Drug bust nets entire Bush Administration

...and most of congress:

After installation of drug trace monitoring technology in the sewers of the nation's capitol, an army of DC area police forces swept up the president, vice president, most white house staff and all but six congressmen. Booking was mandatory because they had each flunked drug tests which are required for federal employees. The "clean six" were found to be free of any trace of the various prescription substances because they never drink the water in the nation's capitol. Preferring imported Vodka to anything coming out of a tap, they were however already facing a variety of DUI charges.

In other news, Congress has voted emergency funds to upgrade water treatment for formerly ill-served neighborhoods around the Capitol where crack houses and the industry supporting them are often found.

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NOTE: some people get paid to find Washington DC funny. The rest of us just do it for laughs.

are you privileged?

I have experienced a trenchant definition of "privilege": it is a condition or circumstance that permits one to ignore the consequences of their worst and most selfish choices. To write this hurts me and it will gain me no friends. Here belatedly are my thoughts on a topic I have been afraid to touch and have quietly avoided in three years of blogging...

I have just seen a production of the play "My name is Rachel Corrie".
The production of that play was suppressed or postponed back in 2006 in Florida and New York...you will be able to guess why. It went on stage without delays in Britain. It was one of the more disturbing dramas I have ever attended...and it was nothing more than one woman on a stage providing just enough prop and action to set scene for the reading of a diary and some emails. It was not just a true story, it was the sort of truth that must be denied. I knew how it was to end before I went to the theater. Due to my own daughter's fledgling activism to find a just peace in Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I knew many of the facts that stick out of the play like so many spikes driven through flesh. And yet, it still left me somewhat stunned.

If nothing else, and whatever your biases, such tours through the "other side" of a conflict make you think. At dinner with the couple who invited us to see the play, they recounted the remarks of an HaAretz editor on Charlie Rose saying "US does not have a foreign policy on Israel: it has a domestic policy not to antagonize the Jewish vote". This I sadly admit is a well founded insight. And I am sad about it because my vote is presumed to be conditioned by my religious affiliation...I am not just taken for granted, I am mistaken for granted. As fellow protesters say: "Not in my name".

There were many lines in the play that wrenched and singed consciousness and belief about the nature of the Israeli state's occupation and the way it has betrayed the deepest hope and calling of any believing Jew: we were to have been a light unto the nations. Israel's cruel and sloppy overkill in uprooting families from the occupied territories has been so under-reported in the US that we Americans are understandably puzzled at our pariah status as the dominant financial and military support for the state of Israel.

You will have to settle for a paraphrase of the line that hit me hardest.

"Privilege protects us from the consequences of our poorest choices"

The exact wording I cannot recall but the meanings are abundant. That sentence is the most important because it applies not just to the character who said it and not just to Israelis but to all who cannot distinguish...because they do not know or want to know...between the feel-good [or at least feel-less-guilty] vagueness of "you must support a Jewish homeland" and the instances of institutionalized barbarity that are among the many tools to meet the oh-so-reasonable goal of "security". The person who is far from this fray and votes or sends money to "make sure that Israel does not perish", i.e. Americans of either Jewish or Christian faith, should look into how Israelis treat Palestinians who get in the way of expanding west bank settlements or whose homes or farms complicate efforts to pacify Gaza. It is we supporters and enablers who are the most privileged in this affair.

If you but scratch the topic you quickly hear there are more provocations for such atrocious takings of land, dwellings and livelihoods than most of you will know. For instance the thousands of Iraqi Jews scattered over the planet could tell you family histories of the death and humiliation used to displace their ancient community from Baghdad. Nothing the Baathists did to 200 thousand Jews who once lived and had lived since biblical times in Baghdad , nothing the Nazis did to the Jews constitute a defensible reason for the Jews to repay in kind. If you win by becoming as coldly destructive as your enemies, who won? There simply is not justice in the west bank settlement policies or the acts committed by Jews against Arabs in occupied territory.

Provocation is not justification. Being hurt by one party in one era and place and then milking that grievance to support striking back at another party in a different place and generation banishes any chance of peace. The weary majorities on both sides of the rising wall cannot out shout or out shoot the self righteous anger of the bellicose minorities among them. That would seem to be human nature at its worst, its typical and dominant worst. The main difference between the Ted Belman's of the world and ostensibly liberal people who try to support Israel without becoming informed about the range of actions taken by the Israelis is only this: the one is honest in saying "we seek annihilation or permanent war" and the other an ignorant assenter to the same policy.

Were it not for the fact that the bravest voices decrying the village by village ethnic cleansing of the west bank are those of Jews, many of them members or ex members of the Israeli military, I would turn my back on the whole stinking mess and support nothing except the cessation of the constant flow of dollars and arms to ANY country in the middle east.

As it is, we have a screaming example, the worst I know, of a failure to imagine what it is like for the other guy. [which failure I see as precisely the most critical difference between the liberal and the conservative mindset]. In one measure or another, that failure is at the root of most organized violence in human history. But claiming you are the good guy, and reading in your weekly Torah portion that "you shall not oppress the stranger" means that for a Jew the failure is far more culpable than a mere weakness of human nature. It seems almost willful or terribly cynical. If you pretend to be a light unto the nations because you have been given the rules by which to survive, surmount and stave off what is flawed in human nature but systematically destroy communities, histories and lives then either you or your rules are a crock. By betraying the hope and idealism that nursed Israel from an idea to shaky new nation, the fierce, reactionary country that has arisen has deeply angered not just its old enemies but many Jews who know the idealism is the more precious legacy than the dirt.

The reviews quoted in the Wikipedia article about the play write it off as propaganda. But to tell any story you must have a point of view. To insist that only one point of view of a multi-national and multi-cultural conflict is valid or tolerable or even publishable is ridiculous. Only holocaust deniers called Schindler's List "anti-German propaganda". When the subject of inhumane actions by Israel against Palestinian noncombatants is raised in even the most liberal Jewish circles the responses are mostly defensive and emotional. The commonest tactic I have seen is to immediately change the subject to atrocious things other Arab groups or nations have done to Jews. That is irrational. But I guess it is the nature of the beast. After all the millennia of learning the hard way what it is like to be on the wrong end of the gun, the Jews are the same as other people and being on the right end of the gun has transformed many of them into the sort of creatures that have lost all the compassionate insights their own faith once gave the world.

It is possible to be emotionally wrought up and still think rationally...but damn uncommon. It is so uncommon that assuming an emotional tone that you detect in some speech belies any reason you may hear is understandable. But our obligation is to know that whomever we face is human and will not have been dealt with fairly until we have gotten past their and our own feelings by listening long enough and deliberately enough to pick up their facts and imagine ourselves in their shoes. That is how I will try to approach the damaging diatribes of Ted Belman or of Abbas. We have a bumper crop of psychically damaged people on both sides and unfortunately the dealings with the situation at the state level simply damage yet more as time goes on.

In confrontations with fellow Jews over the Israeli program of settlement in occupied territories, the conversation often ends with the rhetorical question: "So what is your solution, Mr Pacifist!?" How can I tell you? You can't frame solutions if you don't listen carefully enough to know what the problem is.

Such a strange term humanity: as a noun its encompassing collectiveness is comforting and enlightened. But as an adjective, so rarely deserved, it is the most distant of goals for us.

McCain is an honorable man

Just not a very consistent man.

I was reading an article by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker that I would describe as grudgingly admiring of McCain's straightforwardness and how that works well for him with the press corps.

Well, some of the press corps. A reporter with a nose for what McCain may feel are his weak flanks will encounter a wilting barrage of browbeating evasion and aggressively changing the subject. This is what Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times experienced today.

The funny thing about that particular encounter in which an irate John McCain tried to turn aside the question of his dealings with Kerry in 2004 by repeating

..."No. No. Because the issue is closed, as far as I'm concerned. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows it in America."

Could he describe the conversation? "No, of course not," McCain said. "I don't describe private conversations. Why should I? Then there's no such thing as a private conversation."

Why is that funny? Because the administration that McCain supports to the hilt [so apt an image in his case] and hopes to continue is writhing in its political skin to preserve its tissue of abrogated constitutional rights. There is no such thing as a private conversation in Bushworld. Will there be one in McCain's administration? Maybe only for Johnny boy.

update: I see there is a whole book about how the MSM just don't want to see the problems of a McCain candidacy or presidency.

Maybe they were hoping just this once, they wouldn't have to...

..."go negative".

Chalk it up to the claimed and accepted "greater experience" of the Clintons that Hillary's campaign got dirtier sooner.

Chalk it up to Obama's higher regard for the American voter that he was explicitly reticent and wary in practice about being negative and feels the need to announce that his campaign will now add such tactics to its arsenal.

I personally am cast into a weary disappointment by these developments.

Once someone is elected, the other guy and all that was supposedly wrong with him or her is ancient political footnotes and leaflets in a dumpster. What will be...or more to the point of this process, what we hope will be...is the substance of the candidate's policy ideas, the quality of the advisers they attract, their power to persuade and inspire the broadest spectrum within the electorate. In a word, the positives: who they are, what changes they will propose, how good they are at educating voters on the issues how well their choice of issues reflects the needs that people feel. The positives should dominate the campaigning.

I think this sour turn in the Democratic campaign betokens Clinton knowing and Obama finding out that the American voter is a cheap beast, easily bought by appeals to their insecurity and despite what they tell to pollsters, fond of a little blood on the campaign trail. It is sad to see what works and what does not work on the American voter...and maybe they are not so different from a German voter or an Italian voter after all.

The nearest thing to a silver lining is probably that the swift boaters McCain can count on without even the embarrassment of a phone call and his own attacks will finally be thrown at whichever Democratic candidate has the least to hide and has been the best at catching spears in mid air.

There will be no free lunch

One can point to the irrational agendas of global warming denialists, arguments as sick as their whining that "you liberals are making this up because you want to control what cars we can drive and how fast" and wonder why they cling to their claims in the face of massive and unambiguous evidence that we are wrecking our planet. But these dangerously and willfully ignorant obstacles to progress are abetted by a much larger segment of the population in developed and developing countries. The motive that makes the much broader constituencies of foot-dragging consumers avoid going green works just as well and just out of awareness in the empty heads of the denialists and consumers alike: we are spoiled by the externalization of a substantial portion of the costs that our indulgence in energy, water, metals and halogenated everything place upon a limited stock of natural resources. Only real and present financial or physical discomfort will turn our stiff necks towards the future and make us turn off the key, turn down the heat.

There will be no free lunch unless you learn to get by on grass.

Worse, if you do not learn to eat what you yourself can grow, will you go eat your neighbor's? The security sales pitch, favored tool of fascists and the Bush league and now coming into use by Hillary Clinton to revive her candidacy, never progresses logically or ethically beyond the equivalent of "there's bad people you should fear but trust me to shoot them before they shoot you". There may be bad people, there certainly are people who harm others. But I think none of those harmful people, except from the US, represent particularly well fed or prosperous elements of their respective societies. To divorce the issues of precarious and vanishing climate and soil resources from security in the strict political and military sense our politicians can focus upon is harming our policies and leaving us stupid options. I particularly like Stiglitz and will be quoting him in other posts on the economy but on the topic of that divorce, I take his word as vastly more credible than anything said by the palace playboy of Pennsylvania Ave or his would-be successor. Please notice that the sense of security is a feeling, a summation of haphazardly collected facts and impressions used with very little examination. When that feeling is running in its negative range, it has a terrible tendency to become self-fulfilling.

In spite of what the advertisers tell you, there is no way a healthy person can eat ice cream skip exercise and loose weight. In spite of all the commercials that spin the claims faster than the wheels, you cannot drive a 250 horse power car and still keep the planet clean and cool as it was a mere hundred years ago. Despite the drooling avarice of the corn distribution lobby, many studies have shown that ethanol production is a net negative substitute for fossil fuel...using as much as it produces and damaging the environment along the way.

But I had hoped...and Stewart Brand has argued, that nuke power plants could eventually save us. In my case, the hope was based on my rudimentary knowledge of the amazing energy density of uranium as a fission energy source. But the energetics of the key reaction are not enough. To know if a whole system of nuclear energy production will be a net benefit and workable on the necessary scale to replace coal and oil, you have to take many costs into consideration and you have to crunch quite a few numbers. Well someone has done the homework for us and the answer is: we could not make nuclear energy pay off. I think that puts us back where the truly green thinking has always been: use less, use MUCH less. The old math of renwables still stands as the hope for sustainable technologically developed societies.

political dyslexicon

In the vocabulary of political analysts, the term momentum has, shall we say, lost its momentum.

If creating jobs works so well in Iraq....

As the drama over whether it will be Clinton or Obama for president recedes, the groundswell that has been there in the polling numbers and approval ratings all along ought to be weighing on minds in Washington. [uh, there are some minds in Washington, right?] The nation looks in a foul mood, restless and ready to route the Republicans [those not among the 50 or so that are abandoning congressional careers this year] so you would think Bush League might try to pacify its own citizens with the same enlightened programs portrayed as effective in mollifying a different hostile population. If it works in a place as screwed up as Iraq, it ought to work like a charm here. Why can't US citizens get some government investment in jobs and infrastructure? Are we less important to the republicans and the Bush administration than those poor Iraqis? And I am not talking about jobs building more tanks and bombs...the only way you can waste more of the threadbare reserves of money and good will that our future depends upon than pissing it away on arms is to piss it away on arms and then use those arms on people. [Since you will then be obliged to stabilize the damaged foreign country and rehabilitate ate your own broken soldiers that return when your bombs and tanks are all used up.] This whole administration has been a national slide toward madness and self destruction. By comparison, what do you think would be the gains in political stability in Iraq if we just gave every tax paying family a check for $600? I think they would buy more bullets.