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Home To The World's Best Liberal Thought And Humor
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In This Edition
Robery Parry confirms what we already knew about the American Press in, "Dissing Democracy."
Jim Hightower reports on, "Butchering The Bill Of Rights."
Norman Solomon reports on, "Noam Chomsky -- Saying What Media Don't Want Us To Hear."
Stephen Lemons interviews Aaron McGruder.
Joe Conason says, "Rudy’s G.O.P. Pals Betray New York."
Gene Lyons tells it like it is in, "Terrorism's First Goal: Repression."
Ted Rall reports from Afghanistan, "When Life Is A Short-Term Lease: Everyday Life In Afghanistan."
P.M. Carpenter explains, "Mr. Ashcroft’s America, America's Mr. Ashcroft."
William Rivers Pitt introduces, "John Ashcroft: American Fascist."
Robert Pagani asks who is, "Giving Comfort To The Enemy?"
Nina Totenberg wins the "Vidkun Quisling Award!"
Molly Ivins reflects on, "Patriot Games."
Ann Thomas explains reich-wing, "Scare Tactics."
And finally in Parting Shots 'The Onion' says, "Woman In Burqa Condems Woman In Chador" but first Uncle Ernie explains, "The Ashcroft Factor."
This week we spotlight the cartoons of Rob Rogers with additional cartoons from C.A.L.I.C.O., Oliphant, Ted Rall, Steve Benson, Lederman, Ben Sargent, Jeff Danziger, Mike Smith, Chris Whitehouse, GWBush Art and Political Strikes.
Plus we have all of your favorite departments! Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis." We hope you enjoy your stay! |
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We heil, heil, right in the 'Fuhrer's Face.' Because to doubt the Fuhrer would be a disgrace So we heil, heil right in the 'Fuhrer's Face!' Der Fuhrer's Face ... Spike Jones Yogi Berra once said, "I'm having a Deja Vu all over again," and after watching Deputy Fuhrer Ashcroft at work on the 'Pink Tutu's' in the Senate last week I have to say I know what ole Yogi meant. Disagree with Johnny and be branded a terrorist. And of course if he or our beloved Fuhrer say you're a terrorist you can soon be slowly strangling on the end of a rope for the amusement of the troops. Forget a few hundred years of law, remember we did away with the rule of law in last December's coup d' etat. So why am I wondering why 99 Senators voted to throw out most of the Constitution? Didn't they swear an oath to protect and uphold the Constitution, not throw out the 4th through 9th amendments as well as the 14th? With the violation of the twelfth amendment during the campaign by Bush and Cheney that's 8 amendment gone in under a year folks. This has got to be some sort of record for the take over and destruction of a Republic. Everyday it's something new, a weakening of this Constitutional right or another power rip off for the Executive over the Legislative but always it's something. The Congress seems happy to give away all our hard earned rights for no reason at all. If the Patriots Act had been in place it wouldn't have stopped the terrorists at all. Had the airlines and the Pentagon and the various secret services done their jobs it wouldn't have happened to begin with. Add the fact that they knew it was coming and did exactly nothing to stop it and then took advantage of it for a massive power grab. Then there's Johnny ... The Fuhrer's point man has been out in front raising hell using smoke, mirrors and double speak to amaze and amuse America while Bush takes another vacation. Herr Ashcroft has made a power grab of monstrous proportions and comes on like it's Gods will and any one who questions him about it gets labeled a traitor, a Judas or maybe even Satan himself. This goon is certifiably insane folks and he controls justice in this country. The actions of Ashcroft show why the good folks of Missouri elected a dead man rather than send Johnny back to the Senate. So naturally Bush pegged him for his Junta and the Democrats just pulled down their pants and bent over when it came to okaying him and last week was no different. His attitude was to treat the Senators like little children and then make it perfectly clear that the enemy was anyone who disagreed with the Junta. And since America has the best Congress that money can buy. Johnny breezed through the Senate interview as easy as pie. I've ask it before and I'm sure I'll ask it again, what's next? What unnatural, immoral act of treason is next up on the Bush agenda? Only time will tell and when it happens we'll pass it along to you. We'd like to welcome William Rivers Pitt to our little group of Merry Pranksters. William joins us of his own free will and is a welcome addition to the magazine. After you read his article send him an email with your name and join us in protest. So until the next time, peace Y'all! Chapter 3 of my new book "The Red King's Horror." is now viewing. I post a new chapter on the 1st of each month. It's that time of the year again. Time for a tale that has become a Christmas tradition all over the world, "Winky Tinky's Christmas Adventure," be sure and read it to the kids! Happy Holidays! |
 Dissing Democracy By Robert Parry Major national news outlets have gone silent in the face of evidence that they published misleading stories about the Florida presidential recount. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Washington Post and other leading news organizations relied on a dubious hypothesis to craft stories last month portraying George W. Bush as the recount winner, when the recount actually showed that Al Gore won if all legally cast votes were counted. The news outlets assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that so-called "overvotes," which heavily favored Gore, would have been ignored if the Florida court-ordered recount had been allowed to proceed and that therefore Bush would have won even without the intervention of five conservative allies on the U.S. Supreme Court. "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote," the New York Times front-page headline read. "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush," declared the Washington Post. After those stories were published on Nov. 12, however, new evidence emerged showing that this pro-Bush hypothesis was wrong. It turned out that the judge in charge of the recount was moving to include the "overvotes" when Bush got the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. But rather than run corrections, the major news organizations chose to duck the fact that they had messed up one of the biggest political stories in U.S. history. After learning of this foul-up via the Internet, some citizens complained in letters and e-mails, but the news outlets have responded by turning their backs on the complaints. There has been virtually no debate or commentary in the major news media about the mistaken assumption at the heart of those front-page stories. The silence has sent another message: that the news media believes that something as fundamental to democracy as making sure the person with the most votes wins is a kind of trivial pursuit interesting only to Gore "partisans." In this time of crisis, the news media seems to be saying, it isn't important that the occupant of the White House got there in an anti-democratic fashion -- and if that happens to be the case, it's best not to talk about it. 'Gore Wins' In their Nov. 12 recount articles, all the leading news organizations downplayed the key fact of the unofficial recount: that a full counting of all legally cast ballots in Florida showed that Al Gore won the state, regardless of what standards were used in judging the chads, whether dimpled, hanging or fully punched through. Gore also won the national popular vote by about 537,000 votes, a number that exceeded the victory margins of John Kennedy in 1960 and Richard Nixon in 1968. Still, the major news outlets that paid for the recount led their articles with the claim that Bush would have won the election even if five conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened on Dec. 9, 2000, to stop the statewide hand recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. To construct that lead, the newspapers deleted legally cast votes for Gore and instead used a hypothesis that presumed that the statewide recount would not have counted so-called "overvotes" that broke heavily for Gore. By subtracting the "overvotes" from the total and including only "undervotes," the big media got a number that showed Bush still clinging to a tiny lead. "Undervotes" were ballots kicked out of voting machines that recognized no vote for president. "Overvotes" were ballots that the machines rejected as having more than one vote for president. However, under Florida law, hand recounts must include those ballots if the intent of the voter is clear. For instance, if a voter marked a ballot for Gore and then wrote in Gore’s name, that should count as a legal vote in Florida, as well as many other states. If an "undervote" revealed a partially pushed through chad, that too could be counted as a legal vote. By counting all the ballots where the intent of the voter was clear, Gore pushed ahead of Bush by margins ranging from 60 to 171 votes depending on the standards used to judge the "undervotes," according to the media recounts. Besides those legal votes that should have been counted under Florida law, the media recounts estimated that Gore lost tens of thousands of other unrecoverable ballots. Those were lost because of confusing ballot designs, actions by Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration purging hundreds of predominantly African-American voters by falsely labeling them felons, and the Bush campaign’s success in counting illegally cast absentee ballots in Republican counties while excluding them in Democratic counties. No adjustments were made for those lost votes in the media recounts, though they help explain why Election Day exit polls showed Gore winning Florida, since he was the choice of a clear plurality of Florida voters. A Media Miscalculation But what made the journalistic slant of last month’s "Bush Wins Recount" stories indefensible was the erroneous assumption that the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have excluded "overvotes." Unlike the major national newspapers, however, the Orlando Sentinel of Florida checked with the judge who was in charge of the recount to see what he might have done with the "overvotes." Leon County Circuit Judge Terry Lewis said he had not fully made up his mind about counting the "overvotes," but he added: "I'd be open to that." The Sentinel stated, "If that had happened, it would have amounted to a statewide hand recount. And it could have given the election to Gore." [Orlando Sentinel, Nov. 12, 2001] Then, Newsweek uncovered a contemporaneous document demonstrating that Lewis was moving toward counting the "overvotes" on Dec. 9, just hours before Bush got five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount. In a memo, Lewis said he was instructing canvassing boards to isolate "overvotes" that showed a clear intent of the voters. "If you would segregate ‘overvotes’ as you describe and indicate in your final report how many where you determined the clear intent of the voter," wrote Lewis, "I will rule on the issue for all counties." In effect, Lewis's instructions foreshadowed a decision to count the "overvotes" because once the votes – that were legal under Florida law – had been identified there would be no legal or logical reason to throw them out, especially since some counties had already included "overvotes" in their counts. By assuming that the "overvotes" would be cast aside, the major news outlets had failed to take into account the judge in charge of the recount. Punishing Journalists Normally when serious journalistic errors are made on high-profile stories, a media firestorm ensues. Even when stories are just hyped – not dead wrong – editorialists and media critics rush to rap the knuckles of the offending reporters. Remember, the furor over a CNN report quoting former U.S. military officials seeming to confirm that poison gas was used on defectors and other sensitive targets during the Vietnam War. Press critics demanded a retraction, CNN admitted flaws in the reporting, and two producers lost their jobs amid public humiliation. Remember, too, Gary Webb’s stories about the CIA tolerating cocaine trafficking by Nicaraguan contra forces, leading to the introduction of crack cocaine in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. Though the CIA inspector general eventually confirmed that the CIA and the Reagan-Bush administration had protected contra-cocaine trafficking, major newspapers concentrated their wrath on Webb for supposedly exaggerating CIA malfeasance. He, too, lost his job, at the San Jose Mercury News. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.] In the Florida recount screw-up, however, the major news organizations simply turned a deaf ear to the fact that their core assumption was wrong. No one apparently will pay any price. More significantly, the vast majority of Americans probably have no idea that they were misled by those stories. Millions of Internet readers may know the truth and some Americans may have heard the news by word of mouth, but the big media’s refusal to revisit an embarrassing mistake has guaranteed that most voters will remain uninformed. Part of the reason for this self-protective behavior is that prominent media critics, such as Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, embraced the inaccurate reporting. "The conspiracy theorists have been out in force, convinced that the media were covering up the Florida election results to protect President Bush," Kurtz wrote. "That gets put to rest today." Kurtz scoffed, too, at the notion that anyone still cared about whether Bush had stolen the presidential election. "Now the question is: How many people still care about the election deadlock that last fall felt like the story of the century – and now faintly echoes like some distant Civil War battle?" he wrote. [Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2001] Fearing the 'Liberal' Label Why, many Americans wonder, is the national press corps acting in a way that seems so disrespectful of the democratic process? The answer is, partly at least, fear and self-interest. While conservatives continue to charge that the national news media has a "liberal" bias, the reality for at least the past two decades has been that working journalists who got labeled "liberal" or who offended the powerful conservative establishment in Washington could expect their careers to be damaged, if not terminated, as occurred in the CNN and Webb cases. As self-protection, journalists therefore have learned to bend over backwards to avoid offending conservatives. Journalists have no similar fear of liberal press critics. This reality was on display throughout the 1990s as the Washington press corps sought to prove it wasn’t liberal by playing up petty scandals that kept the Clinton administration on the defensive. Starting with overwrought coverage of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater real estate deal and the furor over the firings at the White House Travel Office, mainstream and conservative news outlets alike kept up the barrage right through Clinton’s impeachment over fibbing about having sex with Monica Lewinsky. This phenomenon of national reporters proving they aren’t liberals spilled over to the coverage of Campaign 2000, where Vice President Gore was hectored for minor or imaginary examples of supposed exaggerations. The news media – from the establishment New York Times and Washington Post to the conservative New York Post and Washington Times – joined in portraying Gore as a serial exaggerator whose behavior bordered on the delusional. To create this caricature of Gore – who is, by any reasonable measure, a hard-working and well-intentioned public servant – the news media literally made up quotes for Gore and misrepresented a variety of other statements. Some of the misrepresented statements became political urban legends, such as Gore’s never-spoken claim that he "invented" the Internet and his supposedly false claim that author Eric Segal had used him as a model for a character in the novel, Love Story. Though Segal later confirmed this fact, the media continued to insist that Gore had made it up. In another case, the media accused Gore of suffering from delusional tendencies for allegedly commenting about the Love Canal toxic-waste investigation that "I was the one that started it all," a quote used in critical stories in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. In reality, Gore had been referring to another toxic-waste case in Toone, Tennessee, and had said "that was the one that started it all." The major newspapers had simply gotten the quote wrong and then dragged their heels on issuing a correction, while the mistake spread to dozens of other news organizations around the country. [For a fuller account of this case, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Al Gore v. the Media."] A Bush-Cheney Tilt Rolling Stone magazine has published a new study of this anti-Gore media bias and quotes reporters on the campaign trail acknowledging the press hostility toward the then-vice president. "The coverage seemed to be much more aggressive and adversarial than I’d ever seen before," said Scott Shepard, a veteran newsman who covered the campaign for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A network television correspondent was quoted as saying, "There just developed among a certain group of people covering Gore, particularly the print people, a real disdain for him. Everything was negative. They had a grudge against [Gore]. I don’t know how else to put it." The Rolling Stone article by Eric Boehlert quoted Ceci Connolly, the Washington Post reporter who misquoted Gore about Love Canal. She continued to insist that her misquote "did not change the context" of Gore’s original comment, though any fair reading of Gore’s remarks would indicate that he was not claiming to have been the first one to discover the toxic-waste problem at Love Canal. [Rolling Stone, Dec. 6-13, 2001.] Katharine Seeyle, the New York Times reporter who joined Connolly in making the Love Canal misquote, also has stood by the general accuracy of her account. Both reporters continue to hold down high-profile jobs as correspondents at these two leading newspapers. Neither they nor any of the other reporters who demonstrated unprofessional hostility toward Gore have suffered the fates of the CNN producers on the poison-gas story or Gary Webb on the contra-crack stories. [For the most detailed coverage of the Gore exaggeration topic, see the archives at Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler Web site.] To make this caricature of Gore as a pathological liar stand out in even starker contrast, the campaign press corps chose to ignore or play down exaggerations and even outright lies told by Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney. For instance, during the vice presidential debate, Cheney depicted himself as a self-made multi-millionaire from his years as chairman of Halliburton Co. As for his success in the private sector, Cheney declared that "the government had absolutely nothing to do with it." The reality was quite different, however, since Cheney had personally lobbied for government subsidies that benefited Halliburton, including federal loan guarantees from the U.S.-funded Export-Import Bank. During Cheney's tenure, Halliburton also emerged as a leading defense contractor with $1.8 billion in contracts from 1996-99. Immediately after the debate, Cheney went on the road and denounced Gore for having an apparent "compulsion to embellish his arguments or ... his resumé." Yet, the major news media made no note of Cheney's own resumé polishing, though that information was all on the public record. [For details, Consortiumnews.com's "Protecting Bush-Cheney."] The Recount Battle The anti-Gore bias carried into the post-election battle for a full-and-fair count of the Florida votes. From the start, commentators leaned heavily on Gore to concede, though his lead in the popular vote was swelling to over a half million votes and he was only a few votes shy of a majority in the Electoral College even without Florida. Mike Barnicle of the New York Daily News argued that Gore should do the right thing and give up. "This could be Al Gore’s moment," Barnicle said on MSNBC on Nov. 8, 2000. "It could be the moment where he finally gets the chance to live up to his great father’s ideals and have the courage to step aside." NBC’s Tim Russert declared that Gore "can’t extend it to too long, nor can he become a whiner about Florida." As for Gore’s advisers, Russert said, "If they continue then to file lawsuits and begin to contest various areas of the state, then people will begin to suggest, ‘uh-oh, this is not magnanimous. This is being a sore loser.’" Conservative commentators made similar arguments with a nastier tone.>{? On Nov. 12, columnist George Will wrote that "all that remains to complete the squalor of Gore’s attempted coup d’etat is some improvisation by Janet Reno, whose last Florida intervention involved a lawless SWAT team seizing a 6-year-old. She says there is no federal role, but watch for a ‘civil rights’ claim on behalf of some protected minority or some other conjured pretext." Gore’s decision to fight for Florida "made the poisonous political atmosphere in Washington even more toxic," said Fox News’ Tony Snow on Nov. 12, 2000. "Gore has established a precedent for turning elections into legal circuses and giving the final word not to voters but to squadrons of lawyers." [For a fuller compilation of post-election comments, see FAIR’s "Media Vs. Democracy" http://www.fair.org/articles/media-vs-democracy.html] The irony of Snow’s words would become apparent only a month later when Bush sent a squadron of lawyers to convince five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent any more counting of votes and to deny the voters of Florida the final word. No Change In the year that has followed, the media trends have continued down the same course, with Bush still getting the kid-glove treatment and Gore still coping with press misquotes. In late November, Gore came in for a new round of ridicule for a supposed claim that he had opened a family restaurant in Tennessee. Quoting a Gore speech in Lagos, Nigeria, Reuters reported that Gore had said, "We have started a family restaurant in Tennessee and we are running it ourselves." To some journalists, this sounded like another case of Lyin' Al claiming some accomplishment that didn't really exist. Comedian Jay Leno included a joke about Gore's restaurant in his monologue on NBC's "Tonight" show. When Gore returned to the United States, however, a transcript was made from a tape of his speech. According to the tape transcript, Gore had actually said, "We stopped at a little family restaurant in Tennessee. We were eating there by ourselves." Reuters then retracted the story. [Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2001]
But the most fitting final comment on Election 2000 may be the silence of major news outlets in the face of evidence that they misreported the results
of their own recount – and in doing so, awarded legitimacy to George W. Bush, the man who lost the election but won the White House.
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I know what I want for Christmas. It's the same wish I have for Hanukkah,
Kwanzaa, the Winter Solstice, and New Year's. I want my Bill of Rights back.
I want it back from Bush, Ashcroft, Ridge, and their whole gaggle of
small-minded autocrats who have pulled off a sudden, sweeping, usurpation of
power, establishing an imperial presidency. They have done it by cowing
congress, orchestrating the media, and diverting the public's attention with loud
shrieks of "Terrorism! Terrorism!" As they shrieked and pointed at Arabs and
Afghanis, they dragged the constitutional genius of Madison, Jefferson, Adams,
Franklin, and other founders into the back rooms and hacked it to bits.
They now assert that anyone they "suspect" of being a criminal or being
connected in anyway to anyone suspected of being a criminal can be detained
by federal authority without charging them or revealing who is being held. They
say they now have the authority to enter your home, business, or computer
without telling you about it, and they can arrest you if you tell anyone they were
there. They can also monitor conversations between you and your lawyer.
Oh, you say, this only applies to terrorists, doesn't it? Hello. These new
executive powers apply to criminal investigations, not just terrorism. More
frighteningly, they don't define "terrorist," except to use catch-all phrases that can
ensnare anyone the authorities have "reason to believe" might be involved in
any action that might have "adverse effects on the U.S., its citizens, its national
security, foreign policy, or economy." Picketers, protesters, demonstrators––this
means you.
This is Jim Hightower saying...Instead of George Washington, we're saddled
with George W; instead of John Adams, John Ashcroft; instead of Tom
Jefferson, Tom Ridge. In recent weeks, these lessors have weakened the work
of the giants, specifically butchering the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments. In
so doing, they've weakened America more than any terrorist could.
Sources: "Ashcroft asked to justify anti-terror measures" Austin American Statesman
11/26/2001
"What, me worry? You bet I will" by Molly Ivins
"Bush's powers growing along with campaign against terrorism" Austin American Statesman
10/20/2001
"Kucinich Sends Bi-Partisan Letter to Bush" Press Release 11/27/2001 from the Congress of
United States House Representatives
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From all indications, the gatekeepers for big media in the United
States don't want to hear what Noam Chomsky has to say -- and they'd prefer
that we not hear him either.
Mainstream journalists in other nations often interview Chomsky. Based
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he's a world-renowned analyst
of propaganda and global politics. But the chances are slim that you'll ever
find him on a large network here at home.
Chomsky is ill-suited to providing soundbites -- and that's not just a
matter of style. A few snappy words are sufficient when they harmonize with
the conventional wisdom in a matter of seconds. It takes longer to
intelligibly present a very different assessment of political realities.
No one disputes that Chomsky revolutionized the study of language more
than 40 years ago. The rich and powerful have no quarrel with his work as
the world's most significant linguist. But as a political analyst, he's
pretty much persona non grata at big U.S. networks and influential dailies.
Meanwhile, overflow audiences of thousands are routine when Chomsky
speaks on college campuses and elsewhere in the United States. For many
years now, community radio stations across North America have featured his
speeches and interviews on political subjects. Progressive magazines publish
his articles.
But at major media outlets, most editors seem far more interested in
facile putdowns of Chomsky than in allowing space for his own words. Media
attacks on him are especially vitriolic in times of international crisis and
war.
Since Sept. 11, the distortions have been predictable: Although he's an
unequivocal opponent of terrorism in all its forms, Chomsky is portrayed as
an apologist for terrorism. Although he's a consistent advocate of human
rights for all, Chomsky is accused of singling out the U.S. government for
blame.
To some extent, Chomsky seems to bring the media salvos on himself.
Even when the brickbats are flying, the guy just won't keep his head down.
He speaks bluntly when the Pentagon terrorizes faraway civilians in the name
of fighting terrorism. And he points out that citizens of the most powerful
country on Earth have special opportunities and responsibilities to work
against deadly policies implemented in their names with their tax dollars.
Chomsky's latest book, titled "9-11," is now arriving in bookstores. It's a collection of interviews, serving as a badly needed corrective to news coverage of the present-day "war on terrorism."
The book will be very useful in the months to come. Yet "9-11" just
scratches the surface. For those who want more depth, many superb Chomsky
books are available -- including the classic study "Manufacturing Consent"
(co-authored with Edward S. Herman), "Profit Over People" and "The New
Military Humanism," as well as volumes of interviews conducted by David
Barsamian.
In "9-11," Chomsky speaks without evasion: "We should recognize that in
much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and
with good reason." Chomsky cites many examples of U.S. actions that resulted
in the killing of several million civilians during the past few decades. A
partial list of nations where those deaths have occurred includes Vietnam,
Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, East Timor, Sudan, Iraq,
Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
All in the past? Chomsky rips into the scam of wiping the U.S.
government's slate clean. "If we choose, we can live in a world of
comforting illusion," he said. "Or we can look at recent history, at the
institutional structures that remain essentially unchanged, at the plans
that are being announced -- and answer the questions accordingly. I know of
no reason to suppose that there has been a sudden change in long-standing
motivations or policy goals, apart from tactical adjustments to changing
circumstances."
Chomsky added wryly: "We should also remember that one exalted task of
intellectuals is to proclaim every few years that we have 'changed course,'
the past is behind us and can be forgotten as we march on towards a glorious
future. That is a highly convenient stance, though hardly an admirable or
sensible one."
For those whose window on the world is mostly confined to mainstream
U.S. media, some of Chomsky's statements may seem odd or absolutely wrong.
But you can't make an informed judgment based on a few quotes. Read a couple
of Chomsky's books and decide for yourself.
Noam Chomsky is not a lone ranger or ivory tower intellectual. For
decades, he has worked closely with grassroots activists. "Understanding
doesn't come free," he commented a few years ago. "It's true that the task
is somewhere between awfully difficult and utterly hopeless for an isolated
individual. But it's feasible for anyone who is part of a cooperative
community." And, he added, understanding the world "doesn't help anyone
else, or oneself very much either for that matter, unless it leads to
action."
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Aaron McGruder, creator of "The Boondocks" The controversial cartoonist calls Bush a moron, says Americans shouldn't worry about bin Laden and says he might leave the country. By Stephen Lemons Long before the war in Afghanistan becomes just a twinkle in the eye of an old general, Aaron McGruder may well be living in exile in Canada. The 27-year-old creator of the daily hip-hop comic "The Boondocks," which features the escapades of a group of young African-American kids growing up in the almost-all-white suburbs, has wrenched the torch of scathing satire from the Boomer King of Cartoon Controversy, Garry Trudeau, and set off on an Olympic-style sprint for infamy. Since Sept. 11, McGruder has been setting fire to the funny pages with incendiary panels of political humor mocking everything from Attorney General Ashcroft's anti-terrorist dragnet and the public's fear of anthrax to FBI wiretaps and the nation's ongoing orgy of patriotism. McGruder's 4-year-old strip does garner laughs, but not without an accompanying sting. The point man in the strip is the pint-size Black Panther-in-spirit Huey Freeman, who recently has been as busy as an anarchist at a WTO meeting. Among his many subversive acts, Freeman has called the FBI tip line to report Ronald Reagan as aiding and abetting terrorism, suggested that the terrorists may be making their bucks these days manufacturing flags and has pointed out the parallels between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden during a Thanksgiving meal prayer. About the only thing Huey hasn't done yet is strap on a Kalashnikov and set off for Kandahar. But now that John Walker's bearded mug is on the front page of dailies worldwide, anything's possible. A number of the 250 publications that carry "The Boondocks" have taken exception to the sardonic sedition of McGruder's characters. The New York Daily News dropped the strip for about a month and a half, Newsday in Long Island chose not to run Sept. 11-inspired strips the first week they started coming out and the Dallas Morning News has moved the strip to a separate section altogether from other comics. None of this fazed McGruder. In response, he temporarily "replaced" the strip with "The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon," where the two symbols sing the National Anthem and talk tough about the U.S. kicking tail. Angry letter writers have suggested McGruder emigrate, and McGruder admits that he's so disgusted with his native land he may eventually do just that. Recently, he tore himself away from ranting at the tube in his Los Angeles digs long enough to rant to Salon about the state of the nation. Your strips post-9/11 have touched a raw nerve with some folks. Did you anticipate all the attention you've gotten because of them? It's become a story because of timing. You know, the New York Daily News temporarily pulls the strip, and in the middle of this wartime situation, it became a story about freedom of speech and all that. The reality is I get pulled all the time from various newspapers for different reasons. And it's been that way since the strip started. Usually, it's a few strips here, a few strips there. Granted, this is the longest I've ever been removed from a major paper. But it wasn't that big of a deal, really. There's been everything from the National Rifle Association strips that got pulled in Dallas to some strips I did about Bob Johnson [of Black Entertainment Television] ... You know, the newspapers make the call. They pull the strips that they don't want to run, and they put the strips back when they're comfortable. I've gotten used to it. I was somewhat surprised at how big of a story it became, because it's happened so often. You don't feel like you're under siege, then? No, because the Syndicate has not asked me to do anything different. And I'm in 250 newspapers, and none of them have asked me to do anything different. So I've been doing exactly what I want, and I haven't felt any pressure to do otherwise. What's the status of things now with the Daily News and the Dallas Morning News? The Daily News said they were going to look at it on a daily basis and decide whether or not to run it. So I have no idea what they're doing. I heard about the Dallas Morning News moving it to a different section, but I don't know much about it. Newsday chose not to run a few strips, and I've heard some reports of some smaller papers. But I don't really keep track of stuff like that. With over 200 clients, it would be too time-consuming and more trouble than it was worth to worry about what each one was doing and why. I do the strip, send it out and what the newspapers want to do with it is up to them. It's between them and their readers. Was there ever a doubt in your mind that you were going to address Sept. 11 in the strip? No, the only question was how soon? And that was the big decision that had to be made. My deadlines at the time were falling on Tuesdays. The day the attack happened was the deadline, and then I had a week to decide whether or not I was going to talk about it the following week. And I did. I wanted to ask you specifically about the Thanksgiving strip where Huey compares President Bush to Osama bin Laden. Do you think that's crossing the line on a holiday like that after a major tragedy such as Sept. 11? A couple of things about that: One, I stole that joke from an Internet forward that was going around. I don't even know who originated it. Two, the best thing about that strip is that it never says G.W. Bush. The reader has to make the connection. If the reader reads what I wrote and thinks about G.W. Bush, that means it's fucking true! So I didn't make it up; you came to the conclusion as well. And if it's true, why are you mad at me? If he's not all those things, then what are you mad at? (Laughs.) [People] Have there been strips you've pulled back on because of Sept. 11? It's always happening. It never happens because I send it in and the Syndicate says we can't run it. It's always part of the creative process of me trying to walk that line and say the things I want to say without taking it too far and doing stuff that you're just not allowed to do in the newspapers. That's always a challenge. Why did you decide to target the post-Sept. 11 displays of patriotism in the strip, and essentially mock them with those two characters Flagee and Ribbon? Because it wasn't genuine. I thought it was very faddish, and there was no real weight behind it. You know, we just came off an election that was a mess. We still don't know if the president won the election. We do know that he got less votes nationwide. There's no question about that. And he may not even have won, legitimately, the electoral contest. There were reports of the massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans in Florida, which went totally unreported in this country, but was covered widely by the foreign press. There were black people in Florida yelling and screaming, trying to get somebody to pay attention to them. They were saying that they had their rights taken away from them, and they were not allowed to vote. And nobody in this country cared. Where was the flag then? Where was this embracing of American ideals when people had their rights ripped from them so unjustly? We have a president who was appointed by the Supreme Court, and there was none of this talk about freedom and love of country at that time. So I feel like the deaths of 4,000 people had really nothing to do with love of country or not. This country made giant mistakes and failed to protect its people. We don't need to be rallying around the government and supporting it, we need to be holding it accountable and being very critical so this type of thing doesn't happen again. So there are a number of reasons why I was uncomfortable with the whole flag thing. A lot of folks would argue that no matter what our disagreements are internally, if we're attacked from the outside, we have to come together and support the current administration even if we have problems with it. How do you respond to that argument? I don't think that's true. Look, they're telling us these people are bad because they hate us, and they hate our way of life. And they hate our way of life because they hate freedom, and they hate the fact that we have freely elected officials. This is what the president said. Well, he wasn't elected! We really have to think about that. Considering that people around the world, other people, people "over there," "bad" people will always try to do bad things, that's kind of outside of your control. The only thing you can be responsible for is what goes on here. The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy. None. The only thing we can exercise some will on is what happens here domestically. So I think the focus is wrong. I don't think the American people should be worried at all about Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or anybody, because our government is going to do what it wants to do to them regardless of what we want them to do or not. All we can control is what happens here. And what happened here is what allowed those attacks to take place. The intelligence community failed. Security failed. The military failed. Everybody failed at the same time. I can be really nice to them and say, "You guys really messed up and need to check yourself." Or I could be not nice and say, "You know, I don't think it's really probable that all the systems can fail at the same time, which means something far more insidious took place." People are really afraid to get into that. Are you suggesting some collusion on the part of our government in the Sept. 11 attacks? I'm not suggesting that. I'm saying I'm not going there. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're idiots, and not that they had something far more nefarious in mind. However, history does teach us that the government has done things like that before, particularly with Pearl Harbor, where there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that [FDR] was aware of it and lured the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. He literally left it undefended. There's some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the '60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba. That's not even a conspiracy theory. The CIA drew up the plans, even though it never happened. So if I were to go that route, I wouldn't be crazy. But I'm not going to go that route. I'm just going to say that the American people need to be concerned about what happens here. Forget what happens overseas. That's out of your control. Be concerned with what happens here. Because honestly, if our game is tight here, we can't be attacked. If our intelligence community and airports and military are doing what they're supposed to do, then we should be relatively OK. This reminds me of the strip where Huey calls the FBI terrorist hotline, tells them he's got a tip on someone who helped the terrorists, and it's Ronald Reagan. Do you think there's been enough coverage of the support our leaders have given the mujahedin in the past? The media have reported on it. But it's not so much [that] they said it or not, it's the way they've said it. When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story. Like, anthrax -- very, very important. Pay attention, it's scary. When they report on the U.S. creation of these people, these terrorists, it's all very matter of fact. Like, oh yeah, we gave them a whole bunch of money, and now on to sports. So a lot of it is not necessarily an issue of it being covered up. In fact, it can't be covered up -- it's well known. But to me, it's not given the right emphasis. The question is to what extent is the government culpable for creating the people who have done this? And to what extent should they be held responsible for the actions of terrorists that they have supported in the past? That's what this is all about. I'm talking about Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., their whole crew, up until the crew that's in there today. After the embassy attacks in Africa, they were well aware of Osama bin Laden. They were well aware of his location in Afghanistan, his protection by the Taliban, and this Bush administration gave them $43 million this year! And nobody talks about it, and nobody holds them accountable, and that's wrong. To be fair, though, I believe even the Clinton administration supported the Taliban in the beginning because they were viewed as a stabilizing force. Well, to hell with Clinton, too. I'm not a Democrat. I don't give a damn about Clinton. Hold these people responsible! You know, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported individuals and regimes that have slaughtered millions across the globe. And they need to be held accountable for that. Your depiction of the news media in your strip makes it out to be almost a cheerleader for the government. Is that a fair assessment of your opinion? They've absolutely been playing cheerleader for the government, to the extent that even they've had to admit it. I watch news shows, and they're like, "Yeah, we're treating Bush differently now." I don't want the news to be patriotic. I don't want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don't want any of that. I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism. They've thrown that out the window. And because they've all thrown it out the window at the same time, it's supposedly acceptable. No! It's ridiculous. I don't need to see that. This is war. It's serious. People are dying on both sides. How dare the media just give in when the government says don't air any of Osama bin Laden's video messages! What is this? He's going to rub his nose and something is going to blow up over here? Like terrorists don't have satellite television, and they can't watch foreign news and get the same messages. That's insane. It's totally and thoroughly irresponsible behavior by the entire institution of the media. Don't hold back, Aaron. I won't. I was talking to some television journalists about this who gave me some interesting insight. Right now, they're scared to be critical of the government. Everything is about access. Reporters are afraid that the administration will cut them off. Decades ago, the mark of a good reporter was how much dirt you could dig up. Like the Watergate scandal. They were actively trying to find out what was going on and report the truth to people. Now it's the exact opposite. Nobody wants to say anything that makes the government mad, and that's ridiculous. Also, after the attacks, now people think it's unpatriotic to say anything critical of the government. Come on, Bush is a moron. There is no doubt about it. And they really didn't have a problem going there before. But now, nobody wants to call him on it. People get excited because he can speak well. What world is this? When we're happy that the president can articulate well. That's something they only used to say about black men. "Oh, you speak so well." That's nuts. You don't say that about the president. We're supposed to have higher standards. The media are a big part of shaping the perception of the country, and right now, they're not asking the tough questions. They're not exploring, for example, the Bush administration's financial ties with Afghanistan. The fact that George Bush Sr. has financial investments in the area, and those investments become much more valuable when the Taliban government is removed. I'm not talking about getting into a whole bunch of conspiracies. Report what's actually happening, and challenge the government to explain itself. Why didn't they ask more questions? Like, how did this happen? How did four planes get hijacked in one day? And who got fired? That's the question I want to know the answer to, because a whole bunch of people should have gotten fired for what happened on Sept. 11. Report on the fact that G. W. Bush is sealing presidential papers. Indefinitely. His, his father's, Reagan's. It's totally unconstitutional. Why don't they talk about that? On the topic of George W's I.Q., I think that idea is pretty threatening to people right now, because like it or not, we're stuck with him. Yes, but living in denial doesn't help the situation. We have to confront the very scary fact that the president is a moron. He's really dumb. He's got some really smart people around him, and people weren't afraid to say that before. They said it in a nice way, but they said it. It was like, he's dumb, but he's got Cheney and he's got Powell, so we'll probably be OK. But now they act like he's done something great. You know, he's called [the terrorists] "evil." That's really some childish stuff. They're bad, we're good. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. That's so incredibly stupid. What do you think they do? They call us "evil." I just see so many parallels between both sides in this war, and it's really uncomfortable. You know, they kill civilians, we kill civilians. They say they're justified, we say the same thing. This is gang warfare on an international level. That's all it is. And when gang warfare happens in American cities, we say it's wrong. When somebody loads a gun, goes 20 blocks and kills the guy who killed his brother, it's not justifiable homicide or self-defense, it's murder and we put people in jail for it. Why is it acceptable that we do it now? Do you support the war at all? I don't support the killing of innocent people, and that's what's happening. What's worse is that we're killing innocent people out of retribution for the killing of innocent people. It's wrong. It's really wrong. But assuming that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida are responsible, we have to go in and get them. How do we go in and get them without taking over that country? I don't know. But I would ask, how many bombs can we drop to bring these people back? We can't drop enough bombs to bring 4,000 people back, and we can't drop enough bombs to ensure that it never happens again. Is it really about Osama bin Laden, or are we narrowing this? The people that hijacked the planes and crashed them are dead. If there's a terrorist network or a man responsible, yes, we should get them, but when you construct it like a police action or an investigation, and not like a war, then you're forced to respect the lives of innocents, even if it's a pain in the ass. I say it's not worth innocent people dying, even if it takes years and you have to keep sending SEAL teams or whatever in there. What the hell? That's what they're trained to do. That's why they exist. Drop them in there to get one guy. F-18s exist to wipe out towns. It may take longer the other way, but that's too bad. But I'm sure you've seen pictures of Germany after World War II, and that country was flattened. Japan too. There were countless innocent lives lost. World War II was 60 years ago. I mean, just in terms of technology, we're not fighting wars the same way. They had special ops, but it was the beginnings of special ops. They didn't have satellites that could listen to a conversation from space or pinpoint and read a newspaper headline from miles in the air. We didn't have that. You went to war, carpet-bombed and a whole lot of civilians died. And you know what? World War II was fucked up. How many millions of people died good and bad? Could World War II have been fought differently? I don't know. There are few wars where innocent people don't die. I don't know why this had to become a war. A war on whom? This feels like the war on drugs. When does it end? When you declare war on Japan or Germany, you know you can stop when those countries are flattened. When you declare war against the word "terrorism," when is that over? What does that mean? Stopping terrorism is like stopping rape or burglary, it's an individual action. Anyone with a gun can go out and commit an act of terrorism, even without a political affiliation. It never ends. So it's like the war on drugs, and what has that accomplished? Not a goddamn thing but a whole lot of black men in jail for nonviolent crimes, millions of dollars spent and nothing else. And that's what the war on terrorism is going to do -- we're going to lose countless amounts of money, people are going to die and get locked up, but that's it. There's going to be no good coming out of it. We're going to lose our civil rights, and they're going to be gone forever. You don't buy the argument that the curtailing of certain civil liberties is temporary, that it's been necessary in previous wars, and that eventually those rights will be restored? It's not temporary. Once you give up rights, they're not going to give them back. This is a war that will never end. When are they going to say they've defeated terrorism? No one is stupid enough to say that. Because then when something blows up, they look like dickheads. They can never again come out and say America is safe. They'd be idiots if they did. So given that they've set the situation up as a war they can't win, they're never giving the rights back. Literally, someone will have to be elected who doesn't agree with this shit and gives us our rights back. Someone, I don't know who, will have to get into power and say, "You know, this was all bullshit, and we're changing the laws." What do you think we'll have to go through for that to happen? America will really have to understand how corrupt its system is, and they'll have to get so fed up that they're ready to make change. And I don't think that'll happen because the media are so in line with the government and so invested in the status quo. We have, essentially, a worthless democracy. I hate to sound so extreme, but things are that bad. There's nothing we have to share with the rest of the world. We don't even have one man, one vote. And we have so much legal corruption in our political system that no one even thinks about it anymore. You say that, but would you want to live anywhere else? I tell you what, I visited Canada, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. This idea that there's no better place in the world to live, I don't buy that. The reality is this: Me, I'm comfortable. I make a lot of money. So I can say, America is OK, up until the point that the LAPD pulls me over and knocks out some teeth on some bullshit. That happens enough to black men that it's a legitimate concern for me. So I have to ask, even with my money, even though I've worked the American dream pretty well, is this really the best place for me to be? I don't know that's true. When you have money, anyplace is good. I could go to South Africa with what I'm making right now and live like a multimillionaire just off the currency exchange. I could live real well in a lot of different places. If you're broke, a lot of places suck. If you're broke in America or Brazil, it sucks. Are you seriously considering that, or just talking? The reason I ask is that prior to Bush being elected, a lot of Hollywood types were talking about how they were going to move to Europe if Bush won and they're all still here. You know, they're Hollywood types, fuck 'em. They're irrelevant to the conversation. Yes, I have thought about leaving. Right now, I can't even find the time to get an apartment in L.A. So when my life settles, and I have to think about where I'm going to raise my kids, when I have them, Canada will be the first place I look. I've never had the opportunity to go overseas because I was broke up until a couple of years ago. Now that I have money, I have to find time to really see the rest of the world. I can't say this is the best place on earth because I haven't been enough places. But I know that in Toronto and Vancouver there are all the comforts of America, and yet there's a difference in the people, and I had health care. When I visited Canada, I didn't have health care here. I go there, I have health insurance. And the air was cleaner -- sparkling, even in downtown Toronto. People say Canada's just like America. No! I'm out of the country, and you know what? It ain't bad. Yet what makes your strip successful, I think, is that it's going against the grain of American society. Don't you think you would lose that if you were living in some other country? I don't need to live here to know how stupid this place is. I don't know G.W. Bush. What I know, I get from the television and the newspapers, and I can get that anywhere. I have been successful to a large degree because of controversy, but I have no intention of living my life mad. And I'm not so in love with making people mad that I want to live my life around it. Trust me, I would rather the attacks had not happened and not have anything to talk about. Sure, the U.S. of A. gives me lots of material, but I would rather things be good. So in the abstract, I would leave. I haven't had the chance to seriously explore it. But I'm 27, so I have some time. This is just not the best place in the world for black people, even the U.N. knows that. They did some study ranking living conditions by ethnicity, and white American men were No. 1. I don't remember where black American men were, but they were a little bit further on down. Do you think your strip reflects in any way a certain skepticism among black Americans toward the government? I cannot be made into the commentator for the unspoken black masses. But I will say that the strip represents a political perspective that people black and white hold that is not being put out in the mass media. I just happen to have incredibly wide distribution in a medium that doesn't draw a lot of attention to itself. It's not like Bill Maher, where you say the wrong thing and the powers that be can just pull the plug. Comic strips don't really work that way. The message gets out there 20 million times a day, but it's still very subtle and very small. The medium itself, not just me. I'd give you more credit than that. Because most comics don't deal with political issues, it makes you and "Doonesbury" pop out. Yeah, we pop out, but it's not a dynamic medium. It's not TV, it's not movies. In that sense, it doesn't capture people's attention in the same way. What happened to Bill Maher is a good example. His show is done, I think. What do you mean? You think "Politically Incorrect" is a goner? I think it's going to be soon. I've heard things, but I don't want to say. I think they already know it's not [going to survive]. Maybe I'm wrong. I watched "Politically Incorrect" recently, and I felt like I was watching "Crossfire." The jokes were gone. It was like, everybody was nervous. Nobody wanted to say anything. You can't have a show called "Politically Incorrect," and have everyone be afraid to be politically incorrect. It doesn't make sense. I mean, I've been on the show before back when the strip launched, and I think Bill Maher got a raw deal. But that's the difference between TV and comic strips. You're working on a "Boondocks" TV show now. Will your show still retain the political flavor of the strip? Will this be on Comedy Central? Well, it's going to be prime time cable as opposed to being network. I can't say the channel, because we've been through this with three networks and every time we think it's going to happen it falls through. But with a year lead time, you can't talk about current events. So the show's mainly going to be about the characters. It's still going to have a heavy political slant to it, but it's not going to talk about specific incidents. Doesn't "South Park" do stuff that's timely? Yeah, but we're talking about animation of a quality that's far superior to "South Park," so it takes a long time. I love "South Park," but it's animated very simply. By the way, here's one vote for you not moving to Canada. Huey in Toronto just wouldn't be the same.
Thanks, but no matter where I live, it's more an issue of how much
longer I want to do this. It's a very demanding job. How long am I going
to feel like I have something relevant to say day in and day out? How
long before I get bored with it or get fed up with the deadlines? A lot
of guys who do this job do it for 50 years. That's not me. I don't feel
like I'm going to be a lifer. There are weeks where I hate the strip
more than anything. And then there are times, like recently, where
everyone else is out of work, and I'm like yeah, I've got a job,
woo-hoo! But am I going to do this another week, or am I just going to
quit now and hope this Hollywood stuff pans out? It's always a debate. |
 Rudy’s G.O.P. Pals Betray New York New York loves Rudy Giuliani, as the saying goes, now more than ever. And as he told us in his farewell advertisement during the Mayoral campaign, Rudy Giuliani loves New York. Yet his recent behavior gives credence to the suspicion that he loves the Republican Party more–and that, all sentiment aside, his blind partisanship could cost the city billions of dollars. The departing Mayor’s dominant role has been magnified even more in recent weeks by contrast with Governor George Pataki, who hasn’t been heard from since his brief, bungled effort to wangle $54 billion from Washington, much of which he reportedly planned to spread around to his cronies upstate. Silent and remote, Mr. Pataki has been about as effective as a cigar-store dummy in securing federal assistance for the city. Unfortunately, Mr. Giuliani has turned out to be just as unhelpful as Mr. Pataki, at a moment when the White House and Republicans in Congress are reneging on George W. Bush’s heartwarming $20 billion commitment. It didn’t take long for the President to decide that he really meant to spend less than half that amount right now, with more to come–probably, maybe, if budget conditions permit, if anyone still cares about New York, if we aren’t at war with Iraq, if his friends don’t need another tax cut–next year or even the year after. By then, the damage to the downtown economy will be irreversible, including the loss of 200,000 jobs or more. While the Mayor concentrates on the removal of tons of debris from ground zero, there are many other pressing needs that may remain unmet unless more money is appropriated before year’s end: reimbursing hospitals and schools, replenishing the state’s almost bankrupt unemployment-insurance fund and restoring small businesses downtown. Amazingly, rather than demand the $20 billion–which is precious little in light of the terror attack’s devastating effects–Mr. Giuliani echoes the Bush budgetary propaganda. Along those lines, he said something quite stupid a few weeks ago: "Right now, we don’t need $10 billion. We would put it in [Treasury notes] if we got it. As we need money, we get it." That remark, which made the Mayor’s own staff cringe, is brandished in the faces of New York representatives whenever they attempt to restore the President’s original commitment in legislation. That remark, and the inaction of both the Mayor and the Governor, encouraged the House Republican leadership to kill a bill that would have provided another $7.5 billion for New York. That remark provided Republican members from upstate, Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey with an excuse to vote against the city’s interests. The margin of defeat was five votes. Imagine what Mr. Giuliani and his eager sidekick Mr. Pataki might have done to swing those votes and insure full funding of the city’s $20 billion. They could have leaned on the upstate Republicans to join Democrats in battle on the House floor. They could have led a delegation of firefighters, police officers and rescue workers to Capitol Hill, where a request for assistance from the nation’s heroes would not have been rejected by any sane politician. And they could have brought those heroes–and victims, too, if necessary–down to Washington every day until they won. Instead, New York’s enemies in the Republican hierarchy have found other uses for that money. For instance, the $7.5 billion that Mr. DeLay and Mr. Armey held back equals the amount they propose to refund to the nation’s 16 biggest businesses by repealing the alternative minimum tax. (Enron Corporation would get back $254 million it paid in corporate income taxes since 1992–a very nice return on its $4 million in campaign contributions to Republicans. Too bad the firm’s energy plays didn’t work out as well.) And they have done this to the city with complete confidence that the Mayor wouldn’t challenge them. Actually, the Republican leaders think that Mr. Giuliani’s renewed celebrity will help them maintain control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections. No matter how badly they treat his beloved hometown, they believe he will travel around the country next year, urging voters to re-elect his fellow Republicans and raising money for them. Mr. Giuliani has said nothing to the contrary, and indeed proved how far he’s willing to stoop for partisan purposes in October, when he taped an endorsement for Mark Earley, the gay-baiting, far-right Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia. (He probably didn’t mention that to his gay roommates when they asked him how his day went.)
The Mayor will have another chance to help the city before his successor takes office. He could tell the
Republican Congressional bosses that he’ll do nothing to help them in 2002 unless the city gets full funding
when the House and Senate meet in conference on the anti-terror spending bill. He could even threaten to
campaign against them. That is what he would do–if he loved N.Y. as much as he loves the G.O.P.
|
 Terrorism's First Goal: Repression By Gene Lyons After last week's sickening performance by Attorney General John Ashcroft and his former colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee, it's tempting to paraphrase the immortal words of Margaret Thatcher: Have the American people gone all wobbly in the face of terrorism, or is it just that the politicians think they have? How any self-respecting group of American citizens, much less a group of U.S. senators, could sit politely and listen to an intellectual thug like Ashcroft equate their concern for constitutional rights to support for Osama bin Laden beggars my poor imagination. Only Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina showed any guts at all. It's worth emphasizing that Ashcroft's most offensive remarks occurred during his carefully scripted opening remarks. "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty," he said "my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil." What rubbish. As a stinging editorial in the Sacramento Bee pointed out, "draconian measures are exactly what America's enemies want." Evoking crude repression is terrorism's first goal; it's how fanaticism grows. Slate's Jacob Weisberg commented that "as someone who was actually prepared to listen to Attorney General John Ashcroft's defense of military tribunals and other security measures, I have to say that I was completely disgusted by his appearance. It was an arrogant, bullying performance that went a long way to substantiating the views of his harshest critics." Frank Rich's column in the New York Times was bitterly entitled "Confessions of a Traitor." To a degree, the administration sandbagged Senate critics, hinting before the hearings that a very limited number of military tribunals were anticipated only in extreme circumstances, that most would be public, that the Uniform Code of Military Justice would be observed, and judicial appeals would be heard-sensible modifications of President Bush's executive order that would reassure civil libertarians and edgy allies that the U.S. isn't in danger of sliding into police state abuses. That's not how it went when Ashcroft started talking. He lectured the cowed senators as if they were a pack of Cub Scouts and Brownies. America's enemies are dedicated evildoers, "plotting, planning and waiting to kill again. They enjoy the benefits of our free society even as they commit themselves to our destruction. They exploit our openness--not randomly or haphazardly--but by deliberate, premeditated design." If that sounds an awful lot like the old Commie conspiracy of legend and song, that's partly because Al Qaida's organizing principles are borrowed from Bakunin and other 19th century Russian revolutionaries. Dostoyevsky saw it all coming in his clunky masterpiece "The Devils." But it's also because Ashcroft's own frame of reference is Cold War fundamentalist dogma of the kind promulgated at Arkansas' own Harding College from the 1940s onward. It's Chicken Little with a Bible: granting the enemy near-Satanic powers, it calls for a rigidly conformist, paranoid authoritarianism in response. The trick for a democracy under attack is to keep its courage up. To surrender fundamental rights at the first sign of trouble is the coward's way. Typically, meanwhile, Ashcroft was never more solemn than when he couldn't bother to be serious. He appears to think guns have more rights than people. Despite Al Qaida manuals found in Afghanistan urging would-be terrorists in America "to obtain an assault rifle legally," his chief aide at the Justice Department denied the FBI access to gun purchase records, preventing it from learning how many of the 1000-odd Muslim men locked up since Sept. 11 had been shopping for weapons. No single fact could have been more crucial, yet Ashcroft claims the law gave him no choice. "In other words," wrote the Miami Herald's Carl Hiassen "we'll lock you up with no trial, interrogate you with no lawyer present, secretly wiretap your friends and relatives--but heaven forbid we invade your privacy by checking to see whether you've bought any guns during your stay in the United States." Equally telling was the attorney general's sneering contempt for the criminal justice system over which he presides. "Are we supposed to read them [accused terrorists] the Miranda rights," he asked "hire a flamboyant defense lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of Osama TV?"
Putting aside the fact that federal prosecutors not named Kenneth
Starr convict more than 90% of persons they indict, almost nobody advocates
treating enemy soldiers as domestic criminals. If Osama bin Laden and the
Al Qaeda inner circle have chosen a warrior's martyrdom in the Afghan
mountains, then so be it. But if the United States abandons its
constitutional freedoms in a spasm of paranoia and fear, it will have
granted bin Laden a victory he could never have won on a battlefield.
|
 When Life Is A Short-Term Lease: Everyday Life In Afghanistan By Ted Rall DUSHANBE, Tajikistan -- "How old are you?" the soldier wanted to know. Resplendent in his spiffy new Northern Alliance hat and shiny Pancho Villa ammo belt and matching AK-47, he tiptoed through what some said was a minefield (though he said they were from Badakhshan and didn't know Takhar or the mysteries of its mines) to take a leak. "Thirty-eight. How about you?" "How old do you think I am?" Salt-and-pepper hair, definitively receding. Not just eye bags, but wrinkles. Subtly hard facial angles; not a gram of baby fat. I thought 42. I said 36 to be polite. He enjoyed a hearty laugh. "I'm 18!" Middle-aged teen-agers shouldn't come as much of a surprise in a country with an average life expectancy of 43 (considerably less for front-line troops). But when you spend just a few weeks living the same toxic lifestyle as these poor and unlucky souls, it's amazing that they live as long as they do. All things considered, I lived considera bly better than the average resident of Taloqan, Afghanistan, where I just spent a couple of weeks. For one thing, I was willing and able to pay the extortionate rate of five bucks for the sticks you burn to boil bath water in an ancient tin stove. A hot-water "hamam" goes a long way toward improving your outlook after a night spent watching bombs fall far too close to your home address. And call me a spendthrift if you want, but I always sprang for the 60-cent horse-drawn cart ride across town. Most Afghans didn't. Otherwise, there were few indignities or inconveniences that my Amex, Visa or carefully concealed wad of crisp hundreds could ease, much less eradicate. Like most Afghans, I slept on a filthy mat along one wall of a freezing-cold room containing said stinky mat on top of one astonishingly dirty red carpet. The foul stench made sleep nearly impossible; strange rashes spread among the press corps. Afghans, when asked about this, shrugged and pointed to their own scary blotches. Though as an infidel I was technically exempt from the 5 a.m.-to-6 p.m. Ramadan fast, the only way to sneak a snack without causing the highly armed locals to take offense was to stay home and pay a kid to run to the bazaar. Since I was always out and about, like other journalists I observed a de facto Ramadan fast. Think it's easy? Try it yourself: Move to Arizona and go all day without a sip of water. The principal difference is that Afghanistan is drier and dustier. Don't get the idea, though, that breaking out that dinnertime flatware after an all-day fast is a big treat. Most people survive on a vegan-unfriendly diet of fatty kebabs and water drawn from the natural goodness of the gutter on the side of the road. When I hungrily inquired about a few plump ducks splashing around in Taloqan's communal bath/drinking fountain/toilet/garbage can, you would have thought I'd said only wimps like AK-47s. "EAT them? Why?" my translator spat in disgust. "In France," I offered, "ducks are a delicacy." "Not here," he shuddered. "We need them alive." "If you don't eat ducks, what good are they?" "They keep the gutter water clean." What an atrociously unbalanced and unhygienic diet and American bombs don't finish off, the triple B's -- bugs, benzene and breathing -- surely will. For one thing, the nation's bedding supports a thriving ecosystem of fleas, ticks, bedbugs, lice and other assorted nasties -- including everyone's favorite bedtime companion, Mr. Scorpion. Neither warrior nor babe nor Osama himself is safe from the contagion, not to mention painful welts, issued by the local critters. After just one week, I counted 106 bites from Afghan bed fauna, many of them on body parts best left unblemished. Furthermore, nights are almost always shockingly cold, and so are the days from November through May. Afghans heat their uninsulated mud-adobe homes with Chinese-made camping lanterns fueled by eye-burning, lung-searing benzene. Every teeth-chattering minute offers a terrible dilemma: Which is worse, freezing to death or poisoning yourself on low-grade Central Asian benzene? Finally, there's the dust. With the consistency of flour, it's kicked up by anything and anyone moving across a 99 percent unpaved landscape. Consequently, everyone in Afghanistan suffers from smoker's cough. I left Afghanistan days ago, yet I'm still ejecting prodigious balls of sandy phlegm.
Perhaps the world will, against all odds, witness the coming of a peaceful, prosperous society
in Afghanistan. Maybe Afghans will routinely live well into their 50s. American civilization may
bring running water, nay, even clean, fresh Evian, into every home. But who's going to take
on the ferocious fleas I'm bringing home in my luggage?
|
 Mr. Ashcroft’s America, America's Mr. Ashcroft By P. M. Carpenter As the Man from Mississippi, Mr. Trent Lott, said on the heels of the narrowest confirmation in 76 years, it "would be a futile waste of time" to question our collective confidence in the new attorney general-as opposed, one assumes, to a productive waste of time. Trent was so right. It's downright silly to question or fault the attorney general for advocating military trials of immigrants in this land of immigrants, or for detaining hundreds of swarthy ethnics without constitutional accountability, or for unfettering the F.B.I. to spy on domestic religious and political groups In general-just to tidy up all of Ashcroft's doings in one neat package-it's silly to fault the man for unleashing the gestapo-spores of a police state, for at his very core is an intolerant, racist, unfulfilled totalitarian yearning of which he has never made much of a secret. Ashcroft may be a Himmlerian doppelganger, but he's our doppelganger, straight out of the scenic, right-wing Missouri Ozarks. He did not simply materialize against our wishes. We put him everywhere he has been and where he is now, every step of the way. He is our creation. Technically speaking, he's now the president's creation, but that is as much a technicality as this president's tenure. George is no more responsible for his own decisions than Dolly the sheep: he's merely an admixed clone of Papa George, anachronistic Cold Warriors, Calvin Coolidge and Friedrich Hayek. In the face of mandatory preppyism and seductive family money, W. didn't have much of a chance to become his own man. Lacking the inherent courage and character of an FDR, who faced the same pitfalls in his youth, W. never even tried. Now his presidency is the enactment of others' desires. In 1991, when Attorney General Dick Thornburgh took a powder, Papa's White House floated then-Governor John Ashcroft as the "favored candidate to head the Justice Department"; Junior only nodded that the dream should come true. "Did I do good, pop?" No, despite W.'s prodding, Ashcroft is our creation-and we have in the attorney general's chair what we deserve. Yes indeedy it's a "futile waste of time" to attack him now, for his curious brand of integrity for decades has been there to behold, accept or reject. It has, by and large, been accepted. The first sign of Ashcroft's extraordinary integrity appeared at the plucky age of 25. As the war in Vietnam raged, this pro-military son of a God-and-country Pentecostal preacher opted for college deferments from the draft until he graduated from law school. Having no educational deferments left, he passed an Army physical-then, with a little help from his church friends, promptly secured an "occupational" deferment from the local draft board. John had a vision: he could best battle Ho Chi Minh's godless horde in the indispensable wartime role of teaching business law to undergraduates at Southwest Missouri State University. While on deferment he also realized the military harm to Ho of opening a private law practice. A kind of precocious integrity, you might say. After serving an unremarkable two-year stint in the unremarkable elected office of Missouri's auditor, Ashcroft went on to serve Show-me men, women and children as their attorney general. In those hoary days he was, avowedly, a politically disinterested opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. This he proved in 1978 by filing what amounted to an oppressive nuisance suit against the National Organization for Women for wanting to organize a convention boycott against the state when it failed to ratify the proposed amendment. Politics had nothing to do with it, said he and his angelic aides. Such speculation was misguided. His only interest was in seeing that antitrust laws were obeyed. Integrity, always integrity. Impressed by his fairness as attorney general, Missourians next awarded Ashcroft the governor's chair. There, the gospel-singing chief executive demonstrated how fundamentalist religious beliefs need not interfere with the high-minded performance of office on behalf of all Missouri citizens and especially-again-on behalf of women. For instance, in organizing a state Task Force for Mothers and Unborn Children, Ashcroft showed real courage by not bowing to pressure to appoint at least one pro-choice member. Official integrity-not slavishness to religious fundamentalism-demanded the best possible task force. It wasn't Ashcroft's fault that not a single pro-choicer was qualified. He was willing to take the heat; to nobly face the gratuitous charge that bible-thumpism had somehow influenced his appointments. Also as governor he rejected leftist extremist views held by such radicals as former president Gerald Ford. It was with Ford and 38 other sandal-wearing types that Ashcroft served in 1988 on a panel concerning American race relations. The other 39 members--to a person--discovered a socio-economic gap between minorities of color and white Americans that wasn't getting any better. They all signed a report that said so. Bosh, said Governor Ashcroft. His fellow board members "fail[ed] to recognize and examine important areas of progress experienced during the last three to four years." You recall those crucial three or four years that the Reagan administration devoted to improving the sorry lot of disadvantaged minorities, don't you? To many folks' way of thinking, the highlight of Ashcroft's subsequent U.S. Senate career-highlight in the sense of revealing his "inner soul," the sort of thing his boss is fond of selectively peering into-came in his 1998 interview with Southern Partisan Magazine. To those who might casually assume the publication is put together by harmless, adolescent history buffs who like dressing up as weekend Dixie warriors, think again. Under its website's heading "What Is Southern Partisan?" the publishers proclaim the magazine is the "unreconstructed voice of the conservative South." There simply ain't any two ways of reading that. "Unreconstructed" conveys only one thing: postbellum efforts at guaranteeing social and political rights for freed blacks were wrongheaded. The South, and by inference the nation at large, would have been better off had whites kept "Sambo" in his place-as was done so charmingly in those happy-go-lucky antebellum or Jim Crow days, as though Reconstruction never happened. One would think a University of Chicago law graduate, state attorney general, state chief executive, and member of the United States Senate would have sensed Southern Partisan's ideological mission to have been at least a trifle distasteful; and if an interview was to be granted, it would be only for the purpose of wringing its racist neck. Not so for John Ashcroft. Instead, he praised the publication for having "a heritage of defending Southern patriots like Lee, Jackson and Davis." Further, "traditionalists must do more . . . or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives . . . to some perverted agenda." Next our children may be falsely taught that Nazi patriots, who just as assuredly gave their lives in the promotion of racist ideology, did so out of "some perverted agenda." Ashcroft was at home with the cretins of Southern Partisan. He said he was. It is in print that he said he was. Yet presumably more progressive-minded Democratic Senators-duly elected voices of the American electorate-failed to filibuster this totalitarian throwback. Eight Democrats even voted for him.
With the shameless support and acquiescence of the Democratic Party,
Ashcroft, after sending up warning flares for more than 3 decades, was
again handed the keys to high public office. And now the country cries
foul? And now the country asks, how could this-our rapid
transmogrification into a secret-police state-be happening?
It's simple. We asked for it. |
 John Ashcroft: American Fascist By William Rivers Pitt
Attorney General John Ashcroft was called before Congress yesterday to give testimony regarding the unprecedented restrictions being placed upon the commonest of American liberties. With the passage of the PATRIOT Anti-Terror Bill, and through an Executive Order signed by Bush authorizing secret military tribunals for suspected terrorists, the latter of which was enacted with virtually no Congressional oversight despite the fact that it seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter of the Posse Comitatus Act, Ashcroft had some things to answer for. From the beginning of his testimony, Ashcroft was defiant in the face of some skeptical Democratic Senators. He waved a copy of an Al Qaeda terrorism handbook in their faces as proof positive that no restriction of freedom was too severe when considering the enemy he seeks. In his opening remarks, Ashcroft made the following statement: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists - for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." There is no plainer way to say it - this is rank demagoguery of a strain so pure that it has not been heard in the political dialogue of this nation since the dark days when Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy made careers out of shattering innocent lives during highly publicized anti-communist Congressional hearings in the 1950s. In essence, John Ashcroft claims that if you question the unprecedented steps he and his Justice Department are taking, if you voice doubts about the concept of destroying freedom in order to save it, if you step out of the narrow line being drawn by he and Mr. Bush, you are a terrorist. If you dare to participate in that most fundamental American activity - dissent - you are aiding and abetting the murderous butchers who sent thousands of our citizens to death three months ago. No more grave an accusation can be leveled in this time, and no more base and groundless a charge can be or has been spoken. It is one thing to sit for weeks and hold your tongue for fear of being called unpatriotic, as many patriotic Americans did in the aftermath of September 11th. It is another again to be called a terrorist for defending the sanctity of the United States Constitution from men who come for it with erasers and redacting tape. Ashcroft claims that there are people who are scaring Americans with "phantoms of lost liberty." Let us examine some of these phantoms, and see if there is any flesh on the bone. The First Amendment of the Constitution reads as follows: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The idea that it was unpatriotic to question Bush in the aftermath of September 11th received wide play and acclaim in the media, and still does in many circles. This skirted the edges of free speech restrictions forbidden by the First Amendment. Ashcrofts proclamation of December 6th, that anyone who speaks out against his and Mr. Bush's plans, fairly defines the reason this Amendment was created in the first place. Patriotic Americans will now fear to speak out against the government, the first fundamental responsibility of any citizen, for fear of an accusation that will taint them forever. It is intimidation in the raw of the first principle - the right to speak your mind, and to defy authority when it has gone awry. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution reads as follows: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Section 213 of the PATRIOT Anti-Terrorism Bill is entitled 'Authority for Delaying Notice of the Execution of a Warrant.' Legal analysts have given this provision a snappier title: the "sneak and peek" section. Under 213, Federal officers can enter your home, search your belongings, and attach devices to your personal computer that record and broadcast back to them any and all keystrokes you make while online. They can do all of this without ever letting you know they were there. Ostensibly, this provision is aimed at true-blue terrorists. We don't want them to know we're watching. After Ashcroft's performance of December 6th, however, any belief we may have that he or his department will restrain themselves from using this provision to police ordinary Americans must be shaken to the core. If you speak out against Ashcroft, you are a terrorist. The next logical step is that you will therefore be treated like one. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution reads as follows: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense." One of the main reasons Ashcroft was ordered to appear before Congress was because of Bush's recent Executive Order authorizing the use of secret military tribunals to try - and potentially order the execution of - anyone suspected of being a terrorist. This is troubling on its face - secret trials with secret evidence followed by secret judgments. Read the Executive Order closely, however. The section entitled 'Definition and Policy' describes what manner of suspect would come before the tribunal: "(a) The term 'individual subject to this order' shall mean any individual who is not a United States citizen with respect to whom I determine from time to time in writing that: (1) there is reason to believe that such individual, at the relevant times, (i) is or was a member of the organization known as al Qaida; (ii) has engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit, acts of international terrorism, or acts in preparation therefor, that have caused, threaten to cause, or have as their aim to cause, injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its citizens, national security, foreign policy, or economy; or (iii) has knowingly harbored one or more individuals described in subparagraphs (i) or (ii) of subsection 2(a)(1) of this order; and (2) it is in the interest of the United States that such individual be subject to this order." It is (2) that gives pause. There are some 20 million non-citizens occupying and working in this country right now. They could be arrested, detained, tried and convicted in secret if someone decides "it is in the interest of the United States." If John Ashcroft, whose idea of treason extends to questioning his highly questionable actions, is representative of the attitude being brought to this anti-terrorism endeavor, the precepts laid out in the Sixth Amendment have suddenly turned appallingly fragile. One last thought: considering the lengths Ashcroft seems willing to go in order to stifle dissent, one wonders how difficult it would be to strip someone like you or I of our citizenship if we yell a bit too loudly. We would then be subject to (2) as well. If we have learned anything in the last three months, we have learned that the only thing sure to happen is the previously inconceivable. The phantoms Mr. Ashcroft so arrogantly disparaged seem to have some significant substance, after all. It comes to this: At the bottom, America is an idea, one represented and defended by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Amendments listed above. Destroy the idea and you have destroyed the nation. If we are to believe the hyperbole of the administration, those who attacked us on September 11th did so because they despise our freedoms. To destroy those freedoms in response to the attack is tantamount to surrender. I am not ready to surrender. Are you? Is Ashcroft? Is Bush? If not, then there are other motives at work here. Power, after all, is always hungry and in search of more territory to annex. Thus has it always been, which is why those Amendments are so vital. Fascism is defined as, "A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism." The only thing probable is the unimaginable now. This definition cuts too close to the bone. The time has come to stand up and say no to this slow evisceration of the idea that is America, to say no to men like Ashcroft who hold our essential freedoms in such contempt. Never forget that it was Ashcroft, in the earliest iteration of the Anti-Terrorism bill, who advocated the suspension of habeas corpus. If there is a beating heart within the body of laws that protect our freedoms, habeas corpus is it. That alone should be enough to rouse us all. I intend to challenge, at every opportunity, the assertion by Mr. Ashcroft that dissention is equal to terrorism. I intend to continue my questioning of his contra-Constitutional program of restrictions until they are stopped. I beg you to do the same. I offer you the opportunity to add your name and voice to this fight. Send me an email at: williamriverspitt@hotmail.com, and I will place your name on a list to appear on this website. By giving me your name, you sign a document that states your opposition to Ashcroft's Constitutional revisions while denouncing him for daring to call you a terrorist. You are an American patriot. Stand up and be counted as one. It is entirely possible that there will be trouble for you if you do this. Any fight for freedom has costs, and I cannot promise that you will not be made to pay for daring to speak your American mind here. All I can promise is this: You will have done the right thing.
Stand up. |
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Der Fuhrer--oops, sorry, the Attorney General, set the tone right at the get-go. He said his critics' "bold declarations
of so-called fact have quickly dissolved, upon inspection, into vague conjecture. Charges of 'kangaroo courts' and
'shredding the Constitution' give new meaning to the term 'the fog of war.'" I've never heard the term "fog of war"
before and I don't know what it means but it sure is catchy, huh?
Let's see...if you're held by the government without any charges being presented, with the threat of being tried by a
military tribunal which doesn't have to show you or your lawyer the "evidence" against you, might the term
"kangaroo court" not be applicable? Yup, those so-called facts sure are pesky, aren't they?
Ashcroft went on to say "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this:
Your tactics only aid terrorists--for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to
America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of
evil."
Got that? In other words, if you're among those who, like me, think that the government is wiping its ass with the
words of the Founding Fathers, you're helping the terrorists. It's not that you sincerely believe that the Bush
administration is overstepping its authority and acting like a dictatorship, nope, you're giving ammunition to
binLaden. You're not an American citizen exercising his Constitutional right to disagree with the government; you're
a terrorist! This, of course, is the cheap rhetorical trick of someone who has no real justification for his actions.
When you can't defend what you're doing, go on the attack.
Remember the scene in Animal House where the Deltas are on trial? Remember Otter going on a rant about how
accusing them of wrong-doing is an indictment of American society? Stuff like that is pretty funny when it's in a
silly frat comedy but it's pretty damn sad when the same logical fallacy is employed by the Attorney General of the
United States, a real-life guy with the power to screw royally with people he disagrees with.
You'd expect that, since they called him to Capitol Hill to defend his actions, the Democrats put Ashcroft through
the wringer. Well, you'd expect that if you've never seen those eunuchs in action. When exactly did castration
become a requirement to run for office as a Democrat? Those empty suits took one look at George W.'s
approval ratings and their testes retracted into their body cavities. This, of course, raises the question:
WHAT'S THE POINT OF THE FRIGGIN' HEARING IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO GRILL THE GUY?
President Bush and his logic-challenged Attorney General are taking the greatest democracy the world has ever seen
into waters previously chartered by the Soviet Union. Remember them, the Evil Empire? If warrantless arrests
without evidence and secret trials were wrong when THEY conducted them, why do they suddenly become okay
when WE do them? See, that's the kind of question it would have been nice if the Democrats had asked John
Ashcroft. Yeah, it would be nice if someone would make this guy defend the radical actions he's taken and continues
to propose. Oh, wait, I forgot--that would be wrong. It would be like giving ammunition to bin Laden.
It would make those who questioned the Attorney General terrorists.
My ass, it would. |
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Dead Letter Office
Heil Bush,
Dear Propaganda Ansager Totenberg,
Congratulations you have just been awarded the Vidkun Quisling Award for 2001. Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Antoni (light-fingers) Scalia.
Without your help shilling for us, spinning the truth, telling out right lies and ignoring the real news, holding onto power after our Coup D' Etat would have been impossible. With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Media Whores," you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account.
Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 2nd class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala celebration in der Fuhrer Bunker (formally the White House) on 12-15-2001. We salute you Frau Totenberg, Sieg Heil!
Signed,
Heil Bush
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Under the high standards of reason set forth by Ashcroft, we are allowed to
present CORRECT information (those who present incorrect information, like
some people in government, erode our national unity and diminish our resolve)
as to what the attorney general is up to. While Operation Enduring Freedom
continues in Afghanistan, enduring freedom is not looking so good here at
home -- and like the A.G., I would be the last to encourage people of goodwill
to remain silent in the face of evil.
Here is some CORRECT information about enduring freedom:
-- Ashcroft's urpily named PATRIOT Act permits government agents to search
a suspect's home without notification. In J. Edgar Hoover's day, this was
known as "a black-bag job." As Nat Hentoff reports in The Progressive: "A
warrant would be required, but very few judges would turn a government
investigator down in this time of fear. Ashcroft's 'secret searches' provision
can now extend to all criminal cases and can include taking photographs, the
contents of your hard drive and other property. This is now a permanent part
of the law, not subject to any 'sunset review' by Congress."
Many of our tough-minded brethren, to whom it is perfectly clear that less
freedom equals more security, have dismissed complaints by saying, after all,
these measures only apply to non-citizens, and besides, the worst parts of it
will sunset in four years. Wrong. This means you, fellow citizens -- if you
happen to know someone whose brother-in-law rented a garage apartment to
a guy who knew someone who might be a terrorist. Benjamin Franklin said,
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty or safety." But I'm pretty sure Franklin didn't mean to
aid terrorists, so please don't report him to the A.G.
-- The expansion of wiretapping authority to computers simply puts privacy in
cyberspace in jeopardy without any concomitant gain to law enforcement.
According to James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy
and Technology, neither Congress nor the media have put all this together to
see the breadth of the dragnet.
The government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals
even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or foreign
government. Bank records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount
cards at grocery stories can be obtained on individuals without establishing
any connection to a terrorist before a judge. According to the Los Angeles
Times, Al Qaeda uses sophisticated encryption devices freely available on the
Internet that cannot be cracked. So the terrorists are safe from
cyber-snooping, but we're not.
-- Ashcroft and Co. essentially say, "Trust us, we won't misuse these new
laws." But in fact the FBI and the CIA have repeatedly violated such trust to
spy on everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Jean Seberg. That's why the
checks were there to begin with.
-- According to an analysis of PATRIOT by the Electronic Freedom Foundation,
the government made no showing that the previous powers of laws
enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on U.S. citizens were insufficient
to allow them to investigate and prosecute acts of terrorism: "Many provisions
that, instead of (being) aimed at terrorism, are aimed at nonviolent, domestic
computer crime. In addition, although many of the provisions appear aimed at
terrorism, the government made no showing that the reasons they failed to
detect the planning of the recent attacks or any other terrorist attacks were
the civil liberties compromised by the bill. The government may now spy on
web-surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search
engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could
lead to information that is 'relevant' to an ongoing criminal investigation."
The person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation nor is
probable cause required.
-- The military tribunals idea is so bad the administration has been backing up
on it steadily, especially since Spain has already announced it won't turn over
its Al Qaeda suspects to a system so violative of international standards. The
Spaniards, who have been fighting Basque terrorists for years, are not
noticeably "soft on terrorism."
-- Lest you think our only attorney general does not care about rights, I point
out that when it comes to the 550 he has "detained" since September,
without evidence, without charges, without identification and without legal
counsel, he so fully respects the Second Amendment rights of these
non-citizens that he has reversed the Justice Department's previous stand to
forbid the FBI to check on their gun-purchase records in order to protect their
privacy. Also, Ashcroft fully believes in the rights of the unborn. The born are
on their own.
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One of the campaign tactics which I find particularly annoying is the 'scare tactics' tactic -- that is, the accusation that one's opponent is using 'scare
tactics'. We hear this all the time from regressives -- "Those liberals are just using scare tactics! How dastardly of them! Boo! Hiss!"
Like most regressive rhetoric, this accusation doesn't hold up well when deconstructed (unfortunately, it rarely is). What, exactly, do they mean when
they accuse Democrats of using scare tactics? Simply put, they mean that Democrats are trying to scare people into voting for them. But that's just the
surface. The underlying meaning is that Democrats are LYING in order to scare people into voting for them. But since it doesn't look terribly honorable
and mature to scream "Liar, liar!" constantly, and since - more importantly - people might ask for DETAILS of the supposed lie (thereby risking the
revelation that the Democrats aren't lying at all) the 'scare tactic' line comes in handy. No explanation is needed -- if Democrats are merely trying to
scare people, then it follows that one shouldn't take anything they say seriously. It's the same philosophy used in the 'laugh it off' tactic...laugh at your
opponents assertions as if he/she is merely being facetious, and the listener isn't as likely to consider that perhaps the assertions are actually true.
Here's the thing: it isn't a scare tactic - in the way the regressives mean it - if it's TRUE. If Democrats had a bit more spine, they'd stand up to the
accusation and state point-blank that they are not using hyperbole or lies, but are issuing warnings about very real dangers that are posed by
right-wing policies.
There's a big difference between a scare tactic and a warning. And of course some politicians use both, Democrats and Republicans alike. But what
the regressives have done is twist the language so that any sort of warning issued by a Democrat is automatically labeled a 'scare tactic' and (if the
strategy works) dismissed. And while the right-wing propagandists are busily accusing those on the left of trying to frighten to poor, stupid people (yes,
stupid - that's the weak part of the strategy; it assumes that people are stupid enough to fall for empty scare tactics and must be warned against
them, and you should remember this point the next time a regressive brings up the issue), they're equally busy deploying their own scare tactics.
Without, I might add, much fear of anyone pointing out what they're doing...because the right has so steadily accused the left of using scare tactics, it
seems that Democrats are afraid of looking like copycats if they do the same thing.
This whole cycle is so damned frustrating that it's difficult to know how to counter it. Patience is needed. When right-wingers accuse others of using
scare tactics, the accused need to stand firm and ask for details. For example, if a politicians warns that, say, privatizing Social Security would
threaten the stability of Social Security, and the nearest regressive screams 'Scare tactic!', the politician should calmly explain that no, privatizing
Social Security WILL threaten its stability, and then go on to give facts and details and prove the point. And THEN go on to point out that a more
accurate example of a 'scare tactic' is having someone like Charlton Heston run around telling people that if a Democrat is elected the government is
going to confiscate everyone's guns. By doing this, one achieves two things: first, for those who might believe that the left uses scare tactics, it sheds
light on the supposed 'scare tactics' and proves that they are, in fact, genuine warnings issued because of a sincere disagreement with a proposed
policy. And two, it proves that right-wingers are hypocrites when they whine about scare tactics, because nobody, and I mean NOBODY, uses scare
tactics as well as the right.
True scare tactics are bad form, and I would be disappointed in any liberal who used them. Warnings, however, are not only acceptable, but
necessary. Liberals should not stop issuing warnings simply because regressives resort to name-calling. Warnings can scare people, it's true, but they
can also spur people into action.
If there's a fine line between scare tactics and warnings, there's an even finer line between scare tactics and threats. And because right-wingers are
so adept at scare tactics, it stands to reason that they'd be awfully adept at issuing threats, as well. And they are, as we have seen. During the
Florida recount, the unspoken but understood threat was that the right-wingers would do anything to see that Bush was placed in the White House.
The Miami-Dade riot was a mere warning of further violence to come if their wishes were not heeded. That this was understood by most people is clear
- even the media acknowledged it in a roundabout way, by talking about the need to resolve matters 'for the good of the country'. Some conservative
legal scholars, while not quite able to accept the Supreme Court's flawed rationale for handing the presidency to Bush, nevertheless condoned the
decision because it was 'for the best' that the matter be resolved (in Bush's favor). In other words, the right-wingers were will |
