No Recruit Left Behind

In a bizarre twist of the “No Child Left Behind” concept, the Army is using every possible tactic to meet its recruiting needs as it falls ever shorter of each month’s goal. And, it is that very act that is giving the Army a helping hand. A provision of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to provide military recruiters with student phone numbers and addresses or risk losing millions in federal education funding. So it would appear that George W. Bush does not want your child left behind when the 1st Cavalry Division ships out for Iraq.

Parents or students 18 and over can "opt out" by submitting a written request to keep the information private. But critics say schools do not always convey that message. In New Mexico, the American Civil Liberties Union chapter sued the Albuquerque Public School District last month, charging it does not adequately inform parents of the opt-out provision.

You will notice that none of the Bush – Cheney children is volunteering for duty in Iraq, even though it would be so easy for the military to ensure that they had a cushy job behind the lines in Qatar. But lots of minority kids are getting those friendly phone calls from Army recruiters who, in the face of stiff competition from the evening news about the real facts in Iraq, often lie to potential recruits in order to get them to sign up.

If the war in Iraq had anything to do with our national security as, say, the war in Afghanistan does, I think you would see a lot more kids enlisting. Think of Pat Tillman, for example. However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Iraq war is just a misadventure on the part of a president who was misled by neocon advisors, leftovers from his father’s administration who always felt they had been denied the opportunity to finish off Saddam in 1991. Now they are using other people’s kids as cannon fodder for a stupid mistake.

When All Else Fails, Call Your Opponent a Coward

Well, the White House reverted to form this week. With the president’s poll numbers in the dumpster, the war in Iraq going south, Republicans in Congress beginning to abandon ship, they turned to their standard line – “we’re stronger on terror than the Democrats.”

Karl Rove – popularly known as Bush’s brain – was addressing the New York Conservative Party this week when he said, “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”

Not only is this remark stupid, vapid and untrue, but it also ignores another aphorism that could be thrown out about 9/11. To wit, the Bush administration used it as an excuse to launch and illegal war on Iraq. One that has not only made us less safe from terrorism (remember Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s remark that we are creating terrorists in Iraq faster than we can kill them?), but it also has diverted most of our military effort away from the actual war on terror, the one in Afghanistan and it has kept us from finding and killing Osama bin Laden.

It just goes to show the truth of the old adage, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Bush Goes to War - Sort of

Heard the latest? Bush is going to Vietnam – finally. I guess he must have broken down, violated his policy and read a newspaper. That would have told him that the war was over and it was safe to go now.

Or maybe his handlers explained to him that he’d be O.K. with all of his bodyguards.

Anyway, the little old draft dodger is finally going to be “in country”.

Resolute or Stubborn?

A headline in today’s San Francisco Chronicle states that George W. Bush is refusing to relinquish his idea of private accounts for Social Security. During the last campaign, Bush scored high in terms of resoluteness, his firm stand on his positions. However, where is the point where resoluteness turns to stubbornness, and stubbornness turns to stupidity? Not only are the Democrats firmly against Bush’s idea, not only is the public against it by a two to one margin, quite a few members of his own party are opposed to the idea – some of them because they are fiscally responsible and see the folly of it and others because they simply don’t want to jeopardize their reelection chances by backing an unpopular idea.

Part of the problem for Bush is his disconnect with the real world. When he went on his 60-city tour to promote this idea, his handlers made sure that he was always speaking in front of adoring and supportive crowds. You had to pass a loyalty test just to get into the auditorium to hear him speak. Consequently, it must have been easy for him to come away with the misconception that the public overwhelmingly supported his idea.

But a bigger part of his problem is that the mantra of this administration is: never admit that you were wrong, never take the blame, never say that the future of your plans isn’t one of rose petals and honey. Case in point – Iraq.

When Bush first met Vladimir Putin he came away saying that he looked into Putin’s soul and saw an honest man that he could deal with. Now that Putin’s Russia is sliding into a new totalitarian state, Bush is concerned but is boxed in by his previous statements and his pathological refusal to admit he could have been wrong.

A lot of this stems from Bush’s religious fervor. He has that smug self-assurance that comes from someone who has a direct line to God’s ear. Bush says that his life became totally new – say, born again – when he dedicated himself to Jesus Christ. In other words, I don’t need to think. God is directing my thoughts and actions. Therefore, anything I do is, ipso facto, the right thing.

Those Liberal Activist Judges: Where Do They Come From?

The far right continues to whine about how they are being mistreated by the judicial branch of our government. They wail about liberal activist judges who use their own personal views to create new laws from the bench. Focus on the Family founder, the so-called Rev. James Dobson, rants regularly about “judicial tyranny” and likens the Supreme Court to the KKK, “I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the country in the South, and they did great wrong to civil rights and to morality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's what you're talking about.” Earlier this year, the Rev. Pat Robertson said that Federal judges were a greater threat to this country than the 9/11 terrorists.

Let’s just look dispassionately at some of the facts. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968. George W. Bush will leave office in 2008. That’s a 40-year stretch. In that period we have had five Republican presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush pops and the Bush baby) who served (or will serve) for a total of 28 years. We had two Democrats (Carter and Clinton) who served for a total of 12 years. So for nearly three-fourths of the 40 years, Republicans have been nominating the judges to sit on the Federal bench.

But wait, it gets even better. For 6 of the 8 years that Bill Clinton was in office, the Republicans controlled the Senate. Many of his nominees (65) did not even get out of committee for a vote on the floor. So for just 6 years of the 40-year span from 1968 to 2008 (four years under Carter and two under Clinton), the Democrats controlled both the White House and the Senate simultaneously and could appoint whomever they chose to the Federal bench. During the remaining 34 years, the Republicans controlled either the nominating process (the presidency) or the confirmation process (the Senate). Yet, to hear the conservatives whine, we are to believe that the Federal judiciary is inundated with liberal judges. How could the Democrats have pulled this off when Mark Shields, a liberal columnist, is always saying they are so confused with different interest groups pulling in different directions that they couldn’t organize a 3-car funeral?

Some additional numbers might be further enlightening. That Supreme Court that Dobson likens to the KKK consists of 7 justices appointed by Republicans and 2 appointed by Democrats. Of those two, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed by the Senate by a 97 – 3 vote and Steven Breyer was confirmed by a vote of 87 – 9.

On the state and local level, many judges are elected as in Texas and here in California. Therefore the claim that judges are freewheeling and unaccountable holds no water.

Indeed there are activist judges of both liberal and conservative stripes. Twenty-five years ago, when I first moved to California, the Chief Justice of the state supreme court was Rose Bird. Rose Bird was opposed to the death penalty. She made it clear that any death penalty appeal that reached the court would be overturned, and she lived up to that promise. Now I am somewhat ambivalent about the death penalty. But I am not ambivalent about a judge saying that she will ignore the law and apply her own bias to any case that comes before her. I, like millions of other Californians, voted for her recall, and she was thrown off the court. So much for the claim that judges are unaccountable.

Memo to conservatives: stop whining. They’re your judges.

The Downing Street Memos

A gradual drumbeat is building over the Downing St. memos. For those of you who live in a political cave, these are British documents detailing the Bush push to start a war with Iraq. The thing is, you see, the memos clearly show that the Bush administration had made up their minds to invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein well over a year before they publicly said so. They were developing the military plans and twisting the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction long before they came out publicly and gave Saddam an ultimatum. It is now clear that there was nothing that Saddam could have done, short of abdicating and going into exile, which would have prevented the Bush administration from attacking him. They demanded inspections; he let in inspectors. The inspectors found long-range missiles (not allowed under the 1991 cease fire); Saddam had them destroyed. They found no biological or chemical weapons; the Bush administration said he was hiding them. There was no way for him to win.

In March of 2003, George W. Bush was almost apoplectic when the U.N. balked at letting him invade Iraq. Not since 1939 had the world seen a head of state who was so adamant about starting a war. The reason why Bush was pushing hard for a start date in the spring of 2003 is simple to understand. The administration wasn’t sure if Saddam possessed biological weapons, but they were sure that he’d use them if he had them. It would have been almost impossible for our soldiers to fight in the heat of the Iraqi summer wearing chemical/biological protective suits on top of everything else they have to carry. If the war wasn’t started in the spring of 2003, that would mean Bush would have to wait until the winter and run the risk of waging a war and a reelection campaign simultaneously. He didn’t want to do that. He wanted the war over, all neat and tied up and delivered to the U.S. public with a big yellow ribbon when he started to campaign in 2004. Hence the tantrums and vehemence with which he pushed to launch his illegal attack on another country.

It was the illegality of the war, as shown in the Downing Street memos, that concerned the British as well. Richard Perle, the self-described Prince of Darkness, and one of the major architects of the Bush foreign policy, conceded in November 2003 that the war had been illegal but justified it by saying, “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.” According to an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, “But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that ‘international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone’, and this would have been morally unacceptable.”

The death toll of young Americans in Iraq has now surpassed 1700. At the current rate, sometime during the Bush presidency, it will exceed the number of those killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This will leave George W. Bush with the dilemma of explaining to the American public why he started an illegal war against a country that was not involved in terrorist activities against the U.S.; why he refused to provide the resources to defeat the enemy and allowed that enemy to pick off our young GIs at will; why Osama bin Laden is still at large in Pakistan; and why the U.S. is now in greater danger from terrorist attacks than before he stumbled into office.

Weak Knees in the Republican Party

The AP ran a wire story yesterday headlined, “Republican Lawmakers Urge Shift in Iraq Plans”. The gist is that Republican members of Congress are getting nervous. No they are not nervous about our boys and girls in Iraq being killed; they are nervous about their own jobs. They see the president’s job approval rating on a down escalator, and, like rats leaving a sinking ship, they don’t want to be dragged under. It’s not that they have had a sudden epiphany concerning Iraq. After all they were big boosters of the president’s plan to go in and sprinkle democracy fairy dust in the Iraqi desert. They can’t come back now and say it was wrong headed; that would be flip-flopping. And, we all know what happens to flip-floppers when they run for office. You see the problem is that next year is an election year, and things just aren’t working out the way they planned.

"I voted for the resolution to commit the troops, and I feel that we've done about as much as we can do," said [Walter] Jones, who coined the phrase "freedom fries" to lash out at the French for opposing the Iraq invasion. Jones, a South Carolina Republican, is getting week kneed and will offer legislation this week proposing a timetable for American withdrawal.

You know things have to be pretty bad for the president’s colleagues to go so starkly against the party line. It was, if you recall, the president who was so adamant against a timetable. He said, if we give the Iraqis a date for our withdrawal, the insurgents only need to hold out for one day longer.

From another Republican stalwart come this, "The insurgency is alive and well. We underestimated the viability of the insurgency," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said on CBS' Face the Nation. He said the administration has "been slow to adjust when it comes to troop strength and supporting our troops."

Slow to adjust! Who’s he kidding? The administration has been obstinate to fault that we had just the right number of troops in Iraq to do the job. This administration is so cowardly and so fearful of admitting an error, that they will let the insurgents pick off our soldiers one at a time rather than admit that there are just too few of them there to handle the situation.

During the election, Bush and Cheney sneered that John Kerry had voted against a bill funding additional body armor for the troops in Iraq. They just never made the connection that it was they who sent those troops into harm’s way without sufficient body armor in the first place. Poor George, he was so certain that he understood the situation. He was so sure of his advisors. Now his approval rating is going down the toilet. And, oh yeah, there's those 1700 dead boys and girls.