Friday, November 28, 2003

Bogus Photo-Ops

So what was Bush’s visit to Iraq about other than a photo-op that’ll be used in ads along with the earlier staged carrier landing during next year’s election campaign. I hope people are smart enough to realize that these bogus political events are hugely expensive. They’re being paid for by you, the taxpayer - it’s not coming out of Bush’s huge campaign warchest.

By the way, when Bush does these things, do you notice that he wears a military uniform, even though he is not a member of the military, and spent about a year AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, while ducking Vietnam duty? Those of you who have relatives and friends being called up, as so many here in Oregon have, should consider that the “brave” President who’s sending your loved ones to Iraq didn’t even have the guts to stay in the Guard when it was his turn.

Also no other U.S. President I can recall ever wore a military uniform while in office, even those who had formerly been in the military. But dictators do - like Saddam Hussein, or Hitler or Mussolini or Castro…

- Bob Woods

Thursday, November 27, 2003

Be Thankful You're Not Dubya

Craving more juicy reasons to offer up profound gratitude this T-day? Try a few of these

By Mark Morford,
SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 26, 2003

This Thanksgiving, as you sip the wine and hug the family and toast the friends and hoard the stuffing and curse the airport security, remember to give thanks you are not G.W. Bush. Hey, it’s important.

1) Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya’s massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.

For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of the most reviled and openly disrespected major world leaders in modern history. America has never been so embarrassed and reluctant to send a president abroad. We cringe when the man takes the stage. We offer humiliated apologies to our former allies, and to the 200,000 Bush/war protesters in London, just last week.

In Bush’s defense, it cannot be easy to be so undeservedly powerful, yet so bumbling and inarticulate and globally loathed for your abhorrent policies and hollow corporate agenda and baffled doofus manner. This Thanksgiving, be grateful you are not him.

2) Thanks, you might want to give, that you are not Iraqi. Be grateful you did not go from brutal scowling despot who at least kept the damn lights on to brutish occupying army no one asked for that is right now laying waste to whatever remains of your once semi-proud oil-rich nation.

Give thanks, furthermore, that you are not one of the estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed to date by U.S. forces, not to mention one of the untold tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were hammered by our million pounds of billion-dollar ordnance in the first few days of the massacre. Be grateful you are not dead in the name of American political and petrochemical profiteering.

3) Give thanks you are not a member of the much-abused U.S. military. Sad but true. Be grateful you are not right now suffering that sickening sinking feeling that you are not, in fact, protecting America from any sort of marauding terrorists, or defending our honor, or our way of life, or guarding innocents from swarthy evildoers and nonexistent WMDs.

But that you are, instead, a wholly disposable henchman for the BushCo corporate regime, with the odds increasing every minute that you will soon join the more than 9,000 U.S. wounded or more than 430 “necessary” dead U.S. soldiers  Rumsfeld mentions when he shrugs off the latest round of guerrilla bombings that killed another batch of your friends. Support our troops. Bring them home right now.

4) Be grateful BushCo’s ratings are slipping lower than an SUV’s mpg rating, and there is only one year left until he joins his father as one of those embarrassing historical footnotes, a jagged scar on the heart of a wary America that other countries point to in years to come and say wow that’s a nasty scar where’d you get that, and we reply, George W. Bush, and they go, oh my God, that’s right. So sorry.

5) Be grateful you are not right now in any way related to, or serve as a spokesperson for, or are employed as one of the apparently very deranged or heavily drugged plastic surgeons who worked on Michael Jackson. This is a gimme.

6) While you’re at it, give thanks you’re not Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, Bennifer, Britney, Liza Minnelli, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Ann Coulter, Ashton Kutcher, Bill O’Reilly, Anna Kournikova, Madonna or Mary Hart. These are lives you probably do not want to lead. Give thanks your soul is not all withery and Botoxed and that it still manages to radiate cool colors like one of those funky cheesy fiber-optic lamps  from the ‘70s.

7) Be thankful they have yet to figure out a way to blot out the sun. Or, for that matter, the moon.

8) Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort on the part of numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty much slap down most all tender offerings of the planet, Earth still manages to produce for us an astonishing array of flora and fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring trees and relentless merciless beauty.

9) Be thankful the planet rather effortlessly continues to baffle scientists and confound astronomers and completely entrance biologists and philosophers and poets. We still, for example, have no idea why whales sing, or how long they live, or where blue whales, the largest and most magnificent creatures on the planet, go to mate. Be grateful for the Mystery.

10) Kneel down, right now, for free speech. Oh yes. We must. Because it is under severe duress. To exercise it now, to speak out against BushCo and war and global corporate profiteering, is a true sign that you are a traitor and an al Qaeda operative and a personal friend of Barbra Streisand. This is what they sneer at you.

Give it up, instead, for free unfettered alt-news sources like truthout.org. And commondreams.org. And alternet.org and counterpunch.com and buzzflash.com and smirkingchimp.com and even Slate and the BBC and The Onion. Cheney scowls, Rove oozes, Ashcroft would love nothing more than to shut down the entire impious godforsaken Internet. Be grateful they can only quiver and hiss and rattle their chains. So far.

11) Molly Ivins. Gore Vidal. Michiko Kakutani. David Foster Wallace. Don DeLillo. Maureen Dowd. Caroline Myss. W.G. Sebald. Tom Robbins. Starhawk. William Rivers Pitt. Rob Brezny. David Attenborough. Dave Eggers. Joseph Campbell. Lewis Lapham. Haruki Murakami. Katha Pollitt. Et al. Thank you.

12) For baskets of locally grown organic small-farm produce delivered to your door. For handmade whiskey-filled chocolate truffles smeared over a lover’s tailbone. For Bernese mountain dogs. For the return of Opus  For Rufus Wainwright and Beth Orton and the Mini Cooper. L’Occitane honey incense and the Apple iPod and “Six Feet Under.” For Cate Blanchett, The Sun magazine, The New Yorker, Peet’s coffee and “Spirited Away.”

13) Here is the big cliché. Here is the final praise. It cannot be overstated: Despite an impressive assault on civil liberties, despite savage BushCo attacks on everything from national forests to air quality to rivers and oceans and water quality and health care, despite attempts to numb the national consciousness overall, we must give enormous, unfettered thanks for this incredible and kaleidoscopic America.

Ours remains the most breathtakingly beautiful, diverse, epic, multifaceted, multiorgasmic landscape on the planet today. It’s true.

We tend to forget. We take for granted. We presume it must be like this everywhere. But one quick trip abroad will only serve to remind you and reinforce your devout appreciation for what this country can offer, the free expression and the religious autonomy and the clean water and the good dentistry and the fresh produce and the space to explore.

We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and insolent and abusive and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex positivism and community awareness and quiet personal spiritual questing and lots and lots of great bookstores.

14) Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get quiet, look around, look inside, check the karmic inventory and offer up heaping pies of gratefulness for what you find.

Sure it seems clichéd. Of course you don’t need some holiday to be deeply thankful for the radiance in your life. But, hey, an opportunity is an opportunity. Just remember, big meaty drumsticks of general gratitude are absolutely fine. But the divine, personal gravy is where the real flavor is.

homepage: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2003/11/26/notes112603.DTL&nl=fix

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack

John O. Edwards, NewsMax.com
Friday, Nov. 21, 2003

Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government. Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq, expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men’s lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.

In the magazine’s December edition, the former commander of the military’s Central Command warned that if terrorists succeeded in using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would likely have catastrophic consequences for our cherished republican form of government.

Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that “the worst thing that could happen” is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.

If that happens, Franks said, “... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”

Franks then offered “in a practical sense” what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.

“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”

Franks didn’t speculate about how soon such an event might take place.

Already, critics of the U.S. Patriot Act, rushed through Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, have argued that the law aims to curtail civil liberties and sets a dangerous precedent.

But Franks’ scenario goes much further. He is the first high-ranking official to openly speculate that the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government. 

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

No intelligence involved

President Bush seems to have been the recipient of poor intelligence again. Last weekend, he claimed that the energy bill approved by Republican leaders would make the country ‘more secure.’ Senator John McCain’s description of the bill as a ‘leave no lobbyist behind’ barrel of pork for selected industries and campaign contributors was closer to the truth.
-Editorial, The New York Times

Monday, November 17, 2003

50

A half century. Five decades. Fifty years.

Today, I turned 50 years old.
Never expected to make it this far.

So much to be thankful for:
Still love my wife as much as when we first met almost 30 years ago,
She’s my best friend and partner in everything I do.
Have a great bunch of friends and family.

I am in pretty good shape for one of my advanced years.
Feel better than I have since my 30s.
Lost the pot belly and 30 pounds.
Lost the glasses I wore for 45 years. Laser eye surgery rocks!
Not a lot of grey hair, although it’s getting thinner.
Don’t look much different from the way I did 20 or 30 years ago.

Never expected the world to be in such shitty shape, though…

- Bob Woods