And now, a word from my friend, colleague and law school classmate,
Stuart Rappaport (originally posted on Facebook; reprinted with permission):
Why
am I so intensely partisan and keep on posting pro Obama anti Rommunist stuff?
(to the annoyance of most of my facebook friends) It’s because I am a human
being, not a goldfish, and my memory goes back more than a few moments. I don’t
detest conservatives, nor do I detest the conservative philosophy, but I detest
hypocrisy.
Now,
there is plenty of hypocrisy and euphemistic double talk to go around on all
sides of this, but truly one side wins the hypocrisy war in a landslide.
Your
modern Republican party owned Congress and the White House from 2000 to 2006
and turned a budget surplus into a deficit, and put in place the reasons we are
still running huge deficits today. You are damned right I am blaming Bush, and
I am blaming the Democratic minority of those years for not having the cajones
to stand up to him. These were the years that the Washington brain trust
started two wars without paying for them, gave us budget busting tax cuts that
somehow failed to create millions of new jobs (let’s do it again – not) and
doubled down on the “regulation is bad, let Wall Street run free” nonsense that
Clinton let slide. Because I am not a goldfish, I remember this stuff. The
results were predictable, and we saw them in the fall of 2008 when Wall Street
crashed our economy.
After
losing the 2008 election, a responsible Republican party (look up “oxymoron”) would
have been part of the solution. But rather than get in the room and do the real
work of governing, they set out on a course of obstructionism more intense than
we’ve ever seen. Is this fact or just my opinion? Count the number of
filibusters over Obama’s first three years and compare that number to what Bush
had in eight. Everything the Obama administration did was faced with a fierce
storm of opposition – even things that Republicans had previously agreed with.
Here
is a news flash – our government – any government – must tax, spend and
regulate. We can have legitimate differences about the extent. That’s where
sane conservatives can and should be part of the solution. As the Obama
administration tried to get us out of this mess, the Republicans sat on the
sideline jeering, screaming (even in the halls of Congress – no lie) and
spreading nonsense. Clutching their little talking point sheets emailed to them
by the Koch brothers, these nattering nabobs of negativism showed up on Fox
News daily to screech about how responsible attempts to clean up this mess
proved that Obama was a socialist.
Everyone
knows that the best way to deal with a bully is to find a way to beat his ass,
or take away his power. That’s why an overwhelming Democratic victory is so necessary
to keep this country going in the right direction. I believe that the best way
to get Washington to work again is to give these Republicans the ass whipping
they so truly deserve. Perhaps after this happens, they will learn to play
nicely, and Congress can partner with the President and stop all of this
foolishness. The foregoing is one man’s opinion. But damn it, I am right!
“Charlie Don’t Surf,”
recorded live in Tokyo in 1982. Originally from the three-disc Sandinista!LP (1980), the song’s title comes from an infamous
line uttered by Robert Duval’s character, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, in Apocalypse Now (1979):
Thinking back, it’s somewhat remarkable that the
war in Vietnam continued to dominate pop culture well into the ’80s. Several
tracks on Sandinista! refer,
directly or indirectly, to Vietnam, “Charlie Don’t Surf” being, perhaps, the
most obvious. Likewise, the final album featuring both Mick Jones and Joe
Strummer, Combat Rock (1982), was littered with Vietnam references,
including, of course, “Straight
to Hell”:
Wanna
join in a chorus
Of
the Amerasian blues?
When it’s Christmas out
in Ho Chi Minh City …
Maybe the lingering influence of Vietnam into the
1980s stems, at least in part, from the simple fact that people were paying
attention. Vietnam was on the news, in the newspapers, a nearly constant topic
of conversation. And the draft ensured that almost everyone knew someone who
served.
Makes you wonder whether this generation’s twin
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will have the same lingering effect, when, unlike
Vietnam, we’ve all but ignored those conflicts, almost from the inception.
While you ponder that, here’s the original album
version of “Charlie Don’t Surf”:
So, this happened the other day. Ralph Nader, best
known as a consumer advocate and civil attorney, lashed out at
Pres. Obama, calling him a “war criminal” and saying he’s worse than former
Pres. George W. Bush, “in the sense that [Obama is] more aggressive, more
illegal worldwide.”
I don’t know what the phrase “more illegal
worldwide” is supposed to mean. I do know that Ralph Nader suffers from a near
terminal lack of self-awareness.
Pres. Obama is a “war criminal” who’s worse than
George W. Bush? Hmm. There are more
than a hundred thousand Iraqis – and a good 4,400 American soldiers and marines – who
can’t be reached for comment, given that they died in Pres. Bush’s ill
conceived and illegal war
against Saddam Hussein and his non-existent weapons of mass destruction. But
I’m sure if they could speak from beyond the grave, they’d thank Mr. Nader for
helping George W. Bush defeat Al Gore in 2000.
Yes, Mr. Nader helped George Bush win in 2000. The facts are these:
When the final, Supreme-Court-approved tally was in, Pres. Bush took all 25
electoral votes from the state of Florida,
because, out of 5,963,110 total votes cast there, he received 2,912,790 to Al
Gore’s 2,912,253. In other words, Pres. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Mr.
Nader’s vote total in Florida was 97,488, or more than 181 times Pres. Bush’s
margin of victory. Had Mr. Nader not run, it’s inconceivable that Pres. Bush
would have won Florida. There’s simply no way that all of Nader’s voters would
have stayed at home or voted for another, more obscure third party candidate.
And all though some of those votes may have gone to George W. Bush as a
protest, it’s hard to imagine any scenario where a significant majority of
those votes would not have gone to Al Gore – certainly more than enough to make
up the 537 vote gap.
And, of course, after the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), effectively sealing George
Bush’s narrow victory in Florida, Bush won the Electoral
College with 271 votes – just one more than the
required 270. Had Florida gone to Al Gore, he would have won 291-245.
Furthermore, had Gore become president in 2000, there’s little doubt
we would have avoided the biggest mistake of George W. Bush’s failed presidency
– the unmitigated disaster that was the Iraq War, a war without any conceivable
legal justification. I know it was tempting for liberals to think (as Mr. Nader
liked to say) that there was no difference between Bush and Gore, but at least
on the subject of Iraq, that’s manifestly untrue. The Clinton administration –
of which, of course, Vice Pres. Gore was a major part – pursued a much saner
strategy towards Iraq … the very strategy, in fact, that ultimately disarmed
Saddam Hussein’s regime of its weapons of mass destruction.
Even so, you might say that while Mr. Nader may have helped George
Bush win the 2000 presidential election, he can’t be blamed for Pres. Bush’s
subsequent mistakes in office, especially his biggest and deadliest mistake.
But hold on. Recall that as a candidate for the presidency, Mr. Nader had
little if any concern for foreign policy; his focus was on the supposed
“corporatist” agenda of both major parties. Candidate Bush, on the other hand,
made no secret of his desire to go to war in Iraq. From independent journalist Russ
Baker:
Two years before the September 11
attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately
about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost
writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in
preparation for a planned autobiography.
“He was thinking about invading Iraq
in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He
said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a
commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital
built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If
I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste
it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going
to have a successful presidency.”
In December 1999, some six months
after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers,
including the Boston Globe’s David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about
Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: “It was
a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about
Saddam’s weapons stash,” wrote Nyhan. ‘I’d take ’em out,’ [Bush] grinned
cavalierly, ‘take out the weapons of mass destruction…I’m surprised he’s still
there,” said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War
to Bush Jr.’s father…It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war
was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was
Bush’s first big clinker. ”
If, perhaps, as a candidate in 2000, Mr. Nader had actually paid
attention to foreign policy, and, for that matter, to what his opponents
were saying about foreign policy,
it might have occurred to him that George W. Bush was a dangerous fellow; that
even if Mr. Gore was in the hip pocket of Wall Street to the same extent as Mr.
Bush, one of them was far more likely to go to war in Iraq than the other. And
that, as it turns out, was not an insignificant difference between the two.
None of this is meant to be an endorsement of Pres. Obama’s actions in
the so-called “war on terror.” I’ve made my
opposition to those policies clear,
and I’ll repeat it here: The very idea of a “war on terror” is nonsensical; it does more harm than good, and we should put an immediate end to it. Full stop.
But when Ralph Nader starts tossing around phrases like “war criminal”
just a few weeks before a presidential election, I’ll be damned if I’m going to
give him the time of day. Because the truth is, he bears a fair amount of
responsibility for why we’re in this mess in the first place.
For a coupla a young punks I know on the Twitter
machine. And they know who they are.
Listen, I know I say this a lot, but this time I
really mean it. This song is the definition of punk rock. Not the political
side of punk, just the sound. It’s as pure a punk rock song as ever there was.
And here’s a live version, recorded in France in
1977:
Eager to shoot down President
Obama’s legislative agenda just weeks before the election, Senate Republicans
on Wednesday blocked a measure that would have provided $1 billion over five
years to help veterans find work in their communities.
The measure, which would have
potentially created jobs for up to 20,000 veterans, was blocked on a procedural
point by Republicans, who argued that the bill was unpaid for. Senator Patty
Murray, a Washington Democrat and the bill’s main sponsor, said the bill would
have covered the costs in part with fees on Medicare providers and suppliers
who are delinquent on their tax bills.
The procedural vote was 58 to 40;
60 votes would have been required to waive Republican objections.
… Remember that this guy:
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), who received five
deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam, replaced this guy:
It’s a sad day in the history of the band that
started it all: John William Cummings, a/k/a Johnny Ramone, died eight years ago
today:
Johnny Ramone was a founding
member of one of the most influential bands of all time, the Ramones. Hailing
from Queens, NY, Johnny invented the relentless; down stroke guitar style that
defined not only the groundbreaking sound of the legendary Ramones, but the
guitar voice of the punk rock movement in general. Listed in Time Magazine’s
“10 greatest electric guitar players” and named #16 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s
top 100 guitarists of all-time.
Johnny was the driving
force behind the Ramones, sometimes referred to as a drill sergeant, bringing
order and regiment to the band. This is evident in the speed, accuracy and
intensity of their music. Johnny kept the Ramones focused and moving forward,
ultimately securing their place in rock history. The Ramones were inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 18, 2002, and nearly a decade later,
the seminal band was awarded a Grammy for lifetime achievement.
Here he is with the band in 1980, at the pinnacle
of their career, playing “Rock ’n Roll High School” and my personal favorite
Ramones track, “Do You Remember Rock ’n Roll Radio”:
If you need to know why punk rock mattered so much,
put your headphones on and turn this up really, really loud. Then you will understand why pop music was
so badly broken by the end of the ’70s, and how the Ramones fixed it.
“What’s My Name,” from
both the U.K.
and the U.S.
versions of the debut album, The Clash. One minute, forty-one seconds of blazingly fast punk alienation. According to the Clash Wiki,
“What’s My Name” “apparently [was] inspired by the Sex Pistols’ version of
‘(I’m not your) Stepping Stone’ ”; but it’s significantly better than anything
the Pistols ever did.
Boom. There, I said it. The Clash always blew the doors off the Sex Pistols.
And just because I care, here’s an even nastier,
more frenetic live version:
[I wrote this
piece a year ago, on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. I
thought about it again today, on the 11th anniversary, after a remarkable
Twitter conversation with my friend Esma (@ThundarKitteh
on Twitter), an Arab American who always has a brilliant perspective on things.
This post is about discussing the tragedy with my kids, who were very young at
the time, and that explains why September 11 stays with me the way it does. At
the same time, though, I agree wholeheartedly with Esma’s comments on Twitter
today that our reminiscences often border on exploitation of the tragedy rather
than honoring the dead, and that the United States compounded the tragedy of
September 11 by launching two unnecessary wars and demonizing Arabs, the people
of the Middle East and North Africa, and Muslims in general. As she said: “Life
of a civilian in the US = Life of a civilian in Afghanistan = Life of a
civilian in Iraq. PERIOD.”]
Yes, it is overkill as a matter of fact. This constant stream of news
stories and reminiscences, this obsession with the calamity of September 11,
2001, is complete overkill. Local DJ Lin Brehmer (no ordinary DJ, mind you)
refers to our remembrances of days like this as “nega-versaries,”
the anniversaries of tragedies that seem to captivate Americans like nothing
else.
It’s overkill, but to some extent it’s unavoidable … because we do remember events like September 11 whether we want
to or not; and those memories are keener on anniversaries of the event and, I
guess, keener still on bigger, “rounder” anniversaries like the fifth and tenth
anniversaries. That it seems illogical doesn’t make it less real: We’re
hardwired to think there’s something especially significant or poignant about
the ten year anniversary of September 11, and to pretend we’re not is an
exercise in futility.
So with apologies to my friends who are sick and tired of hearing
about it, there’s something about September 11 that I feel the need to recall
and to write about today, and I’m just going to go ahead and do it. Because
this is a part of the September 11 story that doesn’t get much attention: The
way the events of that day affected parents of young children and, more
importantly, those young kids themselves. It’s not as gripping as the stories
of the first responders, nor as tragic as the stories of those who died and
those who lost family members and friends. I’m not trying to compete with those
stories; I’m only saying that for someone like me – the father of five and
three year old boys at the time – the events of that day presented a unique
challenge; and for our boys, who are now 15 and 13, and our daughter, now 9,
who was born two months later, the September 11 attacks and what followed may
have an effect that’s even harder to fathom.
Harder to fathom, but not altogether unfamiliar.
Anyway, the thing is this: On September 11 and for the next few days,
my wife and I did everything we could to shelter our boys from the news,
because that’s not really the kind of thing a five and a three year old boy
should have to deal with. But we knew we couldn’t keep the story from them for
very long, especially because our older boy, Paul, had just started
kindergarten at the elementary school down the street and there was virtually
no way to prevent him from overhearing older kids or adults talking about it.
Moreover, on that Friday, September 14, Paul’s school held an assembly for the
kids to address what had happened. The younger kids were spared the gory
details, but they were asked to make paper doves for the assembly and they did
play some role in it. So at a minimum, Paul was bound to have heard something about the attacks by the end of that week.
It also happened that on that Friday night my wife had plans to meet
some friends downtown, and so I was alone with the boys that evening. So after
dinner as the three of us were sitting in the boys’ room playing with Legos or
whatever, I decided I had to talk to them about what had happened and what they
knew. I asked them if they’d heard anything about people getting hurt in New
York City earlier in the week. They both looked at me with blank stares. I
tried again, asking if they’d heard about a building catching fire or anything
like that. Still nothing. So then I asked, “What about a plane crash?”
“Oh, yeah,” Paul said. Mark, our three year old, said nothing. By this
point, I thought he’d pretty much lost interest in the conversation.
But Paul went on: “Yeah, I heard about that. But the good thing is,
the bad guys got killed too.”
Now bear in mind, he’s five years old at the time. He sees pretty much
everything through the prism of superheroes and children’s cartoons and
black-and-white good-versus-evil, and so none of this had any real meaning to
him. “The bad guys got killed” just means some sort of justice was served, some
loose ends of the storyline got tied up. No big deal.
But as we were sitting there, I recalled something I’d read earlier in
a special edition of the Chicago Tribune that was published on the evening of September 11 and distributed to
every household in the area. In one article, a Tribune reporter had asked various religious leaders for
their reaction to the attacks, and Greek Orthodox priest – I wish I knew his
name – made the most remarkable observation I had heard at the time. He said in
addition to the horrific loss of innocent life, people should mourn the deaths
of the highjackers, too, because they were children of God like everybody else;
they came into this world as innocent souls and somewhere along the line they
were lost. And that loss was tragic too.
Even if you take the religious overtones out of it, the priest had a
point. These young men weren’t born
highjackers and murders. They were born human beings like the rest of us. They
went astray, of course; somehow and for whatever reason the learned to hate and they learned to kill; but they weren’t born that way. Somehow,
between birth and death, they lost their way. And that was sad, too.
So that Friday night, sitting in my boys’ room with the world still
not making any sense, I tried to convey that idea to my five year old son. I
said, no, really it’s not a good thing that the bad guys died too. I said they
weren’t always bad guys, but at some point in their lives they turned to bad
ideas; they started out good and became bad. And if they hadn’t gone through
with the attacks; if, for some reason, they decided at the last minute that
they weren’t going to kill innocent people – or if they just chickened out, or
got caught – maybe there was a chance that they could come around, that they
could learn that whatever grievance they felt they had against whomever the
felt they had it, it didn’t justify the wonton murder of thousands of innocent
people. Maybe they could have been saved, somehow. So their dying, on top of
the thousands of innocent people who died that day, really wasn’t a good thing
after all.
I don’t know if that made any sense to Paul. He seemed to understand,
at least on some level, but I couldn’t really tell. As for Mark, I’m fairly
sure all of this was over his head. But as Paul and I were talking about this,
Mark climbed into my lap and held on to me. He knew there was something deadly
serious going on, even if he didn’t know what it was.
Did all of this make any difference? I don’t know. All I can tell you
is, I did the best I could under the circumstances.
But what’s always bothered me about that day and the events that
happened over the next couple of years is this: I realized then that the events
of September 11 and what followed were going to be for my kids what Vietnam was
for me. Having been born in 1962, I grew up with Vietnam. It was everywhere I
looked when I was little. When I was five or six years old, Vietnam dominated
every news broadcast on television or radio; it dominated every conversation my
parents and older siblings had; it was on the front page of every newspaper and
every magazine. There were images of the war everywhere, and even as a young
kid I knew that people were fighting and dying overseas every day. And I knew
there was a risk that my older brothers could get drafted and might have to go
to fight in Vietnam.
And maybe worse than all that, I learned at a very early age that
there were serious doubts about the morality and the justification for the war
in Vietnam.
I wonder if the architects of Vietnam ever thought about that: That my
generation was the first generation in American history to have to ask, at a
very early age, whether our country was engaged in an illegal and unjustified
war; whether our country had betrayed its most sacred principles. Yes, our
country had made grave mistakes before – just ask Native Americans – but most
people learn about those things when they’re older, maybe in high school or so,
and are better able to balance the good things in our history with the bad. But
because Vietnam was ubiquitous in the late 1960s, my generation grew up
questioning from a very early age whether our government had ginned up an
excuse to wage a war in a foreign country in violation of everything we were
supposed to believe in.
So I worry whether in the years since September 11 we’ve bequeathed
that same horrible thing on my kids’ generation. After all, the wars that
followed the September 11 attacks are more or less all they know, and at least
in the case of Iraq the same awful questions linger.
I grew up feeling like a part of my youth had been stolen from me by a
government that was willing to lie the country into war in Southeast Asia. Now
I have to ask whether we’ve done the same thing to my kids’ generation.
“Let the living let us in before the dead tear us apart.”
Still, I understand the point. It’s an issue people
run from. It’s an issue that makes people put their fingers in their ears and
say la, la, la … I can’t hear you.
And the only thing we know for sure is, that doesn’t help.
But here’s the thing. There are days when I can
talk about it and there are days when I can’t. Or, more to the point, don’t
want to. And today is one of those days. Not because it’s something that still
weighs too heavily, but because you can’t force yourself to have something
profound to say just because somebody said today’s the day to say profound
things.
And sometimes it just feels like no matter what you
say, nobody really gets it.
So today’ll just be Monday. We’ll talk about it
again another time.
Combat Rock was originally planned as a double album with the
working title Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg, but the idea was scrapped after internal wrangling within the group.
Mick Jones had mixed the first version, but the other members were dissatisfied
and mixing/producing duties were handed to Glyn Johns, at which point the
album became a single LP. The original mixes were later bootlegged.
Be that as it may, it’s a catchy tune. And now that
the conventions are over, it’s hard to resist playing it in honor of Lord and
Lady Romney, who just don’t understand why you
people aren’t rallying around
them the way commoners are supposed to rally around nobility. It’s their turn, after all.
Anyway, sadly for Mittens and Lady Ann, despite
having a lotta money, there aren’t a lot of singers they can buy; and, sadder
still, there are plenty of singers that Pres. Obama doesn’t have to buy, as
Rolling Stone magazine explains:
From Silversun Pickups to
Twisted Sister,
artists have been lamenting the use of their music by Republicans in the 2012
presidential campaign. Tom Petty can relate. “I’ve been on the wrong side where
I’ve had to tell some candidates to stop using my music,”
he told Rolling Stone on the MTV VMAs red
carpet.
But Petty was pleasantly surprised on
Wednesday night, when his song “I Won’t Back Down” played as President Obama
walked onstage at the Democratic National Convention, after former President
Bill Clinton’s speech. “I got chills,” said Petty. “They knew it would be okay.
I’ve had a chance to meet the President and talk to him about the music he
listens to.”
Poor Willard. That’s gotta sting. You’ll never be as cool as Chicago’s
own Barack Obama.
… As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
observed in his dissenting opinion in Northern
Securities Co. v. United States,
193 U.S. 197 (1904), citing an age-old legal maxim. But it’s a lesson we never
quite seem to learn.
Retired Bolingbrook [Illinois]
police officer Drew Peterson has been found guilty of murdering his third wife,
Kathleen Savio, the verdict eliciting a gasp from a packed Will County
courthouse and ending a case that for years has received salacious tabloid news
coverage.
Peterson showed no emotion as the
verdict was read. He was shackled, said “Good job” to his attorneys and was led
off.
Savio’s family and
supporters hugged and cried along with witnesses who testified for the state.
Tonight in Chicago, and perhaps throughout the
country, there’ll be much rejoicing, and I suppose it’s a good thing Drew
Peterson was convicted. If the media reports were accurate, he probably did
kill his third wife, and his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, is missing and
presumed dead, possibly by Drew Peterson’s hand as well.
Now, for the bad news. Despite Peterson’s
conviction, at least one, if not two, of his ex-wives is still dead; he nearly got away with killing one of them and may yet
get away with having killed the other; police and prosecutors horribly botched
the original investigation into Savio’s death, quite possibly to protect one of
their own; and, in the end, in order to get a guilty verdict – one that is
potentially vulnerable on appeal – the Illinois General Assembly and the courts
had to gut
existing hearsay laws to the detriment of the legal system as a whole … all
to make up for the original botched investigation that nearly let Drew Peterson
get away with murder in the first place.
I know it will never happen, but in a fair world
police and prosecutors would be asking themselves some very hard questions
today. And not just in Will County, Illinois.
These are images you would not have seen at last
week’s Republican National Convention. Let’s hope we see images like this when
the Democrats take their turn this week.
