The media is sprouting wood over Sen. Clinton's lie about her so called dangerous trip to Bosnia.  It's nice to see the MSM actually report on a Clinton lie.  I can't imagine that anyone can rationalize her story which she told on at least three separate occasions from Dec. 2007 to just last week with the video that has been playing.  No snipers, no running with heads down, no immediately being whisked off to safety, just Clinton, her daughter and apparently, as Sinbad put it, "a guitar player and a comedian."

I hope the media will pay attention to an even more blatant Clinton lie that she told to win the Ohio Primary: that she had been against NAFTA since the beginning and was actually acting as a fifth column against NAFTA in her philanderer's, I mean husband's, White House.

John Nichol's "The Online Beat" in The Nation tells the real story, as re-created from Sen Clinton's schedule as First Lady just released.

Clinton has campaigned this year as a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Despite the fact that the deal was promoted and passed during the Bill Clinton presidency, and despite her own long record of praising NAFTA's "benefits," Clinton has been claiming on the current campaign trail that, "I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning."

Well, not exactly.  

In truth, she was an advocate for NAFTA within the Bill Clinton White House. White House records released last week confirm that Hillary Clinton spoke on behalf of NAFTA and participated in strategy sessions organized to figure out how to gain congressional approval of an agreement that was opposed by labor, farm, environmental and human-rights groups.

Clinton's flacks are trying hard to obfuscate.  They have called her meetings to strategize how to beat the opposition of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups as "drop bys".

One of the participants has a different meaning of the word ....."is" or "drop by".

The executive director of the United States Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel, Laura Jones, was at the meeting. She tells ABC News that it is "ludicrous" to suggest that Hillary Clinton was a half-hearted backer of the trade deal that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of unionized jobs, hobbled whole industries, saddled this country with record trade deficits, undermined protections for workers in the U.S. and abroad and forced Mexican farmers off the land and into the immigration stream.

"There was no question that everyone who spoke including the First Lady was for NAFTA, it was a rally on behalf of NAFTA to help it get passed," says Jones. "It's unquestionable."

Why hasn't any MSM outlet picked up on this one yet?  Could it be their corporate owners want this left alone.  Be that as it may, this is sijmply another in a long line of Clinton drive by--or drop by--shootings of the truth.

Here's the link.  http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=302252

Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic nomination is as narcissistic and unprincipled as her husband's 1992 Presidential campaign.  Maybe Joe Klein was correct in Primary Colors with his conclusion that the "Clintons" were so cocksure that they were right for America that they could justify any and every slimy, underhanded, and unprincipled tactic in order to win the prize.  My God, maybe the Republicans were right about their absolute lack of character.  (That fact doesn't make Republicans right about anything else).  And now the Huffington Post has the goods on Hillary's most blatant lie behind her fairy tale foreign policy experience.  She has referred to her trip to Bosnia as something she did because it was too dangerous to send the Bubba in Chief.  That's the smokescreen.  In fact, it was so dangerous she brought her sixteen year old daughter with her.  Now that's either unsound judgement to bring Chelsea or a giant lie about the danger and the foreign policy chops.  

The Huffington Post even has video that shows a little Bosnian girl giving Hillary flowers.  HuffPo wonders if the MSM will get on top of this most blatant of all the Clinton lies.  It is just another shining example of Senator Clinton's lack of character and the existence of only one principle...to get the nomination.   I, for one, will not vote for her if she succeeds in stealing the nomination.  I'll bet I won't be along.  

The Huffinton Post piece should be front and center on the Easter Sunday talk fests.

Here's a link.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/how-will-hillarys-bosnia_b_92844.html

Howard Wolfson has added more Clinton slime that will certainly have the consequence of insuring that no one other than Clinton Kool Aid drinkers will support her stolen nomination. ..I say stolen because, thanks to MSOC's math it is a fact that Clinton can't win the nomination, she can only steal it through malicious fear mongering and prevarication.

Wolfson compared Obama to Ken Starr.  Yesterday Obama commented that his campaign would more actively criticize Clinton's claims of national security experience and lack of transparency about her tax returns after her "slash and burn" tactics in Ohio and Texas.  In only what can be called a Rovian creation of a second reality Wolfson stated

When Senator Obama was confronted with questions over whether he was ready to be commander in chief and steward of the economy, he chose not to address the questions but to attack Senator Clinton, and that's what we're pointing out."

www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN0340558620080306?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&pageNumb er=1&virtualBrandChannel=10112

This incredible lunacy follows on the good Senator's scurillous statement about that hypothetical phone call in the middle of the night that she has the needed experience, McCain has the needed experience, and that Obama made a speech.    That comment is the direct cause of my decision to not vote for Clinton if she steals the nomination.  

Clinton, perhaps showing that she and her husband and other DLC'ers are in fact Republican-lite, has a page straight out of Karl Rove's slimeball politics:  viciously attack your opponenet and then when your opponent responds call that response a vicious personal attack.  My only hope is that because of Obama's calls for citizens to become citizens again and to educate themselves, that this slimeball Rovian tactic won't work.  

How a candidate runs their campaign is exactly how they will run the government and lead the country.  We show people who we are.  How we act is who we are, not what we say we are.  Senator Clinton has truly exposed herself.

I don't know about you, but I don't hear much about or from Ralph Nader except for every four years when he goes on his egomanaical, masturbatory quest for air time.

No matter how much he protests, Nader is the reason for the George Bush season.

Since politics is about consequences, not intentions, somebody tell me the fucking difference between a Nader campaign and a Forbes campaign.  I'll tell you, one of them got George Bush elected (well, with a lot of help from the Supreme Court).

I'm getting tired of the Democratic excuse-machine complaining about not having the votes to overcome the war criminal Bush's veto of any bill regarding getting our troops out of the Bush created quagmire in Iraq.  And they are afraid that the mean old Republicans will say that they don't support the troops if they vote to quit paying for the war criminal Bush's murderous lunacy.

So here Democrats; some schmoe writing in a frog pond will give you the strategy to defeat the war criminal Bush and his enablers the Republican Party.

1.  Pass a bill to continue funding to support the troops in ways the current Administration has never done, namely adequate equipment, ending stop loss, ending multiple deployments and ridiculously short periods of time at home, and fixing the overwhelmed health care system.

2.  Tie funding of the war criminal Bush's war to reversing all Bush tax cuts for his uber-wealthy supporters.  

The Democratic message should be...We will not abandon the troops who are asked to make the sacrifices the ruling class will not itself make (W.C. Bush, Cheney never serving for example).  But we will also not fund the war in Iraq into an idefinite future further expanding W.C. Bush's deficit.  Therefore, we will tax the wealthiest Americans who have been enriched by the W.C. Bush's unfair tax policies.  We will fund the war with a fair tax policy.  

Why doesn't this make sense?

Oh yeah, I almost forgot:

3.  We will impeach the war criminal Bush for his treason and high crimes of torture, concentration camps, destroying the judicial branch, theft of civil liberties, signing statements refusing to faithfully execute the laws of the country, .....add your own to this list.

I only watched the first 4 seconds of the war crminal Bush's speech.  I already knew the lies he was going to tell: the surge is working, he will listen to the military and do what they recommend (well okay, only the sycophants like Petraeus who will say what Bush wants to hear), we will stand down when they stand up, staying in Iraq is the key to fighting al Qaeda because al Qaeda is in Iraq.  

I also knew the lies he had already told beginning with the misreprentations of what had already happened in Iraq between 1991 and 2003.

*WMD in Iraq.   No, war criminal George, the containment of the inspection regime and our no fly zones was working and Clinton had actually destroyed most of them in the Desert Fox operation that Republicans called a disgraceful attempt to deflect attention from their honorable pursuit of blow jobbery inspired impeachment.

*They'll welcome us as liberators.  No, War Criminal Bush, thanks to your daddy's call for Shiite and Kurdish rebellion against Saddam when he had 500,000 troops in southern Iraq and his immoral and criminal failure to use those troops to support the rebellion that in fact occurred, Iraqis tend to believe that whatever comes out of a Bush mouth is bullshit.  Now 2/3rds of Americans realize that truth.

*We'll be in and out and Iraq will pay for the reconstruction.  Well, war criminal President Bush, you intrepid denouncer of nation buiding and craven accuser of Clinton for over extending our military through nation building in the Balkans, you missed that one too.

It's just too fucking depressing to list all the bullshit spewed by the war criminal Bush to go any futher.  So just one last comment.  In my profession we have a little mantra: "past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior."  Applied to the war criminal Bush, we can see that the cowardly hiding behind General Petraeus to avoid being held accountable for lying to start a war and then being too incompetent to both have a strategy and implement one is simply an extension of the young war criminal Bush hiding behind his father's influence to avoid the draft by getting unfairly placed into a National Guard unit and then by dodging even that service when it became apparent he would have to submit to drug testing.  

Here's what a speech offered by a President with courage would have said.  The war in Iraq will be long because of consequences of failure are grave.  The decisions and policies that got us there are mine alone.  We will all have to sacrifice.  Therefore I am asking Congress to initiate a draft.  We can no longer expect the poorest segments of our country (those who join the volunteer services) to make all of the sacrifice for benefits that only the wealthiest few enjoy.  I am encouraging my own children and the children of all member of Congress and of Senators to enlist tomorrow.

Instead, the cowardly, war criminal Bush hid behind Petraeus and Crocker after making sure that they would say what he wanted to hear.  

Instead of the war criminal's speech, I watched the HBO special produced by James Gandolfini about wounded vets from Iraq.  It was heartbreaking and infuriating.  The sacrifice of these fine young people is not worth one ounce of the profit that the war criminal Bush will gain by the increase in the price of a barrell of oil.  That the war criminal Bush will profit by their sacrifice is only one of the many reasons why I will only refer to this person as a war criminal from last night until the day I take my last breath.  

Impeach.  But Cheney first.

From AlterNet:

Paul Harris' piece asking, "Is the US Heading for 'Developing Nations' Inequality Levels?" drew lots of passionate comments, including this anecdote by ALANHESTER:

Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to have to explain to people from Canada and Europe about the homeless people in the US? I met an immigrant who put the issue succinctly: "In the UK, there is debate on healthcare, public transportation, the war in Iraq, how to integrate Muslims into society, and other quality of life issues. In America, we dabate about abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research. In short, the British debate over issues that are important to the quality of their lives, while Americans rarely debate about ANYTHING that will improve the quality of life for the populace as a whole. Katrina is instructive on this issue. Most of the debate by Americans is centered on who to blame, rather than how to rebuild New Orleans or how to prevent a recurrence. Meanwhile, the refugees from Katrina sit in armed trailer camps on top of toxic dumps................

'Nuf said.

The conventional wisdom and media mantra of our political landscape since about 1980 has been that the American population is conservative, which is why the Republican Party has been the dominant party during most of that period.   The conventional wisdom is that the New Deal has been undone by Republicans because the American people were fed up with the leftward swing of the late 1960's and 1970's reflected in hippies, yippies, the environmental movement, feminism, the New Left, all of which were said to have grown out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's.   Americans were scared or embittered or both by this movement away from "traditional values" whatever they are.  (I've always liked to point out to my "strict constructionist" friends that the original intent of the framers included slavery and the relegation of women to non-citizen status).

Rick Perlstein has an interesting article in the July 9 The Nation about a Pew Research Center for the People twenty year study of public opinion titled Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes 1987-2007.  Here are some highlights.

Is it the responsibility of government to care for those who can't take care of themselves? In 1994, the year conservative Republicans captured Congress, 57 percent of  those polled thought so.  Now, says Pew, it's 69 percent. (Even 58 percent of Republicans agree.  Would that some of them were in Congress.) The proportion of Americans who believe government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep is 69 percent, too - the highest since 1991.  Even 69 percent of self-identified Republicans - and 75 percent of small business owners! - favor raising the minimum wage by more than $2.

The study demonstrated that this wasn't just abstract warm fuzziness on the part of Americans.

A majority, 54 percent, think "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt" (it was 41 percent in 1994).  Two thirds want the government to guarantee health insurance for all citizens."

The National Election Studies survey substantiates Pew by finding that

more than twice as many American want "government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending" as want fewer services in order to reduce spending.

 

Gallup finds that over 50 percent of Americans say

they generally side with labor in disputes and only 34 percent with companies; 53 percent think unions help the economy and only 36 percent think they hurt.

How about tax cuts and abortion, those bastions of conservative ideology?

In 2005 an NBC News/ WSJ poll found that 53 percent of Americans thought the Bush tax cuts were "NOT WORTH IT because they have increased the deficit and caused cuts in government programs."

Another poll found that only 25 percent want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, and still another poll found that Americans reject "government-funded abstinence only sex education in favor of "more comprehensive sex education programs that include information on how to obtain and use condoms and other contraceptives" by 67 percent to 30 percent."

On those conservative centerpiece issues like amnesty for illegal immigrants and treating juvenile offenders as adults in the courts 62 percent of Americans favor amnesty and 89 percent of Americans favor rehabilitation over incarceration for juvenile offenders.

Two thirds of Americans think corporate profits are exorbitantly high and three quarters think that "it's really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer."

Here's a very long passage from Perlstein's article that addresses the issue of what Pew identified as "Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats."

When it comes to Americans who identify themselves as Democrats or leaning toward the Democrats as compared to those who identify themselves as Republicans or Republican leaning the percents are 50 percent Democrat and only 35 percent Republican.  In 2002 the percents were 43 and 43.
..again and again, the views of independents track the views of Democrats--more so, in fact, with every passing year.  Pew says it's "striking" that 57 percent of independents think government should aid more needy people even at the price of  higher debt.  In 1994 it was only 39 percent.  When asked their opinion of statement like "Business corporations make too much profit," independents answer the same way as Democrats: about 70 percent agree.  On questions like "Are you satisfied with the way things are going for you financially?" the chart is amazing: Republicans, independents and Democrats clustered together at 65 and 64 percent in 1994.  But Republicans have increasingly answered that question in the affirmative--81 percent in 2007.   Meanwhile, the lines for independents and Democrats headed down, down, down, nearly in lockstep, to 54 percent today.  

Pew says independents are thinking like Democrats, and that fewer and fewer want much to do with the Republican Party.  In 1994 independents gave the GOP a 68 percent approval rating; now only 40 percent do.  And the percentage of people who call themselves Republican has dropped from 29 percent in 2005 to 25 percent today.  But these people are not signing up as Democrats.  The proportion of those who call themselves Democrats has held steady, in the lower 30s."  (My emphasis).

Why is it that independents in America are predominantly progressive, hold values and positions that are associated with Democrats, but still refuse to call themselves Democrats?  Perlstein puts it like this.  Independents say to themselves

If only there was a party that thought like me--that was for harnessing the power of government to help the needy and protect the middle class; for reining in business excess; for fighting overseas threats through soft power instead of reckless force.

Perlstein says that independents don't see the Democratic Party as the answer to this question.  How can that be?

I think we frog ponders know the answer.  It's because the pattern of Democrats losing elections because they don't want to look like Democrats is nothing new and it's something independents get.

Well maybe it's time for Democrats to act and stand up like Democrats for all those values that those Americans who self-identify as independent share.

A big part of the problem is the poor quality of the corporate media.  Corporate media is an equal opportunity exercise in obtuseness.  Just as the media declared conservatism to be dead in 1964, it has declared, as late as 2006, that the American public is still too conservative for the Democratic Party.  

The commentariat tells itself a little fairy tale.  As a new report from the Campaign for American's Future....and Media Matters for America points out (The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth), when the GOP took over Congress in 1994, the New York Times front page claimed "The country has unmistakably moved to the right."  It hadn't; for an excellent study showing this wasn't so, see Ronald Rappaport and Walter Stone's Three's a Crowd, which shows how Newt Gingrich's Contract With America was tailored as an appeal to Perot voters, then retroactively spun as a mandate for conservatism.  Ten years later, when Bush beat Kerry by three points, Katie Couric asked on Today, "Does this election indicate that this country has become more socially conservative?" It was a rhetorical question, for the establishment had set the conclusion in stone long before.  Three weeks before the 2006 election Candy Crowley of CNN said Democrats were "on the losing side of the values debate, the defense debate and, oh yes, the guns debate." After election day Bob Schieffer of CBS said, "The Democrats victory was built on the back of more centrist candidates seizing Republican leaning districts......John Harris of the Washington Post, now of The Politico, said "This is basically not a liberal country."  Concludes the Media Matters/Campaign for America's Future report, "Democratic victories are understood as a product of the Democrats moving to the right, while Republican victories are the product of a conservative electorate.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  As anyone familiar with Presidential elections, the media operates by fairy tale.  It constructs the "good guy" Bush, the "serial liar" Gore even though both fairy tales have no truth in them.  Or the fairy tale about the "values voters" that cost Kerry the 2004 election.  None of these truth resistant fairy tales accurately describe reality which is ostensibly the raison d'etre of the media.

The historical fact is that in 2000 the Supreme Court trampled on the will of the American People and installed a fascistic band of conservatives in power to accoomplish an agenda that is in stark contradiction to the values of America.

The way to victory for Democrats is to simply be progressives again: be for helping the poor and not the rich (the rich will always be able to buy people to help them), be for protecting the middle class and not the investor class, be for a living wage to support a family, be for a rational defense policy and not a messianic wish-fulfillment based war policy.  And one last thing: be for impeaching Cheney and Bush before their term is up so that they can't complete their destruction of our Constitution and our Republic.

Noted historian of American Presidents James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn have written a book entitled The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America.  They also wrote an article for the LA Times which I found in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  While they say nothing about our current President that Frog Ponders don't already know, they do an interesting comparison between Bush and FDR.

They contrast the openess of FDR in bringing people with a wide diversity of opinions and perspectives and political party affiliations to serve on his Cabinet, and Bush's secrecy and a Cabinet of clones.  

They contrast the vibrancy of FDR's Cabinet meetings with the brevity and ideological tone of Bush's.

On the one hand,

Roosevelt believed in strong, collective leadership. His Cabinet was broad and inclusive. Relishing experimentation and the lively competition of ideas, he took talent where he could find it. His secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace, and his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, were progressive Republicans, and Frances Perkins, his secretary of labor, was an Independent. His secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and his secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, were Republicans -- he even chose Republican Harlan Fiske Stone as chief justice in 1941.

On the other,

Recent presidencies have seen the Cabinet decline as a vehicle for collective leadership, but under Bush it has reached its nadir because the president prizes above all ideological uniformity. Cabinet meetings are reported to be brief and perfunctory, with no deep discussions or exploration of alternative policies.

They describe a more disturbing quality of the Bush Presidency is the reduction of even his truncated and passive Cabinet to an even smaller "Kitchen Cabinet" made up only of Dick Cheney.

But Bush's Kitchen Cabinet is rather odd. It has only one member, Vice President Dick Cheney, backed up by hard-core conservative White House staffers, working in secrecy. With little question, Cheney is the most powerful vice president in our history. He controls a staff of true believers, issues his own ideological pronunciamentos and maintains his own alliances with key conservatives in Congress. White House watchers speculate that, behind the scenes, Cheney directs policy.

And they conclude,

The Bush-Cheney presidency -- shaped and led by ideologues who have rejected the creative, collective leadership that might be supplied by a vibrant, diverse Cabinet -- has immobilized itself in its own narrowness and extremism. The test of leadership is not simply calling oneself "the decider." The test is whether leaders can mobilize followers who will sustain them in the tough decisions that lie ahead.

All of this is a nice academic way to say what I would rather put a little more crassly.  We are being led by a petulant little rich boy who, if we won't let him be "the decider" and we don't play his way, he'll just go home and tell Daddy.  The only saving grace of this little fascist may be that he is just so fucking incompent.

Here's a link to the article.

http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1306202.html

Having lived in Louisiana for almost 9 years from '97 to '05, I was thrilled to learn that David Vitter, Republican Senator from LA, has to explain to his wife and children why he is such a shitty husband.  And I am thrilled to apply to this asshole of a husband the same criterion I applied to another asshole of a husband Bill Clinton.  He shouldn't be impeached.  He should, however, be made to march in next year's Mardi Gras parade dressed as a penis.

Here's how Vitter pontificated about Clinton in the Times Picayune.

Some current polls may suggest that people are turned off by the whole Clinton mess and don't care -- because the stock market is good, the Clinton spin machine is even better or other reasons. But that doesn't answer the question of whether President Clinton should be impeached and removed from office because he is morally unfit to govern.

The writings of the Founding Fathers are very instructive on this issue. They are not cast in terms of political effectiveness at all but in terms of right and wrong -- moral fitness. Hamilton writes in the Federalists Papers (No. 65) that impeachable offenses are those that "proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

Regardless of what I think Vitter should do, the more important question is how can Vitter not resign after his grosteque moral failure?  How can Vitter not live up to his own representation of the Founders and act "in terms of right and wrong -- moral fitness?"

C'mon Dave.  Tuck it in your pants and go home.  It's time for you to leave the Senate.  In your own terms, you have no moral fitness to lead or to govern.  It's time for you to quit.  

But Dave, I know you are so mired in hypocrisy and moral relativism that you won't be able to disentangle your own desires from your professed principles.  

I've got your costume for next year's Mardi Gras right here.

I know this is probably old news, but David Corn's review of Michael Moore's latest movie Sicko is .....well, you just gotta read it.

http://www.alternet.org/movies/55049/?page=3

Promoted by Steven D with minor edits to links (not content)

Today the U.S. Supreme Court made it crystal clear that it is the court for corporate power and wealth in opposition to free speech.

LINK The New York Times's article on SCOTUS decisions tells how one will allow corporations and unions to pour "issue ad" money into campaigns while the other denies high school students right to free speech. Onething about Republicans whether legislator, executive, or justice when you put stick your money up their nether end you get what you want to hear coming out of the other.

With absolutely no clue about the hypocrisy of these two decisions,

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that, when regulating what can be said in a campaign and when it may be said, "the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it."

The other case was an actual case of political speech not moeny masquerading as speech.  In Alaska a student held up a sign that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" accross the street from his school when the Olympic torch went by.  He was punished by the school, a punishment SCOTUS upheld.

the court found that a high school principal and school board did not violate a student's rights by punishing him for displaying the words "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" on a banner across the street from the school as the 2002 Olympic torch parade went by.

When the case was argued on March 19, Kenneth W. Starr argued -- successfully, as it turned out -- on behalf of the school authorities that, whatever rights students may have to express themselves, thumbing their noses at school officials' anti-drug messages is not one of them.

If that isn't in your face fuck-you fascism, well hell, I ran out of F's.  When the Supreme Court under the new Court-meister Roberts makes it so clear where it stands, one can only wonder why any Democrat voted for, let's see, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, the fuck-you fascist four.

With this court I had better watch out. I can't actually say they are the in your face, fuck-you, fascist four.  But I can pay someone to say it on TV.

I was listening to NPR about noon central and caught an interview with a guy (didn't catch the name) who had been held in Guantanamo Bay by the President and Vice-President of Torture.  I didn't catch how or if this guy described his treatment.  Suffice it to say that being detained for who knows what for who knows how long, without access to a lawyer or any  means of letting one's family know one's condition would be, well, like how Senator McCain spent seven years of his life in a North Vietnamese camp.  Or, like the American embassy staff held hostage by the lunatic right wing Islamic fundamentalists in Iran.

This detainee, who is now out, wrote several poems while in captivity.  Human, touching poems, one of which was written in repsonse to a poem written by this man's female jailer who was a reservist from Alabama.  She was also plucked out of her life and stuck in Guantanamo for who knows how long.  At least she knew the why and had access to her family.  Her poem was about how much she had in common with this prisoner.  His poem was the same.  

It's humbling and emotionally and spiritually overpowering to me that human beings can dig through the shit and find common meaning.  A twentieth century political philsopher said that we bear our citizenship as a burden in actualizing our humanity.  At least one Alabama reservist has made it through the shit to make a human contact with an "enemy."

So my questions for Senator McCain are asked with heartfelt, genuine human interest, not for any "gotcha" attempt or to make a political point.  Senator, don't you feel a connection to this prisoner? Can't you understand his anger and bewilderment? Do you feel as badly as I do that we both must bear this systematic mistreatment of our fellow human beings, ostensibly done in our names, as a condition of actualizing our own humanity? How can you not speak out against this?

George Bush says he going on offense rather than defense, he's going to use the military rather than the police to deal with terrorists whom he has defined as enemy combatants rather than criminals, he says he will use any and all methods including the most anti-American and inhumane tools of torture to fight the enemy, that it isn't important to determine who did what to whom but it's important to just kick somebody's ...anybody's..... ass, and the American people said, "Cool."  How can this be?  

Because Americans believe the message of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies; that violence committed by the pre-defined hero against the pre-defined enemy is redemptive.  That the murder committed by the Clint Eastwood character is different from the murder committed by the Eli Wallach character.  (Apparently with Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood has become aware of the lies about violence which he told for most of his career; that violence is not redemptive or heroic, it is just sad, pathetic and de-humanizing.)  

These twentieth century American movie versions of the myth of regeneration through violence are built upon the predominant strain of American self-definition. Where did that myth come from?  It came from the attempts by the Europeans who invaded North America to make sense of the lives they created here.  The European universe of the mind which they carted over to North America with them didn't explain life here.  On one level, our forebears created a Constitution to fit part of that new life.  They also created a new self-definition of what a Frenchman named Crevecoeur who came to America called, "this new man, this American."  

In a nutshell, Europeans who came to America discovered that the European symbolic universe they brought with them didn't work so well in North America.  

John Winthrop described their invasion of America as an enterprise that would be "a city upon a hill," a beacon that would shine from New England back to the Old England about how to build a perfect society.  The Puritans didn't emigrate to find the freedom to practice their religion.  They emigrated to form a utopian society based upon the exclusive practice of their religion.  (The lunatic, religious right in America has a tradition as long as any other.)   Puritans wanted to replicate the journey into the wilderness by the Israelites who, according to the founding myth of Israel, escaped from bondage in Egypt to freedom in Canaan.  In both instances, this was not a peaceful emigration into a wilderness but an invasion and conquering of previously established societies.  Canaan was not empty.  Neither was America

It is wrong to think that the Puritans (and this goes for the Spanish in Central and South America) didn't know anyone lived in America.  Of course they knew.  Europeans had incorporated the existence of the "new world" into their symbolic universe ever since Columbus's "discovery" of what he thought was the Indies.  Hence the invention of a new "race" of people that Europeans called "Indians."  

(Parenthetically, this is precisely when Europeans invented racism.  The symbols Indian and Negro were created to deny the humanity of the people thus defined.  Indians and Negroes were not part of human civilization.  They were defined to be part of nature.  This is what makes the European symbols of "Indian" and "Negro" different from that of, for example, the Greek symbol of "barbaros."  For the Greeks, barbarians were simply people from other human societies.  Our connotations of barbarians as rustic, uncouth, classless, well "barbaric," are equivalent in that the humanity of those who are different is never in doubt.  Europeans who invented racism looked back into their past to find justifications that did not exist.  Racism denies a shared humanity.  But this is a whole other diary.)

In order for America to be the wilderness that Puritans were to immigrate into, the people already populating America had to be redefined as simply aspects of the wilderness, as parts of nature rather than of a shared humanity.   As such, the Pequot, Narragansett, Mohican, Lakota, Arapaho, Apache, Hopi, Nez Perce, (and many others) were all redefined in the European/American symbolic universe as "Indians," as creatures of the wilderness who could then be conquered in the same manner as one felled the trees to create farmland, without remorse as part of creating one's own civilization.  The humanity of the indigenous people was denied through their re-creation as denizens of the wilderness, as demons, as inhuman.  This could lead a well respected Puritan cleric, Cotton Mather, to gleefully equate the murderous arson of a Narragansett city which burned women and children in their homes as having the aroma of roasting "Westphalian gammons."  

Imagine the impact on the Puritan symbolic universe when they discovered that they could not survive in their utopian, new world without incorporating aspects of the societies which already existed here and whose very existence as human societies the Puritans denied.   This discovery manifested itself in the Salem witchcraft hysteria.   How else could they explain that those living on the edges, on the frontier, were incorporating "Indian" ways to not only survive but to live well.  To the Puritan, they were becoming, by definition, demonic.  

This transformation from demonic to "this new man, this American" was the beginning of the new American myth of regeneration through violence.  The re-definition left the Puritan symbolic universe in ruins because they could only define those who were not themselves as demonic, but it created the new American mythical self-understanding.  As Europeans became Americans, as they incorporated more and more of "Indian" ways of living and surviving in the "new world" they had to somehow redefine themselves from being demons and denizens of the wilderness in the European symbolic universe to being "Americans." Violence against the "Indians" was the means of this transformation.  

More in Part Three.