Shuriken
01-15-2005, 03:01 PM
RINGING OUT THE OLD
by Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON - Good riddance to 2004.
It seems grimly ironic that a huge natural disaster should hit South Asia at year's end, dwarfing all that went before it in 2004 and putting in perspective the problems that beset this country over the previous 366 days of a dismaying leap year.
The loss of tens of thousands of souls in the earthquake and tsunami that followed in one sense vastly overshadows the deaths of more than 1,300 U.S. troops in Iraq. Except the latter were not incurred at the hand of nature, but in a war of choice begun under false premises.
While nature has been relatively gentle toward the United States, our government's political and foreign-policy decisions have exacted a heavy toll on peace and harmony at home, on the economy and on America's standing in the international community.
Most of all, these decisions have imposed the heaviest price on the families whose sons and daughters find themselves fighting a war in Iraq that didn't have to be fought.
The most frustrating part is that American voters had an opportunity Nov. 2 to remove the perpetrators of this disastrous event and its aftermath. Instead, voters rewarded them with four more years with which to pursue their wrong-headed policies here and abroad.
Over the last year, my e-mails have periodically brought suggestions that President Bush should be impeached for getting the country into the war in Iraq on questionable intelligence and motives. I was sharply criticized by some readers for not flatly advocating impeachment.
My response then was that Americans who were dissatisfied with the policies and direction taken by the Bush administration had a ready and less disputatious alternative to achieve the same result of removing it: the November presidential election.
Millions of voters took advantage of that opportunity in the greatest voter turnout for a Democratic presidential nominee in history. But a relatively few more — 3.5 million out of 118 million voters who went to the polls — voted otherwise, and the will of the majority rightly carried the day.
Still, it is more than sour grapes to note that the president's re-election was achieved in what was yet another stain on the year 2004 — one of the most negative campaigns in U.S. political history. It was marked by an outrageous smear on Sen. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, by supporters of an opponent who was able to avoid combat by enlisting in the Air National Guard and serving under questionable circumstances at home.
Further, Mr. Bush benefited from the careless handling of reports about those circumstances by Dan Rather of CBS, whom Republicans love to hate, that effectively neutralized the allegations and even turned the president into a victim.
The voters also narrowly returned Mr. Bush to office even though his invasion of Iraq turned into a bloody occupation in which American traditions for humane treatment of prisoners of war were shattered by behavior for which no accounting has been made at the top of the chain of command.
In addition, the failure to provide U.S. forces with adequate equipment, including protective armor, has been spotlighted by outspoken troops in the field, again with no administration official paying a price.
The South Asia tragedy has brought an outpouring of solicitude from the nations of the world, joined somewhat tardily but wholeheartedly by Mr. Bush from his ranch in Texas. It gives him an opportunity to demonstrate anew a solidarity with other world leaders, with whom he has been at odds over a range of what are his essentially unilateralist policies.
One hopes that the New Year will bring changes in policy and attitude in the Oval Office and the administration that can begin to restore not only stability and peace in Iraq but also a connection with the world at large, which has more reason to grieve than to celebrate the New Year.
HOW 'BOUT A DO-OVER?
by Molly Ivins
2004 had its highlights, but on the whole we got it wrong
AUSTIN, Texas — Oh 2004, 2004, bird thou never wert. Was it really that horrible a year, or does it only seem that way?
Abu Ghraib, the endless trials of Kobe Bryant and Scott Peterson, war in Iraq looking worse every day, Howard Dean eliminated over a whoop and a presidential race so devoid of joy that the high point was when the president claimed God speaks through him — leaving us to contemplate the news that God doesn't know how to pronounce nuclear and has yet to master subject-verb agreement. "Performance enhancing drugs" in baseball. Ray Charles died. Karl Rove is Man of the Year. We're all overweight. Swift Boat Liars win the presidential race for Bush. Then just to round things off nicely, a terrible natural disaster. What a bummer.
But, look at it this way... the Boston Red Sox won the championship. Eliot Spitzer is scaring the spit out of the insurance industry (check out those year-end bonuses on Wall Street, El). The Greek Olympics went well. Maybe we could end the payola by just having them in Greece every time. Lance Armstrong won a record sixth Tour de France, a symbolic victory for cancer patients everywhere.
Jon Stewart survived a storm of approval and came out just as sardonic as ever. Richard Clarke showed us all that public servant, class act and bureaucrat can be the same thing.
In other highlights:
—The Coalition of the Willing was depleted when Hungary, Thailand, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Honduras, Ukraine, Spain, the Philippines, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland (so movingly cited by President Bush during one of the debates) all proved less than willing. On the other hand, Tonga is still with us.
—Texan Jessica Simpson, the one who makes Paris Hilton look like a genius, showed an astonished nation what a Texas intellectual looks like. Upon being introduced to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, she said, "You've done a nice job decorating the White House."
—The Ukrainians showed us all what people who really care about democracy do when there's cheating at the polls. Bless them for just not standing for it.
—Media Low Point of the Year: Rush Limbaugh on Abu Ghraib: "I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?"
—Emblematic Political Moment of the Year: As the full dimensions of the tidal wave in the Indian Ocean became clear, Bush's staff used the occasion to... take a few cheap shots at Bill Clinton. Explaining why the president had neither returned to Washington nor even bothered to come out and read a statement of sorrow, The Washington Post reported that one official said: "'The president wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He doesn't want to make a symbolic statement about 'We feel your pain.' Many Bush aides believe Clinton was too quick to head for the cameras and to hold forth on tragedies with his trademark sympathy. 'Actions speak louder than words,' a top Bush aide said."
So for action, the Bushies pledged $15 million to help out, less than half the amount that will be spent on parties for the Bush inauguration. [The amount pledged has now grown to $350 million.]
—What Were They Thinking? Moment of the Year: Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl. Seriously, who planned that?
—Dumbest Reaction to Wardrobe Malfunction: FCC decides its job is to censor bad taste on television (got their life's work cut out for them, haven't they?), instead of preventing the truly obscene and dangerous concentration of ownership in the media.
—Another high point: John Ashcroft (the man whose understanding of the right to dissent is so profound he said, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve") will be replaced as attorney general by Al (Defining Torture Down) Gonzales.
Gonzales put out the legal memo that says "cruel, inhumane or degrading" treatment does not constitute torture as long as it is not "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."
Well, friends, the old ball is starting another orbit of the sun, giving us all a chance to do better this time. Let's not blow it, because we sure look like dogmeat after this one.
USEFUL LESSONS FROM 2004
by E.J. Dionne
MIDDLETOWN, R.I. — Except for the glorious victories of the Red Sox and the Patriots, 2004 was a disappointing year. But bad years offer useful lessons. Here are a few:
Relentlessness pays off. President Bush won re-election by ignoring the conventional wisdom that vicious attacks on your opponent don't work and turn off voters. As soon as John Kerry won the Democratic nomination, Bush's campaign went on the attack and never stopped. It worked.
Kerry got painted as arrogant and privileged compared with an arrogant president who was far more privileged.
Kerry was made out to be a flip-flopping liberal, and never mind asking how someone can be both a flip-flopper and an ideologue. Kerry, who shot people in battle and got wounded himself, was painted as less strong than Bush, the guy who said he supported the Vietnam War but was not willing to fight in it.
The sheer negative genius of the Bush campaign is worthy of close study. Face it: Liberals and Democrats are way too sensitive to elite editorial page opinion that asks more responsibility from the side it supposedly supports than from the side it supposedly opposes. Liberals worry themselves sick that if they fight Bush's cockamamie idea of borrowing billions for a shaky Social Security privatization scheme, those editorial writers will savage them. A lead opinion is likely to demand that they enter into negotiations with the president, even if the very act of doing so is certain to give Bush the upper hand.
Memo to Democrats: Forget the editorial writers and ask yourselves: What Would Bush Do? If you are not as tough as he is, he will crush you — again. Memo to liberal commentators: Why bend over backward to demand of your own side what you don't demand of the right, or of Bush?
Cultural hypocrisy should be exposed. I cannot understand why liberals who regularly criticize the excesses of the economic market let the conservatives get away with being the advocates of "traditional values."
When television networks and Hollywood exploit sex to make money, why aren't liberals asking why the free market so revered by the right wing promotes values the very same right wing claims to despise? The coarsening of the culture that traditionalist conservatives denounce is abetted by the very media concentration that economic conservatives defend. Why are liberals so tongue-tied in exposing this contradiction?
Class matters. Bush and the Republicans condemn "class warfare" — and then play the class card with a vengeance. Bush has pushed through policies that, by any impartial reckoning, have transferred massive amounts of money to the wealthiest people in our country. Yet it is conservatives, Bush supporters, who trash the "elites," especially when it comes to culture. Class warfare is evil — unless a conservative is playing the class card.
Somebody has to call this bluff. Why is it taboo to talk about a Wall Street "elite" that has benefited from Bush's tax cuts and would win big time from Social Security privatization? Why is it just terrible to point that pharmaceutical industry and HMO "elites" were paid off handsomely in the Medicare drug bill? Why is it so dreadfully radical to denounce corporate "elites" when conservatives can denounce "the Hollywood elite" with impunity? Why does the right wing get away, year after year, with this double standard on elitism and class warfare?
Stand for something. Bush won this year because of those attacks on Kerry. But he also won because swing voters who didn't like him very much were nonetheless quite certain that he knew what he wanted to do, and would try to get it done.
One line of attack against Bush is to say that his certainties are mistaken and that he never, ever questions them. That's true. It's also inadequate. Those who oppose the direction in which Bush is leading us need to propose an alternative.
They need to demonstrate that we could be much safer — and fight a more effective war on terror — if so much of the world did not mistrust us. They must create a realistic narrative about a more just and prosperous society. Policies on jobs, health insurance, child care, education and taxes should be more than a list. They ought to form a coherent picture of how things could be better, for everyone.
The long-term need for alternatives should not stop the loyal opposition from being tough. But the short-term need to be tough should not stop the opposition's search for alternatives. For Bush's adversaries, 2005 will be a difficult year. It also could be exhilarating.
by Jules Witcover
WASHINGTON - Good riddance to 2004.
It seems grimly ironic that a huge natural disaster should hit South Asia at year's end, dwarfing all that went before it in 2004 and putting in perspective the problems that beset this country over the previous 366 days of a dismaying leap year.
The loss of tens of thousands of souls in the earthquake and tsunami that followed in one sense vastly overshadows the deaths of more than 1,300 U.S. troops in Iraq. Except the latter were not incurred at the hand of nature, but in a war of choice begun under false premises.
While nature has been relatively gentle toward the United States, our government's political and foreign-policy decisions have exacted a heavy toll on peace and harmony at home, on the economy and on America's standing in the international community.
Most of all, these decisions have imposed the heaviest price on the families whose sons and daughters find themselves fighting a war in Iraq that didn't have to be fought.
The most frustrating part is that American voters had an opportunity Nov. 2 to remove the perpetrators of this disastrous event and its aftermath. Instead, voters rewarded them with four more years with which to pursue their wrong-headed policies here and abroad.
Over the last year, my e-mails have periodically brought suggestions that President Bush should be impeached for getting the country into the war in Iraq on questionable intelligence and motives. I was sharply criticized by some readers for not flatly advocating impeachment.
My response then was that Americans who were dissatisfied with the policies and direction taken by the Bush administration had a ready and less disputatious alternative to achieve the same result of removing it: the November presidential election.
Millions of voters took advantage of that opportunity in the greatest voter turnout for a Democratic presidential nominee in history. But a relatively few more — 3.5 million out of 118 million voters who went to the polls — voted otherwise, and the will of the majority rightly carried the day.
Still, it is more than sour grapes to note that the president's re-election was achieved in what was yet another stain on the year 2004 — one of the most negative campaigns in U.S. political history. It was marked by an outrageous smear on Sen. John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, by supporters of an opponent who was able to avoid combat by enlisting in the Air National Guard and serving under questionable circumstances at home.
Further, Mr. Bush benefited from the careless handling of reports about those circumstances by Dan Rather of CBS, whom Republicans love to hate, that effectively neutralized the allegations and even turned the president into a victim.
The voters also narrowly returned Mr. Bush to office even though his invasion of Iraq turned into a bloody occupation in which American traditions for humane treatment of prisoners of war were shattered by behavior for which no accounting has been made at the top of the chain of command.
In addition, the failure to provide U.S. forces with adequate equipment, including protective armor, has been spotlighted by outspoken troops in the field, again with no administration official paying a price.
The South Asia tragedy has brought an outpouring of solicitude from the nations of the world, joined somewhat tardily but wholeheartedly by Mr. Bush from his ranch in Texas. It gives him an opportunity to demonstrate anew a solidarity with other world leaders, with whom he has been at odds over a range of what are his essentially unilateralist policies.
One hopes that the New Year will bring changes in policy and attitude in the Oval Office and the administration that can begin to restore not only stability and peace in Iraq but also a connection with the world at large, which has more reason to grieve than to celebrate the New Year.
HOW 'BOUT A DO-OVER?
by Molly Ivins
2004 had its highlights, but on the whole we got it wrong
AUSTIN, Texas — Oh 2004, 2004, bird thou never wert. Was it really that horrible a year, or does it only seem that way?
Abu Ghraib, the endless trials of Kobe Bryant and Scott Peterson, war in Iraq looking worse every day, Howard Dean eliminated over a whoop and a presidential race so devoid of joy that the high point was when the president claimed God speaks through him — leaving us to contemplate the news that God doesn't know how to pronounce nuclear and has yet to master subject-verb agreement. "Performance enhancing drugs" in baseball. Ray Charles died. Karl Rove is Man of the Year. We're all overweight. Swift Boat Liars win the presidential race for Bush. Then just to round things off nicely, a terrible natural disaster. What a bummer.
But, look at it this way... the Boston Red Sox won the championship. Eliot Spitzer is scaring the spit out of the insurance industry (check out those year-end bonuses on Wall Street, El). The Greek Olympics went well. Maybe we could end the payola by just having them in Greece every time. Lance Armstrong won a record sixth Tour de France, a symbolic victory for cancer patients everywhere.
Jon Stewart survived a storm of approval and came out just as sardonic as ever. Richard Clarke showed us all that public servant, class act and bureaucrat can be the same thing.
In other highlights:
—The Coalition of the Willing was depleted when Hungary, Thailand, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Honduras, Ukraine, Spain, the Philippines, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Poland (so movingly cited by President Bush during one of the debates) all proved less than willing. On the other hand, Tonga is still with us.
—Texan Jessica Simpson, the one who makes Paris Hilton look like a genius, showed an astonished nation what a Texas intellectual looks like. Upon being introduced to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, she said, "You've done a nice job decorating the White House."
—The Ukrainians showed us all what people who really care about democracy do when there's cheating at the polls. Bless them for just not standing for it.
—Media Low Point of the Year: Rush Limbaugh on Abu Ghraib: "I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of the need to blow some steam off?"
—Emblematic Political Moment of the Year: As the full dimensions of the tidal wave in the Indian Ocean became clear, Bush's staff used the occasion to... take a few cheap shots at Bill Clinton. Explaining why the president had neither returned to Washington nor even bothered to come out and read a statement of sorrow, The Washington Post reported that one official said: "'The president wanted to be fully briefed on our efforts. He doesn't want to make a symbolic statement about 'We feel your pain.' Many Bush aides believe Clinton was too quick to head for the cameras and to hold forth on tragedies with his trademark sympathy. 'Actions speak louder than words,' a top Bush aide said."
So for action, the Bushies pledged $15 million to help out, less than half the amount that will be spent on parties for the Bush inauguration. [The amount pledged has now grown to $350 million.]
—What Were They Thinking? Moment of the Year: Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl. Seriously, who planned that?
—Dumbest Reaction to Wardrobe Malfunction: FCC decides its job is to censor bad taste on television (got their life's work cut out for them, haven't they?), instead of preventing the truly obscene and dangerous concentration of ownership in the media.
—Another high point: John Ashcroft (the man whose understanding of the right to dissent is so profound he said, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve") will be replaced as attorney general by Al (Defining Torture Down) Gonzales.
Gonzales put out the legal memo that says "cruel, inhumane or degrading" treatment does not constitute torture as long as it is not "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."
Well, friends, the old ball is starting another orbit of the sun, giving us all a chance to do better this time. Let's not blow it, because we sure look like dogmeat after this one.
USEFUL LESSONS FROM 2004
by E.J. Dionne
MIDDLETOWN, R.I. — Except for the glorious victories of the Red Sox and the Patriots, 2004 was a disappointing year. But bad years offer useful lessons. Here are a few:
Relentlessness pays off. President Bush won re-election by ignoring the conventional wisdom that vicious attacks on your opponent don't work and turn off voters. As soon as John Kerry won the Democratic nomination, Bush's campaign went on the attack and never stopped. It worked.
Kerry got painted as arrogant and privileged compared with an arrogant president who was far more privileged.
Kerry was made out to be a flip-flopping liberal, and never mind asking how someone can be both a flip-flopper and an ideologue. Kerry, who shot people in battle and got wounded himself, was painted as less strong than Bush, the guy who said he supported the Vietnam War but was not willing to fight in it.
The sheer negative genius of the Bush campaign is worthy of close study. Face it: Liberals and Democrats are way too sensitive to elite editorial page opinion that asks more responsibility from the side it supposedly supports than from the side it supposedly opposes. Liberals worry themselves sick that if they fight Bush's cockamamie idea of borrowing billions for a shaky Social Security privatization scheme, those editorial writers will savage them. A lead opinion is likely to demand that they enter into negotiations with the president, even if the very act of doing so is certain to give Bush the upper hand.
Memo to Democrats: Forget the editorial writers and ask yourselves: What Would Bush Do? If you are not as tough as he is, he will crush you — again. Memo to liberal commentators: Why bend over backward to demand of your own side what you don't demand of the right, or of Bush?
Cultural hypocrisy should be exposed. I cannot understand why liberals who regularly criticize the excesses of the economic market let the conservatives get away with being the advocates of "traditional values."
When television networks and Hollywood exploit sex to make money, why aren't liberals asking why the free market so revered by the right wing promotes values the very same right wing claims to despise? The coarsening of the culture that traditionalist conservatives denounce is abetted by the very media concentration that economic conservatives defend. Why are liberals so tongue-tied in exposing this contradiction?
Class matters. Bush and the Republicans condemn "class warfare" — and then play the class card with a vengeance. Bush has pushed through policies that, by any impartial reckoning, have transferred massive amounts of money to the wealthiest people in our country. Yet it is conservatives, Bush supporters, who trash the "elites," especially when it comes to culture. Class warfare is evil — unless a conservative is playing the class card.
Somebody has to call this bluff. Why is it taboo to talk about a Wall Street "elite" that has benefited from Bush's tax cuts and would win big time from Social Security privatization? Why is it just terrible to point that pharmaceutical industry and HMO "elites" were paid off handsomely in the Medicare drug bill? Why is it so dreadfully radical to denounce corporate "elites" when conservatives can denounce "the Hollywood elite" with impunity? Why does the right wing get away, year after year, with this double standard on elitism and class warfare?
Stand for something. Bush won this year because of those attacks on Kerry. But he also won because swing voters who didn't like him very much were nonetheless quite certain that he knew what he wanted to do, and would try to get it done.
One line of attack against Bush is to say that his certainties are mistaken and that he never, ever questions them. That's true. It's also inadequate. Those who oppose the direction in which Bush is leading us need to propose an alternative.
They need to demonstrate that we could be much safer — and fight a more effective war on terror — if so much of the world did not mistrust us. They must create a realistic narrative about a more just and prosperous society. Policies on jobs, health insurance, child care, education and taxes should be more than a list. They ought to form a coherent picture of how things could be better, for everyone.
The long-term need for alternatives should not stop the loyal opposition from being tough. But the short-term need to be tough should not stop the opposition's search for alternatives. For Bush's adversaries, 2005 will be a difficult year. It also could be exhilarating.