Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 180         Today’s News and Views     Monday, June 26, 2006

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Jacob's bad luck: Is it . . . Satan? Bedeviled: His business deals have been delayed, keeping him from fully funding his campaign

By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune

As if beating a five-term congressman wasn't hard enough, John Jacob said he has another foe working against him: the devil.

   "There's another force that wants to keep us from going to Washington, D.C.," Jacob said. "It's the devil is what it is. I don't want you to print that, but it feels like that's what it is."

   Jacob said Thursday that since he decided to run for Congress against Rep. Chris Cannon, Satan has bollixed his business deals, preventing him from putting as much money into the race as he had hoped.

   Numerous business deals he had lined up have been delayed, freezing money he was counting on to finance his race.

   "You know, you plan, you organize, you put your budget together and when you have 10 things fall through, not just one, there's some other, something else that is happening," Jacob said.

   Asked if he actually believed that "something else" was indeed Satan, Jacob said: "I don't know who else it would be if it wasn't him. Now when that gets out in the paper, I'm going to be one of the screw-loose people."

   Jacob initially said the devil was working against him during a Wednesday immigration event, then reiterated his belief Thursday in a meeting with The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board.

   "There's a lot of adversity. There's no question I've had experiences that I think there's an outside force," he said.

   University of Utah political scientist Matthew Burbank said Jacob's sentiment is unusual for a political candidate and might show his inexperience, but is unlikely to be a major issue for the conservative voters he is targeting.

   "Given that, I don't think it's very likely to make a big splash among Republican primary voters, but certainly if he gets through to the general election it might come up again and he'd have to explain it more," Burbank said.

   Jacob, who like Cannon is LDS, said he is not the only one who is being opposed by Beelzebub. He said both Cannon and Sen. Bob Bennett have lost millions of dollars since going to Congress, and he believes their adversity is rooted in the same dark origins.

   Cannon's campaign would not address whether Lucifer is opposing either candidate.

   "Chris would not attribute any adversities to any outside influence," Cannon's chief of staff, Joe Hunter, said regarding Cannon's diminished personal wealth since going to Congress. "I'm not sure that Chris would even call them adversities. It's a conscious decision on Chris' part to do what's important to him. There's been far more important events in Chris' life than his business."

   Jacob explained that, when people try to do something good, there are frequently forces that align to stop them.

   "We have a country that was created by our Heavenly Father and it was a country that had a Constitution and everyone who came to America had strong faith. If that can be destroyed that would be the adversity. . . . Whether you want to call that Satan or whoever you want to call it, I believe in the last eight months I've experienced that."

© Copyright 2006, The Salt Lake Tribune.

Young People Should Respect their Elder Liars

by Matt Stoller, Fri Jun 23, 2006 at 11:02:51 PM EST

I didn't want to just let this article from Richard Morin titled 'Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy' (or 'Comedy Poisoning Democracy') go unanswered (via Alternet).  Here's Morin's argument.

This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

That's particularly dismaying news because the show is hugely popular among college students, many of whom already don't bother to cast ballots.

Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris of East Carolina University said previous research found that nearly half -- 48 percent -- of this age group watched "The Daily Show" and only 23 percent of show viewers followed "hard news" programs closely.

To test for a "Daily Effect," Baumgartner and Morris showed video clips of coverage of the 2004 presidential candidates to one group of college students and campaign coverage from "The CBS Evening News" to another group. Then they measured the students' attitudes toward politics, President Bush and the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

The results showed that the participants rated both candidates more negatively after watching Stewart's program. Participants also expressed less trust in the electoral system and more cynical views of the news media, according to the researchers' article, in the latest issue of American Politics Research.

"Ultimately, negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls," they wrote.

Ugh, there are so many bad leaps of logic here.

First of all, the problem with the testing Morin cites is that it assumes that 'hard news' programs are truthful, that politicians are honorable, and that journalists are honest and helpful to public discourse.  If none of those conditions are accurate, then what the 'Daily effect' really shows is that Jon Stewart is able to accurately describe our political world to young people.  And in fact, Daily Show viewers not only have more negative feelings about the political system, but they are better informed than 'hard news' viewers.  And that sounds about right; things aren't great, the political system took the country to war that is nearly universally acknowledged as a horrific mistake, and 2004 presented us with two wildly unappealing old white men as candidates, so why is it good for citizens to 'feel' good about the political system?  How is that a test of civic virtue instead of simple delusion?

Morin and the researchers go on to bite their nails about what this negative attitude might mean for voting.  Only, young people voted in record numbers in 2004 (and I believe 2005 in NJ and VA as well, though I don't have those numbers handy), when many of them were getting their news from the Daily Show.  Some Daily effect.  

Ok, so let's be clear with what Morin is fretting about.  He thinks that the Daily Show doesn't make younger viewers feel good enough about politicians and media figures.  It's not enough that Daily Show viewers are better informed than any other media consumer, that young people voted in record numbers, that, and that the choice in 2004 for President presented young people with two wildly unappealing old white men.  No, it's all about young people not feeling good enough about the people who routinely lie to them.

Young people have very negative feelings about politics, and rightfully so.  And they're voting anyway.  That's amazing.  I suppose what Morin doesn't like is that the Daily Show punctures the media's sense of self-importance (of which Morin displays an amply large amount), and that young people are watching Stewart instead of reading Morin.  

Big surprise there.

Rob Kall: Bushstapo Uses Entrapment-Tainted "Terrorist Arrest" of Laughable Bozos to Bump CIA Massive Spying on Bank Records as Top News Story

By Rob Kall

Most of the mainstream media ignored the important news and fell for the bait the Bushstapo threw them. It was a brilliant day for media manipulation and spin for Karl Rove.

Yesterday two major news developments emerged. The important one was that the CIA has spied upon millions of financial transactions, which is outrageous evidence of further abuses of power by the Bush administration. They are throwing the constitution down the toilet.

But Bush's team masterfully played the media, almost totally wiping the real story off the front pages, dropping it to minor news on TV, by electing to arrest, using major entrapments, a group of silly, incompetent misfits, who might have had fantasies of being terrorists.

It appears the Bush administration was working from an out of date version of a Canadian playbook, since the Canadians had arrested a group of "terrorists" a few weeks earlies. The problem is, apparently, the Bushstapo didn't keep paying attention in Canada, because the Canadian terrorists have become the laughing stock of Canada. They ordered two tons of highly-tracked-as-potential-bomb-material Ammonium nitrate to be delivered to a local storage locker, a dead give-away that something strange was amiss.

But the Miami "terrorists" didn't even come close to ordering explosive materials. They carried out a few actions that the government agents trying to entrap them encouraged them to engage in. Even Bushstapo chief Gonzalez acknowledged there is no immediate threat."

The reason this ragtag band of bozos was arrested was because the Bush administration needed a cover for the real news that was leaked, to the great consternation of Dick Cheney, that Bush and his people were doing even more spying in another area of our lives.

If we look at the terrorists who the Bush administration has arrested and prosecuted so far, they have two characteristics in common; most are eventually released for lack of an iota of evidence, and the ones who are held are idiots or nut jobs-- not a hardened, tough, serious terrorist among them-- NOT ONE!!

Tragically, these "terrorists" are being used by the Bushstapo to act as a foil for their further assaults on the constitution and American rights to privacy. This "terrorist arrest" was massively orchestrated with the mainstream media, with talking head experts on Terrorism jumping through hoops to describe how safe the targets are, how brilliant the arrest was.

But not everyone is buying it. Bill Press

Attorney Andrew Cohen writes for CBSnews.com Major Terror Ring Or 'Al Qaeda Lite'?:

The same people who told us that Zacarias Moussaoui was the 20th hijacker and that Jose Padilla was building a radiological bomb now are telling us that they've foiled a legitimate terror plot to take down the Sears Tower in Chicago. Maybe yes. Maybe no. I'll wait for the trial to decide.

In the meantime, please forgive me my skepticism amid all the triumphant trumpets of glee and satisfaction. This administration has on too many occasions promised much more than it ultimately would and could deliver when it comes to these terror cases.

...Nothing in the four corners of the indictment convinces me that these guys were legitimate terrorist wannabes as opposed to a bunch of angry bozos looking lazily for al Qaeda to hook them up with all sorts of goodies. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the defense themes here is that the men were conspiring against the "al Qaeda representative" to cheat him out of those supplies and cash they had asked for. And you can hear the defense attorneys now telling the judge and jury that their clients were merely expressing their hostility toward America, protected speech under the First Amendment, and taking photographs of police buildings (perhaps a crime, but not a major one).

Why the cynicism? Because I've been down this road before. I remember when the feds charged John Lindh with conspiracy to commit murder �" even though he was sitting trapped in a filthy prison in Mazar-i-Sharif the middle of a war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance when CIA agent Johnny Michael Spann was murdered by thugs. I remember when the feds tried to sell us on the notion that Moussaoui was the 20th hijacker long after they knew he wasn't. I remember when the government told us that Yaser Esam Hamdi was so valuable as an intelligence asset and so dangerous as a terrorist that he had to be held incommunicado and without charges as an "enemy combatant" until the feds lost a round in court and promptly set him free.

I remember the hullabaloo about the prosecution of terror suspects in Michigan that later imploded amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct (the prosecutors failed to turn over exculpatory evidence). And, of course, I will never forget John Ashcroft, then-attorney general, interrupting a visit to Russia to jump on a satellite feed to warn us all back home that Padilla was a would-be "dirty bomber." Today, Padilla is just a regular old terror defendant in a case his Miami judge this week called "light on facts."

Because I remember these things, and because they contain the common themes of over-hyping and over-dramatization that are possible here, I'm going to wait a bit before I declare this latest indictment a major victory in the war on terrorism. I suggest you do so as well.

And Robert Parry mocks the arrests of these pathetic substitutes for real terrorists in his article Terrorists in Miami, Oh My!

The Bush administration finally took action against alleged terrorists living in plain sight in Miami, but they weren't the right-wing Cuban terrorists implicated in actual acts of terror, such as blowing a civilian Cuban airliner out of the sky. They were seven young black men whose crime was more "aspirational than operational," the FBI said.

As media fanfare over the arrests made the seven young men, many sporting dreadlocks, the new face of the terrorist enemy in America, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conceded that the men had no weapons or explosives and represented "no immediate threat."

But Gonzales warned that these kinds of homegrown terrorists "may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda." [NYT, June 24, 2006]

For longtime observers of political terrorism in South Florida, the aggressive reaction to what may have been the Miami group's loose talk about violence, possibly spurred by an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative, stands in marked contrast to the U.S. government's see-no-evil approach to notorious Cuban terrorists who have lived openly in Miami for decades.

For instance, the Bush administration took no action in early April 2006, when a Spanish-language Miami television station interviewed Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who offered a detailed justification for the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight that killed 73 people, including the young members of the Cuban national fencing team.

Bosch refused to admit guilt, but his chilling defense of the bombing-- and the strong evidence that has swirled around his role-- left little doubt of his complicity, even as he lives in Miami as a free man, protected both in the past and present by the Bush family.

Will these charges stick? Lynn Glasner blogs, on OpEdNews, On Entrapment

So they are sure they caught some bad guys. That's what they say. Don't you feel safer already? Having just completed a stint on jury duty in which the entrapment technique was the basis for the charges, it's time to revisit what happens in these stings. Whether NYC cops or FBI agents in Miami, the m.o. is to pose as a kindred spirit in the illicit activity du jour. But the smarter ‘criminals' don't fall for this crap, so the operation itself becomes mere bottom feeding. But these agents of our state(s) have to produce results lest they lose their jobs, so they ply away at the bottom, where the picking is plentiful and easy. The PR bounce is discernable, whether in the offices of 1 Police Plaza where the number of indictments grows like a feather in the cops' cap or in the press that sells us the ‘news' of a terrorist sting. The unsuspecting public continues to think it's good news when these stings are successful.

For hours, the major news networks covered this "major terrorist bust" that was really a distraction and an effort by Karl Rove to move forward his goal of making terrorism and fear the main issue in the Fall elections. Will the American public buy it?

Authors Bio: Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, and organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology. He is a frequent Speaker on a wide range of subjects. See more of his articles here and, older ones, here. 

Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2006

June 20, 2006

Ten Reasons To Impeach the President -- And One Reason Why Democratic Leaders Are Wrong To Be Afraid To Do It

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Dave Lindorff

As prospects grow for a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives, and perhaps even the Senate, this November, the idea of impeachment is gaining attention. Yet even as polls show increasing numbers of Americans supporting the idea of removing Bush from office before the end of his term, Democratic Party leaders keep backing away.

This is not simply bad politics. It is cowardly, wrong and dangerous.

Let's look at the facts.

President Bush has committed grave offenses against the Constitution and against the people of the United States. Among these offenses are:

1. Initiating a war of aggression against a nation that posed no immediate threat to the U.S. -- a war that has needlessly killed 2500 Americans and maimed and damaged over 20,000 more, while killing between 50-100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children.

2. Lying and organizing a conspiracy to trick the American people and the U.S. Congress into approving an unnecessary and illegal war.

3. Approving and encouraging, in violation of U.S. and international law, the use of torture, kidnapping and rendering of prisoners of war captured in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the course of the so-called War on Terror.

4. Illegally stripping the right of citizenship and the protections of the constitution from American citizens, denying them the fundamental right to have their cases heard in a court, to hear the charges against them, to be judged in a public court by a jury of their peers, and to have access to a lawyer.

5. Authorizing the spying on American citizens and their communications by the National Security Agency and other U.S. police and intelligence agencies, in violation of the First and Fourth Amendments and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

6. Obstructing investigation into and covering up knowledge of the deliberate exposing of the identity of a U.S. CIA undercover operative, and possibly conspiring in that initial outing itself.

7. Obstructing the investigation into the 9-11 attacks and lying to investigators from the Congress and the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission -- actions that come perilously close to treason.

8. Violating the due process and other constitutional rights of thousands of citizens and legal residents by rounding them up and disappearing or deporting them without hearings.

9. Abuse of power, undermining of the constitution and violating the presidential oath of office by deliberately refusing to administer over 750 acts duly passed into law by the Congress -- actions which if left unchallenged would make the Congress a vestigial body, and the president a dictator.

10. Criminal negligence in failing to provide American troops with adequate armor before sending them into a war of choice, criminal negligence in going to war against a weak, third-world nation without any planning for post-war occupation and reconstruction, criminal negligence in failing to respond to a known and growing crisis in the storm-blasted city of New Orleans, and criminal negligence in failing to act, and in fact in actively obstructing efforts by other countries and American state governments, to deal with the looming crisis of global warming.

Each one of these offenses (and it is not meant to be a complete list) would be sufficient on its own to require the president's removal from office, and in some cases, where an actual statutory crime can be charged, his subsequent indictment and trial. Together they cry out for impeachment and removal.

There are those, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who argue against impeachment, claiming that it would be a diversion from the "important agenda" of the Democratic Party. Aside from the fact that there is not much "there" in the so-called agenda of the so-called opposition, the reality is that the Democratic Party, should it manage to win a majority in House and Senate in November, will be unable to accomplish a single thing with President Bush in the White House, since the president has already claimed that he has the power to violate and ignore 750 acts and laws passed by a Congress led by his own party. Before the Democrats can count on a single bill of theirs becoming the law of the land, they will have to remove this usurper from office. Even ardent conservatives should be afraid of leaving stand actions that, if unchallenged, will set a precedent for all future presidents, Republican and Democrat, making American presidents into tyrants answerable to no one.

There are those who fear that impeaching Bush would mean turning over the White House to Vice President Dick Cheney. This is nonsense. The vice president has long been known to be the real president, and any constitutional crimes that are exposed in the course of impeachment hearings will quickly be traced also to Cheney's office. The vice president, however, does not have the president's Constitutional immunity from prosecution, and would likely be indicted and forced to resign long before Bush's impeachment got to a Senate trial. Nor would impeaching Bush mean turning the White House over to Rep. Dennis Hastert. Besides the fact that Hastert is reportedly facing his own legal troubles, impeachment is not even going to occur unless the Democrats take over the House in November first, and that would make the next person in line after Cheney none other than Democrat Pelosi.

There are people, especially in the media, who say impeachment is a bad idea both because it would allegedly cause a "constitutional crisis" and because it would lead to public anger at Democrats who promoted another divisive political battle. This is both unprincipled and absurd. First of all, impeachment is no constitutional crisis: the Founders thought it so important that they included impeachment of the president in the same Article II of the Constitution that defines the president's powers. If anything, we are facing a constitutional crisis right now. Impeachment is an integral part of the governing process. Secondly, polls suggest that a majority of Americans favor impeachment -- certainly more than ever favored impeachment of either Clinton or Nixon. People have had it with the sanctimoniousness, the dishonesty, the staggering incompetence and the nasty political dirty tricks of this administration. Third, they want an opposition that will stand on principle. But finally and most importantly, the crimes of this president and this administration are so grievous that it is shameful to even talk about practicalities and political advantage. The president simply must be impeached, because as the Willie Sutton of Constitutional violators, he is putting the Republic and the Constitution at grave risk. The only principled and valid discussion about strategy is about how best to achieve impeachment, not about whether to seek impeachment.

No one should imagine that a successful impeachment of President Bush would usher in some wonderful new world of honest and progressive government. The Democratic Party long ago lost its soul and its right to call itself a party of the people. But if the American people, in the course of this 2006 election year, force the Democratic Party to do that which their leaders are afraid to do -- to impeach this criminal president -- there is a chance that those same people will also push the Democratic Party to do other things that it has not done in decades: namely, to act in the interests of ordinary working people instead of the same moneyed interests that own the party of Lincoln.
 
Dave Lindorff

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Dave Lindorff, a long-time Salon contributor, is co-author with Barbara
Olshansky, of  The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing
President George W. Bush from Office, (St. Martin's Press, May 2006).

© BuzzFlash.

Deflating Big Brother by Debunking Right Wing Lies, Myths, and Propaganda

By Len Hart

Did Christ not say "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God"? Did Christ not say "...turn the other cheek"? And of the merciful, did he not say that they, in turn, obtain mercy? Is the Bible not true? If not, then why do these people insist upon being seen going to church? What is gained by maintaining frauds and pretenses?

How can "Christians" insist upon believing lies when their Savior was said to have told Pontius Pilate: "I am the truth" he implied that truth itself was the source of all that is good and absent in all that is bad. You don't have to be a Christian to believe that. Jacob Bronowski whose critique of the "logical positivist" position in his Science and Human Values pointed out an underlying, unproved social injunction implied in A. J. Ayer's analytical methods. That implied imperative is:

"We OUGHT to behave in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so."

Ironically, Bronouski's critique may have saved logical positivism from its own inflexible consistency, placing its edifice not upon an unassailable axiom but rather upon an affirmation of values which will not admit of proof. What true and lasting ethic could not be based upon the pure pursuit of truth?

I would like to create a database of the various, multitudinous right wing/GOP myths, propaganda, claptrap and urban legends cooked up by the right wing, disseminated by a dutiful mainstream media, swallowed eagerly by a flock of faithful who never question it. But, that's more work than I am willing to spend with a entire class of deluded losers. But -the denial of global climate change is among the more pernicious and immediately harmful right wing lies.

When the right wing is confronted by truth, it tries to shut up the source of it. Lately, Thom Friedman has taken a different tack. He discounts the very concept of "truth" itself. What does being right have to do with anything? he asked recently. Well, for one thing: being right has survival value. Those who disagree will not refute that proposition; they will merely label it: Darwinism!

Even so, we will never know what claptrap might have been believed by Cro Magnons. They're all dead. The right wing only recognizes "survival value" in the exercise of raw power just as the US has tried to silence its critics abroad.

Friedman is not only often wrong, he's repetitive. Perhaps, he thinks that if he repeats a spin often enough, then one day it will be true. Keep on doing whatever it is that's making you sick. Search for your lost keys under the street lamp because the light is better there. Beat your head against a wall; one day, when you're dead, the headache will stop.

Authors Website: http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/

Authors Bio: Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI. He maintains the progressive blog: The Existentialist Cowboy

Copyright © OpEdNews, 2002-2006

Springsteen Mocks Ann Coulter, TV Pundits

By E&P Staff

Published: June 23, 2006 1:00 PM ET

NEW YORK Appearing on CNN today to promote his current tour and album of Pete Seeger songs, rocker Bruce Springsteen took note of the current controversy surrounding Ann Coulter in responding to a question about whether musicians should speak out on politics.

Springsteen was asked by Soledad O'Brien if getting flak about his political views, such as backing John Kerry in 2004, made him wonder if musicians should try so hard to be taken seriously on topical issues.

"They should let Ann Coulter do it instead?" he mused, with a chuckle. Then he said, "You can turn on the idiots rambling on, on cable television, every night of the week -- and they say musicians shouldn’t speak up? It’s insane, it’s funny," he said, laughing.

He called politics "an organic part of what I’m doing. ... It’s called common sense. I don’t even see it as politics at this point.''

As for the Iraq war, he commented, "You don’t take your country into a major war on circumstantial evidence -- you lose your job for that. That’s my opinion and I don’t have a problem voicing that. Some people have a problem with that, others don’t."

He revealed that some former fans have mailed records back to him.

© 2005 VNU eMedia Inc

Saturday, June 24, 2006

WALL STREET JOURNAL CALLS HUGO CHAVEZ A THREAT TO WORLD PEACE

The Wall Street Journal Calls Hugo Chavez A Threat to World Peace - by Stephen Lendman

You won't find commentary and language any more hostile to Hugo Chavez than on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Their June 23 piece by Mary Anastasia O'Grady in the Americas column is a clear, jaw-dropping example. It's practically blood-curdling in its vitriol which calls Hugo Chavez a threat to world peace. The sad part of it is Journal readers believe this stuff and are likely to support any US government efforts to remove the "threat."

The O'Grady article is about the elections scheduled to take place in the fall for five non-permanent UN Security Council seats to be held in 2007. One of them will be for the Latin American seat now held by Argentina. The two countries vying to fill the opening are Guatemala and Venezuela, and the other countries in the region will vote on which one will get it. You won't have to think long to guess the one the US supports - its Guatemalan ally, of course. And why not. For over 50 years its succession of military and civilian governments have all followed the dictates of their dominant northern neighbor. In so doing, they all managed to achieve one of the world's worst human rights records that hasn't abated even after the 1996 Peace Accords were signed ending a brutal 36 year conflict. Although the country today is nominally a democratic republic, it continues to abuse its people according to documented reports by Amnesty International.

Amnesty is aware of sexual violence and extreme brutality against women including 665 murders in 2005 gotten from police records; 224 reported attacks on human rights activists and organizations in the same year with little or no progress made investigating them; forced evictions and destruction of homes of indigenous people in rural areas (echoes of Palestine); and no progress by the government and Constitutional Court in seeking justice for decades of genocidal crimes and crimes against humanity committed by paramilitary death squads and the Guatamalan military. The sum of these and other unending abuses led Amnesty to call Guatamala a "land of injustice."

That record of abuse hardly matters to the Bush administration nor did it bother any past ones either since the CIA fomented a coup in 1954 ousting the country's democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. That coup began a half century reign of terror against the country's indigenous Mayan majority. It was fully supported by a succession of US presidents who were quite willing to overlook it as long as Guatamalan governments maintained a policy of compliance with the US agenda. They all did, and in return received the support and blessing of the US and its corporate giants that continue to suck the life out of that oppressed country.

Guatamala fills the bill nicely for the Bush administration and would be expected to be a close ally in support of US positions that come up for votes in the UN Security Council. Venezuela, on the other hand, is a different story. Since he was first democratically elected in 1998, Hugo Chavez has done what few other leaders ever do. He's kept his promises to his people to serve their interests ahead of those of other nations, especially the US that's dominated and exploited Venezuela for decades. He's served them well, and in so doing engendered the wrath of his dominant northern neighbor that already has tried and failed three times to oust him and is now planning a fourth attempt to do it.

The idea of a Chavez-led government holding a seat on the Security Council does not go down well in Washington, and the Bush administration is leading a campaign to prevent it with aid and support of the kind of attack-dog journalism found in the Wall Street Journal. Honest observers know this newspaper of record for corporate America has a hard time dealing with facts it dislikes so it invents the ones it does to use in their place.

The June 23 editorial is a good example. It extolls the record of the Guatamalan government with its long-standing record of extreme abuse against its own people falsely claiming it's been "accumulating an impressive record of international cooperation on a variety of UN efforts." It claims one of its main qualifications is its "active role in international peacekeeping" and that the country is now home to a Central American regional peacekeeping school and training center. Oddly, it mentions that Guatamalan peacekeepers are now serving in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Haiti. What it fails to mention is that those so-called "peacekeepers," along with those from other countries serving with them, have in large part functioned as paramilitary enforcers, and in that capacity have committed gross human rights abuses against the local people rather than trying to protect them. The WSJ writer surely knows this but didn't choose to share that information with her readers. Instead she extolls the country's "democratic credentials." But readers with any knowledge of recent Guatamalan history surely know that country's true record is one of extreme violence and abuse against its own people and one no one would think of as a nation representing them democratically.

The WSJ's June 23 editorial is titled "A Vote for Venezuela Is a Vote for Iran." The commentary in it is one of the paper's most extreme diatribes against the Venezuelan leader which would seem to indicate the Bush administration and corporate America are stepping up their attack on Hugo Chavez in advance of when they plan to make their move to oust him. The Journal writer calls him a "strongman" in an "oil dictatorship" leading a government that values "tyranny and aggression" who'll use his seat and Council presidency when his nation assumes it to support "hostile states" like Iran, Cuba, Sudan and North Korea. Observers knowledgeable about Venezuela under Chavez would have a hard time containing themselves as the true Chavez record is totally opposite the one the Journal portrays. The Journal writer, of course, knows this, but would never report it in her column. Her employer and the interests it serves wouldn't be pleased if she did.

While claiming that a Guatamala seat on the Council is a "voice for the region, not its own national interests," it says Venezuela's "rests largely on oil 'diplomacy' and the capacity to push anti-American buttons around the UN." It goes on to state "It may seem strange Venezuela has any support in the region. Over the past seven years, its meddling in its neighbors' politics 'have' (even the grammar is wrong) earned it a reputation as a bully. Mr. Chavez is persona non grata in more than a few Latin nations. Many countries are worried about Venezuela's 'big spending' to acquire fighter jets and 100,000 kalisnikovs from Russia." Readers may need to pause to catch their breath.

What the Journal writer doesn't explain is far more important than what she does - but she's doing her job as a servant of the US empire. Chavez's so-called "oil diplomacy," in fact, is based on his Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas or ALBA. It's based on the principles of complementarity (not competition), solidarity (not domination), cooperation (not exploitation) and respect for other nations' sovereignty free from the control of dominant powers like the US and its large transnational corporations. It's the mirror opposite of US-style predatory capitalism and the one-sided trade agreements it uses to exploit other countries for its own gain.

The nations participating in ALBA-style agreements are able to operate outside the usual international banking and corporate trading system in their exchange of goods and services so that each country benefits and none loses - just the opposite of the one-sided way the US operates. Because Venezuela is rich in oil, it's been able to trade that vital commodity with its neighbors who need it, even sell it to them at below-market prices, and get back in return the products and services its trading partners can supply on an equally favorable basis. It's a true "win-win" arrangement for participating countries but one that angers the US because it cuts its corporations and big banks out of the process. The Chavez plan is to help his people, not serve the interests of the corporate giants or dominant US neighbor. The WSJ calls this "meddling" and Chavez a "bully." What glorious meddling it is, in the true spirit of the country's Bolivarian Revolution, and "bully" to Hugo Chavez for doing it.

As for Chavez's so-called "big spending" for weapons that has "many countries worried," one must wonder which countries the Journal writer means. She mentions none, which she surely would have and quoted their officials if, in fact, there were any. The truth, of course, is Hugo Chavez is acting no differently than most all other countries in the region or elsewhere, has expressed no hostility toward any of them, has never invaded a neighbor or threatened to, and is a model of a peace-promoting leader who's only taking sensible steps to upgrade his small military and protect his nation against a hostile US he has every reason to believe will attack him. But you'll never find that commentary on the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal editorial ends in grand style. It demeans the poor countries of the region benefitting from below-market priced Venezuelan oil as likely supporting that country for the Latin American Council seat. It also attacks Argentina for being a "Venezuelan pawn," calling it "once a haven for Nazis" (the US was and still is), and stating "the country has been so incompetent about managing its 'resources' that it too needs charity from Mr. Chavez." Indeed, Argentina had big financial trouble at the end of the 1990s, but the Journal writer doesn't explain why. It was because the country became the "poster child" model for US-style neoliberal free market capitalism in the 1990s. It wrecked the economy causing it to collapse into bankruptcy it's still struggling to recover from.

The Journal writer also attacks Bolivia and Cuba for supporting Chavez but is particularly hostile to the Lula government in Brazil for its siding with the Venezuelan leader. She calls that support "surprising" and accused the Brazilian government of being "Bolivia's unofficial energy advisor (that) orchestrated the confiscation of Brazilian assets (in Bolivia) recently." Bolivian president Evo Morales nationalized his nation's energy resources which Bolivian law clearly states the nation owns. He confiscated nothing, which the Journal writer surely knows but failed to tell her readers. She also mentioned a so-called "eternal Brazilian struggle to prove that it can challenge US 'hegemony' in the region (that) trumps the need to regain dignity and protect its investments abroad." Left out of the commentary is any mention that Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and Brazil are sovereign states with the right to support whatever policies and other countries they wish without needing US approval to do it.

About the only final comment the Journal writer can make is to claim Guatamala has the "solid backing of the 'more serious democracies' in the region - such as Colombia and Mexico." It's likely what the writer means by "serious" is those countries' elections are about as free and fair as ours - meaning, they only are for the power-elites controlling them who arrange the outcomes they want.

The June 23 Wall Street Journal editorial was a typical example of what this newspaper calls journalism and editorial commentary. This writer follows it to learn what the US empire likely is up to. In the case of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, it's no doubt up to no good. The continued hostile rhetoric is clearly to signal another attempt to oust the Venezuelan leader at whatever time and by whatever means the Bush administration has in mind. Stay tuned.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

posted by SteveLendman @ 6:55 AM

"Reading Leo Strauss," Steven B. Smith's admirably lucid, meticulously argued book, persuasively sets the record straight on Strauss's political views and on what his writing is really about. The epigraph to its introduction, from an essay by the political scientist Joseph Cropsey, sounds the keynote: "Strauss was a towering presence . . . who neither sought nor had any discernible influence on what passes for the politics of the group."

Although it is said that Strauss voted twice for Adlai Stevenson, he appears never to have been involved in any political party or movement. What is more important is that his intellectual enterprise, as Smith's careful exposition makes clear, repeatedly argued against the very idea of political certitude that has been embraced by certain neoconservatives. Strauss's somewhat contrarian reading of Plato's "Republic," for example, proposed that the dialogue was devised precisely to demonstrate the dangerous unfeasibility of a state governed by a philosopher-king.

"Throughout his writings," Smith concludes, "Strauss remained deeply skeptical of whether political theory had any substantive advice or direction to offer statesmen." This view was shaped by his wary observation of the systems of totalitarianism that dominated two major European nations in the 1930's, Nazism in Germany and Communism in the Soviet Union. As a result, he strenuously resisted the notion that politics could have a redemptive effect by radically transforming human existence. Such thinking could scarcely be further from the vision of neoconservative policy intellectuals that the global projection of American power can effect radical democratic change. "The idea," Smith contends, "that political or military action can be used to eradicate evil from the human landscape is closer to the utopian and idealistic visions of Marxism and the radical Enlightenment than anything found in the writings of Strauss."

Liberal democracy lies at the core of Strauss's political views, and its basis is the concept of skepticism. Since there are no certainties in the realm of politics, perhaps not in any realm, politics must be the arena for negotiation between different perspectives, with cautious moderation likely to be the best policy. At one point, Smith, the Alfred Cowles professor of political science at Yale, describes Strauss's position as "liberalism without illusions." All this may sound a little antiquated, and Smith is right to associate Strauss with cold war liberals like Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Walter Lippmann and Lionel Trilling. But it's a view from the middle of the past century that might profitably be fostered in our own moment of political polarization, when a self-righteous sense of possessing assured truths is prevalent on both the right and the left.

The other general point that Smith makes about Strauss's alleged paternity of neoconservatism is that a considerable part of his work has nothing to do with politics of any sort. Smith divides his book — a collection of previously published essays, inevitably with some repetition among them — into two parts, the first entitled "Jerusalem," the second, "Athens." Strauss used these terms to designate the two poles of Western culture, roughly corresponding to revelation and reason. It is in the "Athens" section that Smith traces Strauss's trajectory through the history of political philosophy. The essays of the "Jerusalem" part, on the other hand, follow his engagement with Maimonides, Spinoza, Scholem and Zionism (a movement that he had embraced from adolescence but that he thought did not alter the metaphysical condition of galut, exile, in which Jews found themselves).

The Jewish-theological side of Strauss certainly had no perceptible effect on his American disciples, most of them Jews and all of them, as far as I know, secular. In these concerns, Strauss was thoroughly the intellectual product of 1920's German Jewry. Like others of that period, including Walter Benjamin, he approached the idea of revealed religion with the utmost seriousness. It does not appear that he remained a believing Jew, yet he was not prepared simply to dismiss the claims of Jerusalem against Athens.

On the contrary, the sweeping agenda of reformist or revolutionary reason first put forth in the Enlightenment worried him deeply, and he saw religion, with its assertion of a different source of truth, as a necessary counterweight to the certitudes of the 18th century. His vision of reality was, to use a term favored by both Scholem and Benjamin, "dialectic." Why some of his most prominent students missed this essential feature of his thought, and why they turned to the right, remains one of the mysteries of his intellectual legacy.

Robert Alter's most recent book is "Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

6.25.06

When out-of-touch politicians get desperate

A brief scan of the political news these days makes clear that politicians and pundits in Washington are getting very frightened about the grassroots activism boiling outside the Beltway - and now they are getting really desperate. David Broder and David Brooks now regularly use their columns to attack activists who have the nerve to get involved in their own democracy. And now, today, we see New York Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) is jumping into the fray as well.

Schumer, a consummate Washington insider, is now using his position as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to try to crush his own party's activists in Connecticut. According to Time Magazine, Schumer has pressed Senate candidate Ned Lamont (D) to abandon his run against Sen. Joe Lieberman (D) - the Democratic incumbent who has repeatedly and destructively undermined the Democratic Party for years. Schumer has also said he would consider backing Lieberman's bid for re-election even if Lieberman leaves the Democratic Party.

None of this is surprising. Schumer's been a Washington politician for decades - and grassroots energy frightens people like him. But what is surprising is how Schumer has become so desperate, he is now flinging out wild stories to justify his actions. Time reports that "Schumer has told colleagues he thinks that if Lieberman lost the primary, it would send a bad signal to moderate voters and might hurt the party's chances of winning Senate seats in places like Montana and Missouri in November."

One of two things explains this comment - either Schumer is even more out of touch with American politics than previously thought, or he's so desperate he's resorted to fabricating patently laughable stories to justify his nauseating behavior. It is definitely possible Schumer is totally and completely out of touch - he's made similar comments in the past that expose him as having positively no understanding of anything that goes on outside his insulated world in Washington. And self-important politicians and political operatives in our nation's capital do have a tendency to believe ordinary voters are super keyed into the minutia of politics - often making these insiders look particularly stupid and more out of touch.

But I believe Schumer's just desperate, and thus resorting to open dishonesty - because I just can't believe he could be so intellectually impaired that he actually believes Joe Lieberman losing would imperil Democrats chances in states thousands of miles away from Connecticut, with totally different political dynamics. The idea that a voter in, say, the critical swing area of Yellowstone County here in Montana is going to vote against Jon Tester in November because Joe Lieberman was defeated in a Democratic primary in August is beyond the scope of what can even be called "totally absurd" - it's an out and out lie, and one that could only be mouthed with a straight face in a place as sadly comical as Washington, D.C. is today.

Here's the deal: what's going on in Connecticut is good for the Democratic Party and good for democracy. No politician - not Joe Lieberman, not Chuck Schumer - owns a congressional seat. We the people do, and thankfully, at least some courageous Democrats like Sen. Russ Feingold (D) understand that and are willing to use their position to give voice to that truism. When incumbents get challenged by courageous people like Ned Lamont because those incumbents are selling out America, that's democracy in action. And any politician or political operative who tries to thwart that contest shows an ugly contempt for the democratic tradition our country was built on.

Schumer claims to be concerned with winning elections - but what he's really concerned about is maintaining his and his insulated colleagues' increasingly weakening hold on power. What will help Democrats win elections will be a surge in grassroots energy and a reengaged corps of activists who are working to take their party and country back - energy like we are seeing in Connecticut. What will hurt Democrats ability to win elections is New York Senators sitting in their comfortable offices in Washington, D.C. embarrassing themselves by making statements that show their isolation from America's heartland and using their quickly fading power to try to depress the grassroots energy that makes all the difference at the ballot box.

Posted by David Sirota at 4:38 PM

© 2006 Working Assets. All rights reserved.