We’re just days away from the close of one of the most asinine election seasons I can remember (and trust me — I can remember quite a few). Like the Howard Dean “scream” of 2004, the media has latched onto a phrase from a John Kerry speech, the interpretation of which apparently was fed to them directly by Jack Abramoff friend Ken Melman or White House blimp Karl Rove. At this point in the game, can anyone possibly believe that this administration gives a flying shit for the fighting men and women in Iraq? Just this week it was reported that the Pentagon cannot account for thousands of guns, rocket launchers, etc., that we have sent to that sorry husk of a nation. (My guess is that our troops know what happened to them, since they’re being shot at all the time.) And yet these Bush clowns feel confident enough to actually field Kerry’s lame laugh line as a campaign issue. But that’s our corporate media — Kerry botches a joke (so what’s new?) and it’s a story. Bush lets 104 young Americans die pointlessly in Iraq during the month leading up to the election, and it’s ho-hum.

This election is very important to the party in power, and they are pulling out all the stops to keep it from being a total disaster for them. Both parties have dumped millions of dollars into mostly negative advertising here in my backwater hometown district (New York’s “fighting” 24th), but it’s worth saying that I’ve received a different glossy mailing from the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee every other day, each one attacking the Democratic candidate. As someone who’s worked in advertising and done a fair amount of direct mail, I can tell you that this represents enormous sums of (unregulated) money, to say nothing of how much they’re spending on local television air time. Where campaign law is concerned, this is considered legitimate party-building activity, but really all it is is an attempt to depress turnout and build cynicism. Cynicism helps to ensure that the powerful will not be inconvenienced by “meddlesome outsiders”, as Walter Lippman put it — that is to say, people like you and me.

Some of the ads stoop pretty low, as you probably are aware. Bogus shit about triple-X 800 lines and all that. One purports that Democratic congressional candidate Michael Arcuri pushed for the release of a convicted rapist. It features an excerpt from a letter sent to a parole board by one of Arcuri’s assistant DA’s, the text of which noted the convicted man’s role in helping prosecute a murder case, closing with: “Please consider such in your overall determining of whether Thomas should be released on parole.” The excerpt featured in the RCCC mailing? “Thomas should be released on parole.” This attributed to Arcuri. The Republicans are apparently applying the same standard of accuracy to these ads as they applied in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Next they’ll be telling us Michael Arcuri has been building weapons of mass destruction. (They’ve probably already linked him with Osama.) Will the investment pay off? Not if I can help it. Don’t get me wrong — I think the Democrats are about as ineffectual an opposition party as can be imagined. But we need to shake up this one-party state a little bit.

So here’s my advice, for what it’s worth. Vote this repulsive Congress out of office. Then turn right around and hold the new Congress’s feet to the fire. Either way, keep at it. ‘Nuff said.

luv u,

jp

Well, it only took two solid months for the Israeli government to admit that, yes, it had used white phosphorus bombs against what it termed Hezbollah targets — though the vast majority of targets so termed have proven to be civilian homes, apartment buildings, shelters, hospitals, family cars, etc. Of course, the admission came (to me, at least) via a small item tucked inside my Gannett daily newspaper. If memory serves, Tel Aviv’s indignant denials were displayed a bit more prominently. Now that no one’s paying attention, it’s okay to admit that you used chemical weapons in violation of international law. First law of modern warfare, I suppose. (It certainly worked for the U.S. in Fallujah, where similar weapons were enthusiastically deployed.) We live in a strange world where war crimes such as these are not taken seriously unless (a) they are committed by our enemies, or (b) they rise to the level of Nazi war atrocities. It apparently raises few eyebrows anymore to drop burning phosphorus on people and generally trash the Geneva Conventions. What next — a reality show?

Actually, it seems as though the Bush administration is actually sweating this election a bit more than previous ones, since the possibility (however remote) of investigations and prosecutions looms a bit larger should the Democrats win control of either or both houses of Congress. My illustrious brother was commenting on this the other day, and judging by the increasing shrillness of Dubya and his crew, I suspect he may be right. It’s interesting to watch the GOP slime our local Democratic congressional candidate as being “soft on crime” while their candidates consistently warn the voters that Dems will launch congressional investigations and tie up the legislative process with this foreign thing called “holding people accountable.” Apparently they’re only concerned with certain types of crime — not the kind that involves dropping bombs on people or leaving unexploded ordinance lying around where some kid can find it. For that kind of crime, it is sufficient to merely express your regret at the always unintentional deaths and injuries that result.

This last couple of weeks have seen a good many more “unintentional” deaths added to the bill of particulars against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Blair — more civilians blown to bits in Afghanistan, more people caught up in the most recent counterinsurgency sweeps in Baghdad… to say nothing of the 2,800th U.S. soldier to die in Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. All this death and misery provides a morbid backdrop for this year’s political campaigns — few candidates speak directly to the issue that is in the back of everyone’s mind, namely, when and how is this all going to end? The response from the administration is to change their rhetoric so that they will seem more flexible, while denying (quite laughably) that Bush was ever big on the phrase “stay the course”. Fact is, they’re trying to avoid the issue as well, hoping some superficial atmospherics will help grease their way to another slender victory.

End of the road for these clowns? I’ll believe it when I see it.

luv u,

jp

October is turning out to be one of the bloodiest months for U.S. troops since the war in Iraq began — their lives being expended so carelessly that even the generals on the ground are publicly re-thinking their latest pacification strategy in Baghdad. (One can only guess ho many Iraqis are dying in these operations. One can only guess because, as I mentioned last week, no one in an official capacity in the U.S. seems interested in counting them.) At the same time, we’re hearing more and more about how our leaders are “losing patience” with the Iraqi government, and there’s been some suggestion of a possible coup, martial law, etc. (see Saigon 1963). One can see a screw job in the making, for sure — a well-worn imperial gambit. Those damnable natives; they just can’t get it together! (See Saigon, pretty much any time between 1946 and 1975.) This whole Iraq thing was going great until they got in the game.

Once again I’m reminded of a comment I heard from a Canadian official a couple of years ago — something to the effect of, “When’s the last time you can recall the Americans taking responsibility for anything?” Well, it still rings true, particularly with regard to the perpetual explosion that is Iraq. Blame will be assigned to the Iraqi government, the Shi’ite militias, the Sunni insurgents, the Iranians, the Syrians, “foreign (i.e. not American) fighters,” Hezbollah, Hamas, Bill Clinton, Barbara Streisand — anybody but “me”. (That’s MBA backwards: Anybody But Me. Bush has got one of those, hasn’t he?) But no matter who is to “blame”, the game will remain the same — stay the course, get the job done, etc. That’s all Bush has now, and since he can’t run again, he’d just as soon not be one of those presidents who had to reverse their Custer decision and pull troops out from where he’d sent them, mission decidedly un-accomplished.

Correct me if I’m wrong (honest — there’s a comments form!) but I believe the mission now is to keep George W. Bush from looking bad… well, worse, let’s say. As long as we stay in Iraq, his political allies can ride around on their unicycles and tell all who will listen that Dubya is like Lincoln and Truman, taking political heat for an unpopular but necessary war, later to be vindicated by history and celebrated as strong and visionary leaders (Lincoln for saving the union; Truman for building the U.S. empire). If we leave Iraq now, that fiction evaporates. So 20, 22, 28, 35-year-old Americans are dying in combat to preserve Bush’s bogus claim to future greatness. That, at least, is what it looks like, since they appear to have no real plan behind what they’re doing. Just keep it going. Like Rumsfeld suggested last week, the War on Terror may never end. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

If wishes were horses…

luv u,

jp

I didn’t hear much about the Johns Hopkins study of civilian deaths in Iraq before hearing people jeering at its conclusions as gross exaggerations and — in the tiny mind of our president — an incitement to further violence in the nation he has destroyed (sadly, with our help). Like most politicians, Bush likes some statistics and detests others, and nowadays the sound of a mere $250 billion federal budget deficit is so much sweeter than that of 655,000 dead Iraqi non-combatants. A grim tally indeed. One of the study’s authors, Les Roberts (recent candidate for the democratic nomination for congress in my hometown district), seems to me not at all the hysterical exaggerator type. A physician and epidemiologist, he has been working on public health issues for many years, including time in war zones like Bosnia. This study is a follow-up on the one his team released a couple of years ago that put the number of “excess deaths” (i.e. those resulting from the U.S. invasion) at that time conservatively at 100,000. (The administration hated that number too, as I recall. )

Of course, this is a statistic that was born to be an orphan, and I have little doubt that while it is excoriated by the Republicans, the Democrats will treat it like a leper, just as my hometown newspaper had done so far (no story as of yet). Bush’s reaction is understandable. Hey, what the hell — practically the only “good” news coming out of Iraq for Bush is the Saddam Hussein trial, so when someone claims that Dubya has killed more Iraqis than Saddam, this is not at all a good thing. And as the Democratic leadership knows, he’s not the only one on the hook. There’s enough blood here to stain us all, and that always makes politicians uncomfortable. Don’t want to be giving people the impression that they are, well, responsible for anything their democratically elected leaders do, now do we? That’s no way to get votes. Just give the people happy talk about how we’re the greatest country in the world, and how we’ve never done anything wrong to anybody… and by the way, there’s that evil menace out there. Oh yeah… and you can have war and tax cuts at the same time.

Whatever the pols would have you believe, if this new Iraq casualties study is anything close to true, this is truly one of the major bloodlettings of our time — Rwanda league, for sure. But even if it were closer to the lower figures I hear the administration bandying about — a mere 50,000 or 100,000 — isn’t that bad enough? Isn’t the real crime that those deaths are so unimportant, regardless of their magnitude? For chrissake, does anybody still think that this war was unavoidable? If we’re close to unanimity on that, isn’t it time we consider the degree to which we are responsible for the suffering in Iraq? Is it somehow less disturbing to imagine a 2:1 ratio of Saddam’s killings to our own than something closer to 1:1, when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of bodies in either case? Shouldn’t totals like this bother us at least as much as some lame-ass Congressman pulling a boner on teen pages?

Democracy = responsibility. That’s why we need to speak up, act up, and vote to end this stupid war.

luv u,

jp

Quite a spectacle this season, and I don’t mean the changing leaves. Our Republican friends trying to cling to power, fucking things up with such consistency that even so moribund an opposition as the Democrats can give them cause for worry. Still, there’s no day so sunny that the Dems can’t coax a little rain out of it. Hard to see what kind of dramatic difference they would make in power after having provided a dozen votes in the Senate to eliminate habeas corpus protections and give the president extra-constitutional powers and unprecedented legal immunity. Sometimes it seems like they feel they’ll only get to run the store by giving it away first. Weird people. But that’s what corporate money does, I guess — it just promotes a mind-numbing sameness; a narrowing of the political spectrum so that there will be virtually no risk of the ownership class’s interests being threatened. Our republic is definitely in trouble if only because the vast majority of people can find no effective political means of addressing our most pressing problems. Encouraged towards cynicism by both parties, they are increasingly likely to drop out of the political game altogether.

So… why do I have a horse in this race — namely the 24th Congressional district in upstate New York? Well, not because I think it’s going to make all the difference. I’m supporting the Democrat — Michael Arcuri — because I want to give the party currently in power a pain in the ass. Also, the Republican in the race is one of my hometown GOP politicians who’s been considered next in line for this seat for at least a decade. He’s a disgusting little vermin who will support the most reactionary policies of Bush, Hastert, Boehner (pronounced “boner”), and company, and he richly deserves to lose. Of course, the national Republican party has been sending boatloads of money his way, running ads that accuse Arcuri (a district attorney) of being soft on crime, a “tax and spend liberal,” plus funded by shady businessmen and comrade Barbara Streisand. Our backwater district has been graced by visits from Dick Cheney (who raised $200,000 for his boy Ray Meier) and Laura Bush (who raised $150,000 from local fat cats eager to shake her hand), so it’s pretty clear that the Bush White House wants… needs to hold onto this seat, which the GOP has held longer than anyone can remember.

That is why I’m putting some effort into this campaign — not because I’m all that fond of the Democratic candidate, but because Cheney and Hastert and Dubya want the seat so bad. Let’s face it, whoever is elected in November will work to bring federal contracts, projects, and cash home to the 24th district — that’s a given. They all bloody do it. The only meaningful point of comparison is which set of national policy priorities either one is going to support. If Arcuri wins and the Dems take over the House, John Conyers, Barbara Lee, and Dennis Kucinich will be banging the gavel at committee meetings. If the other guys win, it will be Boehner and Foley (well… not, Foley… though something tells me he’ll still be busy with Boehner… pronounced “boner”). That is enough reason for me to help put Arcuri over the top, then return to normal agitating the day after.

Electoral politics is just one small part of the game. And even if the “gains” are negative ones (e.g. slowing down the most pernicious aspects of the Bush agenda), it’s worth putting a few hours into. Nuff said.

luv u,

jp