It Only Looks Like Suicide: The Politics of S-CHIP

As Rescued at Daily Kos and frontpaged at E Pluribus Media.

Why would the very unpopular lame duck President lead Republican members of Congress to defeat a bill to expand SCHIP, a successful program favored by 81% of Americans (according to CBS) to save the lives and health of children?

It's counterintuitive, even for Republicans. Next to advocating arsenic for babies, this was the most daringly callous, profane and seemingly brain-dead political stand possible. It seems like political suicide.

So, why do it?I believe the answer is this: the Republicans are gearing up to fight Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee (in Bush's eyes), and they are going to do so on the issue of government-run health care, the issue they defeated her on before.

Here's briefly what the debate is about, as summarized by Keith Olbermann: SCHIP currently covers six million children too poor for insurance but not poor enough for Medicaid. But a growing number of Americans, two out of five, are not covered by employer insurance; 47 million don‘t have any health insurance. That number is also up. The uninsured children increasing by 600,000 last year alone. So Democrats want to expand S-CHIP to cover four million more kids. The cost, seven billion dollars a year.

Last week the White House and Republican congressional leadership fought hard to deny Congress enough votes to override the Bush veto. Moreover, they did it by distorting what the law would actually do, including who it was intended to cover. And by the viciousness cited here in the previous post.

The answer to "why" is partly in the White House statement, and partly in exactly how they distorted the bill. And the most direct part of that answer is this: the Republicans are gearing up to fight Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee (in Bush's eyes), and they are going to do so on the issue of government-run health care, the issue that they won against her before.

Bush said his opposition to SCHIP was partly on principle, because the bill goes down the road of "socialized medicine." That's been a regular Republican refrain for at least a half century; they used it to oppose what became Medicare in the Kennedy administration. Now it's being linking directly to Hillary Clinton's health care reform proposal, not only by Republicans in Congress, but by the leading Republican presidential candidates, as reported by Brian Tummulty for Gannett and published in USA Today:

At a forum for Republican presidential candidates Wednesday in Detroit, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani sparred on some issues, but they were united on Clinton's health care plan."If we do HillaryCare or socialized medicine, Canadians will have no place to go to get their health care," Giuliani quipped, referring to the Canada's single-payer national health system."HillaryCare is government gets in and tells people what to do from the federal government's standpoint," Romney said.

Ironically, the "socialized medicine" charge was not made so often or so boldly against President Clinton's universal health care plan, which was organized in a very public way by Hillary Clinton. Universal health care was immensely popular, and one of the issues that elected Clinton. (Its potency was first discovered a couple of years before when one ad on the subject virtually propelled Harris Wofford into the U.S. Senate in a Pennsylvania special election.)

Clinton's proposal was defeated, not by Republican political bombast, but by a very well financed campaign against it by the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries. When a series of TV ads began changing the poll numbers, Republicans eagerly pounced on the issue again.But though the term "socialized medicine" wasn't so prominent, the arguments behind it were. They were prominent in the ads especially: individuals and families would lose their right to choose their doctor, and their doctors would not decide on their treatment--government bureaucrats would. Further, a huge, faceless, powerful but unresponsive federal bureaucracy would waste billions of taxpayer dollars, driving up health care costs.

So the Clinton proposal for universal health insurance was defeated, and the private corporate HMO and health insurance industry grew so fast and so big that few seem to remember when it didn't totally dominate medicine in this country. The reality that everyone knows is that everything the opponents of the Clinton plan said did come true--but it is the huge, faceless, powerful corporate medical insurance system that routinely decides what doctors patients can see (or if they can see any), and what treatments and services doctors and hospitals can provide. They spent a high percentage on "administration," and they have driven health care costs higher and higher, until now they are bankrupting middle class families and small businesses, and threatening the financial viability of large and otherwise successful corporations.

Yet the Republicans are using exactly the same arguments. And they may be successful. And they know it.Why is that possible--when health care is emerging as the domestic issue that voters care the most about? Because Hillary's health care plan--as well as those of most of the other Democratic candidates--include private insurance companies. They mostly funnel taxpayer dollars to those companies. So it is very hard for these Democratic candidates to point out the obvious: corporate run health insurance has been a cruel travesty.

One of the reasons that it never made sense was the demonstrably false argument that corporations could run health care for their own profit, and do it cheaper than the government, which does not seek to make a profit. But for-profit healthcare has amassed not only huge profits, but huge amounts of money these companies use to destroy and buy up their competitors, and--very much to the point--to lavishly lobby government officials and finance their increasingly expensive campaigns. All paid for by that chump, the consumer, otherwise known as the taxpayer.

The amounts of money are huge because of another fallacy in the Republican argument, trotted out for every attempt to "privatize" a formerly public responsibility, but used especially to argue against government financed health insurance. Corporate care is more efficient because corporations compete, and have to be efficient to make a profit. But corporations compete, not by efficiency, but by destroying or absorbing their competitors--then they expand, and keep expanding until there is no competition, unless limited by regulation.

This has happened to private health insurance, which means that the amounts of consumer-dollars they have to spread around to politicians are huge. No presidential candidate can apparently afford to offend them.So that's the second part of the answer to "why." Republicans are representing the interests of medical insurance and related corporations, such as Big Pharma.

It's also likely that Republicans will actually do much the same on health care should their candidates be elected (this same USA Today article points out that Mitt Romney's plan is not very different from Hillary's.) After all, the most successful innovation of the Bush administration was turning the federal government into a funnel, transferring taxpayer dollars to selected corporations, as Naomi Klein has shown so well. Eventually they will pass laws that will further enrich the criminal enterprise known as health insurance corporations. They are already passing such laws in the states, making it against the law not to do business with them.

So while the Republican "death to children" march seems like suicide, and indeed it may turn out to be politically fatal, it had a purpose--to breathe life into their Get Hillary campaign. And it's not going to be pretty.

It's Not Just the Heat

It's also the humidity, among other things. The planet is getting more humid as well as hotter, according to a new study. "This humidity change is an important contribution to heat stress in humans as a result of global warming," said Nathan Gillett of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, a co-author of the study. According to this AP report:

The finding isn't surprising to climate scientists. Physics dictates that warmer air can hold more moisture. But Gillett's study shows that the increase in humidity already is significant and can be attributed to gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

And that's just One More Thing. The same story says that climate scientists have now seen the man-made fingerprint of global warming on 10 different aspects of Earth's environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants in animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world's oceans.

The Climate Crisis will continue to offer surprises to nonscientists and scientists alike, because one big shift like this leads to consequences that result in other changes. Some, like drought, are big and obvious. Others, like excessive pressure on plants (including trees) and animals, play out over time, but when plants and animals leave an ecological niche, a cascade of effects can follow fairly quickly.

High humidity causes physical stress to humans, but as we all know it also shows up in behavior---people get short-tempered and miserable, and their judgment is often impaired. The Nobel committee officially recognized the part that the Climate Crisis can have in causing warfare over resources. But it is also likely to cause other stresses that can make warfare an impulsive choice, when cooler heads don't prevail, because there might not be any.

Right now humidity isn't rising everywhere. Australia, South Africa and the western U.S. are getting very dry. There's drought in the American southeast and now in the Great Lakes region (although that is probably caused by warmer winters and less ice melt.) But the humidity is getting higher in the eastern U.S.--you know, where New York and Washington are.

Normal Viciousness

For Bushites, (right) winger pols, media bobbleheads, bloggers, and often enough, Republicans in general, no "new low" stays new very long, before they take themselves and the political dialogue even lower.

There's the latest attacks on the children and their families who provided their stories to support what's called the S-Chip program, that helps working families pay extraordinary medical bills for their children. A couple of families made commercials explaining how the program made a major difference in their lives, and supporting its expansion to other families.The attacks include the usual viral lies but also a call for them to be hanged. These are children severely injured in an accident, and even after extensive care, the boy speaks with a lisp and the little girl is blind in one eye.

When Keith Olbermann asked New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (who'd just written about why Al Gore drives Republicans insane) if this attack didn't just leave him speechless, Krugman said it was not really exceptional, that it was "normal in its viciousness."

What happens to a democracy when viciousness becomes normal? Some say it has always been so, but I wonder if that's much consolation. I think we all wonder what happens to a society when viciousness really becomes normal. The answer would seem to be: it ceases to be a society. There is a continuum between civilization and savagery, and we are clearly moving towards savagery--faster than we realize.

But apart from the pragmatism of those like Krugman who are exposed to this political viciousness pretty much every day, this savagery can be seen to follow logically from the belief that this is a dog eat dog world, that the winners are those who destroy their competitors by any means necessary. Ironically, it is a twisted variation of Darwinism, a natural selection based on the simplistic but (to some) viscerally convincing criteria that the winners win by being clever (including deceptive) as well as by using power (including violence) without conscience.

Our "entertainment" these days is often about those situations in which survival depends on using any means necessary, especially violence. There is something reassuring about these movies and TV shows, in an elemental way--the way that children are reassured by stories in which the hero and heroine survive the wicked witch in the forest, the ghosts, the monster. It reassures us that the bad forces aren't all powerful, and in this bewilderingly complex society, we aren't powerless.

But we all know that these situations are relatively rare--that more often, in our human-dominated world, we survive through non-violent means--through responsibility and keeping our word, through negotiation, conciliation, cooperation--as well as by helping each other. That's the basis of every civilization, including (ironically again) the ones we consider primitive. It's not the kings and the armies--they change things, they destroy, but they mostly serve the rulers, not the society. For most people, it's playing fair and expecting fair play, it's empathy and altruism, and there's no getting around it. It's the Golden Rule, it's "you'd do the same for me."

And not very ironically, in fact both sadly and grandly, civilization depends on precisely the people the wingers are going after now: the families who are grateful that their government helped them literally save their children's lives, and provided them with help towards something like a normal life, but who haven't just taken what they were given--they want it for others, as many others as possible. And they have the courage to say so.

It's absurd to think we can't afford such a program. There are other reasons for Bushite opposition, which I'll get into later, but this isn't about the program--it's about who we are, what we value, and what kind of a society we want to live in. We might start with a civilized one. We're going to need it.

"Good Germans"

The earliest reference the Wikipedia has to the expression, "good Germans," is a New York Times report from 1945: "There's a saying among our troops, that there are no real Nazis in Germany, only 'good Germans.'" The phrase dripped with hypocrisy, and came to mean Germans who claimed not to have supported Hitler, but did nothing to oppose him.

The truth is, for a long while, that described many people in Europe and elsewhere, but the phrase stuck, and as the Wikipedia says, "The term has come to be used to refer more generically to people in any country who observe reprehensible things taking place — whether done by a government or by another powerful institution — but remain silent, neither raising objections nor taking steps to change the course of events."

Like anything to do with Hitler and the Nazis, the phrase is heavily weighted. And so when on Sunday New York Times columnist Frank Rich used it to describe contemporary Americans, it ignited a controversy that still rages across the Internet.But it is an historical analogy that is work taking seriously, especially given the case Rich assembles. “BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves, he begins.

That the Bushites have been able to perpetrate a dizzying array of policies and activities that for at least the past few generations would have seen impossible, that no Americans would stand for torture, rendition, domestic spying, armed thugs, better equipped and much better paid than U.S. troops, acting beyond any laws in Iraq and then brought back to the U.S. to patrol the streets of New Orleans; the attempted hijacking of the justice system for partisan and ideological gain; the suffering being caused or tolerated in Iraq, Africa, so many places...the list just goes on and on. And a President, with the support of less than one quarter of the country, continues without effective public outcry. How in the world can this be explained?"Good Germans" comes as close as anyone has. Maybe because people don't want to lose what comforts they have--and those closest to centers of power have quite a lot.

Rich begins at the centers of responsibility: Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top. But he does not absolve the rest of us, nor should he: As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

He brings the analogy closer to the source: Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Sometimes such a shocking analogy cuts through the fog, helps us find a moral definition. The analogy of the Good Germans is much too close for continued comfort.

The China Syndrome

Bringing the Dalai Lama to the White prior to officially presenting him with the Congressional Medal of Freedom was a welcome distraction for the Bushites. Photographs with one of the most respected and beloved people in the world and especially in the U.S. helps diffuse the image of the vetoer of life-saving medical care for children, and it draws attention to the 1989 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and away from this year's winner, Al Gore, whose honor is yet to be acknowledged at the White House.

But it sure pissed off the Chinese government. Like most imperialists, it goes nuts when its brutal aggression and even more brutal colonial administration is even implictly, even theoretically or possibly questioned. In this case, China's armed takeover of Tibet included the murder of thousands of Buddhists, and its war against the Dalai Lama (the traditional political as well as spiritual leader of Tibet) has forced it into absurd embarrassments, the most recent of which is outlawing reincarnation without government approval.

But the White House doesn't want to piss them off too much. "We in no way want to stir the pot and make China feel that we are poking a stick in their eye for a country that we have a lot of relationships with on a variety of issues," said press secretary Dana Perino. " No, not with China financing the Iraq war and the further mega-enrichment of Bushites and their cronies, and leaving the piper to be paid by future American generations, one way or another.

Besides, China has become a kind of model for the Bushites: it has shown that a nation can get good p.r. for coming out against tyranny and murder in Darfur and Burma while still do nothing to endanger profits gained in relationships with those countries. And above all, the greatest lesson of China today, though no one wants to say it out loud, is that capitalism without democracy works just great. Something that the Bushites have certainly taken to heart.

Signal v. Noise on Iran: S.O.S.!

The noise is killing us in more ways than one. We keep missing the important stories. Sometimes because they're deliberately hidden and those whose job it is to discover and tell these stories just aren't doing it. When the Bushites sneaked a provision into the huge Defense Authorization Act last October that allows the President to declare martial law--to override state and local officials and use the military as domestic police in response to unspecified "emergencies"-- virtually no one reported it. It remains what it was supposed to be, a secret.

In this case, one which potentially makes dictatorship legal. For the entire history of the Republic, every President could declare martial law only if threatened with an armed insurrection. That's how seriously this nation's founders considered it, and not in the most perilous times in our history has this law changed, until last October.

But right now we're missing a crucial story that's totally public, that in fact President Bush announced in a media-covered speech. Even most of the lefty blogs, currently feasting on the Idahomosexual story, ignored it. Fortunately one of the more respected bloggers, Glenn Greenwald, didn't.

Perhaps Bush's threat against Iran sounded like the same old. Greenwald calls it "the most disturbing speech of his presidency." It sounded to me when I heard just the soundbite that it was tantamount to an announcement that this administration is going to militarily attack Iran, very soon (as reflected in my post yesterday.)

Nobody wants to believe Bush will do it. It's too much of an utter nightmare. The military is overstretched to the breaking point in Iraq. There's some question as to whether orders would be followed, although Bush--or should we say Cheney--is likely to depend on the Air Force and Navy who have paid less of a price and may want more of the action. And nobody wants to contemplate what a disaster it could very well begin.

It seems in fact like madness. Apart from the rising guilt over needless death in Iraq, the Washington and media establishment is apparently willing to tolerate a crazy President and an insane Vice-President for a year and a half more, assuming they will confine their looniness to surreal speeches and delusional press conferences. We wish. But it seems increasingly like we're not going to get off that easy.

So far the human price of Iraq has been paid (at least directly) by a relative few, and the bulk of the cost has been pushed into the future. Bush's design in Iraq seems to be to push obvious failure past the expiration of his term, so Republicans can blame Democrats should they win the White House and retain Congress. But a sustained bombing of Iran would likely begin a sequence of events that would make Iraq pale by comparison. The calculation might be that an even greater war, a regional war with global reach, would force voters to support the war party and its candidate, Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson.

Such an attack and such a war have endless possibilities for catastrophe that might transform the country, and could very well destroy it. A wrecked domestic economy, energy rationing, a military draft--it could well end up with the realization of that first untold story: martial law in America, brought to you by Halliburton and Blackwater.

And don't forget, the plans for attacking Iran as initially revealed involved the U.S. using tactical nuclear weapons. It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheney government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power in the world under Bush is that this government is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.

But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran could turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long-lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.

Four More War

President Bush, true to form, ignores reality but has the power to create his own. In his speech to yet another ancient veterans group, he virtually declared war on Iran.

If Bush attacks Iran, Republican candidates like Guliani will run on the warmaking platform. If he is elected, the US will essentially destroy itself in the next four years with war in the Middle East. It's war we can't afford and which this time the nation will not survive intact.

Mark my words. Look back into time on this blog and see what I said about Bush in the beginning.

Don't let this happen.

A Dream Darfured

Everybody talks about the killing in Darfur but nobody does anything about it. When Joe Biden repeated the fact that people are being killed every day there at a Democratic presidential debate, his fellow candidates stood in embarrassed silence. Clearly, China bears a lot of responsibility for international sanctions not working. But Western countries don't want to send a peacekeeping force there, which some observers (including Biden) say could stop the killing virtually overnight. Instead we send them to Iraq where it contributes to more death, including more dead and maimed Americans. And even though the UN is expected to authorize a peacekeeping force, and the Bush spokespeople--including most recently, Condi Rice--talk a lot about genocide and how the world is failing Darfur, it's the U.S. and its failure to pay its UN dues that threatens the peacekeeping effort before it starts.

Broken

The United States of America is founded on two basic functional principles: our democratic system and our rule of law, both set forth in the U.S. Constitution. In both categories, thanks to the Bush administration, this nation is in grave danger of failing. And by failing I mean setting itself up for chaos and blatant dictatorship, which in effect will threaten the future of the civilized world and perhaps life as we know it on Earth.

Our rule of law is challenged again and again, so obviously this past week when the Bushites try again to override a court decision that denies them their ability to destroy constitutional and international rights. The principle of habeus corpus is obscurely named --perhaps it should be repeated as "the right to your day in court" or to be charged and put on trial according to law. But its bad branding shouldn't obscure how fundamental a right it is--basic to every other right in the Constitution, including free speech and freedom of religion. As Constitutional law expert said on Countdown: "...it is actually the foundation for all other rights. When the president—when the government throws you into a dungeon for what you say or who you pray to, it‘s habeas corpus that‘s the right that allows you to see the enforcement of the other rights."

We learned more last week about the lengths to which the Bushites go to deny these rights, in the effort to circumvent the law by appealing to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft when he had relinquished his authority temporarily to have surgery and recover from it.

But these are not new efforts--the Bush administration has been doing all this persistently, and yet they continue to do so, with no one effectively stopping them. Such brazen success emboldens others to defy the rule of law, such as the Republicans who lined up last week to demand the immediate pardon of Scooter Libby, despite his lawful prosecution and conviction, despite the fact that he was convicted of obstructing justice by preventing effective investigation and possible prosecution of larger, underlying crimes in the Valerie Plame affair, and despite contravening the established procedures for pardons in the most outrageous ways. Pardons are normally given after the sentence is served or at least begun, and after the convicted admits guilt, repents and asks for mercy. But Republicans want the law and the courts to simply be ignored and overpowered by the executive.

What if President Clinton had looked at the Supreme Court decision of Gore v. Bush that gave the election to Bush in 2000, rightly concluded that it was a flawed decision, against precedent, and made by justices with political conflicts of interest, and simply voided it? The principle is exactly the same.

But from this, we get supreme irony. Clinton respected the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary. And so we got a guy who doesn't.

In other times, actions of which President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are accused or have admitted would be sufficient cause to bring articles of impeachment against them. But no such congressional action is forthcoming.The Bushite challenge to the rule of law is an aspect of their challenge to the fundamentals of our democratic system. The Iraq war is opposed by three-fourths of the American people, yet it goes on. Three-fourths of the American people believe the country is on the wrong track, and yet the Bushites persist. Even though the Bushites are legitimately in power until the next election, this indecent ignoring of the opinions of citizens is very dangerous to democracy.

More serious still are the Bushites direct threats to electoral democracy. The pattern of firing and hiring officers of the law in the U.S. Justice system based on political party and ideological loyalties is itself a major threat to our system. Yet the people responsible for this have not been held accountable. After many calls for his firing, after many predictions that he would not last out the week or the month, Alberto Gonzales is still the Attorney General of the U.S., despite evidence which continues to mount that he has been dishonest, incompetent and acted against the rule of law, and against fairness necessary for the democratic electoral system to function.

Moreover, the intent of these manipulations of justice seems more and more clearly to be to suppress votes that may go to Democrats, by appointing judges who would prosecute charges of voter fraud against Democrats, no matter how dubious those charges might be, and to ignore charges of voter suppression and fraud against Republicans, no matter how substantial the evidence might be.

The intent clearly is to create a permanent majority for Bushites, who might more properly be called Rovians, because they intend to continue beyond this administration (possibly with Fred Thompson.) So simply waiting for Bush to leave office won't be enough. The intent is to subvert the electoral system.

The Bushites have so far successfully acted like a dictatorship, and no one has stopped them. There are ongoing investigations but they are painfully and perhaps fatally slow. The Bushites, the Rovians seek to establish the means for further dictatorship, and no one is preventing them. The U.S. is in deep trouble, and so is the future.

Ever Learn?

Once again, we had no phony Memorial Day around here. All the false and misguided pieties can't obscure the conviction that a people that truly cares about fallen soldiers would be intent on making sure needless war never takes another. We're very far from that these days.

The reflex to call such sentiments pacificism and ask the sophomoric question about standing by while your grandmother gets attacked is so bitterly out of place these days, in view of the kind of war we're sending soldiers to die in. And dying they are, at record speed. All you need to know about the disposition of this war now is in this report on what soldiers in Iraq told a blind warhawk senator and his response.

That this war is so obviously wrongheaded that even soldiers are speaking out, and that this war was founded on lies from the start--the most recently one to be exposed being that the "intelligence" was faulty.

The soldier defending the homeland from attack is so seldom the actual cause of war--and hasn't been in the wars America has fought since at least World War II, not counting at least the intent of military action in Afghanistan. The cynicism of those in power who speak piously of patriotism and supporting the troops for political and monetary advantage and nothing else is disgusting. The awful truth is that many if not most warfare is to make the rich richer, and for that, the non-rich will die and be maimed, and their families and the rest of the non-rich are tricked and manipulated into believing it's all for a noble cause.

The noble cause is developing, acquiring and using the skills of peace. It is facing the real threat to our people, like the climate crisis. It is facing the future together, rather than repeating the terrible patterns of the past that benefit the undeserving few.

No Crook Left Behind

Just when you were beginning to forget the Bushies are ultimately about stealing huge profits, the ends to which the obsession with partisan politics is just the means, comes more news about old fashioned money-grubbing corruption in one of those programs with weepy names, No Child Left Behind. According to the Washington Post, it's so blatant that even this Justice Department can't ignore it.

The disclosure came as a congressional hearing revealed how people implementing the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program made at least $1 million off textbooks and tests toward which the federal government steered states.

Since this program was all about these tests, the intent is clear. Now we know for sure what "compassionate conservatism" means to the Bushies. It means you sound compassionate as a way to rob the Treasury and privatize for personal profit.

Hillary Divorces Bill, Declares Love for Whoopi Goldberg!

While supposed statesmen like John McCain and Lindsay Graham claim Baghdad is safe, American soldiers and correspondents in the field laugh at them. One veteran reporter said that everyone knows an American alone wouldn’t last twenty minutes anywhere in Baghdad—if not killed, then kidnapped for politics or money. Millions are homeless and hundreds of thousands dying in Africa in wars invisible here, while Americans obsesses over the final resting place of a model. The fate of civilization and the health of the planet are in grave jeopardy, according to a scientific consensus nearly as strong as that suggesting there are laws of gravity, but in the leading nation of the world deniers rule and no action is taken, as every moment brings future generations closer to a cursed and inevitable fate.

Hah hah—didn’t mean it! April Fool!

Hah hah—didn’t mean that! It’s true! So who’s the April Fool now?


April Fool’s Day has roots in many cultures that reach as far back as history goes, and probably farther. Part of its complex pedigree is a fairly direct relationship to the Bill of Rights.

The historical roots of the day include ancient festivals of spring which often had some component of comedy, trickery and release from ordinary rules, which in the western world at least usually included orgies of gluttony, drunkenness and sexual licentiousness. The probable direct ancestor of April Fool's Day is more specific—when France adopted the Gregorian calendar in the sixteenth century, New Year's moved from April to January 1. But old habits are hard to break, especially those beginning in 45 B.C., which was when Julius Caesar set up the old Julian calendar. Some gullible Parisians were tricked by clever neighbors into celebrating New Year's on what was now the wrong day.

Out of this was born the classic cry, April Fish! Which is something that did not cross the Atlantic when the calendar was later changed in America. No one is quite sure what the fish thing is about. Still, the first April Fool's Day jest was probably, "Happy New Year!"

But the more important aspect of this history relates to the tradition of the licensed fool. America never had court jesters, but for all the time this continent was being explored and populated as well as centuries before, most European countries did. From imperial Rome through the medieval period and the Renaissance, official fools were not only a popular and well known presence in royal courts, but for part of that time were also employed by cities, clergy and wealthy families.

Their duties ranged from song and dance to pratfalls and acrobatics, ribaldry and general foolishness. At times no fashionable dinner party was complete without a fool hired to insult the guests. But the key element of the "allowed fool" was his (and occasionally, her) freedom to do and especially to say anything to anyone.

The official fool also has roots in an aspect of the aforementioned festivals, which featured a Lord of Misrule— a commoner who took on the trappings of the king or bishop or town mayor for a day. As far back as the tenth century, these became elaborate performances, mixing entertainment with social comment, and topical plays or burlesque sermons that satirized the real rulers of state and church, who had to at least pretend to enjoy it. These events became hugely popular, but nobody was fool enough to criticize the powerful if there were going to be reprisals. So the tradition included immunity for the fool.

When kings hired permanent court jesters, political satire as well as pointed personal remarks were part of their repertoire, and the tradition of immunity came with them. Archibald Armstrong, one of England's last and most political jesters replied, "No one has ever heard of a fool being hanged for talking, but many dukes have been beheaded for their insolence." So it happened that the only people in Europe with the absolute right of free speech were kings and queens, and fools.

This fact was not lost on others who were agitating for that kind of freedom for all. The original document of the Magna Carta, England's first great challenge to absolute royal power in 1215, was decorated with the figure of a court jester. From the late 15th century until well into the 17th, "societies of fools" flourished in France, composed of young men who criticized the government and agitated for freedom while wearing the traditional court jester motley.


America never had court jesters, though some of its first expressions of freedom and identity were in the foolery tradition, from the burlesque of the Boston Tea Party (a bunch of Anglos badly costumed as Indians who struck a blow for political independence by dumping tea into cold water) to some early symbols such as Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam. "Yankee" was a British ethnic slur which New Englanders turned into a badge of honor, and Yankee Doodle Dandy was a clown figure (what else can you say about a guy who sticks a feather in his cap and calls it macaroni?) made immortal in the song sung at key moments in the American Revolution, including at the British surrender. A similar figure, a Yankee "wise fool" stock character popular in early American stage comedies, was a source for Uncle Sam.

Americans also pride themselves on being straightforward, so there's also a tradition of mistrusting the tricky. But today our Zeitgeist depends so heavily on some forms of deceit--spin, disinformation, oversimplifying and the straight-faced lie--that selectively moralizing about other forms rings hollow. Historians are dishonored for missing quotation marks, but not if the history they write is dishonest bunk. Injustice wears clothes of obscurant nomenclature, and success by any means necessary is our guiding morality. Mendacity is a trick of power.

The heart of the fool's relation to free speech is speaking truth to power. For awhile we may have thought that serious journalism was going to speak truth to power, but when the most powerful owns the most presses, and the line between editorial and advertising becomes more and more imaginary, it's looking like a piquant hope.

The rich and powerful can easily ridicule the countrified (the original meaning of "clown") and unsophisticated, but the figure of the fool deflects the ridicule back upon the pretentious and corrupt. Freedom to criticize the powerful is at the heart of both the fool tradition and free speech.

The pretensions of power are automatic, perhaps the inevitable product of consciousness equipped with opposable thumbs. Our particular social systems depend on some forms of deceit while moralizing about others. Historians are dishonored for missing quotation marks, but not if the history they write is dishonest bunk. Injustice wears clothes of obscurant nomenclature, while paradox or irony shade into hypocrisy as we deny freedoms in the name of protecting freedom.


Today April Fool's Day is just about our only nod to this tradition. You can play tricks on people any day of the year, but the idea is that on this day, you are allowed to. This year it falls on a Sunday, so the usual office trickery is shall we say a bit trickier this year. Yet the Internet more than makes up for this as a celebration of intentional foolery that unintentionally looks like every other day on the Internet.

Since laughter seems to override anger, wit is often its own protection, at least temporarily. The cosmos itself seems designed with persistent uncertainties, which is perhaps why many religious and cultural traditions make the trickster a major myth.

Historically and perhaps in practice, the freedom of the fool makes way for freedom of speech in all its aspects. Humor often seems to make the truth clearer and perhaps easier to acknowledge. We have to be tricked into seeing what we would rather not see. We can have tricksters without truth, and in our entertainment-dominated society we mostly do. But rarely can we fallible humans have truth without tricksters.

When They Stand Up, We Fall

From the AP: The U.S. military death toll in March, the first full month of the security crackdown, was nearly twice that of the Iraqi army, which American and Iraqi officials say is taking the leading role in the latest attempt to curb violence in the capital, surrounding cities and Anbar province, according to figures compiled on Saturday.

The Associated Press count of U.S. military deaths for the month was 81...

Valerie Plame Wilson. AP photo.

Exposing the Masters of Deceit

They lied us into the war that began four years ago today. They said Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and were collecting materials to build nuclear bombs. We now know that they knew there was little evidence that those weapons existed, and the one bit of supposed evidence that Iraq was trying to acquire nuclear material was false. They not only insisted it was true--they went to treasonous lengths to keep their lie from being exposed.In an effort to destroy the credibility of the messenger--Joseph Wilson, who the CIA sent to track down the nuclear rumor--at the interfering insistence of VP Cheney--the White House exposed the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, a covert CIA officer, and falsely accused her of sending her husband to Niger. (As if, by the way, that alone is enough to make the fiction of Iraq's nuclear attempts true.)

On Friday, Rep. Henry Waxman began his hearings into security breaches with a statement in which General Hayden, current head of the CIA, affirmed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert agent when her name was published, having been distributed to the press no fewer than 20 times by multiple members of the Bush administration. In her testimony, Plame said under oath that she had been on covert status, that she had in fact travelled outside the U.S. as a covert agent within five years (a technicality in the law protecting the identity of covert operatives), and that her outing had destroyed her 20 year career investigating weapons of mass destruction programs that might threaten the U.S.

Despite President Bush's statements that he would investigate the leak of her name, and fire anyone involved, there was further testimony from the Director of the White House Office of Security that there was no investigation whatever. And Karl Rove, one of the leakers, is still an official force in the White House.

Plame said that she knew that her identity might be discovered and exposed by a foreign government. She never imagined it would be exposed by high officials of her own government.

Still, the supporters of Bush, the right wing TV and radio babbleheads, continue to insist that Plame was not covert, and that this is mere politics. Which leads to the question: if killing more than 3,000 American soldiers and maiming thousands more, as well as killing and maiming countless thousands in Iraq as well as destroying that society, all based on lies, and the outing of a U.S. covert agent for political purposes, and the continung defense of these acts by means of more lies--if all this is not treason, what is?

It Can Happen Here (Latest Chapter)

The Bushite scandals come so fast they are hard to keep track of, and start becoming indistinguishable, but the latest is worth isolating for its meanings and implications.

What is it? A number of federal attorneys--at least 7, probably more--were fired by the Bush Justice Department, officially by the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. After some local news stories and blogger investigations, congressional hearings revealed that many of them appear to have been fired for not being sufficiently zealous on behalf of Republicans, in several cases after improper questions and pressure on their current investigations--suggestions that they ought to be prosecuting Democrats (for "voter fraud") and not prosecuting Republicans (for corruption.)

At first, Gonzales denied to Congress there were any political considerations--these were personnel matters, based on performance. When evidence of good performance reviews etc. appeared, Republicans changed their tune to: the President has the right to fire these officials, and all Presidents do it on a political basis. But, in fact (they said) it wasn't political, at least the White House wasn't involved, specifically Karl Rove.

Now it's come out that this was a political decision from the beginning, going back to early 2005, and that Gonzales was involved even before he was Attorney General, when he was on the White House staff, and that Rove was involved--in fact (according to emails revealed Thursday), he was a chief instigator.

What's the underlying problem with this? Presidents often change federal prosecutors at the beginning of their terms, as Bush did--they are in that sense political appointments. But firing prosecutors selectively based on how they are prosecuting Republicans or not prosecuting Democrats strikes at the heart of the justice system, already admittedly weakened by the political appointee tradition. What the Bush White House is doing in this instance, as in others, appears to be unprecedented. It's also unusual to replace one Republican appointee with another because Karl Rove wants a pal in his place--especially when the office is in Little Rock, where yet another round of investigations into the Clintons could begin, just as Hillary runs for President.

What else is behind this? Howard Fineman for MSNBC points to the practices and intents of Rove and the other Bushites as far back as Texas:

Judges are elected in Texas. Karl Rove made his fortune not by running George W. Bush for office, but by training, building and running slates of conservative Republican judges. If the judges are purely political, what does that make the lawyers who practice in front of them? Surely not just “officers of the court.”The Austin Gang – Bush, Rove, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers – saw the legal world as something to control, if for no other reason than if they did not, the Trial Lawyers – the backbone of the modern Texas Democratic Party – would.

Gonzales made his bones literally keeping Bush out of court when, as governor, Bush was called to jury duty. Had Bush been subject to questioning by attorneys over his suitability to serve, he would have had to reveal that he had been arrested for drunk driving. Not a good thing to do before a presidential campaign. Gonzales managed to get the Boss out of the jury pool.

But it's even more specific, according to a New York Times editorial:

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings. In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

The integrity of the election system, the integrity of the justice system--just two attacks on the integrity of the Constitution that characterize this Bush administration. I don't know if it is possible, but impeachment is more warranted now than ever.

The Long Dubai

So after screwing the U.S. taxpayers from here to eternity for their billions in no-bid contracts to serve tainted food to U.S. soldiers, and various other hyperinflated and substandard services in Iraq, Halliburton is getting out of town. Way out. Moving headquarters to Dubai. Yes, that same sandy paradise where corporate capitalism on steroids meets the terrorist network, and where the companies are that the Bushites wanted to put in charge of U.S. ports.

Halliburton, the company that gave its former prez and now ours, Dick Cheney, a $35 million severance package, though its doubtful the severance was all that, shall we say, severe. They are leaving the building. In fact, the whole country.

Gee, what do you think they have in mind? Your first guess may be as good as Hillary Clinton's: "I think that raises a lot of serious issues we have to look at," said the former First Lady. "Does this mean they are going to quit paying taxes in America? They are going to take all the advantage of our country but not pay their fair share of taxes?"She continued, "They get a lot of government contracts - is this going to affect the investigations that are going on? Because we have a lot of evidence of misuse of government contracts and how they have cheated the American soldier and cheated the American taxpayer. They have taken the money and not provided the services, so does this mean that we won't be able to pursue these investigations?"

I expect that within a year or two of the move (into the Cheney Complex in Cheney City), they'll quietly change their name and go after U.S. contracts again, although thanks to them there may not be any money left by then.

But Senator Frank Lautenberg has even darker thoughts than this: he suspects the move is a way to circumvent U.S. law so that Halliburton can continue to pursue contracts with--get this--Iran. Yeah, the one with the "n" at the end.It seems a Halliburton subsidiary already in Dubai has been doing business with Iran for years.

There is a possible upside: if Halliburton does get some big contracts for Iran's nuclear program, that's virtually a guarantee that it will be set back for years. If the Iranians think they're the Axis of Evil, they are about to meet the real thing.