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December 21, 2005

Dumb and dumberer.

I've been hesitant to say this because I fear it's going to sound arrogant, and I don't mean it that way. Really I don't.

It's just...well...

I'm afraid I might be smarter than anyone in a position of power.

I know, I know, the obvious response is something like "well, if you're so smart, why aren't you in charge?" I don't know. I hope I'm wrong. But the thing is...

I knew the Bush administration was lying about Iraq.

And it seems like there's a lot of "well, we simply couldn't have known the administration was lying" coming from Democrats and moderate, or at least non-lockstep, Republicans. That's been the case for a while. The conventional wisdom seems to be that "everyone" thought Saddam had big scary banned weapons.

To some extent, that argument seems circular to me. Why did everyone think that? Because the administration kept saying it. Compounding the circularness of this, they also fed stories to sympathetic and very uncritical reporters like Judith Miller, then of the New York Times, then pointed to those stories as proof that "everyone" agreed with them.

But not everyone did think that. Even in the fall of 2002, before the new round of weapons inspections started, some people--like former U.N. chief inspector Scott Ritter, who would seem to have had some relevant experience in the matter--were saying Saddam didn't have anything. Should we have taken him uncritically at his word? Maybe not, but why is it we ignored him?

I admit, I thought Saddam probably had something. I didn't support war and I wasn't scared of Iraq, but I thought we'd probably find 20-year-old vats of mustard gas, or jars of actual mustard, or something, and the administration would point to them and beat their chests and proudly declare "well, good thing we saved democracy from THAT, huh?"

But, you know, when we sent the inspectors back in, they kept saying they couldn't find anything. And the fact is, by all accounts I've seen, you can't hide a nuclear program from that kind of inspection regimen. You probably can't hide anything threatening from that kind of inspection regimen. So, really, we all should have known then. And...some of us did. But apparently those in charge had no idea. And that's what worries me.

I thought the jig was up when Colin Powell went to the U.N. and made that presentation that was, at the time, hailed as "persuasive." It wasn't persuasive to me. He showed what looked like aerial photos of Winnebagos, and spouted stuff about aluminum tubes that had been discredited months earlier, and I kind of stared and went "if this is all they've got, they don't have anything!" And then every "moderate" liberal columnist in America declared "oh, well, now I'm persuaded! Roll out the tanks!" I didn't understand and I still don't.

But even before that, they should have known.

They should have known before they voted for the war resolution. Many of them have, since, used some species of the argument that they weren't voting for war, they were voting to give Bush the authority to use force in order to force Saddam to show his hand and let inspectors back in, and it was, like, a complete shock when Bush actually used that authority to rush the country into a war.

I knew he was going to do that. Didn't you, really? This is a guy who told several senators, months earlier, "f**k Saddam, we're takin' him out." This is a guy who had filled his administration with people who had, as part of the Project For a New American Century, been agitating for military removal of Saddam for over a decade at that point. There was simply no chance, given the authority to invade, they weren't going to use it. Cheney didn't even want to send inspectors in, he just wanted to roll in the troops. Powell forced the issue. As far as I can tell, it was his only victory, and it did no one any good at all.

I could tell all of this at the time. And, even more than that, didn't it just, in some ill-defined way, have the whiff of lies? The facts didn't add up, but it was more than that. I don't know. I guess I can't explain it. But I don't think this is unique to me. I think Americans have a natural sense for when politicians are lying to us. Maybe I was just one of the few Americans not scared out of my mind by 9/11, and therefore one of the few who didn't temporarily suspend that sense out of a deep psychological need to believe the people in power had my best interests at heart.

I don't know.

All I know is, I knew they were lying. And apparently very few prominent Democrats did. Or at least they claim they didn't. Maybe they did, but considered their own short-term political advantage more important than thousands upon thousands of lives. That would be even worse.

But they say you can't make a man understand something if his career depends on his not understanding it. (It applies equally to women.)

So apparently, I'm (heavy sigh) smarter than those in the government representing my interests. I'm not congratulating myself, here. It really honestly scares me. Because I'm not that smart. Certainly it is reasonable for me to expect those in charge to be smarter and better informed than I am.

Down with dumbness. Maybe that should be our new rallying cry.

September 27, 2005

The times, they are a-frustratin'.

(This essay has been corrected; as a number of readers pointed out, I confused "RU-486," the French "abortion pill," with the "morning after pill," when in fact the two are different. Many apologies. I do try to be accurate.)

FEMA has just rehired disgraced former director Mike Brown as a "consultant" helping investigate why he botched the Katrina response.

The Bush administration replaced the Director of Women's Health, who resigned in protest of the FDA's anti-scientific rejection of the "morning after" pill, with someone who was not only a man, but a veterinarian. When there was an outcry, they quickly appointed a woman and denied they'd ever appointed the first guy even though they'd already publicly announced it.

George W. Bush is claiming that Katrina proves we must win the War on Terror because our enemies are the kind of people who "look at Katrina and wish they'd caused it."

Bush also canceled a trip to Texas, pre-Rita, because it was too sunny, and his people felt that having him photographed on a sunny day made for a bad photo op because it did not make it clear that a hurricane was approaching.

A majority of Americans now think Iraq was a mistake and want to start bringing troops home, but Democratic politicians are still terrified of looking "weak" and won't touch the antiwar movement.

There's a hundred other things that are impossible to satirize.

And of course that's the whole thing. I know it's kind of a truism--one I've made fun of before--that politics always serves up a huge dose of absurdity, but the truth is the current environment has begun to wear on me. Because the absurdity is not only nonstop, but regards matters of real consequence. Areas where failure, hackery, swagger, the dismantling of areas of government in which I genuinely believe...it's all deadly serious. This is not the frivolous investigations into nothing, sex scandals, and general nonsense of the 1990s. No...this is stuff that matters, and it's relentless, brutal news with no one paying any visible price. And it's wearing on me.

Not only that, but I've become unhappy with the work I've been doing on this strip. I think three a week, at least for now, is too many. It's caused the strip to become a bit more...reactive. I feel like my insight has become limited, and a lot of the time the strips are just me reacting. It may sometimes be amusing, but it's not as insightful as I'd like.

So what I'm going to do to give myself a break is, starting next week, I'll post one strip a week, here. I think I'll do them in color, because that's fun for me, and at a rate of one a week--there really is currently no professional reason to do any more than that--and this will give me the opportunity to adequately process ideas, do more elaborate, insightful cartoons, actually give you what I think instead of just how angry I am.

I think it will be a good thing. Post day will be Tuesday. I'll see you then!

September 1, 2005

The incompetence of King George.

The irony is enough to make you vomit.

Today, September 1, the Department of Homeland Security launched National Preparedness Month.

Preparedness for what? The display of unpreparedness going on in Louisiana is greatest human tragedy on American soil in my lifetime so far. How dare these people talk to us about preparedness. People are dying amidst disease, squalor and misery because of their unpreparedness.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm sorry. I'm really angry.

What we keep hearing, from the administration but also from people who should know better, is that this is not the time to "play politics" with the disaster.

Well, first of all, who's playing? I could not possibly be more serious.

And second, why do so many people have this idea that politics are a game? Some sort of popularity contest, unrelated to people's actual lives? I have news for you. Politics are the means by which we select the leaders who will, in turn, make policy. Policy affects your life. At times like these, policy can be the difference between life and death.

Poll after poll shows that people agree with the Democrats on almost every major issue. We would be a liberal country if we voted for the leaders who would actually enact policies we agree with. But we don't vote that way for some reason. You saw it in the last election. It was all "I'm going to vote for Bush because you know where you stand with him." And "I'm voting for Bush because he makes me feel safe."

It is not the quality of a leader's Clint Eastwood impression that keeps you safe, people. It is the quality of his (or her) policies. And this administration's policies are terrible. Al Gore's would not have been. John Kerry's would not have been. You would have agreed more with their policies and priorities. They would not have been asleep at the switch. America, your nearsightedness in returning this man to power made this crisis worse. It made people die.

George W. Bush said on "Good Morning America" that no one anticipated that the levees might break. That is flat out false. In fact, many people anticipated it. FEMA, in 2001, identified a category 5 hurricane destroying the levees and flooding New Orleans as one of the three major disasters most likely to befall the United States. One of the others was a terrorist attack on New York.

Well, guess what? We've had both. Guess what Bush did to prepare? Nothing. Then the administration looked us straight in the eye, both times, and said no one could have anticipated that this would happen. Well, bullshit, George. It's bullshit and I don't think you care.

This one is even worse, because in 2003 and 2004, the Bush administration specifically cut the funds for strengthening those specific levees, because it needed the money for Iraq. It's ironic that we were told, ad nauseam, that we had to invade Iraq because it posed a real threat to our safety and we had to be proactive. So, in the name of that, the administration took away the funds that might have prevented a far more likely tragedy from claiming so many lives, as it is now in the process of doing.

And who normally deals with these tragedies? Well, the National Guard. That's why we have a National Guard. It isn't designed to fight wars. It's designed to deal with domestic disaster scenarios. But nearly half the Louisiana National Guard is in Iraq.

George's vanity war and his neo-imperialist fantasy of remaking the middle east and his obsessive desire to slash his friends' taxes all came before these people's lives. And now they're dying. Old people. Children. Sick people. Mostly poor people, who couldn't escape, and, when the hurricane was bearing down on them, got no governmental help in doing so. And now they're dying, George. Dying.

Playing politics? George, you've spent your whole presidency invoking 9/11. You've spent your whole presidency trying to claim anyone who doesn't support your policies doesn't care if 9/11 happens again. This despite the fact that the other side tried to stand with you right after that tragedy happened. They ignored your policy failures; the fact that Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, gave you specific warnings about bin Laden and plans for dealing with them; FEMA's warnings that such an attack would be a huge disaster; and the fact that Hart-Rudman warned explicitly in Spring 2001 that one was coming. And you did nothing, but the Democrats let it slide because no one thought it was the time to dwell on past failures.

Well, now we're in it again, and in a lot of ways this one is even worse, and you not only did nothing to prepare, you impeded others' ability to do so. And again we're being told this isn't the time. Well, when is the time? How many times do you have to get people killed before we're allowed to talk about it? How many dead babies do we have to see on TV before criticizing the people who let it happen stops being "shrill"? I've had enough.

America, to you I say, this is proof that your policymakers should be people who are competent and whose policies you actually support. If you install a government because, gosh, they look likable and macho on television, you're going to get lousy policy, and people will suffer and die. It is not a game, it is not an abstraction, and you need to stop treating it so casually.

George, to you I say, we are not playing politics. You're the one who's playing. Playing golf, playing guitar in photo ops, acting like nothing was wrong the day after Katrina hit, the day the levees broke and New Orleans started to disappear. Giving speeches comparing yourself to FDR while lives were being washed into the Gulf of Mexico. You're the unserious party here. You don't get to base your whole career on playing politics, then urge others not to do so the moment politics becomes inconvenient.

People are dead because of your policies. If you really do talk to God, I hope he gives you an earful for this one.

June 3, 2005

Time we had another Watergate.

So. Watergate.

It's funny. I'd been planning for a while to write something about presidential impeachment and how we should have one now. And then, while I'm processing my arguments in preparation for typing them up, Deep Throat, apparently a.k.a. W. Mark Felt, former FBI official, outs himself.

It's disappointing. I was hoping Deep Throat would turn out to be Ben Stein, or Pat Buchanan, or somebody. It's a mystery that's older than I am; the solution should have been cool.

Stein and Buchanan, though, jumped on the bandwagon of Nixon officials being paraded all over television calling Mark Felt a traitor and all sorts of other things. That's kind of disturbing, isn't it? The suggestion that Felt's first loyalty was not to his country, but to Nixon. Remind you of anyone? Like, say, the man currently sitting in Nixon's old chair?

This brings me to impeachment. Why is this not being discussed outside of liberal circles? As Bob Dole used to say, where's the outrage?

Nixon resigned before he could be impeached, but the House of Representatives had already drafted an article of impeachment against him, for obstruction of justice.

When Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998, the charge was perjury--that he'd gotten a blow job and then lied about it under oath (ooooo, now that's going to bring the republic down). As much as I hate to draw any comparisons between Nixon's near-impeachment, which was deadly serious, and Clinton's, which was the single stupidest thing Congress has ever done, the common thread is that in both cases, it wasn't the crime, it was the coverup.

So let's drag the other impeached president, Andrew Johnson, into this. Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act. In other words, with Johnson, it actually was the crime.

Which brings us to George W. Bush.

Former Nixon Counsel John Dean, who would know, has written an entire book alleging that the abuses of power committed by the Bush people are "Worse Than Watergate." It shouldn't surprise anyone. Look at the number of people--Rumsfeld, Cheney, and a then-budding dirty trickster named Karl Rove, to name the three biggest--who got their start in the Nixon/Ford administrations who are now serving in this one.

There are two lessons they could have taken from this. One--don't engage in dirty tricks ("ratfucking" was the self-inflicted term for it, in those days). The other was how not to get caught. How to insulate yourself in layers of absolute loyalty, how not to leave a trail (not tape recording yourself talking about crimes you're planning to commit is a big one), how to control the media so the likes of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein don't come around asking uncomfortable questions.

They learned that second lesson. Which is why they've been able to abuse their power every bit as badly as Nixon did--at the very least--and not get called on it.

I'm with Dean, though. I think what we have now is worse. (And it makes Clinton look like Gandhi.) Consider: no one died as a result of Watergate. Watergate was a two-bit burglary in a clumsy attempt at election tampering. Yes, it was an insult to democracy as a threat to the Republic.

But Bush lied us into a war. The Downing Street Memo proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt. That the media have not been splashing it all over the front pages is possibly the saddest indictment of our press in a century.

Because it proves an impeachable crime. One for which thousands of people, including over 1600 Americans, have died. The Downing Street Memo proves that Bush, when he went before Congress and said things about WMDs, Al Qaeda ties and his own intentions, violated the False Statements Accountability Act of 1996.

The act makes it a crime "knowingly and willfully (1) to falsify, conceal or cover up a material fact by trick, scheme or device; (2) to make any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3) to make or use any false writing or document knowing it to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; with respect to matters within the jurisdiction of the legislative, executive, or judicial branch."

It seems like an open and shut case. Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against President George Walker Bush.

How about it, Congress? Do you believe in the system? We're waiting.

May 12, 2005

WWII--without those pesky Democrats

It has been said (I forget by whom) that Iraq war supporters were longing for a World War II moment.

You certainly heard World War II invoked a lot in the leadup to the war. We kept hearing that Saddam was the new Hitler, that people who weren't for invading Iraq were cowards and "appeasers" like Neville Chamberlain, and that George W. Bush was the new Winston Churchill for bravely standing up to tyranny.

Let's be clear about this: George W. Bush is not Winston Churchill. Saddam Hussein was not Hitler. Jacques Chirac is not Neville Chamberlain. The Iraq war is not World War II. Absolutely no part of that swaggering foregone conclusion of a military campaign to oust an essentially unarmed two-bit dictator was anything like that democracy-saving war to stop a madman who had conquered most of Europe and murdered millions.

And it is a massive insult to pretend otherwise. It always was. It is a massive insult to the leaders of the time who rose to that daunting challenge. It is a massive insult to the soldiers who died in that war. It is a massive insult to all our intelligence.

I understand why the hawks were so determined to try and create a WWII moment, though. People remember WWII fondly as a moment of moral clarity (whether or not it seemed that way at the time). Liberals and conservatives alike (well, except for a few insane Hitler-loving conservatives, like Charles Lindbergh and Pat Buchanan) agreed, and agree still, that it was a fight that needed to be fought. We haven't seen the like of it since. Vietnam was totally different. Vietnam divided the country, and made a lot of people very skeptical about large military engagements.

Neoconservatives (it's almost silly to discuss foreign policy in terms of "liberal" and "conservative," ideologies mostly defined by domestic politics, but that's another essay) understandably want to get back to a World War II kind of environment, because they want our military to get engaged in all kinds of idealistic conflicts and they want us all to get behind them. So they want a WWII moment to erase Vietnam from the national consciousness.

But this all comes into conflict with something else they want to erase: the President who fought Hitler. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He's a liberal icon, possibly history's greatest Democratic president (seriously, is there even any competition?). His legacy is World War II, but also, and (at least for me) more significantly, social security, the 40-hour work week, the right to unionize--you know, the entire New Deal.

And it's no secret that Republicans want to undo as much of the New Deal as they possibly can. They can't say it, of course. At least, the ones in charge can't, but it's obvious to most of us, which is why the plan to "save" social security by killing it is going nowhere.

These are people who want Roosevelt off the dime, and Reagan on it. They want Democrats' biggest icon to disappear, and his domestic legacy dismantled.

Ah, but how to square that with all the WWII rhetoric? Simple. Make FDR a coward for not taking on Stalin right after the war. Here's George W. Bush, on Yalta:

The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

Yup. That's right. According to Bush, with seven million Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, with the country, the continent and the world exhausted already from half a decade of brutal war, FDR was a big pansy for not getting into a war with Stalin. Apparently we still had too many young men who hadn't been killed off.

Seriously, does anyone think we should've turned right around and gotten into World War III before World War II had even ended? We hadn't defeated Japan yet, at the time. The very idea is stupid.

Especially considering the source. It's interesting that George W. Bush, who we're always being told is this era's Churchill, is now dissing Churchill for the Yalta agreement. But obviously Churchill is just collateral damage. FDR is the real target. This way, they can have WWII without venerating FDR.

What's most insulting and absurd about all this is that Bush evidently thinks that having toppled a pathetic, virtually unarmed regime, then done a really terrible job of repairing the occupied country in two years since, qualifies him to criticize the men who stood up to Hitler.

George: Your misguided desert adventure is not World War II. You are not Churchill, no matter what that deluded old fool Zell Miller says. And you are unfit to lick Franklin Delano Roosevelt's shoes.

April 22, 2005

If I could put Time in a bottle, I'd never take the cork out.

How pathetic is the state of modern American journalism?

Ann Coulter was just on the cover of Time.

It was also the second straight issue in which Time sang Coulter's praises, whitewashed her record, whitewashed her disregard for facts, whitewashed her record of saying insanely violent and menacing things about anyone who isn't on her side politically.

If there's some usefulness in presenting the most caustic, horrible person we have allowed into our public discourse in my lifetime (at least) as charming, funny, honest, and a lot of other things she distinctly isn't, I'm failing to see it.

(Incidentally, now that she's been all over television talking-head shows for years and written up in two consecutive issues of Time, can conservatives please stop insisting that liberals who dislike Coulter are the only ones paying attention to her? Because it's patently not true.)

I don't feel compelled to run off a list of Coulter lies here, because if you want to know, Google should provide plenty of that. Or just try this list from the Washington Monthly's archives. Or visit The Daily Howler for a more specific dissection of Time's laughable attempt to pass this off as journalism.

Suffice it to say that a 2002 Columbia Journalism Review examination of 40 claims made in her loopy rant posing as a book, "Slander," found that 21 of the claims would not have passed a basic fact check at any respectable publication.

I found all sorts of information about this, but Time's reporter claimed he couldn't locate many outright errors by Coulter. That's...jaw-droppingly lazy journalism. And apparently no one at Time saw any problem.

For the non-journalists out there, yes, a record of being factually wrong over 50% of the time is generally considered kind of bad. If Time were in the business of actual journalism, there's simply no way someone like Coulter would have any business being on the cover of it unless she went on a shooting spree.

Which I wouldn't rule out, frankly. That's the other thing about Coulter. Her "humor" (I am told she's supposed to be funny) frequently involves violence. She says, for instance, that the only real way to talk to liberals is with a baseball bat. She said the country needed to execute John Walker Lindh to send a message to liberals that they could also be killed, because otherwise they'd all turn into traitors. She says, often, that being a liberal is the exact same thing as being guilty of treason, which, she'd be the first to remind you, is a capital offense.

Ha ha. Isn't that hilarious? Not to mention a really useful and constructive contribution to the national discourse.

Now, consider: the Coulter cover appeared on April 19, 2005. Guess what happened on April 19, 1995? That's right--Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

So on the tenth anniversary, who does Time put on its cover?

A woman who once said "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

She later clarified this by saying, of that statement, "Of course I regret it. I should have added, 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.'"

Oh, good. That'll certainly ease the insult to the loved ones of the Oklahoma City dead, 19 of whom were little kids.

The editors of Time need to apologize to the people of Oklahoma City. Then they need to apologize to the country. Then they need to fire themselves.

I am officially through with Time. Yeah, this was the final straw, but the truth is Time is one of those big mainstream media outlets that seems to bend over backwards to avoid being accused of being liberal. Consider their columnist roster. There are literally no meaningful liberal voices in their pages (even Newsweek publishes a few). What passes for a liberal voice is Joe Klein, who's a "liberal" of the type who seem to spend all their time bending over backwards to prove they're "fair-minded" by criticizing their own side. He's the type of liberal who exists just so right-wingers can say "even the liberal Joe Klein says..."

Meanwhile, they happily publish the likes of Charles Krauthammer, who spent years abusing his psychiatry degree and journalistic position to insist that Al Gore was clinically insane.

Imagine. Time has become a publication that believes Al Gore is unhinged...and Ann Coulter is not.

It boggles the mind.

April 1, 2005

But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out?

Today's comments were inspired by a discussion that took place both in my LiveJournal (a place I normally try to keep free of politics, because, well, it's like bringing your work home) and in the IDT forum. I'm writing about it here because it made me think.

I want to talk about the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

God, but we spend a lot of time arguing about what the founders meant by that. And whether it applies to today's world.

Personally, although it's really not one of my pet issues, I'm in favor of more gun control than we have at present, and a lot more of it than the NRA wants. I mean, the NRA recently objected to the idea that people on a terrorism watch list should be prevented from buying guns. People are weird about that particular freedom--if people were as irrational about the first amendment as they are about the second, there'd be a powerful organization out there agitating for the right to commit libel and shout "fire" in crowded theaters.

(An opponent of gun registration tried to make some sort of point to me recently by saying he would support registering guns the day I supported registering voters. Think about that for a moment, and then weep for American democracy, which only works when people, like, know things. The silver lining: if he actually doesn't know about voter registration, at least his vote probably hasn't been counting.)

People make all sorts of claims, supported by all sorts of quotes from all sorts of founders. But the basic argument by the many, many people who interpret the second amendment very broadly is that the founders wanted us to be as heavily armed as possible in case the government ever became tyrannical and we had to overthrow it.

Mind you, even such people, who claim to believe in unrestricted access to arms, draw a line, just like the rest of us--Michael Moore, in "Bowling For Columbine," memorably got unconvicted Oklahoma City co-conspirator James Nichols to assert that the government should restrict access to nuclear weapons because "there's a lot of wackos out there."

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that the founders did want us to have unrestricted access to guns. And let's say that the technological shift, from muskets to anti-tank weapons and machine guns and whatever the deuce we have now (I'm not up on my gun technology), would not have altered this view.

There are quotes to support it--some of the founders were very enthusiastic about violent revolution. Jefferson seems to have thought we should have them periodically to keep the government on its toes. Adams and some of the others were less so, but let's ignore them. Let's say Jefferson is the final word, and let's imagine Jefferson walks into my apartment right now and tells me he thinks we should all be able to have guns so we can overthrow the government if we have to.

I would tell him he was wrong.

The debate over this issue doesn't address that possibility nearly enough, in my opinion. It's all about what the founders wanted at the time (hard to know), would want in a modern context (impossible to know), and all that. But what if they were simply wrong about this?

Bloody revolutions in pursuit of better government have a relatively short history, and it's worth looking at what they tend to produce, and what the alternatives are.

Let's take, for instance, France. In 1789, the year of the US Constitution, the downtrodden French underclass rose up against the fat aristocrats who were oppressing them, beheaded anybody who looked as if they might at some point have worn lace, and the result of all that blood and death and violence and horror was...that within a few years, they had Napoleon running things and marching them off on quests for empire.

Let's take Russia. In 1917, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, offed the Tsar and his entire family, children and all, in the name of instituting a socialist worker's paradise. The result of that act of violence in the name of the people? Stalin. And oppression and poverty and misery for the better part of a century. Arguably, Russia is still not out from under that shadow in 2005.

Let's take Iran. Thirty years ago they cast off the American-backed Shah, who had to flee the country, and put into power...Ayatollah Khomeini.

In all three of these instances, the people rose up violently against governments far worse than the U.S. has ever had (I loathe Bush, but he isn't Stalin and he never will be) and ended up with governments that were even worse. Violence has led to more violence.

The American revolution is the exception that proves the rule, so let's look at it. America didn't have to execute a domestic regime, we just had to show a regime on the other side of the Atlantic that we weren't going to accept its rule anymore. We lost a lot more battles than we won--we basically only won two during the entire war. But it was enough that popular support for continued rule of the colonies was waning in Britain, so finally they packed up and went home. In some ways, we were their Vietnam.

So maybe that was the one revolution that worked. But did even that one work as well as the alternatives? Canada never had to fire a shot to become independent. They just waited a while, then asked for their independence and got it.

India also had to get the Brits off their backs, but instead of going to war like we did, they had Gandhi, who proved that you can wage a revolution nonviolently.

Europe--including France, home of the original blood-soaked domestic revolution--eventually did democratize, and they did it bloodlessly, and it's pretty hard to argue with the results.

Am I a pacifist? I suppose I am. Because nearly every example of violent domestic revolution has replaced one awful government with another, and nearly every example of actual improvement in governance is nonviolent.

I'm willing to accept that sometimes a government becomes so nightmarishly awful that force is called for. It's pretty hard to argue that the world would not have been better off if some German had managed to successfully take out Hitler. But, in this as in any situation, Hitler is the exception that tests the rule's limits. Violence is called for if you have Hitler. If you don't, you're likely to see better results if you work tirelessly within the system you have. Government is never perfect, but it has to get pretty awful before you'd actually be better off purging it with blood.

And anyway, look for a moment at the types of people who tend to be most enthusiastic about violently overthrowing governments. Timothy McVeigh was a big fan. He really thought the US government was tyrannical, and that after he blew up those little kids we'd all rise up in revolt along with him.

The acquaintance of mine who was most enthusiastic about the idea has since gotten a life sentence for trying to offer US military secrets to al Qaeda. And I wasn't that surprised.

The fact is, in a bloody revolution, there's absolutely no mechanism to determine who ought to take power. The guys with the guns take power. And those tend to be some pretty freaky guys. How bad does the government have to get before we'd prefer to be governed by violent people with delusions of grandeur? It's worth asking. I know it's generally considered unfair to judge an idea by its adherents, but in this case these are the people who would be taking power.

Do I like the direction the government is heading? No, I hate it. But I don't for a moment think any act of violence would make my lot better than it is. Only the slow wheels of social change, within the imperfect but workable system that is this or any functioning democracy, will do that.

Jefferson, you were wrong.

March 23, 2005

Okay, I have to say something about this.

The most painful thing about the Terri Schiavo case is simply that such a very private, very painful matter ever became a political football in the first place.

For those of you who live in caves and yet somehow are reading this, Schiavo is that woman in Florida who has been disconnected, at her husband's request and against her parents' wishes, from her feeding tube after 15 years as a total vegetable.

"I Drew This" has always been, more than anything, about finding the personal side of political issues. The Schiavo case, by contrast, is an entirely personal issue, and it should never have been allowed to have a political side.

But it was too good for the Republicans to put aside. Recently a memo surfaced, distributed by some unknown person among Congressional Republicans, praising the case as "a great political issue" and crowing about how excited this case would make the "pro-life base."

The thing is, whoever that awful person was, he or she seems to have miscalculated. Polls show that vast majorities in this country 1) side with the husband, 2) recognize that the Republicans in Congress are being cravenly political about this, and 3) think this is none of the federal government's business. So much for trying to seem compassionate.

This in spite of the fact that the media coverage of this has been full of phrases like "Congress has acted to save Terri Schiavo." Once again...what liberal bias?

Passing a law that applies only to one person is, it must be noted, an idea the U.S. founders--people the right can't stop invoking, when it suits them--hated. James Madison, co-author of the Federalist Papers and later our shortest President, said this:

"Bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and laws impairing the obligations of contracts, are contrary to the first principles of the social compact, and to every principle of sound legislation. ... The sober people of America are weary of the fluctuating policy which has directed the public councils. They have seen with regret and indignation that sudden changes and legislative interferences, in cases affecting personal rights, become jobs in the hands of enterprising and influential speculators, and snares to the more-industrious and less-informed part of the community."

This is why the Constitution bans "bills of attainder" aimed at just one person. So the Republicans have acted unconstitutionally.

Perhaps even more important, they have also acted in a way that smacks of naked opportunism. You wouldn't know most of this from a lot of the media coverage, which has so far declined to draw the connection, but here are some facts you might want to bear in mind:

1) Terri Schiavo has continued to be "alive" as long as she has because of money her husband won in a malpractice suit--exactly the kind of decision these same Republicans want to limit or do away with entirely.

2) While we're all arguing about what to do with someone whose life is, by any reasonable measure, over already--I'm sorry, it's terribly tragic, but it's true--we're ignoring the fact that Republicans' proposed medicare cuts are going to kill a lot more people, for whom it isn't too late. For that matter, our health care system remains scandalously inadequate--as Jon Stewart said the other night, "if you want to know just how sick you have to get before Congress will step in and do something about it, well, now you know."

3) These people--particularly George Bush--have a history of not visibly giving a flying expletive whether sick people are disconnected from life support. Mr. Bush, who cut one of his Crawford vacations short to fly back to Washington and sign the Schiavo bill--something he didn't do with the specter of impending terrorist attack looming in 2001, or when that tsunami hit in December, or indeed at any other time before now--signed a bill as governor of Texas that permits people to be disconnected under similar circumstances, even against the family's wishes. And it makes inability to pay one factor in the decision. The bill was just used to disconnect a baby from life support in Texas, against the wishes of the parents.

Under the bill, Terri Schiavo's husband would be able to disconnect her without interference. If this is something Bush believes in, he's only just arrived at that belief.

So when these people tell you they're acting out of a pure respect for the sanctity of life, well...as most people seem to realize, they're completely full of it.

I wish, for both sides in Terri Schiavo's family's tortured dispute, peace and comfort when this is all over. As far as the Republicans pretending to care about it, well...I don't believe in Heaven or Hell, but if I did, I do believe this sort of false compassion would be enough by itself to determine which way they're eventually headed.

March 14, 2005

I love my grandparents dearly, and they love me, even though they're far-right, Ann Coulter-reading wingnuts and I'm a liberal Paul Krugman-loving pinko.

We don't talk politics, and we haven't in years; on the rare occasions it does come up, it takes the form of gentle ribbing rather than heated debate. It's a rule I enforce studiously--I do not let my feelings about politics interfere with family harmony, because, hey, I know what's important, and life's too short.

So anyway, in one such conversation recently, when I humorously let slip that I had spoken with Ted Rall, a man they hate, I did my usual thing, laughed, and said something like "but ha ha, life's better when people disagree. The world would be boring if everyone agreed."

And Grandma said, "No, the world would be better if everyone were conservative."

The thing is, too, she was serious. That's what she really thinks. It really struck me.

I think my grandparents are extremely typical right-wingers, frankly. They have Fox News on all the time. They listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity religiously. They read whatever the bestselling right-wing tome of the moment is. They think the way the right-wing media tell people to think.

And it's an attitude I had seen in a lot of places before. But for some reason the difference had never struck me before. I, the liberal, was saying that it's good that we have a diversity of views in this country. She, the conservative, responded that, no, it would be better if everyone thought exactly the way she does.

And there you have the reason liberals and conservatives can't talk to each other in this country anymore. And you know what? It really is all their fault. Conservatives in general, I mean, not my grandparents specifically.

One of my big problems with other liberals has always been that they're too willing to acknowledge that the other side "has a point," a courtesy we should know by now we're never going to get back. But in a way it's also what gives liberals the high ground. Putting aside for the moment that there's obviously less than zero strategic value in having the moral high ground, it's laudable to accept that there's more than one way to look at a situation. Liberals acknowledge this; contemporary movement conservatives don't.

Even I willingly acknowledge that conservatism has a legitimate role. I'm talking conservatism, mind you, of the classic variety--the less government, slower pace of social change, pro-business, pro-military-strength conservatism of everyone from Dwight Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush. I don't subscribe to those ideas myself, but I think they have a legitimate role in the national discussion and at various times have had a valuable role in shaping policy.

(I do, however, think we should keep messianic religious fanaticism, bigotry, and disdain for human rights, traits that have defined conservatism at its worst moments such as the present one, off the table.)

The modern conservative movement, though, has made its feelings clear: liberalism is illegitimate. It is objectively wrong. It has no place at the table.

This is why media outlets dominated by liberals tend to present both sides, but media outlets dominated by conservatives present only the right-wing side of any issue, then claim with a straight face that they're being "objective." In their minds, they are being objective, because as far as conservatives are concerned, they're objectively right and liberal ideas are a sign of being willfully obtuse.

All I can say to that is, are those conservatives willing to say that the ends of slavery, institutionalized racial segregation, institutionalized sexism, child labor, widespread poverty among the elderly, and unrestricted pollution were all bad things? Because those things are the legacy of liberalism. Every once in a while, a right-winger (like Newt Gingrich, in one unguarded moment) admits as much. So, what, are they saying we've been right all sorts of times in the past but are now objectively wrong? I'd certainly take my chances in front of any impartial jury on that one.

But that's the problem in this country for you. However tolerant and respectful we may try to be, we will simply never be able to talk to people who believe our very existence as an ideological movement is illegitimate. Period. We have to fight them in the mud they've chosen as their territory. And if you don't like that, blame them.

But I love my Grandma and Grandpa anyhow.

March 3, 2005

What with the Supreme Court considering the role of the Ten Commandments in the public square, I thought it was time to revisit the issue here as well.

I went and found a live journal entry I wrote back in 2003, on another occasion when the issue came up.

I've edited it only slightly:

The argument is always this: "the Ten Commandments are the moral foundation for American law." This never seems to be adequately questioned. I thought it'd be fun to look at what those commandments actually say, and see for ourselves.

1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.

Hm. It's a little hard to find the application this has to U.S. law. Moving on...

2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.

I'm not entirely sure what a graven image is, but given what I do for a semi-living, I'm pretty sure I've made one at some point, and no cop has ever challenged me on it.

3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Hrm. I don't have solid statistics on this, but I'd say at least half the country does this on a daily basis...and I'm still not seeing the foundations of U.S. law...

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Well, okay, the post office is closed on Sunday, but not a lot of us get all patriotically weepy about it. And again, I've never gone out on a Sunday and been arrested or even ticketed.

5. Honor your father and your mother.

I'm all in favor of this, but it's not exactly federally mandated, and, um, we're halfway through now. There had better be some deeply constitutional stuff in the second half.

6. You shall not kill.

Yes!!! Yes, finally, something richly and thoroughly illegal! ...well, except we do still have, um, the federal death penalty...and the Iraq war...and, um, it's hard to imagine a government founded on Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism would have left murder legal...

7. You shall not commit adultery.

I want to point out that, wrong as it may be to commit it, it's not illegal, and most people who are not Kenneth Starr don't feel it should be.

8. You shall not steal.

All right! A second crime. Two more to go. We could still hit 40 percent!

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You could certainly argue that the whole idea of swearing people in in a courtroom is based on this. So...okay, maybe. Although it would be a lot more compelling if the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth were currently on trial for their lives.

And now for the big finish! This one should be good.

10. You shall not covet.

Aw, just one little covet? Please?

I'm pretty sure we don't have any federal laws against coveting. So basically, three commandments of ten actually resemble important federal laws, and I have enough faith in humankind to think we might have worked out on our own that killing, stealing and bearing false witness were bad ideas.

Incidentally, I refreshed my memory of what the commandments actually say by looking at the page on the topic put together by the "Positive Atheism" site. They also are kind enough to provide a Biblical list of the punishments for these offenses (hint: it's almost always that you have to die a horrible death. Hear that, blasphemers?).

February 19, 2005

So what constitutes a conservative?

As I attempt to shed some light on this deceptively difficult question, I suppose you ought to bear in mind that I have no use for conservatism and very few conservative friends. I am not even going to try to be objective about this. In fact, perhaps my dislike of conservatism is inextricably linked to my inability to fathom how any decent person could adopt such an ideology.

I understand, mind you, that many conservatives are decent people. I just don't understand why they became conservatives.

So I'm not objective. Okay? Okay.

It just seems to me that contemporary conservatism is a mishmash of things that don't obviously go together. Some of them are religious, some entirely secular and economic. Some of them are highly self-interested; a few are altruistic, however misguided. Some of them are not, in any traditional sense of the word, the slightest bit "conservative."

Some of the contradictions are so obvious as to have become cliches. I am not the first person to wonder how people who can't shut up about all the great things they're doing for the children of Iraq are so content to slash effective programs that help many thousands of children in America, but that's George W. Bush for you.

Similarly, I cannot be the first person to wonder how the same people who insist that government can't get anything right, and should basically get out of the business of trying to help people at all domestically, see nothing wrong with exporting "democracy" at gunpoint, then throwing piles and piles of cash ("our money") at it to make it work.

But the real puzzler to me, the real contradiction I find myself utterly unable to grasp, is how right-wing fundamentalists and people who claim to be "libertarians" ever formed an alliance in the first place.

Where do these people's interests overlap? Are the freedom to buy a gun with no waiting period, and the desire to pay as little as possible in taxes, really such a seductive coupling that they trump everything else?

I honestly don't have a lot of use for "libertarian conservatives" who are willing to vote for theocracy advocates despite their alleged support for abortion rights, gay rights, unrestricted free speech, etc. In a way that almost seems more contemptible than what the religious zealots are doing. They can't help themselves; they're crazy.

The libertarians, on the other hand, should know better. They're selling out principles in which they claim to believe, for the promise of lower taxes. That strikes me as a pretty brazen form of selfishness.

I'm convinced that some day that alliance has to crack. But then, I thought it would before now. I wanted to see it crack before the 2004 election, and we all know how that came out.

But I'm convinced it's coming. "Conservatism" is too much of a contradiction these days to hold together forever.

Next time: What is liberalism? What makes us liberal? And how do you answer your Republican relatives (if you're reading this, it's hard to imagine you have a lot of Republican friends left) when they ask you what's gotten into you?

February 7, 2005

Despite the fact that we were lied to about the motivations for this war, despite the fact that nothing has gone as planned, despite the lack of evidence that these elections have actually constituted significant progress, everyone seems to have agreed that Bush is now, for some reason, vindicated.

Bush has just submitted a budget in which he slashes services for needy children, veterans, environmental protection, etc., on the grounds that we have no fiscally responsible choice but to slash those things. But he's still pushing to make his tax cuts permanent.

I have a hangnail that's really bugging me.

Even PBS is apparently now knuckling under to right wingers who apparently believe that if you point the camera at a committed lesbian couple for any reason, you're a propagandist on par with Goebbels. Look, PBS, you're going to get accused of being liberal no matter what you do. You may as well actually be liberal.

The press has apparently agreed to pretend that when George Bush insists that the most pressing problem we face is that in the 2040s or 2050s social security benefits may drop by 20% or so, he is not talking out of his butt.

Millions of children are still suffering, and sometimes dying, from wholly preventable diseases because they have no health coverage--in the richest country on Earth. And for some reason this is apparently not as important.

I can't seem to stop putting off scrubbing out my bathtub.

Sir Paul McCartney actually said yes when they asked him to play at the Superbowl. You just know John Lennon would have said no, and he would have been right.

I wonder if I've doomed myself, in choosing the career path I've chosen.

I wish I believed in God; everything would have so much more of a point. Meanwhile, I'm more or less surrounded by, and to a certain extent at the mercy of, people who do and who believe that gives them the right to dictate what I can do in my personal life.

It's raining out. Although it's kind of pretty and very familiar, since I grew up in western Washington. So maybe that shouldn't be on this list.

My computer is really old, by computer standards. And it's starting to show it.

I fear my outlook on life might be just...a little bit too negative.

January 23, 2005

Your ancestors were cowards. Your ancestors, when the going got tough, didn't stay where they were, to fight the good fight. No, they packed up and fled!

Your ancestors abandoned their homelands of England, Germany, Norway, Armenia, China, and a hundred others, and came to the United States. What a bunch of craven wussies your ancestors were. (Unless you're black or Native American, of course, but...well, those of you who are, stay with me on this.)

Obviously no one with an ounce of bravery would ever move to another country just because he or she had good reason to believe life would be better there. What kind of person does that? Well...okay, the overwhelming majority of us are descended from people who did that. So the only conclusion any reasonable person could possibly reach is that America is a nation founded on abject wimpiness.

But we overcame it! And now we're a brave nation that never backs down! Never! Not even when, well, we're confronted with exactly the same dilemma our ancestors faced.

Not even when we're looking at a homeland with a terrible health care system, where people who are self-employed--cartoonists, for instance--get royally screwed on the kind of basic coverage that pretty much every other civilized country on earth regards as a basic human right.

Not even when we're looking at a homeland in which the most important, committed relationships we'll ever form are deemed "a threat to the American family" and legal recognition of them is banned in an incresing number of states.

Not even when a political party that sees no problem with any of this--in fact, endorses it--is scaring people into giving them more and more power.

Do you think your ancestors were wussies? Well, I don't either. I don't really think anyone has ever sincerely made the argument that the brave immigrants who came to America, back when it was a great unknown, full of promise but also peril, were in fact cowardly bastards for not staying in their homelands to fight for whatever it was they didn't have.

But if you don't think that, well...

How about cutting those of us who are eyeing Canada as the setting of a better life for ourselves a little slack?

Thank you.

January 8, 2005

People say I take an extreme left position.

I suppose in the spectrum of American politics, I'm right up against what most people consider the left end. But don't blame me for that. Blame a political "spectrum" that's been defined in a way that allows the craziest right-wing fruit baskets--people like Jerry Falwell, or Grover Norquist, or that one Alabama state rep, Gerald Allen, the guy who wants to ban all books with gay characters--to be treated as "conservatives," as if their views were merely part of the normal spectrum, unlike beyond-the-pale lunatics who want to, say, provide health insurance for poor children.

And blame the media for the fact that it works that way. See, this is why I'm not going to miss Crossfire.

CNN has pretty much announced that the program is ending, after--what, two decades, or something close? I'd have to look it up. And as much fun as it is watching James Carville gesture (I admit it, I'm a James Carville fan), I think Crossfire's legacy is mostly a negative one. I think we're worse off than we would have been had it never existed.

People who make the "good riddance to Crossfire" argument seem mostly to point to the fact that it's spawned a whole lot of other shouting-head shows, and in doing so debased the national debate. You could call this the Jon Stewart argument, since it's the one Stewart made when he was on the program last fall, and got into a dustup in which he called Tucker Carlson a "dick," which Carlson is. (CNN has decided not to renew Carlson's contract, though they're keeping the other three hosts on in various roles; CNN President Jonathan Klein said this week "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise.")

But my problem with Crossfire is a different one. An alleged fellow "liberal" I know said something that made me angry, and I had to take a moment to digest why I had that reaction. What he said was this:

I enjoyed Crossfire when Michael Kinsley was (supposedly) on the left. (I know, I know... Kinsley has always been a centrist. So am I.)

My problem with this statement? Former Crossfire co-host Michael Kinsley most assuredly isn't on "the left," and he never has been. I admire Mr. Kinsley as a journalist very much, but the fact that Crossfire pits conciliatory, fair-minded, let's-look-at-all-sides objectivists like Kinsley against frothing partisan right-wingers like Pat Buchanan is exactly the problem with Crossfire.

In doing so, they contributed to the perception, still rampant in this country, that you can go as far to the right as you want, to the point of extreme protectionism, foaming homophobia and thinly-veiled racism, and still be part of the mainstream--but if you drift to the left of a centrist like Michael Kinsley, you're an insane left-wing radical.

I don't think I can forgive Crossfire for its role in propagating that notion. I think the damage from it is going to prove persistent.

Let's look at what insane left-wing radicals like me actually want.

Universal health-care, especially for children. Environmental protection. Labor laws that give workers a fair shake. Keeping Roe V. Wade intact. Some sort of legal recognition of committed same-sex relationships.

Every one of these positions has majority support. So I'm a left-wing radical only under a very strange, contorted definition of that term. My views are very mainstream, but it's the funhouse-mirror reality of contemporary American politics that people who disagree with me, holding the minority position on all of these issues, are seen as more "normal" and "mainstream."

Maybe America is like that old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to belong to any organization that would have someone like him as a member. Maybe Americans don't want to support candidates who are stupid enough to agree with them on important issues. I dunno.

I do know I believe Crossfire really hasn't done us any good.

January 1, 2005

It's January 1, 2005.

Everybody's been doing their "year in review" thingies. And I feel like I should have a lot to say about 2004.

It was an enormous year for me personally. At the start of 2004, I had not yet created "I Drew This." This comic was the product of my answering an ad for cartoonists, in the Washington State University Daily Evergreen. The conversation, last January, went something like "hey, I'm a cartoonist. You want me to give you my existing strip to run, or do you some political cartoons or something?" "Well, I really like editorial cartoons." "Okay, I'll do some."

I walked out thinking I maybe screwed up, and maybe I should have pushed for them to just run Ozy and Millie--I'm sure they would've, and that would've meant substantially less work for me. But as it worked out, I liked the creative challenge, I liked having the outlet for my political and personal thoughts, and the strip was a hit.

What's more, it convinced me that I was kidding myself to think I was anything other than a cartoonist. I started hating my coursework; drawing IDT became the best part of my work. So I dropped out of grad school, and moved a considerable distance away, in July, to be with my significant other and cartoon full-time. It's an arrangement that I consider a resounding success. So it was a big, good year in that way.

Of course, politically, the year ended on a horrible note, with hopes built up over the course of the previous 10 months dashed to pieces on November 2, and with my other half and I deciding that we have no choice but to move to Canada, which means that one day soon IDT will be drawn from more of an 'outside observer' standpoint.

Even politically, though, there were hopeful as well as dreadful developments--it was a mixed bag. After years of being marginalized and kicked around and just taking it, in the name of "tolerance for other views," the American left finally stood up to the pack of schoolyard bullies that the American right has become, and almost won. It would not be a stretch to read this as a sign that actual victories will follow, if we persist. Still, a lot of us were hoping we'd have some actual victories by now. November 3 was the most depressing day I can remember in my life since high school.

Meanwhile, there's this country with gay marriage, universal health care, and, as I believe I noted a few weeks ago, a lot fewer chest-beating Jesus freaks, a short drive from here. O Canada indeed. But I'll always be an American; wherever I am geographically, I'll still fight to make the land of my birth a better place.

I'm rambling; it's January 1, as noted, and I'm still tired. But I'm also hopeful. Let's keep pushing as hard as we can in '05. Luck favors the determined.

Peace out.

2006 Thoughts.

2004 Thoughts.