July Week 2, 2005

...to close your mind to the facts when the facts don't support your views is one definition of insanity.

The kids (Autumn, Monica and Baldo) and I are going to the parade down town... I enjoy the parade, I hate the announcer, I don't even want to know who he is...

Autumn and I walked down the road toward some shade at the Acton School and got flagged down by Kate Trotta and she invited us to sit with them, Steve was in the parade marching with the Cub Scouts. A long haul for all concerned since the 'organizers' made them park at the end of the parade and walk up hill to the start...

We sat far enough away from the announcer so that I couldn't hear him. The sides of the road were packed in spite of all the Motorhomes, there were many more people lining the street than were in the parade, when I first started going 20 years ago it was the other way around. Garrison Keillor told a story about how the 4th of July parade went through his town twice so that all the people in it the first time could sit down and watch all the people who had watched them be in a parade too.

The parade was more disorganized than usual, it took forever to get everyone through it, five and ten minute breaks between some of the participants... but it was fun, if it wasn't disorganized it wouldn't be "The Acton Parade". I have been trying to figure out what aspect of Patriotic Pageantry annoys me. It may be that some of the most extravagant displays are put on by the folks who have the least invested. Some of the folks in the parade were just showing off, one guy had a Hummer towing a huge boat... He wasn't being Patriotic he was saying "Look at my stuff."

Do you suppose the fella who made the shirt thought that Magnanimity was too big a word for us rubes to understand?

In my humble opinion, Molly Ivins wrote the best 4th of July column of the day... step back, get a true perspective, enjoy the day...

"Live ever day as if it were your last...and someday, you'll be right."

H. H. "Breaker" Morant

I thought I had written something here for today. .. If I did I can't remember what it was.

A fire started up on the other side of the ridge behind my house... it could get exciting.

Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

It appears that the fire will be the main preoccupation of the day... I went over to Avenue S on the other side of the ridge, , and took a couple pictures

The fire was completely under control by noon, about 550 acres burned. The firemen praised the residents for doing an excellent job of clearing brush. I think this is just the beginning of a long dangerous fire season.

Cindy's biological brother, Michael, called today, he says that had been searching for her for a long time. Children's services wouldn't tell him where she lived till she turned 18. Christy talked to him and was impressed by his apparent frankness and enthusiasm. We will probably set up a meeting in a day or two. He is living with his grandparents and his grandmother has reportedly had a stroke... I have met her... about 14 years ago. This situation may or may not be a can of worms...

He is coming up for a visit tonight, this is progressing very fast, Christy is unconcerned but I remember his father... This is an aspect of being a Foster Parent and adoption that we are prepared for I think.

The visit went well I think, he seems like a pretty sharp kid. He was very excited to see Cindy and Cindy is in Seventh Heaven. She has been asking about her biological family for the past couple of months.

If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.

reality is just a matter of perspective and we all perceive it to the best of our ability but ultimately we we only accept the parts we can deal with...

People hear what they want to hear and our government knows that so all George and his cronies have to do is get up in front of the microphone and say just about any platitude or inane generality and some people will interpret it to be profound.

I took the kids to see Fantastic 4, it was silly but a lot of fun... the kids really liked it a whole bunch.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Steve Jobs, Commencement speech to 2005 graduating class of Stanford University

Not really into this today... or yesterday apparently... yesterdays entries aren't very inspired either...

I am still trying to fathom what killing innocent people is supposed to accomplish. Is there a society anywhere that reacts with submission to to intimidation... what makes anyone think that some cowardly act of murder is going to change anything. It will only solidify resolve. Especially with the Brits!

I wish I felt more confident in the response of Americans, we used to be independent minded folks who could analyze a situation and react appropriately but we Americans have surrendered our will to a bunch of zealots who have made a bigger mess of the situation than just ignoring it would have. We never looked for the masterminds, we never seriously hunted terrorists, we never pooled resources with other countries, we never listened to the truth, instead we created an atmosphere of hate and outrage around the world.

The world is afraid and angry and I don't blame them. Terrorism has increased from 600 attacks in a year to over 3000. Hell, the Iraqi's are not standing for it And they are getting better at it. They aren't stupid, they know that when you are fighting someone more powerful who wants to kill you you have to fight from the shadows, you have to use unconventional methods and you don't attack his strengths you attack the unsuspecting and you attack the weakest links, if there are collaborators you attack them

I was going to go to Laguna Seca to watch the Superbike and International GP but I decided on Thursday that I wasn't prepared to invest the time and energy into going up there to be stuck in traffic and sit on the ground for two days in 100^o heat... I was looking on the Net to see if the race was going to be televised someday and discovered that it will be on this afternoon at 1300... cool. Both races were a runaway, I even watched #9 leg of the Tour de France, some Danish kid went from about mile 3 til the end , 106 miles, over mountains, and lead all the way... amazing.

I do need to get away though, Christy is going to be gone for a week starting on the 21st so I may take the kids she's not taking and go up to Sequoia for a few days... If I can get Mike to come along... I can't, in good conscience, leave him here alone, besides, my internal sense of self preservation that would be like putting a 5 year old in a hay-barn with a box of kitchen matches.

AUSTIN, Texas — Once again, we celebrate America — despite absolutely everything, still a great nation after all these years. Happy birthday to us.

Yet again, we rejoice not so much in what makes America great, as in what makes it really peculiar. This is in the belief that one of America's finest traits is that it is a blissfully funny place to live.

In the You Gotta Be Kidding Category, we now have doggie plastic surgery for neutered male dogs. They give the dogs plastic balls so they'll feel better about themselves. So far, no Botox.

In reporting on Christmastime USO tours, one television network happily announced, "Wayne Newton is the new Bob Hope." I would comment, but I'm still speechless.

Lynne Cheney, the veeper's wife, has formed the Committee to Protect American Civilization, which is publishing 100 examples of allegedly unpatriotic assertions by professors in our nation. For example: If all Lynne Cheney's brains were dynamite, she couldn't blow her nose?

True, we are at war, which would be sobering if the cable news channels paid attention to anything except shark attacks and missing white females.

The Texas Legislature decided gay couples can be foster parents, but only if they're not married. The governor of Texas recently bid adieu to an interviewer by saying, "Adios, mofo."

John Ashcroft has left the attorney general's office, so we can once more view the nekkid tits on the statues of Majesty of Justice and Spirit of Justice. So far, no noticeable deterioration in the national moral fiber has ensued.

We continue our charmingly eccentric habit of polling ourselves to find out how ignorant we are. Then we all slap our foreheads in dismay over the national dumbness. This particular oddity yields such nuggets as: 37.2 percent of us think the Mexican border should pay rent.

The University of Connecticut is planning to offer a master's degree in homeland security. Movies have been made from the TV series "Bewitched" and "The Dukes of Hazzard." You get to make up your own joke about that. Martha Stewart was convicted. Michael Jackson was acquitted. No one ever claimed justice in our nation was perfect.

According to the president of the United States, "disassemble" means not to tell the truth.

The U.S. Navy sent a letter to Fola Coats, an 80-year-old Arkansas woman, asking her to join the Seabees. The president and CEO of Formula One racing, discussing racer Danica Patrick, said that "women should be dressed in white, like all other domestic appliances." Except for those in Harvest Gold or Avocado Green.

Deep Throat and the Runaway Bride are both working on movie deals. Last month, Donald Rumsfeld, that little ray of sunshine, admitted that, statistically, things are just as bad in Iraq as they were at the time Saddam Hussein was deposed. However, he said, "a lot of bad things that could have happened have not happened." This requires deep pondering. (Note: All items in the last two paragraphs were from various issues of Harper's Weekly, researched by Paul Ford.)

Among the official job-title changes put in place by the Scottsdale, Ariz., school district this year were those for receptionist (now "director of first impressions") and school bus driver (now "transporter of learners"). (From "News of the Weird.")

All this and so much more make America the country we love. Anyone who is blase, jaundiced, bored or seldom-startled just isn't paying attention. So here's to all of us who make this a great nation, including the school-crossing guards, the people who line up hundreds of dominos to fall over on other dominos and the bingo players who carry their little plastic chips in blue velvet Crown Royal scotch bags.

Here's to baseball in spite of everything, to the bagpipers, the bakers, bongo-players and bull-riders. Here's to the skateboarders and especially to all the bald kids in all the cancer wards who use their IV poles as skateboards. They put one foot on the base of the pole and use the other to push with, and then hold IV-pole races in the hospital hallways. And to all the kids too sick to do that — we love you.

Here's to the lifeguards and the skydivers, to the people who read physics textbooks onto tapes for recordings for the blind and to the blind people who listen to them. Here's to the musicians, the math teachers, the Muppets and the merry pranksters. Here's to Afleet Alex, the great racehorse who made that brilliant recovery after he was almost knocked off his feet.

And here's to all the angry liberals and to all the angry conservatives — take the day off, and enjoy the hot dogs and the fireworks. And try to remember when we come back to normal partisan warfare that all of us do, actually, love this ridiculous, wonderful place.

"It depends", said Bill Clinton, "on what the meaning of ’is’ is" ; and he was promptly pilloried by scandalized commentators and shocked - shocked - legislators whose morals and motives were of course impeccable. But there is curious silence on the part of these paragons of semantics and virtue now that there is disagreement about the meaning of words used by two pathetic crackpots who occupy posts in the present US administration.

Washington’s charlatan-in-chief, Cheney, has boasted he stands by his statement that Iraq’s insurgents are in "their last throes", because it all depends on what the meaning of ’throes’ is. He decided to order some deep thinking, and his researchers told him to say "If you look at what the dictionary says about throes, it can still be a violent period".

The vain and arrogant draft-dodging Cheney should know all about that. When the war in Vietnam was in its last throes, and he was obtaining deferment after deferment because he said he had "other priorities", the conflict was indeed violent. And the violence ended when the US was forced out of the country.

It is obvious that when Cheney first used the phrase "last throes" he was convinced the insurgents were in their final shuddering spasms before collapsing. He meant he was sure that the insurgents were indulging in last desperate efforts and that the débâcle would soon end in victory for the Washington warmongers. And if there were a few hundred more US troops killed in the process that wouldn’t matter because, in the words of Bush, the "Mission Accomplished" president, "I’m not giving up on the mission. We’re doing the right thing."

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on June 23, General John Abizaid, commander Central Command, didn’t seem too keen on Cheney’s smart comment. He admitted there are just as many insurgents now as there were six months ago, but when asked if they were in their "last throes" he could say only that "There’s a lot of work to be done against the insurgency . . . . I’m sure you’ll forgive me from criticizing the vice president." I’m not sure what that means except for one thing : if he had agreed with Cheney that the insurgency was in its last throes, he would have said so in a very loud voice. But he lacked the moral courage to answer the question.

Then there is the matter of the word ’quagmire’ that so excites Rumsfeld. Webster defines ’quagmire’ quite simply : "Marshy ground that gives way under the foot; a difficult situation". Oxford says it’s "A hazardous or awkward situation." The sense comes through. Quagmires are nasty.

In his anxiety to portray Iraq as a non-quagmire the equally vain and foolish Rumsfeld told the Committee that the insurgents "in recent months have suffered significant losses and casualties, been denied havens and suffered weakened popular support." Nobody pointed out that in recent months US occupation troops "have suffered significant losses and casualties, been denied havens and suffered weakened popular support." In March to May there were 168 American soldiers killed and 534 wounded in Iraq. But it isn’t a quagmire, of course.

Senator Ted Kennedy asked a question about quagmires and "Rumsfeld, flanked by top US commanders, responded : ’First let me say that there isn’t a person at this table who agrees with you that we’re in a quagmire and that there’s no end in sight’." So there must, conversely, actually be an end in sight to the counter-insurgency war.

Let’s think back to 1967, to the quagmire in Vietnam. The US embassy in Saigon held a New Year’s party to welcome 1968. The invitation read "Come see the light at the end of the tunnel". Exactly a month later, on the night of January 31, 1968, 19 Vietnamese guerrillas arrived at the embassy and blew their way in to its compound, killing four US soldiers. The Tet offensive had begun. And on February 6 Art Buchwald’s column read :

"Dateline: Little Big Horn, Dakota. General George Armstrong Custer said today in an exclusive interview with this correspondent that the Battle of Little Big Horn had just turned the corner and he could now see light at the end of the tunnel. "We have the Sioux on the run", General Custer told me. "Of course we’ll have some cleaning up to do, but the Redskins are hurting badly and it will only be a matter of time before they give in."

The Senate hearing was on Thursday June 23, and the world was told by Rumsfeld that there is an end in sight to his war in Iraq. But on June 26, on Fox News Sunday, Rumsfeld said "Insurgencies tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve years". So what happened in Cheney-Bush Washington between Thursday and Sunday?

One of the things that happened was a decision that Rumsfeld should get himself on the Sunday news shows to try to make up for his stumbling and embarrassing performance in front of the Committee. But his pathetic attempts to achieve credibility fell flat.

NBC’s Tim Russert showed Rumsfeld a video clip of Cheney’s silly claim that the US invaders would be "greeted as liberators" and was asked "Do you think this was a misjudgment?" There is only one honest answer to that question, because it was one of the most foolish misjudgments of the many made by the Cheney-Bush administration. But of course Rumsfeld couldn’t give an honest answer. He got himself in deeper by avoiding the question and then claiming he had given Bush "a list of about 15 things that could go terribly, terribly wrong before the war started."

Rumsfeld declared that "oil fields could have been set aflame like they were in Kuwait, [and] we could have had mass refugees and dislocations and it didn’t happen. The bridges could have been blown up. There could have been a fortress Baghdad where the moat around it with oil in it and people fighting to the death. So a great many of the bad things that could have happened did not happen." Certainly, "a great many of the bad things" didn’t happen before the invasion. They happened later, as a direct result of the triumphal mindset and unthinking brutality of the conquerors.

There was no moat of oil around Baghdad. That was a ludicrous prediction. But as to the other main warnings Rumsfeld says he gave, it appears he doesn’t read newspapers. It was his air force that destroyed bridges, and there have been scores of oil pipeline fires caused by guerrilla attacks since Iraq was "liberated".

Pipelines are much less risky to target than oil wells, as anyone could have told Rumsfeld if he had not been so vain and smug as to reject advice about his war. Such attacks have several effects : they deny oil, and thus national income ; the threat of interference ties up security forces ; and they demonstrate the impotence of occupation forces and the make-believe government in Baghdad. The day before Rumsfeld’s talking parrot performances it was reported that guerrillas had blown up two pipelines : one in the far north, from Kirkuk to Turkey, and the other in the south, along the line from Basra to Baghdad. But Rumsfeld said Sunday that "solid progress is being made . . . economic progress is being made . . ." He must imagine that building more US prisons and military bases all over the country can be called economic progress.

Rumsfeld’s alleged warning to Bush about refugees and relocations was not relevant at the time of their invasion. These disasters took place afterwards. Has he heard of Fallujah? It was his merry men who took Nazi-style reprisals on the city and reduced much of it to rubble, creating hatred of America that will last for generations. Rumsfeld doesn’t want the world to know the extent of the destruction wrought by his merciless blitzes, but the State Department has revealed officially that "about 90,000 of Fallujah’s 300,000 residents have recently returned to the city".

Where are the rest? -- They are despairing, bewildered, poverty-stricken, helpless, tent-dwelling refugees who have to be fed, after a fashion, by the UN and other charitable refugees’ organizations. They are examples of Rumsfeld’s "solid progress."

And in the north there is massive "relocation" taking place, because the Kurds are forcing out the Arab population at gunpoint, and US forces are doing nothing about it. They couldn’t do anything even if they wanted to. They don’t understand the problem and they haven’t got the expertise or troop numbers to even begin to moderate the ethnic cleansing and slaughter that are taking place. "Solid progress"?

Then there was Rumsfeld’s amazing nonsense about the full scale insurgency that has taken thousands of lives. Tim Russert wanted to know if the vain and arrogant secretary of defense had foreseen this, so asked him "Was a robust insurgency on your list that you gave the president?"

That was a very good question. In old-fashioned British military parlance (and to quote Evelyn Waugh), it was a ’swift one’. If Rumsfeld had told the truth and said "No", there would have been melt-down. If he had answered "Yes", he would have looked even more stupid. So he tap-danced round the point and said "I don’t remember whether that was on there, but certainly it was discussed the possibility that you could have dead-enders who would fight."

It may be credible to some that the US secretary of defense does not remember if there was a factor as vital as post-invasion insurgency on the list of 15 likely problems he says he gave to his president. On the other hand, you could conclude that Rumsfeld is a liar.

Rumsfeld’s tactics are eerily reminiscent of the Nixon era -- "Just say you don’t remember". In fact the writer George Higgins summed up the Nixon presidency and was unknowingly prescient about the Cheney-Bush administration when he wrote in the Atlantic of November 1974 that "The Nixon School of Lying was erected on the premise that people will hear what they want to hear, and all you have to do is give them something." Last Sunday Rumsfeld gave the people of the United States of America the same sort of mendacious twaddle that Nixon and his people dished out about Watergate.

Rumsfeld said he didn’t remember if he had mentioned the biggest single problem facing any military occupation force : the likelihood of an uprising by people who don’t like their country being occupied and who do not take kindly to swaggering bullies blowing down their doors in the middle of the night, stealing their savings, humiliating men, terrifying women, torturing captives and in general behaving as barbarians. The army and marines acted and continue to act like a tribe of video-game hi-tech savages. Their conduct is a direct result of lack of training that was caused by lack of planning.

And the lack of planning was the direct result of inaction on the part of a vain, naïve and foolish man : Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense. He thought he knew it all. He thought he was infallible. Perfection personified in a priggish buffoon. But at the Senate hearing he was taken down a well-deserved peg by Senator Byrd who said "Mr. Secretary, I’ve watched you with a considerable amount of amusement . . . I don’t think I’ve ever heard a secretary of defense who likes to lecture the committee as much as you. You may not like our questions, but we represent the people . . . We ask the questions that the people ask of us whether you like it or not . . . The problem is we didn’t ask enough questions at the beginning of this war that we got into, Mr. Bush’s war . . . I don’t mean to be discourteous [but] I’ve just heard enough of your smart answers to these people here who are elected . . . So get off your high horse when you come up here." Rumsfeld could not summon up a reply. (This splendid piece of ego-deflation was not a feature in the main newspapers or any TV reportage.)

Rumsfeld might have been shaken by such a well-merited rebuke from someone whose boots he is not fit to polish, and his dumbfounded reaction certainly indicates this possibility. But he is so absurdly convinced of his righteousness that he and his soul-mate Cheney cannot understand that anyone who disagrees with them might actually have a reasonable point to make.

Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush are so arrogant, ignorant and vain that they imagine they can never fail. But they have failed disastrously and in the course of their reckless self-deception they have disgraced their country. There is small comfort in the fact that hubris leads to nemesis, because countless human beings have been sacrificed to their bumptious pride. They don’t yet realize it, but they are in the quagmire of their vanities.

Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs. He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughley07022005.html

The Rattlesnake as a Symbol of America