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Tag: politics

An incipient dictator spends his political capital

Posted on January 10, 2007

His victory was determined by electronic voting machines that are indirectly under his control, he’s consolidating the Media and the now virtually one-party state under his command, and he’s planning to assume special legislative powers – powers previously outside the domain of the executive branch. For those of us who’ve criticized the GOP’s determination to govern without Democratic input the past five+ years and their tendency to ignore or support the President’s legally-dubious domestic spying, it’s tempting to say he’s George Bush’s Liberal mirror image. But here’s one major distinction (among several): Bush and his party never tried to eliminate Presidential term limits. I think it’s necessary to say now that what we have in Venezuela is an incipient dictator.From Yahoo News:

A leading anti-U.S. voice in the world and in the vanguard of a shift to the left in Latin America, Chavez now wants to scrap presidential term limits and lead the OPEC nation for decades. 

Many of us agree with most of Chavez’s stated goals; chief among them the novel idea that Venezuelans should benefit more than foreign investors do from their own natural resources, and that the United States’ Monroe Doctrine (used by Presidents to justify numerous invasions and subversions of Latin American governments) is an anachronism. We agree with Chavez that the nations of Latin America have a right to self determination, they have a right to deny foreign exploitation of their own resources and to insist that the United States stay out of their political affairs. But we cannot turn a blind eye to the very real prospect that an even more fundamental right – the right of people to govern themselves – looks like it may be endangered in Venezuela.If Hugo Chavez grows a long beard, we’ll know it’s game over in Caracas.***EDIT: As a reader points out in the comments to this thread, the leaders of Chile and Brazil – whose acceptance has been credited in no small part to the popularit of Hugo Chavez – have so far demonstrated that socialist values are not incompatible with Democracy. Perhaps the teacher should start taking notes.

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Candorville: more respect for the truth than for the dead?

Posted on January 8, 2007

“Be to my faults a little blind, Be to my virtues very kind.”I’m not sure who originally wrote that phrase. I’ve seen it attributed to various people from John Lennon to Ben Franklin, and I have yet to come across a definitive account of its origin. Maybe that’s because I haven’t spent too much time looking, but I’d like to think it’s also because it’s such a universal desire that it actually goes back to the dawn of time. Maybe when the first doomed nucleic acid was spit out by a primordial chemical system, it’s last words were “remember me well.”The desire to be remembered as a positive force once we’re gone is probably as instinctive as it is universal. Every saint and every dictator wanted to leave behind a legacy they thought positive. And because we all want the same thing, we routinely, wilfully, whitewash people’s lives once they’re gone — hoping that someday, when our time comes, the world will return the favor. Some believe that pays tribute to the departed. Perhaps most believe that. I believe the opposite. I believe that by sanitizing someone’s effect on the world and their history, you don’t pay tribute to that person, you pay tribute to some phantom you’ve created in their stead. When it’s a person of historical significance, you run the risk of erasing history. And we all know the other saying about what happens to people who forget their history.Here’s today’s Candorville, followed by a representative response to it from a Candorville reader:Today’s stripReader feedback

Dear Darrin Bell,My paper just picked up your comic strip on the first, and I was okay with it. It was mildly funny, and I could relate to some of it. However, today, you published the comic about James Brown “explaining” about what he didn’t do, while you showed Gerald Ford running away. I now refuse to read your strip. If you want to attack a person, at least do it while they’re alive. 

My response

Thank you for writing. That’s exactly what tomorrow’s comic strip deals with — the notion that we should only speak well of the departed. You really shouldn’t judge a comic strip by one edition of it, or you might miss out on something you’d otherwise come to enjoy. The reason the strip is called “Candorville” isn’t because I think I know the Truth. It’s my promise to always say exactly what’s on my mind, regardless of what everyone else is saying. It’s my suggestion that honesty is always the best policy, even when it involves sacred cows. When the war in Iraq was popular, Candorville pointed out its counterproductivity. When Barak Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were being idolized as phenomena by the Media a couple years ago, I pointed out that they’d done nothing more than anyone else could do, and the only reason they were seen as exceptional was their race (What has Obama accomplished, really?). Everyone loves Oprah Winfrey, but I’ve commented on how she seems to regularly invite celebrity guests in order to fish for compliments from them, and I’ve pointed out that every single issue of her magazine features HER on the cover (which strikes me as a bit egotistical, even if it is good business sense). Not all these observations are equally important, but they’re all candid assessments.I “attack” people who are living 99.99999999% of the time, but I see no reason to sanitize someone’s past just because they’ve died. And when the rest of the Media, from left-wingers on Air America to the mainstream media to right-wingers like Limbaugh, are ALL refusing to mention a person’s drawbacks once they’re dead, I believe in the case of a public official, that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to ignore history, to sanitize it out of sentimentality. So I point out that the person isn’t a saint, that his affect on history hasn’t been as uniformly positive as the Media is telling us it has. I say “hold on a second, stop canonizing someone who has such a checkered record.”If you want to hear the sanitized line on issues, the rest of the Media provides that. If you want to hear candid opinions and truthful depictions of modern Americans and their actions & discussions, Candorville tries to provide that. If you’re offended by that sort of candor, then perhaps Candorville isn’t the strip for you, but I thank you for giving it a chance up ’til now. Thanks again for writing, and I hope you have a happy New Year.

***UPDATE***Looks like I spoke too soon. The above feedback was representative of a handful of e-mails early in the morning, but the vast majority of the feedback since then (all of it, in fact) has been positive. Here’s another note which is more representative of the feedback for this strip:

I have been a fan of Candorville since the git go. As a afro-cubano who was raised in Pasadena I can relate to Susana and the entire cast of characters. Since I was a teen in the mid-60s listening to KGFJ 1230am, I have been a fan of James Brown, I also lived the stain of Tricky Dick’s scandal and the behind the scenes arrangement he made with Ford to get pardoned, all the while I was on the front lines of the struggle, freedom fighting and protesting the Nam conflictYour Jan 8th strip with the Godfather at the pearly gates hit home and if not your best, fo sho it is in your top 5 im my book…

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Merry Christmas, Iraq, three years late

Posted on December 24, 2006

Is it just me, or does anyone else think this is something we should have done THREE @#$% YEARS AGO?

THE White House is expected to announce a reconstruction package for Iraq as part of a plan for a “surge” of up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad when President George W Bush unveils America’s new strategy next month.Bush is being urged to give up to $10 billion (£5.1 billion) to Iraq as part of a “New Deal” that would create work for unemployed Iraqis, following the model of President Franklin D Roosevelt during the 1930s depression. 

But while some of us were suggesting this very plan the moment our tanks began their dash across the desert, the Bush administration was busy laying the foundations for the insurgency by carrying out their plan to carve up Iraq and feed the white meat to Haliburton and its no-bid contract winning no-Iraqi-hiring, no-work-finishing, tax-payer-money-squandering subcontractors from Hell. Instead of putting Iraqis to work, the Bush administration was busy freezing them out of possibilities to rebuild their own country. Now with possibly 600,000 Iraqis dead and the country embroiled in a vicious, bloody civil war, the Bush team may have finally decided to allow Iraqis to go to work to rebuild their country. If only they’d come to this conclusion before the Iraqis came to feel they had nothing left to do but destroy it. In keeping with their pattern, the Bushes are a few years late to the party. Merry @#$% Christmas, Iraq.One other thing to note here: Apparently $10 billion U.S. is now worth only 5.1 billion British pounds. Historically, that 10-large should have been worth over £6.5 billion. Anyone else bothered by this?

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When the story matches the ad…

Posted on December 20, 2006

Came across this moment of synchronicity on the Washington Post’s website this morning, and just had to capture it for posterity: 

 There comes a time when you have to cut your losses, admit your mistakes (or at the very least, declare victory) and leave, and we very well may be at that point right now. What is the alternative, sending more troops to become targets for the resentment and bombs of an entire nation? Hussein is gone, a democratic government was created and now they’re fighting a civil war to determine either who will control it or whether they want to keep it.Do we really believe that through force of arms we can help them make that decision? Can we? What is our mission in Iraq? How will we know when we’ve succeeded? What exactly is this “victory” to which Bush keeps referring? The answer to that seems to change month by month. With every turned corner, we find another corner that needs turning. Seems more like a maze with no exit than a path toward anything. And every year it seems as if there are more questions than answers.I blame Churchill.•••

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It’s all in the timing.

Posted on December 20, 2006

In 2001, according to former terrorism czar Richard Clark, he and others in the government demanded that President Bush pay attention to the threat from Al Qaeda. The White House ignored the demands (instead focusing on apparently more pressing matters, such as Internet pornography), and the entire world is familiar with the results of that negligence.In 2001 and 2002, millions of Americans demanded an investigation of 9/11. The President and his party refused for months before finally relenting. But by then it was too late, and those who were shown to possess questionable intelligence – in every sense of the word – had already taken us into Iraq. Had we known prior to invading that we were trusting the word of the incompetent, thousands of American troops, not to mention hundreds of thousands (most likely) of Iraqi civilians, would still be alive today, and we wouldn’t have spent half a trillion dollars in order to create an Islamic failed state in a formerly secular dictatorship.In 2004, Mr. Bush dismissed John Kerry’s plan to increase the number of troops in Iraq in order to try halting the slide toward civil war. Bush dismissed the notion that a slide toward civil war was even occurring. Two years, and untold deaths later (untold because we and our puppet government in Iraq now refuse to count them), George Bush has changed his mind. Yet again, coming around to what may be the right conclusion only when it’s far too late to matter.

Democrats have been calling for additional troops for years. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) proposed an increase of 40,000 troops during his 2004 campaign against Bush, only to be dismissed by the administration. As recently as June, the Bush administration opposed adding more troops because restructuring “is enabling our military to get more war-fighting capability from current end strength.”But Bush yesterday had changed his mind. “I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops — the Army, the Marines,” he said. “And I talked about this to Secretary Gates, and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea.”

Most outside the White House, including Colin Powell, seem to believe additional troops at this point wouldn’t help. It’s too little, too late. It’s all in the timing. Perhaps a surge of troops would have made a positive impact a couple years ago when everyone else first thought of the idea, but today it’s likely to do nothing but give insurgents more targets for their resentment and their IED’s. Furthermore, although the military seems to have largely met its recruiting goals this year, those goals were lowered a couple years ago. They’ve struggled to meet their goals, and there’s no telling exactly where Bush thinks he’s going to find an additional 70,000 troops, unless he were to propose reinstituting the draft (which ain’t gonna happen). Perhaps through more stop-loss programs, shifting more troops from elsewhere, conscripting the Coast Guard, calling up the Girl Scouts, and recalling the last living World War One veteran to duty. I’m sure they’ll try some combination of the above.If only I were on the White House staff, I’d solve the problem in no time. I’d empower the President to fulfill his wish in the quickest way possible — by walking into the Oval Office and uttering three simple words: Work release program.Not only would a work release program allow the President to proceed with his troop increase, it would also solve our chronic prison overcrowding problem. In fact, if we were to send nothing but death row inmates to Iraq and put them on the frontlines, it may even save us a buck or two on all those needles and electric bills.But, it’s all in the timing, and this President’s habitually late to the game. Odds are my phone’ll be ringing two years from now.

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Politics is the art of the disgusting

Posted on December 13, 2006

Democratic Senator Tim Johnson may have suffered a stroke today. Strokes are serious business. My mother suffered through one years ago and I’m not sure she ever fully recovered, even though they caught it early. Everyone wished her well and we’ve been pulling for her because we love her. But my mother wasn’t the deciding vote in the United States Senate. If Senator Johnson is unable to serve, his replacement will be appointed by a Republican governor, and will most likely be a Republican — denying Democrats control of the Senate.Count on the conservative blogs to salivate over this (while offering half-hearted “best wishes”), not because they’re evil, but because they care more about regaining power than they do about the life and health of a human being. Count also on the liberal blogs to be deeply concerned for Senator Johnson’s health, not because they truly care about him, but because they care about holding on to their party’s newly-won power. The latter is only slightly less odious.It’s also human nature.•••

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Histury Lessens

Posted on November 22, 2006

Airlines mix up luggage all the time, especially when said luggage is a nondescript black duffle bag. I returned from my Laotian vacation the other day, all rested and tanned. On the long subway ride home from SFO, I got bored, so I opened my duffle bag in search of my i-Pod. I was surprised to find, instead, what’s apparently a manuscript for some sort of academic journal. This is of no use to me. A manuscript can’t play Gnarles Barkley’s “Crazy,” or Shuggie Otis’s “Sweet Thang” while I close my eyes and pretend that’s only water on the seat across from me. I want my i-Pod back. I couldn’t find an address or phone number anywhere in this duffle bag, so I’ll post an excerpt from the manuscript here. If you recognize yourself as the author of this treatise, please contact me and I’ll return the bag to you in exchange for my i-Pod shuffle.

Histury Lessens, an academick paper I have learned as a nation, many lessens from the war in Vietnam. Chief amonst them are that we succeed in wars, unless we quit. Also chief amongst them are that Vietnam was worth fighting because if we had cut and run there, well then the dominoe effect tells you the scourge of Communism would have swept across the globe, hurting folks’ economies. Free markets everywhere would fall under the knuckles of of those who hate freedom.The first casualties of a cut and run policy are business and initiative. And I told the Vietnaminians that at their Stock Exchange today. At a lunch with a bunch of foreign investors, I told every businessman there that if America had only stayed in Vietnam and kept our promise to help them fight for freedom, maybe they would know the sweet love of entrepreneurialship. At the airport when I was leaving to go to Indonesia, I saw folks handing each other business cards and talking on cell phones. I think they got my message.And it made me muse back to the 1970s, when I was a fighter pilot during the war protecting our homefront: How much faster would they have gotten my message if we hadn’t given up on that war? And how many freedom-loving Vietnaminian women and children would be alive and safe today if we were still there to this day, shooting into the jungles and rice pattees to keep Vietnam safe for freedom?And how many nations today would be free and libertied if we hadn’t cut and runned and Vietnam hadn’t become the homebase from where Communism spread across the world and snuffed out the flame of freedom, just as Rummy and Dick and other foresighted people said it would back in the ’70s? And that is why we must stay in Iraq indefinitely, so that what happened to Vietnam and Asia in the decades since we cut and runned, would never happen to Iraq and the Middle East. For me, it’s a lessen lurned.

I miss my Shuffle, so whoever you are, I hope you see this.In a totally unrelated subject, Keith Olberman gave another interesting “special comment” the other day:

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Why can’t we be more like South Africa?

Posted on November 14, 2006

I remember when this country used to be more progressive than South Africa. Whatever happened to that?

The South African parliament on Tuesday approved new legislation recognizing gay marriages _ a first for a continent where homosexuality is largely taboo… “When we attained our democracy, we sought to distinguish ourselves from an unjust painful past, by declaring that never again shall it be that any South African will be discriminated against on the basis of color, creed culture and sex,” Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa- Nqakula told the National Assembly…

•••

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Ignoring that cross-burning elephant in the room

Posted on November 7, 2006

There’s an old English idiom about an “elephant in the room.” An elephant sits in the corner of a room, while everyone in the room just sort of pretends it’s not there so they don’t have to talk about it. Once they did talk about it, after all, they’d have to do something about it, and nobody wants to be the one who has to try and evict an elephant. So everyone goes about their business as if the elephant isn’t there.America is a land filled with elephants. For instance…We all want to believe the racist practice of voter disenfranchisement is dead and gone, so much so that we’re willing to ignore it when it’s sitting in our kitchen, its trunk is flailing about knocking over the microwave, and it’s eating our lunch. That particular elephant, which we thought we’d killed in 1964 when LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act into law, has again been sitting in our rooms ever since the year 2000 when Florida’s Secretary of State – who also just happened to be George Bush’s campaign chairwoman – denied tens of thousands of African-Americans their right to vote by wrongly declaring them “felons.” (the felon voting rules themselves have their genesis in the Civil Rights era, as a means to disenfranchise Blacks, who were far more likely than Whites to be convicted of felonies in the South). That pachyderm has been chilling in the corner with a big tub of nachos ever since the party that benefitted from its presence refused to investigate it, and the Justice Department declined to hunt it down.Nationwide, 1.9 million black votes were discarded. Thrown away. Not counted. That was 50% of the ballots that were discarded as “spoiled” in 2000, even though Blacks only made up 12% of the electorate.-SF Chronicle, June 20, 2004Now, as all people who benefit from crimes would say, “that’s in the past. Get over it. Forget about it. Move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Well, unfortunately for our leaders, the American people – or at least a large number of us – have longer memories than they’d like us to have. When the people who committed this crime are still benefitting from it and still trying to do it again, it is not “in the past.”2004•Florida AGAIN tried to remove thousands of Black voters from the rolls. The state run by George Bush’s brother created ANOTHER “potential felons list” filled with people who’ve never committed a felony. That one would’ve robbed more than 22,000 African Americans of their right to vote.(“Florida List for Purge of Voters Proves Flawed.” NY Times, July 10, 2004)•It was widely reported that in several urban precincts in Ohio, African Americans had to wait up to ten hours in line in order to vote. Ohio’s Secretary of State, another Bush campaign chairman, refused to provide minority precincts with an adequate number of voting machines. There was no such problem in the predominantly Caucasian suburbs.2006As for this year, time will tell. I would be THRILLED if I were proven wrong this year. I really hope that happens. I really do. But the damage may have already been done, as Black voters, disillusioned by the resurrection of the age-old pracitice of voter disenfranchisement, may simply stay home today.Some Americans would have us believe it’s all in the past — still others would have us believe it never happened at all. I spoke with one of those this morning when Frank Beckmann, an ABC “News” talkshow host from Michigan, called to talk about last Sunday’s cartoon (above). During the interview, he told me Blacks “have not been disenfranchised,” that those 54,000 African Americans who were removed from the voter rolls in 2000 WERE felons (even though the United States government report on the election concluded the opposite), and that reports of long lines in Ohio were simply wrong. People can convince themselves that any problem doesn’t exist if they don’t want it to exist – or if they benefit from its existence.Anyone who’s read Candorville should know that I don’t believe it serves us to ignore the elephants that stand in our rooms, no matter what they are, from the constant persecution of gays, to voter disenfranchisement, to the pervasive thug culture. We can’t solve our problems unless we have the courage to first acknowledge they exist. Instead of ignoring the elephants, we should grab our elephant guns and go on safari. As difficult as it may be, it has to be done.•••

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Hispanic voters targeted AGAIN?

Posted on November 5, 2006

In honor of the repeated attempt to disenfranchise Hispanic voters, I’ll re-post that last cartoon:Bradblog has posted a note from a Democratic voter in New Mexico. The voter’s complaint prompted a judge to issue an injunction preventing the Republican Party of New Mexico from calling non-Republicans with precinct information. It seems voters with Hispanic surnames may have been specifically targeted:

Yesterday (11/04), about 1pm MST, I rec’d a phone message from the Republican Party of NM telling me that my polling location was John Adams Middle School. My polling place is usually Longfellow Elementary about 1 block away. John Adams is about 7 1/2 miles away. In my horror and disgust I quickly deleted the message. Thinking that maybe my polling place changed, I then called the **Republican Party** here and simply asked if they could tell me my polling place. They asked my address only, I told them, and they said, “You vote at Longfellow.” This is correct and I hung up.About 5pm MST, the Republican Party of NM called AGAIN and left a message telling me that my election day polling place was West Mesa High School, even further away than John Adams. They gave the full address and zip code. My Caller ID shows “REPUBLICAN PART.” I DID NOT DELETE THIS MESSAGE.Then around 7pm MST, the same thing happened. The Republican Party of NM called and left a message telling me that my election day polling place was back to John Adams Middle School. My Caller ID shows “NEW MEXICO VICT.” I did a Google search on the phone number and this entry came up:New Mexico Republican Party :: CalendarSummary:, Contact your local county party or call the Victory Officeat (505) XXX-XXXX to find out what you can do to help our 2006 Republican candidates. …I DID NOT DELETE THIS MESSAGE.If you want the actual phone numbers, I can give them to you…-Read more at Bradblog.com

So far this is the only complaint about this, but it certainly fits the pattern that’s plagued our elections since 2000. There’s something seriously wrong with your party if you have to keep people from voting in order to win elections.•••

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