For this week’s Energy and Capital, I offer highlights of the energy policy debate at the 2009 Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston, the world’s largest oil and gas industry conference and trade show.
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At long last, the seemingly endless national nightmare of the Bush administration is over, and a Democratic liberal has taken the reins. I still can hardly believe it’s true. I wept with relief and joy as I watched his acceptance speech last night. I can’t remember ever being so moved by anything political in my entire life.
Long live President Obama! I wish him luck–he’s got a very tough row to hoe. He’s going to need all the support he can get from Congress to tackle the challenges of the next four years, and he’s going to need the entire country’s help to take out the wedges that Karl Rove and his operatives drove between us, and heal the divides within. My new article, to be published tomorrow, will take a close look at his energy policy proposals, so stay tuned for that. For now I’ll just say: WAHOO!!
Below the fold, a banner and YouTube video submitted by friends, in recogntion of this historic moment.
What an amazing, blessed relief. After eight years of utter shame, I am once again proud to be an American.
Folks,
I have been meaning to revisit the cost of the Iraq war for some time, but this snippet from yesterday’s Progress Report did a suitable job of it, so I’m just pasting it here.
Back in 2003-4, I had numerous email conversations that went on for days with some of my readers about the expected cost of the war. Somehow, they believed the Administration’s lowball estimates, claiming that the $200 billion figure cited by White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was way over the top, that it was the result of “double counting” and a whole lot of other nonsense.
I, for one, never bought that. I thought $200 billion and several years was itself extremely lowball…and so far, I’ve been right.
Not that any of the aforementioned readers have had the decency to admit it.
This war isn’t going away any time soon. Not even if the Congress votes to de-fund it. The Saudis have said recently and publicly that our occupation of Iraq is illegal and unjustified, but I think that’s just a requisite CYA for domestic assuagement. They know better than anyone that if the U.S. military wasn’t in Iraq right now quelling the Shi’ites, that Saudi forces would have to step into the breach–which they no-how want to do. They need us there to fight a proxy war for them.
Especially now that a recent Woods-Mackenzie study has reviewed Iraq’s oil reserves and concluded that they were much larger than previously thought–second only to Saudi Arabia’s–there’s no way we can leave Iraq. Not now, and probably not ever.
So what does this do for the accounting on the War on Terror War for Energy?
I’m now raising my estimate: Half a trillion is still lowballing it. Big time.
The U.S. military has spent an average of $44 billion a year to protect oil operations in the Persian Gulf, and they’ve been doing that for years. Here’s a sneak preview from a new article I just finished, which will go out later this week:
We import about 800 million barrels per year of black gold from the Persian Gulf. Divided into $44 billion, that works out to slightly less than $55 a barrel. When oil is trading on the open market around $65!
If those protection costs weren’t externalized onto the U.S. military (your tax dollars at work!) but priced into the world market, I reckon that would put oil at around $120 a barrel.
Does anybody still think renewable energy is too expensive compared to oil?
This administration has lied pretty much every time it has opened its mouth about the Iraq war. From the missing WMDs to the purported connections between Saddam and al Qaeda; from the alleged attempt to purchase Nigerian yellowcake to the outing of Valerie Plame; from the assertion that Iraq could fund its own reconstruction to the firing of the guy who provided the (lowball) $200 billion estimate; from the promise that we would be greeted as liberators, to the denial that Iraq has descended into a civil war that we cannot win; from the completely fabricated stories about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, to the persistent under-reporting of casualties, woundings and long-term illnesses suffered by soldiers; from the “they hate us because we’re free” pabulum to the secretive attempt to privatize Iraq’s oil wealth and put it into the hands of U.S. oil companies…it has been one, big, fat, cynical, outrageous, and unforgiveable lie.
And speaking of shamless liars, check out the latest bit of “revisionist history” visited upon us by none other than Mr. “Global Warming is a Hoax” himself:
“The whole idea of weapons of mass destruction was never the issue, yet they keep trying to bring this up.”
– Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), 4/27/07, criticizing Congress and the media for “mischaracterizing” the reasons for U.S. involvement in Iraq
VERSUS
“Our intelligence system has said that we know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction — I believe including nuclear.”
– Inhofe, 8/18/02
Ugh. I mean…??? How dumb (or forgetful) do these guys think we are?
When I think about how that half a trillion plus has been and will be spent, with hardly any serious debate on the alternatives…and then think about how far half a trillion would take us in developing renewables and weaning ourselves off of foreign oil…I just shake my head. It just seems too brain-dead to be true. Is there nobody driving this bus?
But that discussion is for another time…
Until then,
–C
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Folks,
I have been greatly relieved to see some of the truth about the Office of Special Plans coming out into the open…finally. I first blogged it in June 2003, quoting an article from Newsweek, so we’ve known about it for nearly four years. I have blogged it seven times since then.
OK, so this investigation is about four years too late to save us from getting into the Iraq debacle, but at least the truth is coming to light. Now that the White House’s deceptions about the war are becoming public knowledge–no longer something that can be cast aside as “conspiracy theory”–perhaps we can also have a real debate about Iraq. Again, yes, a debate we should have had before the war–and would have had, had the Republicans dominating all three branches of government not stonewalled it, but better late than never, I guess.
I am reminded again of one of my favorite quotes by the Dr. Martin Luther King: “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
–C
By Mark Thompson/Washington
Friday, Feb. 09, 2007
For a person most Americans have never heard of, Doug Feith has been called terrible names by very important people. In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward quotes General Tommy Franks — appalled at the quality of intelligence about Iraq — railing that Feith, then the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was “the f—king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” Today, there was another bad review. Feith got publicly slapped by the Defense Department’s inspector general for developing pro-war intelligence on Iraq — outside of official channels — that now seems plainly wrong. The IG concludes that Feith’s office, on a free-lance basis, made claims “that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community.” The report said that Feith’s shop exaggerated the purported links between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda. “That was the argument that was used to make the sale to the American people about the need to go to war,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the armed services committee. He said the Feith’s work, “which was wrong, which was distorted, which was inappropriate … is something which is highly disturbing.”
Feith may have been one of the Bush Administration’s most fervent supporters of war with Iraq but, in truth, he was only a bit player. Indeed, he is the third bit player in the Iraq fiasco to be paying for the sins of his superiors recently. For a couple of weeks now, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been in the dock in federal court in Washington, trying desperately to keep his one-time boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, from being stained by the responsibility for Libby’s chats with reporters and government officials about Valerie Plame’s CIA job. Then, just yesterday, Army General George Casey was raked over the coals by Senators who didn’t think his past 30 months in command of U.S. ground forces in Iraq warrants his elevation to Army chief of staff. While he did get the promotion, the Senate vote of 83-to-14 was the poorest showing for an Army chief since Vietnam. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said Casey should be held accountable for giving Congress too-rosy assessments of the war as the situation there spiraled downward into chaos. “I have questioned in the past and question today a number of decisions and judgments that Gen. Casey has made in the past two and a half years,” McCain said. “During that time, conditions in Iraq have gotten remarkably and progressively worse.”
This trio of woes seems to have a common thread: Underlings snared while trying to please their bosses. It’s almost like blaming the hammer instead of the carpenter for a bent nail. Speaking to the Associated Press, Feith took umbrage at descriptions that his work was “inappropriate.” Said he: “The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow ‘unlawful’ or ‘unauthorized.’” He has a point: it was the Bush administration that chose Feith’s reports over those generated by its $1 billion-a-week intelligence operation. Feith’s work was most certainly authorized — from the very top.
Source: Time: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1587982,00.html
Folks,
The progressive cause lost one of its very best and brightest yesterday, as Molly Ivins succumbed to cancer.
She was really my kinda gal: her heart was always with the common man and the progressive cause, but her trenchant critiques and her rapier wit cut the Left as easily as the Right.
She was nobody’s fool. She could boil endless layers of Beltway gobbledegookdown to straight and simple talk without even trying, and she could depants a Texas politician in a New York minute with a single well-turned phrase. I lost count of the times I breathed an explosive sigh of relief after reading some of those phrases, as if she had taken a huge burden off of me by speaking the straight and simple truth when all around was confusion and noise.
But maybe more importantly, her aim was true. I haven’t done a count, but having read her over the years, I think the record would show that she was right on the money most of the time.
She had so many brilliant quotes, it’s impossible to choose one carefully, so here’s one more or less selected at random:
Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair’s-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?
Oh, it’s just that your life is at stake.
She is also the one who coined the President’s nicknames of “Dubya” and “Shrub.”
I won’t try to tell her story here–there are hundreds to choose from. But if you aren’t familiar with her work, I encourage you to take a look at her thousands of articles and her many books. Or maybe you’d like to check out the half-dozen blogs in which I featured her work.
She was an American treasure. The only other person I can think of who can hold a candle to her unabashed progressiveness, and her plainspoken, incisive wit, is Jim Hightower…and I pray for his good health.
I’ll be missing you, Molly. Missing ya huge. Nobody did it better.
Letting her have the last word, then, here’s her last column.
–C
Posted on Jan 11, 2007
By Molly Ivins
The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that we simply cannot let it continue.
It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. “You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically,” he said.
His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.
Bush’s call for a “surge” or “escalation” also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.
About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: “The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own—impose its rule throughout the country. … By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed.” But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.
A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country—we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls. We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.
Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy’s proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration’s idiotic “plans” and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.
Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.” It’s like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?
As The Washington Post’s review notes, Chandrasekaran’s book “methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq’s fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis.”
We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush’s proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, “Stop it, now!”
Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.
It’s not easy to get your head around all that’s happening in the world today, but Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy does a very effective job of rounding it up without sacrificing the truth. I think she has a fearless, fair, and balanced view of what’s happening in the world, but it might hurt a little. As she says at the outset of this video, she has a critique of nationalism, and it is also indeed a critique of American foreign policy, particularly toward Israel, but it’s not anti-national, or anti-American, while still remaining sympathetic to the Palestinians. She has her detractors, as dutifully listed in her Wiki, but every revolutionary does, and besides, having a ballyhooed economist call your critique of globalization “shallow” is sort of self-reinforcing, isn’t it? I think she’s got a great message with lots of good food for thought.
Her most recent book is An Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire. Among her many other books are two that she co-authored with our champion of justice, Noam Chomsky!
I found this video in another blog, While the Earth Burns by Jeremy Kirouac, a hip Canadian cat with a blog that feels like one of GRL’s Canadian brethren. Check it out, there’s a lot of interesting video material there. He says:
This is a ‘must see’ 64 minute documentary film.
In 1997 Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. In 2004 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.
The film examines the widely unregarded worlds of Anthropology and Geopolitics in a very dynamic manner, and is probably stylistically quite unlike any documentary that you have previously seen.
It covers the world politics of power, war, corporations, deception and exploitation. It is particularly hard hitting when it comes to the United States and western powers in general.
Its unconventional style has proven to be very successful in engaging younger viewers – many of whom find more traditional content dealing with these subjects quite dry and uninteresting. It is almost in the style of a music video, featuring contemporary music (lush, curve, love & rockets, boards of canada, nine inch nails, dead can dance, amon tobin, massive attack, totoise, telepop, placebo and faith less) overlaid with the words of Arundhati Roy, and images of humanity and the world we live in today
–CArundhati
Roy – We (Video)
Home page for this video: http://www.weroy.org/index.shtml
About The Film
“We” is a free documentary produced by an anonymous student in New Zealand. He (or She) goes by the name “anon”. It was released for free on the Internet and first appeared at an Australian web site called resist.com.au. ”
“This is an unusual kind of underground production. An anonymous sympathiser has edited a video recording of Roy’s speech over 64 minutes, interspersing an impressive array of archival footage to illustrate themes and specific historical events. Contemporary music overlaid throughout the piece shifts the mood and quickens the pace. The result is a visual essay rather than a traditional documentary, perfectly suited to its creator’s intentions, which is to spread the anti-imperialist, social justice politics of Arundhati Roy everywhere.”
Folks,
As you go to vote today, whatever your party affiliation, I’m begging you to realize the importance of this vote, and the crucial neccesity of putting us back on the right track.
We must, MUST, make a change, and now. This country simply cannot afford to continue in the direction we’re going. We can’t afford it financially, we can’t afford it in our civil relations with the rest of the world, we can’t afford it environmentally, and most of all, we can’t afford it morally.
Here are a few facts, for your consideration:
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Folks,
Here’s an article related to the last, examining the feelings of Bush-supporting churchgoers. This one ought to be required reading for any liberal heathen.
–C
The Covert Kingdom: Thy Will be Done, On Earth as It is in Texas
by Joe Bageant
25 May 2004
Source: Counterpunch
Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the graves there. From
the wide open front door the Pentecostal preacher’s message echoed from within the plain wooden walls: “Thank you Gawd for giving us strawng leaders like President Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan’s Muslim
armies.” If I had chosen to go back down the road a mile or so to the sprawling new Bible Baptist church – complete with school facilities, professional sound system and in-house television production – I could have heard approximately the same exhortation.
Usually offered at the end of a prayer for sons and daughters of members in the congregation serving in Iraq, it can be heard in any of the thousands upon thousands of praise temples across our republic.
After a lifetime of identity conflict, I have come to accept that, blood-wise, if not politically or spiritually, these are my people. And as a leftist it is very clear to me these days why urban liberals not only fail to understand these people, but do
not even know they exist, other than as some general lump of ignorant, intolerant voters called “the religious right,” or the “Christian Right,” or “neocon Christians.” But until progressives come to understand what these people
read, hear, are told and deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective. Given fundamentalist Christianity’s inherent cultural isolation, it is nearly impossible for most enlightened Americans to imagine, in honest human terms,
what fundamentalist Americans believe, let alone understand why we should all care.
For liberals to examine the current fundamentalist phenomenon in America is accept some hard truths. For starters, we libs are even more embattled than most of us choose to believe. Any significant liberal and progressive support is limited to a few urban
pockets on each coast and along the upper edge of the Midwestern tier states. Most of the rest of the nation, the much vaunted heartland, is the dominion of the conservative and charismatic Christian. Turf-wise, it’s pretty much their country, which is to say
it presently belongs to George W. Bush for some valid reasons. Remember: He did not have to steal the entire election, just a little piece of it in Florida. Evangelical born-again Christians of one stripe or another were then, and are now, 40% of the electorate,
and they support Bush 3-1. And as long as their clergy and their worst instincts tell them to, they will keep on voting for him, or someone like him, regardless of what we view as his arrogant folly and sub-intelligence.
Forget about changing their minds. These
Christians do not read the same books we do, they do not get their information from anything remotely resembling reasonably balanced sources, and in fact, consider even CBS and NBC super-liberal networks of porn and the Devil’s lies. Given how fundamentalists
see the modern world, they may as well be living in Iraq or Syria, with whom they share approximately the same Bronze Age religious tenets. They believe in God, Rumsfeld’s Holy War and their absolute duty as God’s chosen nation to kick Muslim ass up one side
and down the other. In other words, just because millions of Christians appear to be dangerously nuts does not mean they are marginal.
Having been born into a Southern Pentecostal/Baptist family of many generations, and living in this fundamentalist social landscape means that I gaze into the maw of neocon Christianity daily. Hell, sometimes hourly. My brother is a fundamentalist preacher,
as are a couple of my nephews, as were many of my ancestors going back to god-knows-when. My entire family is born-again; their lives are completely focused inside their own religious community, and on the time when Jesus returns to earth – Armageddon and The
Rapture.
Only another liberal born into a fundamentalist clan can understand what a strange, sometimes downright hellish family circumstance it is – how such a family can love you deeply, yet despise everything you believe in, see you as a humanist instrument of
Satan, and still be right there for you when your back goes out or a divorce shatters your life. As a socialist and a half-assed lefty activist, obviously I do not find much conversational fat to chew around the Thanksgiving table. Politically and spiritually,
we may be said to be dire enemies. Love and loathing coexist side by side. There is talk, but no communication. In fact, there are times when it all has science fiction overtonestimes when it seems we are speaking to one another through an unearthly veil, wherein
each party knows it is speaking to an alien. There is a sort of high eerie mental whine in the air. This is the sound of mutually incomprehensible worlds hurtling toward destiny, passing with great psychological friction, obvious to all, yet acknowledged by
none.
Between such times, I wait rather anxiously and strive for change, for relief from what feels like an increased stifling of personal liberty, beauty, art, and self-realization in America. They wait in spooky calmness for Jesus. They believe that, until
Jesus does arrive, our “satanic humanist state and federal legal systems” should be replaced with pure “Biblical Law.” This belief is called Christian Reconstructionism. Though it has always been around in some form, it began expanding rapidly
about 1973, with the publication of R. J. Rushdoony’s, Institutes of Biblical Law (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1982).
Time out please In a nod toward fairness and tolerance – begging the question of whether liberals are required to tolerate the intolerant – I will say this: Fundamentalists are “good people.” In daily life, they are warm-hearted and generous to
a fault. They live with feet on the ground (albeit with eyes cast heavenward) and with genuine love and concern for their neighbors. After spending 30 years in progressive western cities such as Boulder, Colorado and Eugene, Oregon, I would have to say that
conservative Christians actually do what liberals usually only talk about. They visit the sick and the elderly, give generously of their time and money to help those in need, and put unimaginable amounts of love and energy into their families, even as Pat Robertson
and Rush Limbaugh blare in the background. Their good works extend internationally – were it not for American Christians, there would be little health care on the African continent and other similar places. OK, that’s the best I can do in showing due respect
for the extreme Christian Right. Now to get back to the Christian Reconstructionists…
Establishing a Savage Eden
Christian Reconstruction is blunt stuff, hard and unforgiving as a gravestone.
Capital punishment, central to the Reconstructionist ideal, calls for the death penalty in a wide range of crimes, including abandonment of the faith, blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, striking a parent, and ”unchastity
before marriage” (but for women only.) Biblically correct methods of execution include stoning, the sword, hanging, and burning. Stoning is preferred, according to Gary North, the self-styled Reconstructionist economist, because stones are plentiful and cheap.
Biblical Law would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Leading Reconstruction theologian David Chilton declares, “The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics” Incidentally,
said Republic of Jesus would not only be a legal hell, but an ecological one as well – Reconstructionist doctrine calls for the scrapping of environmental protection of all kinds, because there will be no need for this planet earth once The Rapture occurs.
You may not have heard of Rushdoony or Chilton or North, but taken either separately or together, they have directly and indirectly influenced far more contemporary American minds than Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and Howard Zinn combined.
A moreover covert movement, although slightly more public of late, Christian Reconstructionism and Dominionism have for decades exerted one hell of an influence through its scores of books, publications and classes taught in colleges and universities. Over
the past 30 years their doctrine has permeated not only the religious right, but mainstream churches as well, via the charismatic movement. The radical Christian right’s impact on politics and religion in this nation has been massive, with many mainstream churches
pushed rightward by its pervasiveness without even knowing it. Clearly the Methodist church down the street from my house does not understand what it has become. Other mainstream churches with more progressive leadership, simply flinch and bow to the radicals
at every turn. They have to, if they want to retain members these days. Further complicating matters is that leading Recoconstruction thinkers, along with their fellow travelers, the Dominionists, are all but invisible to non-fundamentalist America.
(I will
spare you the agony of the endless doctrinal hair-splitting that comes with making fundamentalist distinctions of any sort – I would not do that to a dog. But if you are disposed toward self-punishment, you can take it upon yourself to learn the differences
between Dominionism, Pretribulationism, Midtribulationism, and Posttribulationism, Premillennialism, Millennialism I recommend the writings of the British author and scholar George Monbiot, who has put the entire maddening scheme of it all together – corporate
implications, governmental and psychological meaning – in a couple of excellent books.)
Fundamentalists such as my family have no idea how thoroughly they have been orchestrated by agenda-driven Christian media and other innovations of the past few decades. They probably would not care now, even if they knew. Like most of their tribe (dare
we say class, in a nation that so vehemently denies it has a class system?) they want to embrace some simple foundational truth that will rationalize all the conflict and confusion of a postmodern world. Some handbook that will neatly explain everything, make
all their difficult decisions for them. And among these classic American citizens, prone toward religious zealotry since the Great Awakening of the 18th Century, what rock could appear more dependable upon which to cling than the infallible Holy Bible? From
there it was a short step for Christian Dominionist leaders to conclude that such magnificent infallibility should be enforced upon all other people, in the same spirit as the Catholic Spanish Conquistadors or the Arab Muslim Moors before them. It’s an old,
old story, a brutal one mankind cannot seem to shake.
Christian Reconstruction and Dominionist strategists make clear in their writings that homeschooling and Christian academies have been and continue to create the Rightist Christian cadres of the future, enabling them to place ever-increasing numbers of believers
in positions of governmental influence. The training of Christian cadres is far more sophisticated than the average liberal realizes. There now stretches a network of dozens of campuses across the nation, each with its strange cultish atmosphere of smiling
Christian pod people, most of them clones of Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. But how many outsiders know the depth and specificity of political indoctrination in these schools? For example, Patrick Henry College in Purcellville,
Virginia, a college exclusively for Christian homeschoolers, offers programs in strategic government intelligence, legal training and foreign policy, all with a strict, Bible-based “Christian worldview.” Patrick Henry is so heavily funded by the Christian
right it can offer classes below cost.
In the Bush administration, seven percent of all internships are handed out to Patrick Henry students, along with many others distributed among similar religious rightist colleges. The Bush administration also recruits
from the faculties of these schools, i.e. the appointments of right-wing Christian activist Kay Coles James, former dean of the Pat Robertson School of government, as director of the U.S. office of personnel. What better position than the personnel office from
which to recruit more fundamentalists? Scratch any of these supposed academics and you will find a Christian zealot. I know because I have made the mistake of inviting a few of these folks to cocktail parties. One university department head told me he is moving
to rural Mississippi where he can better recreate the lifestyle of the antebellum South, and its “Confederate Christian values.” It gets real strange real quick.
Lest the these Christians be underestimated, remember that it was their strategists whose “stealth ideology” managed the takeover of the Republican Party in the early 1990s. That takeover now looks mild in light of today’s neocon Christian implantations
in the White House, the Pentagon and the Supreme Court and other federal entities. As much as liberals screech in protest, few understand the depth and breadth of the Rightist Christian takeover underway. They catch the scent but never behold the beast itself.
Yesterday I heard a liberal Washington-based political pundit on NPR say the Radical Christian right’s local and regional political action peak was a past fixture of the Reagan era. I laughed out loud (it was a bitter laugh) and wondered if he had ever driven
20 miles eastward on U.S. Route 50 into the suburbs of Maryland, Virginia or West Virginia. The fellow on NPR was a perfect example of the need for liberal pundits to get their heads out of their asses, get outside the city, quit cruising the Internet and meet
some Americans who do not mirror their own humanist educations and backgrounds.
If they did, they would grasp the importance The Rapture has taken on in American national and international politics. Despite the media’s shallow interpretation of The Rapture’s significance, it is a hell of a lot more than just a couple hundred million
Left Behind books sold. The most significant thing about the Left Behind series is that, although they are classified as “fiction,” most fundamentalist readers I know accept the series as an absolute reality soon coming to a godless
planet near you. It helps to understand that everything is literal in the Fundamentalist voter universe.
I’ll Fly Away, Oh Lordy (But you won’t.)
Yes, when The Rapture comes Christians with the right credentials will fly away. But you and I, dear reader, will probably be among those who suffer a thousand-year plague of boils. So stock up on antibiotics, because according to the “Rapture Index”
it is damned near here. See for yourself at
http://www.raptureready.com. Part gimmick, part fanatical obsession, the index is a compilation of such things as floods, interest rates, oil prices, global turmoil As I write this the index stands at 144, just one
point below critical mass, when people like us will be smitten under a sky filled with deliriously happy naked flying Christians.
But to blow The Rapture off as amusing-if-scary fantasy is not being honest on my part. Cheap glibness has always been my vice, so I must say this: Personally, I’ve lived with The Rapture as the psychologically imprinted backdrop of my entire life. In fact,
my own father believed in it until the day he died, and the last time I saw him alive we talked about The Rapture. And when he asked me, “Will you be saved?” Will you be there with me on Canaan’s shore after The Rapture?” I was forced to feign
belief in it to give a dying man inner solace. But that was the spiritual stuff of families, and living and dying, religion in its rightful place, the way it is supposed to be, personal and intimate – not political. Thus, until the advent of the of the new
radical Christian influence, I’d certainly never heard The Rapture spoken about in the context of a Texan being selected by God to prepare its way.
Now however, this apocalyptic belief, yearning really, drives an American Christian polity in the service of a grave and unnerving agenda. The psuedo-scriptural has become an apocalyptic game plan for earthly political action: To wit, the messiah can only
return to earth after an apocalypse in Israel called Armageddon, which the fundamentalists are promoting with all their power so that The Rapture can take place. The first requirement was establishment of the state of Israel. Done. The next is Israel’s occupation
of the Middle East as a return of its “Biblical lands,” which in the radical Christian scheme of things, means more wars. These Christian conservatives believe peace cannot ever lead to The Rapture, and indeed impedes the 1,000 year Reign of Christ.
So anyone promoting peace is an enemy, a tool of Satan, hence the fundamentalist support for any and all wars Middle Eastern, in which their own kids die a death often viewed by Christian parents as a holy martyrdom of its own kind. “He (or she) died protecting
this country’s Christian values.” One hears it over and over from parents of those killed.
The final scenario of the Rapture has the “saved” Christians settling onto a cloud after the long float upward, from whence they watch a Rambo Jesus wipe out the remnants of the human race. Then in a mop-up operation by God, the Jews are also
annihilated, excepting a few who convert to Christianity. The Messiah returns to earth. End of story. Incidentally, the Muslim version, I was surprised to learn recently, is almost exactly the same, but with Muslims doing the cloud-sitting.
If we are lucky as a nation, this period in American history will be remembered as just another very dark time we managed to get through. Otherwise, one shudders to think of the logical outcome. No wonder the left is depressed. Meanwhile, our best thinkers
on the left ask us to consider our perpetual U.S. imperial war as a fascist, military/corporate war, and indeed it is that too. But tens of millions of hardworking, earnest American Christians see it as far more than that. They see a war against all that is
un-Biblical, the goal of which is complete world conquest, or put in Christian terminology, “dominion.” They will have no less than the “inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people,” according to the Recon masters of the covert
kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. If perpetual war is what it will take, then let it be perpetual. After all, perpetual war is exactly what the Bible promised. Like it or not, this is the reality (or prevailing unreality) with which we are faced.
The 2004 elections, regardless of outcome, will not change that. Nor will it necessarily bring ever-tolerant liberals to openly acknowledge what is truly happening in this country, the thing that has been building for a long, long time – a holy war, a covert
Christian jihad for control of America and the entire world. Millions of Americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis.
Pardon me, but religious tolerance be damned. Somebody had to say it.
Joe Bageant is a senior editor at the Primedia History Group and writes from Winchester, Virginia. He may be contacted at
bageantjb@netscape.net.
Folks,
This recent article from the New York Times Magazine is one of the most revealing I’ve read about the Bush presidency in a long time. It explains a lot, I think, about why it is so much more secretive than any presidency in recent memory; why the press is so cowed into meek submission in its coverage of the presidency; why Bush seems impervious to facts and intolerant of dissension; and why so many Christian Americans seem to support him unequivocally and unthinkingly. He seems to truly believe that his actions are indistinguishable from God’s will. His is a faith-based presidency, unapologetically out of touch with reality, and firmly resolved to stay that way. This is very sobering stuff. Highly recommended reading.
–C
Folks,
In this excellent essay on the state of the media, NYT columnist Frank Rich wonders what exactly it will take to break through the wall of near-silence around the Bush administration to bring America the truth it needs, and who among the media, in the face of intimidation and character assassination, would have the guts to do for America what Bob Woodward et. al. did for her during the ultra-secretive Nixon administration…which looks eerily similar to the Bush administration in its regard for, and manipulation of, the truth.
–C
Will We Need a New ‘All the President’s Men’?
Frank Rich
October 17, 2004
The New York Times
Such is the power of movies that the first image “Watergate” brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation’s rescue in “All the President’s Men.” But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome – as it is, daily – we have not yet reached that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we’re back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly enforced message of victory at hand.
It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite – or, as he spelled it out, “a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men.” It was then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS’s Daniel Schorr. Today it’s John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, also invoking “national security,” that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three years ago.
“The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before,” wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House says our free press is being attacked as “never before,” you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don’t reveal their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn’t even write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so far that he’s created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.”
It’s all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media intimidation that’s been building for months now. Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations owned by The Washington Post’s parent company. The current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson’s breast and Howard Stern’s mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which broadcast both of these entertainers’ infractions against “decency,” that its chairman, the self-described “liberal Democrat” Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month. “I vote for what’s good for Viacom,” he explained, and he meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the “60 Minutes” fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom’s CBS News, another Republican target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional “safeguards” regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political means to do it.
Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line. Disney’s refusal to release Michael Moore’s partisan “Fahrenheit 9/11″ in an election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world’s largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special DVD of “Three Kings,” David O. Russell’s 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn’t been remotely tested yet.
To understand what kind of journalism the Bush administration expects from these companies, you need only look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its Web site an article by its chief political correspondent containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry, it was retracted as “written in jest.”) But Fox is just the tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.’s chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on page 8 and didn’t get to the clause “while no stockpiles of W.M.D. were found in Iraq” until the 16th paragraph. This would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious.
It’s hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr. Murdoch’s, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the shadows last spring when John McCain called it “unpatriotic” for ordering its eight ABC stations not to broadcast the “Nightline” in which Ted Koppel read the names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered only about 500.
Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who first broke the story last weekend, we now know that Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to broadcast a “news” special featuring a film, “Stolen Honor,” that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film’s creator is a man who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge. Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to be sandwiched in with network hits like “CSI,” “The Apprentice” and “Desperate Housewives.” Democrats are screaming, but don’t expect the Bush apparatchiks at federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were as serious as a “wardrobe malfunction.” A more likely outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term.
Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush administration arrived at the White House already obsessed with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years, a special National Press Club study concluded that the president had instituted “an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information.” Sound familiar? The current president has seen to it that even future historians won’t get access to papers he wants to hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy.
The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration’s first legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer’s first effort to warn the media to “watch what they say,” it’s failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of Jessica Lynch. It’s when the percentage of Americans who felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April, that identically worded letters “signed” by different soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq’s citizens had been “largely restored.” (As David Greenberg writes in his invaluable “Nixon’s Shadow,” phony letters to news outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal harassment of the press, like the Republican party’s Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the war’s decline in support.
“What you’re seeing on your TV screens,” the president said when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are “the desperate tactics of a hateful few.” Maybe that’s the sunny news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at virtually every news organization describe a downward spiral so dangerous that they can’t venture anywhere in Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington Post about the quagmire they’re witnessing firsthand and its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. “Every day you read the articles in the States where it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s getting better and better,” said Lance Cpl. Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. “But when you’re here, you know it’s worse every day.” Another marine, Lance Cpl. Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru: “We’re basically proving out that the government is wrong. We’re catching them in a lie.” Asked if he was concerned that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out, Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: “What are they going to do – send us to Iraq?”
What “they” can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit and prosecute news organizations that report stories like this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good final act of “All the President’s Men.”
© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
