This was first posted at SocialistWorker.org on November 23, 2010.
The midterm elections are over and the general plan for economic policy is now clear. Oddly, these two things are unrelated.
A mere week after voters went to the polls, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the Democratic and Republican co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, announced their proposals to cut taxes for the rich and cut Social Security and Medicare for the rest of us.
So the Republicans would have won even if they had lost. Am I the only one who now feels silly for having even paid attention? That was valuable time I could have spent perfecting my mix of all-time songs with “monkey” in the title.
It’s worth taking a minute to appreciate come of the moral and logical gymnastics just performed by our political class.
Republicans and Democrats made us watch hundreds of bitter campaign ads over the past year – at the same time that they were quietly getting along just fine in the Commission’s large stately room in the Senate building.
Democrats warned us that we needed to vote for them to protect Social Security but forgot to tell us how to protect it from fellow Democrat Bowles. Republicans launched paranoid Tea Parties to protest Obama’s every act of Big Government Tyranny – except his creation of an unelected government body tasked to decide our economic future.
And political commentators barely finished catching their breath from hailing the significance of the elections when they began hailing the significance of a Commission whose report would have been the same regardless of the elections.
At least Jon Stewart might be pleased that Bowles and Simpson didn’t display any of the “insanity” that the comedian deplored at his Washington rally. There were no rabid delusional speeches tailored for Fox News. If you check out the videos of the Commission’s sessions, you’ll see a model of the old-school decorum that used to rule Washington: old white men working across party lines for the purpose of screwing the majority of the population.
But despite their drowsy septuagenarian good cheer, Bowles and Simpson produced recommendations straight from the Tea Party’s “fuck society” doctrine.
We all knew that these guys were going to call for cutting Medicare and Social Security. Their main role as retired politicians was to be a shield for both of their parties to go after America’s two most popular social programs. But it’s a little nutty to then call for the rich to pay lower taxes when your assignment was supposedly to find ways to increase government revenue. Presumably, if Bowles and Simpson served on a task force to reduce childhood obesity their main recommendation would be to abolish all taxes on millionaires, who could then donate used Shake Weights to needy schools.
Perhaps the co-chairs veered so far right because some their staffers were on loan from hard right think tanks funded by billionaire Pete Peterson. The commission’s executive director Bruce Reed defended this arrangement as a model of government thrift: “"We have a very small budget…Part of our job is not to add to the problem ourselves."
What an innovative way to reduce government spending! In fact, why even bother having to pay all those salaries for Congressional representatives and their staffers? We can save a boatload by replacing them with folks whose salaries are generously paid directly by BP, Goldman Sachs, and other corporations devoted to the call of public service.
When Obama created the Fiscal Commission, he assigned it to deliver its report after the elections on the premise that democracy isn’t a good way to make the “tough choices necessary to solve our fiscal problems.” The conventional wisdom voiced by pundits - usually in a tone reminiscent of Bill Cosby on “Kids Say the Darnedest Things!” - is that Americans don’t like the deficit but they also don’t want to cut their favorite programs.
In fact, there are two very expensive programs that the majority of Americans tell pollsters they are quite willing to cut: the Bush tax cuts and the war in Afghanistan. Oops. Wrong “tough choices.”
That’s the real reason for this unelected commission: No matter how many Tea Parties they fund, the American plutocracy still can’t convince most of us to pay for its bailout.
Of course, most Tea Partiers are not exactly black belts in the art of political persuasion. Rand Paul’s argument for cutting social programs is that “people don’t understand why they have to balance their family budget, but Congress doesn’t.”
Apparently, most families would like to tighten their budgets even further from lower Social Security checks in order to feel more metaphorically connected to the federal government.
Here’s a better analogy. Cutting Social Security and Medicare and slashing state budgets while lowering taxes for the rich is like a family that decides to cut off Junior’s allowance, take Sis out of college, force Mom to get a second job, and cut off Grandpa’s medication to make sure that Dad can keep himself deep in pure Bolivian cocaine and upgrade to business class for his weekly Vegas binges.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that Rand Paul’s ideas are actually quite popular. After all, his party just dominated the midterm elections. But actually, only about twenty percent of Americans voted for the Republicans. While that’s better than the nineteen percent who voted Democrat, it’s dwarfed by the numbers who stayed home because they didn’t think their vote would make a difference.
I wonder what gave them that idea?
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Obsessed With Their Constitution
First published at SocialistWorker.org on 11/3/10
Obsessed with their constitution
THE TEA Party revolution has arrived--exhaustively televised. So what's their plan to restore the economy and rescue America? Since they don't want to tax the rich or end our pointless and expensive wars, they're going to have to come up with something really innovative. What's it going to be?
In his victory speech last night, Kentucky's new Sen. Rand Paul proclaimed that the message of the Tea Party is "fiscal sanity, of limited constitutional government and balanced budgets."
Expect to hear more about the U.S. Constitution in the next couple of days. It's a big Tea Party theme. The now Republican-led House of Representatives may pass a number of resolutions this year in favor of having three branches of government and a bicameral legislature.
At least, that's what I remember to be the main points of the Constitution. It's a document that lays out the structure of the U.S. government, not a guide to action. A candidate who pledges to vote according to the Constitution is like a football coach whose strategy against an upcoming team is to read and re-read the rulebook.
Most of the Constitution is about as inspiring as the minutes of a local PTA meeting--if, that is, right before the report from the bake sale committee was a resolution extending the international slave trade for 20 years.
And yet, Tea Partiers can't get enough of it. In September, they organized nationwide public readings of the Constitution. I have to imagine that stopped seeming like such a great idea at about the two-hour mark of people awkwardly cheering on lines like: "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction."
Some of the new members of Congress talk about truly understanding the Constitution with an intensity that I can only compare to my feelings about the Smiths when I was 15 years old. Like today's conservatives, I was frightened and angry, and I thought the world sucked. I knew things would be better if everyone would just sit on my bed and just...like...listen.
One reason that conservatives are so rapturous about something so boring may be that they're thinking of a totally different document. That's what you have to conclude after reading the preamble of the Constitution Party, a nutty group with close connections with the newly elected Rand Paul. The preamble states that the Constitution "established a Republic rooted in Biblical law," and that America "was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
If these guys are right, then Jesus must be pissed, because he's not given credit even once in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or any of the Amendments. On the other hand, this would explain our government's lack of support for storm victims from New Orleans to Pakistan--after all, Biblical law is pretty tolerant toward the occasional apocalyptic flood.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE MORE a Tea Party politician talks about the Constitution, the less likely he's actually referring to anything in the Constitution. It's just another cultural code word meant to conjure up a time when men were men, youth had respect, and there was no such thing as a Black president.
But opposition to Obama has merely added a new twist to the traditional right-wing silliness that the Constitution prohibits all measures not foreseen and approved by its authors--otherwise known as "progress." Social Security, Medicare and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were all opposed in their times as unconstitutional intrusions by the federal government into areas best handled by the states.
For some reason, conservatives view state capitals as idyllic paragons of popular democracy--while to the rest of us, they're just places where politicians live after they're elected and before they're sent to jail or busted for having an affair.
This "strict construction" view of the Constitution may have made some sense when it was first written, and We the White People were mostly small farmers who had fought a revolution to create their own independent communities, free from a tyrannical government.
But today's pseudo-libertarians are led by business owners and professionals whose lives are far from self-sufficient--unless Sarah Palin feeds and clothes her family exclusively with hunted moose. They only oppose those laws that limit their ability to exploit their workers or the environment that we all must share. At the same time, they're all for any government intervention that can help such exploitation--from ICE raids to anti-strike injunctions to publicly funded cleanups of privately caused oil spills.
And you can bet that the new rebels in Congress aren't planning to take on the real government tyranny of the ever-expanding Wars on Drugs, Immigrants and Terror. In fact, when it comes to these aspects of the state that are actually Orwellian, their main complaint is that the government isn't playing dirty enough--because it's too wedded to the Constitution!
Sarah Palin is the darling of the right because she isn't intimidated by this kind of faulty logic; instead, she revels in it with a narrow-mindedness so pure it inspires her audience. In a speech she gave earlier this year, she spoke for and against the Constitution in such rapid succession that somewhere in heaven Rick James must have been jealous:
At the end of the day, the true Tea Party plan is to preserve the minority's sacred Constitutional right to its wealth by cutting the majority's benefits and services to the bone. The Democrats will meekly follow and hope we forget that they still control the White House and Senate.
If we want to stop them, we'll have to build an opposition in the streets and reclaim this country's revolutionary tradition for our side. We're the ones who fight for the freedoms of religion and speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. We're the ones organizing against an empire that denies self-government to peoples across an ocean.
The only thing today's new Congress-people have in common with the original Tea Party is that they don't give a shit about polluting our waterways.
In his victory speech last night, Kentucky's new Sen. Rand Paul proclaimed that the message of the Tea Party is "fiscal sanity, of limited constitutional government and balanced budgets."
Expect to hear more about the U.S. Constitution in the next couple of days. It's a big Tea Party theme. The now Republican-led House of Representatives may pass a number of resolutions this year in favor of having three branches of government and a bicameral legislature.
At least, that's what I remember to be the main points of the Constitution. It's a document that lays out the structure of the U.S. government, not a guide to action. A candidate who pledges to vote according to the Constitution is like a football coach whose strategy against an upcoming team is to read and re-read the rulebook.
Most of the Constitution is about as inspiring as the minutes of a local PTA meeting--if, that is, right before the report from the bake sale committee was a resolution extending the international slave trade for 20 years.
And yet, Tea Partiers can't get enough of it. In September, they organized nationwide public readings of the Constitution. I have to imagine that stopped seeming like such a great idea at about the two-hour mark of people awkwardly cheering on lines like: "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction."
Some of the new members of Congress talk about truly understanding the Constitution with an intensity that I can only compare to my feelings about the Smiths when I was 15 years old. Like today's conservatives, I was frightened and angry, and I thought the world sucked. I knew things would be better if everyone would just sit on my bed and just...like...listen.
One reason that conservatives are so rapturous about something so boring may be that they're thinking of a totally different document. That's what you have to conclude after reading the preamble of the Constitution Party, a nutty group with close connections with the newly elected Rand Paul. The preamble states that the Constitution "established a Republic rooted in Biblical law," and that America "was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
If these guys are right, then Jesus must be pissed, because he's not given credit even once in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or any of the Amendments. On the other hand, this would explain our government's lack of support for storm victims from New Orleans to Pakistan--after all, Biblical law is pretty tolerant toward the occasional apocalyptic flood.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE MORE a Tea Party politician talks about the Constitution, the less likely he's actually referring to anything in the Constitution. It's just another cultural code word meant to conjure up a time when men were men, youth had respect, and there was no such thing as a Black president.
But opposition to Obama has merely added a new twist to the traditional right-wing silliness that the Constitution prohibits all measures not foreseen and approved by its authors--otherwise known as "progress." Social Security, Medicare and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were all opposed in their times as unconstitutional intrusions by the federal government into areas best handled by the states.
For some reason, conservatives view state capitals as idyllic paragons of popular democracy--while to the rest of us, they're just places where politicians live after they're elected and before they're sent to jail or busted for having an affair.
This "strict construction" view of the Constitution may have made some sense when it was first written, and We the White People were mostly small farmers who had fought a revolution to create their own independent communities, free from a tyrannical government.
But today's pseudo-libertarians are led by business owners and professionals whose lives are far from self-sufficient--unless Sarah Palin feeds and clothes her family exclusively with hunted moose. They only oppose those laws that limit their ability to exploit their workers or the environment that we all must share. At the same time, they're all for any government intervention that can help such exploitation--from ICE raids to anti-strike injunctions to publicly funded cleanups of privately caused oil spills.
And you can bet that the new rebels in Congress aren't planning to take on the real government tyranny of the ever-expanding Wars on Drugs, Immigrants and Terror. In fact, when it comes to these aspects of the state that are actually Orwellian, their main complaint is that the government isn't playing dirty enough--because it's too wedded to the Constitution!
Sarah Palin is the darling of the right because she isn't intimidated by this kind of faulty logic; instead, she revels in it with a narrow-mindedness so pure it inspires her audience. In a speech she gave earlier this year, she spoke for and against the Constitution in such rapid succession that somewhere in heaven Rick James must have been jealous:
Our vision for America is anchored in time-tested truths: Government that governs least governs best. That the Constitution provides the path to a more perfect union--it's the constitution! By the way, it's within our own borders and the homeland that we should feel safe and not condone any violence. That makes me want to say, in these volatile times, when we are a nation at war is when we need a commander in chief, not a constitutional law professor.To Palin and her friends, there's no contradiction here: The Constitution is for us, not them. And those two categories aren't just defined by what side of the border you're on. For Rand Paul, "us" are business owners who shouldn't have been forced by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to have to serve African Americans, who obviously fall into the category of "them" for Kentucky's newest senator.
At the end of the day, the true Tea Party plan is to preserve the minority's sacred Constitutional right to its wealth by cutting the majority's benefits and services to the bone. The Democrats will meekly follow and hope we forget that they still control the White House and Senate.
If we want to stop them, we'll have to build an opposition in the streets and reclaim this country's revolutionary tradition for our side. We're the ones who fight for the freedoms of religion and speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. We're the ones organizing against an empire that denies self-government to peoples across an ocean.
The only thing today's new Congress-people have in common with the original Tea Party is that they don't give a shit about polluting our waterways.
Democrats Stoop A Little Lower
Originally posted at socialistworker.org on 10/15/10
Democrats stoop a little lower
LAST WEEK, the White House unveiled its two-pronged October Surprise for the midterm elections. First, reject the growing call for a moratorium on foreclosures. Second, accuse the Republicans of receiving "secret foreign money" from the Chamber of Commerce.
Rather than give us hope by actually doing something to limit the power of American financial institutions, the Democrats' plan is to make us frightened and angry about fictional non-American financial institutions. In other words, we now have a choice between Tea-Party-Dee and Tea-Party-Dumb.
"This is a threat to our democracy," Obama warned last week about the supposed foreign donantions to the Republicans. "The American people deserve to know who's trying to sway their elections."
Do you know what's actually a threat to our democracy? The fact that no matter who we vote for, we end up with the same stupid shit.
Before you get too frustrated, though, a word of warning: If you're reading this Web site, chances are the White House is already very disappointed in you. Facing an impending disaster at the polls, Democratic leaders have figured out that you're the culprit.
Joe Biden thinks you're spending too much time "whining" about bank bailouts and Afghanistan, and not enough time being scared about the Tea Party. In fact, you probably are nervous about some of these right-wing cranks who may take over Congress next year. But you can't get it out of your head that right now, with huge Democratic majorities, that same Congress has been unable even to end unpopular policies like tax cuts for millionaires and "don't ask, don't tell."
Your reckless live-in-the-moment attitude isn't entirely your fault, according to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. You've been misled by the "professional left," a shadowy network that ranges from Jon Stewart to revolutionary socialists, and includes all those in between who rigidly cling to their values, even when they come into conflict with the political strategies of a Democratic administration.
Gibbs throws up his hands at the impossibility of dealing with crazies who will only "be satisfied when we have Canadian health care, and we've eliminated the Pentagon."
Gibbs may be right that you actually like the sound of his dystopian nightmare of world peace and free medicine. But you may be wondering why the White House spokesperson sounds so much like Glenn Beck when he describes anybody who just wants his boss to fulfill his campaign promises.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SINCE POLLS show that you haven't been getting the hint, President Obama himself felt the need to set you straight in a recent interview with Rolling Stone:
It's funny, but you don't remember that being the reason for your excitement when Obama was elected, do you? Come to think of it, one reason you were so happy was that you thought with the Democrats having a majority of 18 seats in the Senate and 75 seats in the House, you'd barely even have to know the Republicans existed.
And you're pretty sure that there was all sorts of legislation you expected to be passed. Not just ending "don't ask, don't tell" and ending millionaire tax cuts, but laws protecting homeowners, the environment, abortion rights--the list goes on and on. Of course, back then, you were naïve enough to think that with super-majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama and his party could pass those laws just by, you know, voting for them.
You were still dealing with your disappointment in Team Obama's performance over the past two years when they started semi-mocking you for believing all of their talk about "change" to begin with. And now, to top it all off, the folks telling you to shut up and vote have embarked on what may be the dumbest political strategy in recent history.
Barack Hussein Obama: Nativist.
"Where has the Chamber been getting some of their money lately?" asks an ad from MoveOn.org. "From foreign corporations in countries like China, Russia and India--the same companies that threaten American jobs." "It's incredible," says another ad from the Democratic National Committee. "Republicans benefiting from secret foreign money."
First of all, there must be some bitter laughter coming from Venezuala, Iran and all the other countries with opposition parties funded by the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy.
Closer to home, the real money influencing our elections is coming from the very American bankers that Obama is afraid of pissing off with a moratorium on foreclosures--precisely because their money influences our elections.
One other hole in the "secret foreign money" argument: It's probably not true. Campaign finance watchdog groups say there's no evidence behind the accusation. When Obama's aide David Axelrod was asked on Face the Nation for proof that the Chamber was funneling foreign money to Republican candidates, he cleverly responded, "Well, do you have any proof that it's not?"
Not only are the Democrats trying to out-xenophobe the Tea Party--they're trying to out-stupid them as well.
Rather than give us hope by actually doing something to limit the power of American financial institutions, the Democrats' plan is to make us frightened and angry about fictional non-American financial institutions. In other words, we now have a choice between Tea-Party-Dee and Tea-Party-Dumb.
"This is a threat to our democracy," Obama warned last week about the supposed foreign donantions to the Republicans. "The American people deserve to know who's trying to sway their elections."
Do you know what's actually a threat to our democracy? The fact that no matter who we vote for, we end up with the same stupid shit.
Before you get too frustrated, though, a word of warning: If you're reading this Web site, chances are the White House is already very disappointed in you. Facing an impending disaster at the polls, Democratic leaders have figured out that you're the culprit.
Joe Biden thinks you're spending too much time "whining" about bank bailouts and Afghanistan, and not enough time being scared about the Tea Party. In fact, you probably are nervous about some of these right-wing cranks who may take over Congress next year. But you can't get it out of your head that right now, with huge Democratic majorities, that same Congress has been unable even to end unpopular policies like tax cuts for millionaires and "don't ask, don't tell."
Your reckless live-in-the-moment attitude isn't entirely your fault, according to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. You've been misled by the "professional left," a shadowy network that ranges from Jon Stewart to revolutionary socialists, and includes all those in between who rigidly cling to their values, even when they come into conflict with the political strategies of a Democratic administration.
Gibbs throws up his hands at the impossibility of dealing with crazies who will only "be satisfied when we have Canadian health care, and we've eliminated the Pentagon."
Gibbs may be right that you actually like the sound of his dystopian nightmare of world peace and free medicine. But you may be wondering why the White House spokesperson sounds so much like Glenn Beck when he describes anybody who just wants his boss to fulfill his campaign promises.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SINCE POLLS show that you haven't been getting the hint, President Obama himself felt the need to set you straight in a recent interview with Rolling Stone:
[T]here's a turn of mind among Democrats and progressives where a lot of times we see the glass as half-empty...[W]e made a series of decisions that were focused on governance, and sometimes there was a conflict between governance and politics. So there were some areas where we could have picked a fight with Republicans that might have gotten our base feeling good, but would have resulted in us not getting legislation done.Ouch. The guy who once seemed like the only politician who respected your intelligence now views you as a simple-minded zealot who would rather scream at Republicans than pass any laws.
It's funny, but you don't remember that being the reason for your excitement when Obama was elected, do you? Come to think of it, one reason you were so happy was that you thought with the Democrats having a majority of 18 seats in the Senate and 75 seats in the House, you'd barely even have to know the Republicans existed.
And you're pretty sure that there was all sorts of legislation you expected to be passed. Not just ending "don't ask, don't tell" and ending millionaire tax cuts, but laws protecting homeowners, the environment, abortion rights--the list goes on and on. Of course, back then, you were naïve enough to think that with super-majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama and his party could pass those laws just by, you know, voting for them.
You were still dealing with your disappointment in Team Obama's performance over the past two years when they started semi-mocking you for believing all of their talk about "change" to begin with. And now, to top it all off, the folks telling you to shut up and vote have embarked on what may be the dumbest political strategy in recent history.
Barack Hussein Obama: Nativist.
"Where has the Chamber been getting some of their money lately?" asks an ad from MoveOn.org. "From foreign corporations in countries like China, Russia and India--the same companies that threaten American jobs." "It's incredible," says another ad from the Democratic National Committee. "Republicans benefiting from secret foreign money."
First of all, there must be some bitter laughter coming from Venezuala, Iran and all the other countries with opposition parties funded by the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy.
Closer to home, the real money influencing our elections is coming from the very American bankers that Obama is afraid of pissing off with a moratorium on foreclosures--precisely because their money influences our elections.
One other hole in the "secret foreign money" argument: It's probably not true. Campaign finance watchdog groups say there's no evidence behind the accusation. When Obama's aide David Axelrod was asked on Face the Nation for proof that the Chamber was funneling foreign money to Republican candidates, he cleverly responded, "Well, do you have any proof that it's not?"
Not only are the Democrats trying to out-xenophobe the Tea Party--they're trying to out-stupid them as well.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Ground Zero, Hallelujah!
Welcome to the Church of NineEleven. Brothers and sisters, we gather today in praise of Ground Zero, a site so holy it has the power to expand its size to encompass any proposed mosque.
Did you know that the name Ground Zero actually goes back over five hundred years? Grondaseero was an Algonquin word meaning “place where enormous metal trees will be hit by flying machines flown by Muslims.”
Over time the name faded from usage. Instead the area became known as “downtown”, “the World Trade Center”, and “the porn district.” Then, of course, came DEVINE CHANGE (Day EVerthing INstantly CHANGEd), when Americans discovered that not only had Osama Bin Laden attacked us, his fellow Muslims had occupied most of the world’s oil producing regions. (Note: the Church of NineEleven is not anti-Islam.)
Islam is an evil religion that teaches its followers to hate America. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Muslims did not attack us during our first 215 years. We refer to this period of American history as “The Big Snooze”, when Presidents Washington through Clinton daydreamed while our enemies patiently waited for the perfect time to strike.
Due to our generous nature, we did not respond to DEVINE CHANGE with a war against all Muslims – only most of their countries. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia, we’ve shown the Islamic world how a civilized nation goes about using airplanes to kill people.
Meanwhile, back in the homeland, Saint Rudy (blessed be his name) founded our Church on a few simple beliefs:
1) NineEleven is not a date. It’s a way of life.
2) We are born fearful and angry and should strive to return to that pure natural state.
3) All races and creeds should form a brotherhood of man against Arabs and Muslims.
In recent years, the Church has gone through some hard times. Americans have disappointed us with their lack of enthusiasm for endless war against Islamo-petroleumism. The 2008 election almost broke our spirit entirely. Not only did people elect a man whose name rhymes with Osama, they didn’t even give the Republican nomination to Saint Rudy (praised be he, a pox on his ungrateful children.)
But now things are looking up - thanks to Ground Zero. Who would have thought that a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center based on “multifaith dialogue” (yuck!) could turn so quickly into its glorious opposite? Oh NineEleven, you sure do work in mysterious ways!
Every day more Republicans come back to church. Democrats are quietly coming too, shuffling in the side door with a liberal two-step – “I believe in freedom of religion, just not here.” Smile Democrats! Just because the Church doesn’t allow you to sit up front doesn’t mean NineEleven doesn’t love you.
It gratifies us to see so many people refer to Ground Zero as “hallowed ground” for those who died there. However, we are afraid that this term is too limiting. Most of the Church elders - like Sister Sarah and Brother Newt – aren’t actually connected to those who died that day. But that doesn’t make us any less qualified to speak to the true meaning of NineEleven.
In fact, it makes us more able cast out the Judases in our midst: so-called “9/11 families” who oppose endless war. Someone who lost a loved one on DEVINE CHANGE probably wouldn’t be able to scream “shut up!” at a Judas suffering the same grief. Brother O’Reilly could.
Besides, if Ground Zero is merely hallowed ground, than how can we expand our Church? NineEleven belongs to all Americans. If your town wasn’t lucky enough to have a Ground Zero, you should be able to build your own - federally funded and Church administered. We’ll call them Ground One, Ground Two, etcetera. And maybe they’ll just happen to be located near Muslim houses of worship.
At this point, some of you may have voice in your head raising questions: Isn’t this a little crude? What about freedom of religion? Here’s how you can put that little guy on mute: Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and repeat these words: “Nine Eleven. Nine Eleven.” Now picture the towers coming down. Forget all those burdensome facts you learned in the days and years after. That moment is the truth.
Okay, open your eyes. Did you feel the spirit of NineEleven? Welcome to the Church!
No? Then we’ll see you in hell. Or prison, depending on the next election (good luck Sister Sarah!)
Did you know that the name Ground Zero actually goes back over five hundred years? Grondaseero was an Algonquin word meaning “place where enormous metal trees will be hit by flying machines flown by Muslims.”
Over time the name faded from usage. Instead the area became known as “downtown”, “the World Trade Center”, and “the porn district.” Then, of course, came DEVINE CHANGE (Day EVerthing INstantly CHANGEd), when Americans discovered that not only had Osama Bin Laden attacked us, his fellow Muslims had occupied most of the world’s oil producing regions. (Note: the Church of NineEleven is not anti-Islam.)
Islam is an evil religion that teaches its followers to hate America. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Muslims did not attack us during our first 215 years. We refer to this period of American history as “The Big Snooze”, when Presidents Washington through Clinton daydreamed while our enemies patiently waited for the perfect time to strike.
Due to our generous nature, we did not respond to DEVINE CHANGE with a war against all Muslims – only most of their countries. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Pakistan to Yemen to Somalia, we’ve shown the Islamic world how a civilized nation goes about using airplanes to kill people.
Meanwhile, back in the homeland, Saint Rudy (blessed be his name) founded our Church on a few simple beliefs:
1) NineEleven is not a date. It’s a way of life.
2) We are born fearful and angry and should strive to return to that pure natural state.
3) All races and creeds should form a brotherhood of man against Arabs and Muslims.
In recent years, the Church has gone through some hard times. Americans have disappointed us with their lack of enthusiasm for endless war against Islamo-petroleumism. The 2008 election almost broke our spirit entirely. Not only did people elect a man whose name rhymes with Osama, they didn’t even give the Republican nomination to Saint Rudy (praised be he, a pox on his ungrateful children.)
But now things are looking up - thanks to Ground Zero. Who would have thought that a proposal to build an Islamic cultural center based on “multifaith dialogue” (yuck!) could turn so quickly into its glorious opposite? Oh NineEleven, you sure do work in mysterious ways!
Every day more Republicans come back to church. Democrats are quietly coming too, shuffling in the side door with a liberal two-step – “I believe in freedom of religion, just not here.” Smile Democrats! Just because the Church doesn’t allow you to sit up front doesn’t mean NineEleven doesn’t love you.
It gratifies us to see so many people refer to Ground Zero as “hallowed ground” for those who died there. However, we are afraid that this term is too limiting. Most of the Church elders - like Sister Sarah and Brother Newt – aren’t actually connected to those who died that day. But that doesn’t make us any less qualified to speak to the true meaning of NineEleven.
In fact, it makes us more able cast out the Judases in our midst: so-called “9/11 families” who oppose endless war. Someone who lost a loved one on DEVINE CHANGE probably wouldn’t be able to scream “shut up!” at a Judas suffering the same grief. Brother O’Reilly could.
Besides, if Ground Zero is merely hallowed ground, than how can we expand our Church? NineEleven belongs to all Americans. If your town wasn’t lucky enough to have a Ground Zero, you should be able to build your own - federally funded and Church administered. We’ll call them Ground One, Ground Two, etcetera. And maybe they’ll just happen to be located near Muslim houses of worship.
At this point, some of you may have voice in your head raising questions: Isn’t this a little crude? What about freedom of religion? Here’s how you can put that little guy on mute: Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and repeat these words: “Nine Eleven. Nine Eleven.” Now picture the towers coming down. Forget all those burdensome facts you learned in the days and years after. That moment is the truth.
Okay, open your eyes. Did you feel the spirit of NineEleven? Welcome to the Church!
No? Then we’ll see you in hell. Or prison, depending on the next election (good luck Sister Sarah!)
A Toast to Stephen Slater
First published 8/17/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/17/toast-to-steven-slater
Today we raise a glass to Stephen Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who gave a vicarious thrill to workers across Great Recession America.
Stephen, when the light dinged on in your head that you were now free to tell off that rude passenger, pop open the emergency exit, and just slip slide away, you did more than fulfill your own long-held fantasy.
Thanks to you, Stephen, flight attendants are walking those narrow aisles today with a swagger and air travelers are making eye contact with them to let them know “you wont have any trouble from me.”
You have taught America that our working class heroes can be gay. Badass gay at that. You escaped from the airport, raced home, and jumped into bed with your boyfriend, which is how the police found you. That is ridiculously cool.
You’ve showed us that solidarity via Facebook can force media wise-asses to take their narrative (Daily News Day 1: “Planely Nuts”) and shove it (Day 2: “Hero to Working Stiffs.”)
Finally, Stephen Slater, we toast you because before you left that plane, you stopped and grabbed a couple of beers from the beverage cart.
That’s what gave your freakout some flair. It transformed the act from postal to rebel. With or without the beers, we still would have identified with your rage. But they made the difference between our saying “Damn I wish I could do that” and not “Lord, I hope that’s not me in five years.” Taking the tallboys signalled that you weren’t a rampaging maniac, just a guy saying “no job is worth this shit.”
Those are six powerful words that bear repeating. No Job Is Worth This Shit. You don’t hear them too often right now, when folks haven’t been able to find work for two years.
Stephen, what you did felt like a throwback to the 1970s, like something Lily Tomlin would have done in “9 to 5” or Johnny Fever in “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Back in the Seventies, Ronald Reagan was just a nutty governor and down-sizing wasn’t a word. Being an American worker didn’t mean having your ass handed to you every day; it meant clocking in with your head high and your middle finger ready.
Here’s what I mean. In 1972, autoworkers in Lordstown, Ohio went on a strike that wasn’t about money or benefits – they didn’t have too many complaints about that. No, what they were pissed about was assembly line speedups. The local union president told author Studs Terkel that the guys were striking for the right to be “able to smoke, bullshit a bit, open a book, daydream even."
Can you imagine anybody doing that today? Imagine the picket line chants: “No YouTube? No Work!”
Stephen, you reminded workers in America that the bankers and CEO’s haven’t always gotten their way in this country without a fight. That’s why even talk show hosts like Jimmy Fallon are writing ballads about you.
Of course, not everybody has a sense of humor about what you did. Incredibly, you face up to seven years in jail for reckless endangerment and criminal mischief. Come on. The only thing you endangered was $25,000 of JetBlue’s money, which apparently is what it costs to replace the emergency slide.
Speaking of JetBlue, no one seems to be talking about its role in all this. The combination of profit seeking and terrorism paranoia has made air travel a delightful experience. We’re packed into tiny seats like mindless cattle only minutes after our shoes have been given a search worthy of a world-class criminal. Rude passengers are inevitable in this situation and yet airlines let their flight attendants be human shields to face the cabin crackpots.
For example, a few years ago, one of your co-workers, Mala Amarsingh hadn’t even started work when she was verbally assaulted and spat on by drunken man who had been denied boarding on previous flights. What did JetBlue do to defend its employee? It fired her, officially because she dared to curse at her assailant. Want to know the unofficial reason? Because Mala Amarsingh thought JetBlue flight attendants should join a union.
With that in mind, I’ll end my toast with a question. What now, Stephen Slater? The same pundits who initially dismissed you now assume that you’re a passing fad whose only shot at lasting significance is landing a spot in a reality show. After all, they say, things have changed since autoworkers went on strike over smoke breaks.
Indeed they have. But, Stephen, your popularity shows that people haven’t changed that much. As often as we’re told differently, we still can’t get it into our heads that we’re only as good as our production quota or evaluation form.
So here’s to you, Stephen and here’s to you Mala Amarsingh, are here’s to all the JetBlue flight attendants still talking union. When you guys finally win, we’ll all raise two beers in your honor.
Today we raise a glass to Stephen Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who gave a vicarious thrill to workers across Great Recession America.
Stephen, when the light dinged on in your head that you were now free to tell off that rude passenger, pop open the emergency exit, and just slip slide away, you did more than fulfill your own long-held fantasy.
Thanks to you, Stephen, flight attendants are walking those narrow aisles today with a swagger and air travelers are making eye contact with them to let them know “you wont have any trouble from me.”
You have taught America that our working class heroes can be gay. Badass gay at that. You escaped from the airport, raced home, and jumped into bed with your boyfriend, which is how the police found you. That is ridiculously cool.
You’ve showed us that solidarity via Facebook can force media wise-asses to take their narrative (Daily News Day 1: “Planely Nuts”) and shove it (Day 2: “Hero to Working Stiffs.”)
Finally, Stephen Slater, we toast you because before you left that plane, you stopped and grabbed a couple of beers from the beverage cart.
That’s what gave your freakout some flair. It transformed the act from postal to rebel. With or without the beers, we still would have identified with your rage. But they made the difference between our saying “Damn I wish I could do that” and not “Lord, I hope that’s not me in five years.” Taking the tallboys signalled that you weren’t a rampaging maniac, just a guy saying “no job is worth this shit.”
Those are six powerful words that bear repeating. No Job Is Worth This Shit. You don’t hear them too often right now, when folks haven’t been able to find work for two years.
Stephen, what you did felt like a throwback to the 1970s, like something Lily Tomlin would have done in “9 to 5” or Johnny Fever in “WKRP in Cincinnati.” Back in the Seventies, Ronald Reagan was just a nutty governor and down-sizing wasn’t a word. Being an American worker didn’t mean having your ass handed to you every day; it meant clocking in with your head high and your middle finger ready.
Here’s what I mean. In 1972, autoworkers in Lordstown, Ohio went on a strike that wasn’t about money or benefits – they didn’t have too many complaints about that. No, what they were pissed about was assembly line speedups. The local union president told author Studs Terkel that the guys were striking for the right to be “able to smoke, bullshit a bit, open a book, daydream even."
Can you imagine anybody doing that today? Imagine the picket line chants: “No YouTube? No Work!”
Stephen, you reminded workers in America that the bankers and CEO’s haven’t always gotten their way in this country without a fight. That’s why even talk show hosts like Jimmy Fallon are writing ballads about you.
Of course, not everybody has a sense of humor about what you did. Incredibly, you face up to seven years in jail for reckless endangerment and criminal mischief. Come on. The only thing you endangered was $25,000 of JetBlue’s money, which apparently is what it costs to replace the emergency slide.
Speaking of JetBlue, no one seems to be talking about its role in all this. The combination of profit seeking and terrorism paranoia has made air travel a delightful experience. We’re packed into tiny seats like mindless cattle only minutes after our shoes have been given a search worthy of a world-class criminal. Rude passengers are inevitable in this situation and yet airlines let their flight attendants be human shields to face the cabin crackpots.
For example, a few years ago, one of your co-workers, Mala Amarsingh hadn’t even started work when she was verbally assaulted and spat on by drunken man who had been denied boarding on previous flights. What did JetBlue do to defend its employee? It fired her, officially because she dared to curse at her assailant. Want to know the unofficial reason? Because Mala Amarsingh thought JetBlue flight attendants should join a union.
With that in mind, I’ll end my toast with a question. What now, Stephen Slater? The same pundits who initially dismissed you now assume that you’re a passing fad whose only shot at lasting significance is landing a spot in a reality show. After all, they say, things have changed since autoworkers went on strike over smoke breaks.
Indeed they have. But, Stephen, your popularity shows that people haven’t changed that much. As often as we’re told differently, we still can’t get it into our heads that we’re only as good as our production quota or evaluation form.
So here’s to you, Stephen and here’s to you Mala Amarsingh, are here’s to all the JetBlue flight attendants still talking union. When you guys finally win, we’ll all raise two beers in your honor.
Michael Bloomberg: Kleptocrat
First published 7/14/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/14/kleptocratic-mayor-of-new-york
In the past year, the mayor of New York City has become two billion dollars riches while his city has grown one billions dollars poorer.
When this type of thing happens in a country in Africa or Central Asia, we call it a failed state. Their failure, apparently, is a lack of subtlety. Looting your country’s grain reserves to build the world’s largest tetherball arena makes you a kleptocratic dictator. But if you get stinking rich selling information technology to the banks that have looted your treasury through bailouts, well you’re just Mayor Mike.
Of course, the real saving grace for Michael Bloomberg is that, unlike a banana republic strongman, he hasn’t kept all the wealth to himself but generously shared it with a few thousand of his city’s 8 million inhabitants.
These hedge funders and investment bankers are too numerous to depict themselves in a 200 foot golden statue that rotates with the sun, as did the late Turkmenestan dictator Saparmurat Niyazov. Instead, various smaller monuments to gluttony dot the city’s boutiques and restaurants in the form of bejeweled flip flops and $150 hamburgers.
If countries like Nigeria are said to suffer from an “oil curse” because petroleum revenues have corrupted their political system, does New York have a “bank curse”?
Consider that Bloomberg is eliminating two thousand public school teachers to close a budget gap caused by bailouts to Goldman Sachs execs who could each pay a teacher’s salary and benefits with the money they spend on their own children’s private school and tutoring. (This isn’t an exaggeration. Wealthy New Yorkers routinely pay $25-$50,000 on private tutors for the SATs and academic help – on top of $30,000 plus tuitions for private schools.) Each of these public school teachers would have taught this year about one hundred children whose parents didn’t love them enough to become bankers.
Last month, New York’s lame duck governor David Paterson dared to suggest a small tax on hedge funds, the folks who brought you the recession. Parents and teachers might have expected their mayor to back this plan. Not exactly.
"I think it's the best thing that ever happened to Connecticut,” Bloomberg sneered. “I can't imagine why every hedge fund wouldn't pick up tomorrow and move.”
Our mayor is advising them to leave. He may even round up some friends and a van to help. In most cities, mayors are civic boosters, tireless pitchmen for their towns armed with pie charts showing why East Shitsburgh is a great place to start a business and raise a family. But the mayor of America’s business and cultural capital can’t think of anything New York City has over Stamford, Connecticut. After all, “Hedge funds are a bunch of desks with terminals on them -- they can be anyplace.” Um, mister mayor, those are “Bloomberg terminals”, correct? There wouldn’t be any conflict of interest going on between your business interests and mayoral duties, would there?
Nonsense, says Mayor Mike. He’s just following basic economics: "The first commonsense rule of taxation is, 'Don't tax people that can leave,'" Left unstated is the obvious corollary to this rule: grab what you can from everyone who can’t. Like any good predator, Bloomberg has his eyes on the young (public schools), the old (25 senior centers and a day of library service cut), and the sick (cuts to HIV services).
According to the anti-corruption group Transparency International, the kleptocrat in recent history was Suharto, who embezzled over $15 during his three decade reign in Indonesia. Michael Bloomberg has almost matched that in only nine years as mayor, quadrupling his net worth from $4 billion to $18 billion.
Here’s the silver lining: Almost everyone on TI’s corruption list was eventually deposed by popular movements, from Suharto to Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines to Mobutu Sese Soko in Zaire.
What would it take for that to happen here? Three simple words: Tax the rich. One of two things would happen. Either they shut up and finally pay their share. Or they leave for the suburbs as threatened and their mayor leaves with them and starts a government in exile, leading search parties for doggie spas and $50 sashimi.
Then the real New Yorkers, the ones who can’t leave, could go about rebuilding our democratic and civil institutions after years of Bloombergian misrule.
In the past year, the mayor of New York City has become two billion dollars riches while his city has grown one billions dollars poorer.
When this type of thing happens in a country in Africa or Central Asia, we call it a failed state. Their failure, apparently, is a lack of subtlety. Looting your country’s grain reserves to build the world’s largest tetherball arena makes you a kleptocratic dictator. But if you get stinking rich selling information technology to the banks that have looted your treasury through bailouts, well you’re just Mayor Mike.
Of course, the real saving grace for Michael Bloomberg is that, unlike a banana republic strongman, he hasn’t kept all the wealth to himself but generously shared it with a few thousand of his city’s 8 million inhabitants.
These hedge funders and investment bankers are too numerous to depict themselves in a 200 foot golden statue that rotates with the sun, as did the late Turkmenestan dictator Saparmurat Niyazov. Instead, various smaller monuments to gluttony dot the city’s boutiques and restaurants in the form of bejeweled flip flops and $150 hamburgers.
If countries like Nigeria are said to suffer from an “oil curse” because petroleum revenues have corrupted their political system, does New York have a “bank curse”?
Consider that Bloomberg is eliminating two thousand public school teachers to close a budget gap caused by bailouts to Goldman Sachs execs who could each pay a teacher’s salary and benefits with the money they spend on their own children’s private school and tutoring. (This isn’t an exaggeration. Wealthy New Yorkers routinely pay $25-$50,000 on private tutors for the SATs and academic help – on top of $30,000 plus tuitions for private schools.) Each of these public school teachers would have taught this year about one hundred children whose parents didn’t love them enough to become bankers.
Last month, New York’s lame duck governor David Paterson dared to suggest a small tax on hedge funds, the folks who brought you the recession. Parents and teachers might have expected their mayor to back this plan. Not exactly.
"I think it's the best thing that ever happened to Connecticut,” Bloomberg sneered. “I can't imagine why every hedge fund wouldn't pick up tomorrow and move.”
Our mayor is advising them to leave. He may even round up some friends and a van to help. In most cities, mayors are civic boosters, tireless pitchmen for their towns armed with pie charts showing why East Shitsburgh is a great place to start a business and raise a family. But the mayor of America’s business and cultural capital can’t think of anything New York City has over Stamford, Connecticut. After all, “Hedge funds are a bunch of desks with terminals on them -- they can be anyplace.” Um, mister mayor, those are “Bloomberg terminals”, correct? There wouldn’t be any conflict of interest going on between your business interests and mayoral duties, would there?
Nonsense, says Mayor Mike. He’s just following basic economics: "The first commonsense rule of taxation is, 'Don't tax people that can leave,'" Left unstated is the obvious corollary to this rule: grab what you can from everyone who can’t. Like any good predator, Bloomberg has his eyes on the young (public schools), the old (25 senior centers and a day of library service cut), and the sick (cuts to HIV services).
According to the anti-corruption group Transparency International, the kleptocrat in recent history was Suharto, who embezzled over $15 during his three decade reign in Indonesia. Michael Bloomberg has almost matched that in only nine years as mayor, quadrupling his net worth from $4 billion to $18 billion.
Here’s the silver lining: Almost everyone on TI’s corruption list was eventually deposed by popular movements, from Suharto to Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines to Mobutu Sese Soko in Zaire.
What would it take for that to happen here? Three simple words: Tax the rich. One of two things would happen. Either they shut up and finally pay their share. Or they leave for the suburbs as threatened and their mayor leaves with them and starts a government in exile, leading search parties for doggie spas and $50 sashimi.
Then the real New Yorkers, the ones who can’t leave, could go about rebuilding our democratic and civil institutions after years of Bloombergian misrule.
The fear-mongers go to work
First published 5/14/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/14/fear-mongers-go-to-work
THE FAILED car bombing in Times Square has New Yorkers, some of whom still have nightmares from 9/11, on edge once again.
While most of us can't afford therapy, at least we have universal access to the soothing counsel of politicians and pundits. For the past two weeks, we've received dozens of cheery reminders that none of us are safe from terrorism--ever.
At times like this, it's nice to know that we have the kind of straight-shooting elected officials who aren't afraid to jump in front of the nearest camera and tell us their foolproof plan to prevent anybody from ever packing a car with common, yet explosive, materials and parking it on a street somewhere in the United States of America.
Of all their helpful suggestions--stripping suspects of citizenship, eliminating Miranda rights, and adding the phrase "for whites only" to each of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution--none of them have proposed to stop doing the thing that seems to have actually caused the Times Square attempt: our own bombing of Pakistan.
That, at least, is what the suspected Times Square bomber said his motives were. In the past year, pilotless U.S. planes have dropped bombs that have killed more then 300 Pakistanis. Most of them were non-combatants, many of them were children, all of them lived in a country with whom we are not at war.
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" we do not. Of course, the guy who coined that phrase was one of those radical Middle Eastern clerics flagged as a terrorist and taken out by the authorities--2,000 years ago.
IT'S NOT exactly a secret that the suspected Times Square bomber was motivated to murder by our own murders. A New York Post headline in early May screamed, "Why He Did It: Revenge for U.S. Drone Attacks on Taliban Terrorists."
The Post ran this cover not to make a point about imperial blowback, but as just another sinister detail of the "Taliban lackey's twisted mission." Which only demonstrates that those in charge of molding public opinion have a moral code that owes less to Jesus Christ than it does to that other Jewish philosopher, Mel Brooks. "Tragedy," Mel once said, "is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."
Terrorism, according to our conventional wisdom, is when we suffer anxiety from a barbequed Pathfinder. Foreign policy is when you and your family die a fiery death while lying in your beds at night.
Of course, in case some readers got the wrong idea from its headline, the Post ran another article that day declaring that the "drone attacks have been incredibly successful in the war on terrorists in Pakistan." Seems that the only downside to this incredibly successful weapon against terrorism is that it produces terrorism.
According to some in the media, the Times Square incident actually proves the wisdom of the drone bombings because it shows that the Pakistani Taliban are growing desperate [1].
So we've come full circle. George Bush justified his disastrous war in Iraq by saying that we were fighting "the terrorists" over there so that wouldn't have to fight them here. Now Barack Obama can claim that his escalation of the Afghanistan war is so successful that the terrorists we were fighting over there are now fighting us over here.
By this logic, we'll know that we're really close to winning the war on terror when there's another attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11.
It would be nice to laugh at this lunacy, but it's obviously not a joke. I'll have to settle for watching the next tough-on-terror press conference at Times Square and rooting for the politician of the day to step into one of my fine city's many open sewers.
THE FAILED car bombing in Times Square has New Yorkers, some of whom still have nightmares from 9/11, on edge once again.
While most of us can't afford therapy, at least we have universal access to the soothing counsel of politicians and pundits. For the past two weeks, we've received dozens of cheery reminders that none of us are safe from terrorism--ever.
At times like this, it's nice to know that we have the kind of straight-shooting elected officials who aren't afraid to jump in front of the nearest camera and tell us their foolproof plan to prevent anybody from ever packing a car with common, yet explosive, materials and parking it on a street somewhere in the United States of America.
Of all their helpful suggestions--stripping suspects of citizenship, eliminating Miranda rights, and adding the phrase "for whites only" to each of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution--none of them have proposed to stop doing the thing that seems to have actually caused the Times Square attempt: our own bombing of Pakistan.
That, at least, is what the suspected Times Square bomber said his motives were. In the past year, pilotless U.S. planes have dropped bombs that have killed more then 300 Pakistanis. Most of them were non-combatants, many of them were children, all of them lived in a country with whom we are not at war.
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" we do not. Of course, the guy who coined that phrase was one of those radical Middle Eastern clerics flagged as a terrorist and taken out by the authorities--2,000 years ago.
IT'S NOT exactly a secret that the suspected Times Square bomber was motivated to murder by our own murders. A New York Post headline in early May screamed, "Why He Did It: Revenge for U.S. Drone Attacks on Taliban Terrorists."
The Post ran this cover not to make a point about imperial blowback, but as just another sinister detail of the "Taliban lackey's twisted mission." Which only demonstrates that those in charge of molding public opinion have a moral code that owes less to Jesus Christ than it does to that other Jewish philosopher, Mel Brooks. "Tragedy," Mel once said, "is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."
Terrorism, according to our conventional wisdom, is when we suffer anxiety from a barbequed Pathfinder. Foreign policy is when you and your family die a fiery death while lying in your beds at night.
Of course, in case some readers got the wrong idea from its headline, the Post ran another article that day declaring that the "drone attacks have been incredibly successful in the war on terrorists in Pakistan." Seems that the only downside to this incredibly successful weapon against terrorism is that it produces terrorism.
According to some in the media, the Times Square incident actually proves the wisdom of the drone bombings because it shows that the Pakistani Taliban are growing desperate [1].
So we've come full circle. George Bush justified his disastrous war in Iraq by saying that we were fighting "the terrorists" over there so that wouldn't have to fight them here. Now Barack Obama can claim that his escalation of the Afghanistan war is so successful that the terrorists we were fighting over there are now fighting us over here.
By this logic, we'll know that we're really close to winning the war on terror when there's another attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11.
It would be nice to laugh at this lunacy, but it's obviously not a joke. I'll have to settle for watching the next tough-on-terror press conference at Times Square and rooting for the politician of the day to step into one of my fine city's many open sewers.
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