They needed to get the government to release the hold on the Navy’s reserve of oil so they could get their hands on it.  Here’s a teaser from the article explaining the beginning of what would come to be known as the Teapot Dome scandal:

So Big Oil thought of a solution. They decided to buy the presidency. A consortium led by Jake Hamon — a J.R. Ewing for the Jazz Age — started to buy the delegates to the 1920 Republican Convention with brown-envelope bribes, one-by-one. Once they owned a hefty block, they approached the initial front-runner — General Leonard Wood — and said they would make him the Republican nominee if in return he had to promise to make Hamon Secretary of the Interior — and therefore boss of Teapot Dome. Wood yelled: "I am an American soldier. I’ll be damned if I’ll betray my country! Get the hell out of here."

So Big Oil picked a different candidate instead: an obscure, bumbling Senator called Warren G. Harding, who had been a forty-to-one shot at the start of the convention. He had barely been out of Ohio and had only fuzzy ideas about politics — but he could be marketed as Mr. Normal, the 1920s equivalent of a hockey mom. Big Oil lavishly funded a PR campaign selling him to ordinary Americans as One of You. He was pictured at baseball games eating hot dogs with his sweet family — while his opponent was presented as arid and "elitist."

Sound familiar?  The GOP selects a candidate for their ticket for the White House that was widely unknown prior to emerging on the presidential ticket (not to mention one who is currently embroiled in an ethics investigation that originated prior to her selection as the VP candidate).  The GOP selects a candidate that can easily be portrayed as "one of us," with the express purpose of duping the voters into believing that once in office, said candidate will look out for the interests of those whom she is supposed to be identified with.  The GOP then uses that candidate’s image to try to cast even more of an "elitist" light on the opposition.  If the similarities aren’t clear to you, you might need glasses…I’m just saying…

The lesson we should take from this is clear.  We all know that anyone with the means to run for the highest office in the land (especially in today’s political machinery) is well above - economically speaking - the average American, yet the Republicans (the party historically linked to cooperation and collusion with large oil conglomerates) are still trying to slide their candidates into office by presenting the image that they are somehow just like the rest of us.  Well, since we know the opposite to be true (when is the last time a Republican - or Democratic, for that matter - candidate had to choose between paying the mortgage and buying groceries?), why do voters keep falling for it?

The idea that any major party candidate for the Presidency or Vice-Presidency could be "one of us" is merely a political trojan horse.  Do you honestly think that - regardless of their past - a senator with 20+ years in Washington or a Governor so prone to covert maneuvering and manipulation of state funds (re: charging the taxpayers of Alaska for per diem payments while she was actually in her own home) can honestly claim to be a regular, salt-of-the-earth citizen like the majority of us?  It is pure theater of the type that has dominated our political landscape for the better part of a century, if not longer.

This deception has to be laid bare, and Johann Hari does a good job of getting that ball rolling.  Check out the article and draw what conclusions you may.  The ones I drew enhanced my sheer apprehension toward letting the Republicans slide another faux-normal candidate past the voters this year.  For our country’s sake, I sincerely hope their efforts are in vain this time around.