Month: August 2007

My mail today included a response from Sen. Wyden to a letter of mine about habeas corpus.

At least he writes back. Gordon Smith hasn’t responded in over three years.

Lots of words spilled about the Wyden town hall yesterday at Blue Oregon, where the editors have taken to calling dissenters a “lynchmob”, saying that their arguments are “crap”, and accusing them of “shrieking” and “screaming”.

Can you hear the shrillness, Kenneth?

What’s funny, given that commenters at BO are apparently unhappy about my picking on poor, poor Sen. Ron Wyden for saying he trusts the Bush administration (what else could he do?) is that whether he trusted them wasn’t even the question I went to ask.

What I was going to ask him was what — when a majority of the Democratic senators on the intelligence committee (including Wyden) and a majority of the senators on the armed services committee voted against the Iraq AUMF — could possibly have possessed 29 Democratic senators (including four of the current presidential candidates) to give authority to Bush to invade Iraq? I figured that after four years he must have talked to some of them. As a member of the intelligence committee he saw the best info that anyone in Congress could have seen, did he have any idea what (apparently false) evidence the other senators saw that could have caused them to make such a grave mistake?

But I didn’t get enough time to ask that. Maybe he wouldn’t have liked that question either.

One of my comments from the “screaming” post:

Over on the other thread, one of the posters mentioned Sen. Barry Goldwater and the Nixon impeachment. He (or she) had the timeline wrong, but here’s a snippet of an interview with Goldwater from TIME magazine in May 1973 (my emphasis):

Should President Nixon resign? If the President of the United States lied to the American people, then the question is: Can you trust him? Impeachment would come up. And this country is in too much trouble internationally to have such a gigantic demonstration of distrust in its leaders. I’m convinced he knew nothing at the inception [of the Watergate affair]. But the coverup?

If it can be proved that he lied, resignation would have to be considered.

It would be quick. Everything would be over, ended. It wouldn’t drag out like impeachment.

That was a member of the president’s own party, a year after the Watergate break-in, and a year before the impeachment hearings began in the House Judiciary committee.

“Can you trust him?” That was essentially my question to Sen. Wyden. Barry Goldwater could bring that up after what was in comparison a pretty small operation at the time (most of the abuse of power charges in the Nixon impeachment articles were uncovered after this interview). If the door to impeachment in the Senate is locked — even by people who vote the right way like Ron Wyden — there’s no impetus for the House to pursue it. Someone has to kick open the door by actively discussing the possibility that it could happen, if they’re actually open to the idea.

If they’re not, good luck to “getting us out of Iraq, fixing energy policy, fixing the health care system and correcting schools” while Bush and Cheney are in office. That just seems like a political fantasy to me.

I didn’t include this in yesterday’s post, but as I turned to leave, Wyden said that he was going to be working in September to beat back the FISA bill. I replied that Bush has already stated that he was going to push for further authority than he’d gotten last month. A bright-eyed young woman defended Wyden and told me that of course that’s what Bush would do. But that’s sort of my point. That is what Bush would do. You can expect the administration to cross the line at every opportunity. Trust and verify is fine when the subject has earned your trust. But the Bush administration has shown time and again that it is not trustworthy. At the very least it needs to be constrained.

Just got back from the two-hour exercise in futility that was Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) Portland Town Hall on Iraq at the near-capacity (about 400) Hoffman Hall at Portland State.

Lots of people wanting to ask questions. Lots of condescencion from Wyden about how the Senate doesn’t initiate impeachment and that he has to remain impartial as a potential juror just in case impeachment ever does happen which he thinks it shouldn’t because it would take up all the time the Senate needs to do important things like end the war, provide health care to every American, and get a Democrat into the White House (and apparently pass last week’s FISA extension). It was a rowdy crowd, and while Wyden got kudos from a number of people for his votes against the Iraq AUMF and war funding, he was jeered a number of times for statements on impeachment.

I had the misfortune of accidentally sitting in the middle of a bunch of 9/11 conspiracy theorists who were pretty vocal (although I have to admit I joined the general mob on a couple of points) so I may have been more in the thick of things than most.

A number of people pressed Wyden on the Israel/Palestine issue, since the Iraq Study Group made that a central point in the plan they put forth many moons ago. Wyden kept coming back to the amazing offer Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat in 2000, which seemed to rile a number of people — including the 9/11 contheos. Perhaps Wyden doesn’t realize that there’s some dispute about how wonderful the offer was.

My number to ask questions was 75, and as the second hour wound to a close and they started cutting things off, I think they were only up to the low 30s. There were a number of good questions and statements from people — mostly mothers — with children or more in service in Iraq. A lot of people wanting to know when the Democrats were going to end the war.

At one point, when answering an impeachment question, Wyden talked about how long and drawn-out the Senate trial would be. He made it seem as if there would be trucks full of evidence parking in the chamber. I thought I knew a piece of info and double-checked it on my Treo so that I could incorporate it into my question but one of the other folks who’d been sitting a couple of rows in front of me got there first and asked him if he knew how long the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton had lasted. I couldn’t hear if he actually said anything, but people in the audience started shouting it out: “One month” (January 7, 1999 to February 12, 1999).

So I didn’t get to ask him any of the questions I had bubbling in my head in front of the audience. I walked up to the front of the auditorium as he was shaking hands and let the old ladies and the people who knew him press the flesh first, because I’m nothing if not polite. Just before it looked like he was about to take off, I gave him one of my cards and introduced myself, then asked him the question I’d settled on.

“Senator, do you really trust these guys?”

He grinned at me and said “I believe in the Reagan Rule: Trust but verify.” Then he went on to explain how he was my guy in Washington to provide verification, but I have to admit I was a little stunned, well, no, really stunned, because after the past seven years of lies, evasions, and degradation this country has been subjected to by the Bush administration, I just wanted to say “Are you fucking kidding, Senator?”

I’m nothing if not polite. I didn’t say that. But I have to believe that anyone who thinks that they can start from a position of trust with the Bush administration at this point is incredibly naive.

Everybody’s talking about health care like it hasn’t been a problem for a long time. It was a major theme in the AFL-CIO Democratic presidential forum the other night, Michael Moore’s SiCKO got the backs of the insurance companies up earlier this summer, but really, problems with the health care system have plagued the US for decades, world’s richest country or not.

For evidence, I present The Hospital. The 1971 film starred George C. Scott (just a year after his Oscar-winning turn in Patton) and Diana Rigg, who’d been steaming the screens of TVs across the land in the imported episodes of The Avengers (and who makes a gut-splitting appearance in the second season of Ricky Gervais’s Extras, which watched the night after seeing The Hospital).

Network was still five years off in the future, but Paddy Chayevsky won an Oscar (and a BAFTA and a Golden Globe and a Writers Guild Award) for Original Screenplay (Scott got a nomination for another Dest Actor Oscar).

The story veers between comic and grim, with the inner city hospital Scott’s character is the medical director for in the process of expanding by tearing down adjacent tenement apartments where people are still living. Doctors and staff suddenly begin mysteriously dying. And an air of neglect and indifference hangs everywhere like curtains of gauze. With blood on them.

The situations, though, aren’t over the top like you tend to find in weekly TV medical shows. Chayevsky himself narrates the opening scene, in which a patient with chest pains arrives at the hospital having been diagnosed by his nursing home doctor with angina. At the hospital, the patient is treated for angina (instead of emphysema) and rapidly declines, only to be treated for severe heart problems and then die within the first two minutes of the film. A death in the emergency room is only discovered when the persistent and thorough billing clerk checks in on a patient/body lying in one of the waiting areas.

Those types of incidents are the foundations of the story, and lead up to one of Scott’s great monologues:

What the hell is wrong with being impotent? You kids are more hung up on sex than the Victorians.

I got a son, 23 years old. I threw him out of the house last year. Pietistic little humbug. He preached universal love, and he despised everyone. Had a blanket contempt for the middle class, even its decencies. Detested my mother because she had a petit bourgeois pride in her son, the doctor. I cannot tell you how brutishly he ignored that rather good lady. When she died, he didn’t even come to the funeral. He felt the chapel service was an hypocrisy. He told me his generation didn’t live with lies. I said, “Listen, everybody lives with lies.” I grabbed him by his poncho and I dragged him the length of our seven-room, despicably affluent, middle-class apartment, and I flung him…out. Haven’t seen him since.

You know what he said to me? He’s standing there on the landing, and on the verge of tears. He shrieked: “You old fink. You can’t even get it up anymore.”

That was it, you see. That was his real revolution. It wasn’t racism, the oppressed poor, or the war in Vietnam. No, the ultimate American societal sickness was a limp dingus.

My God. If there is a despised, misunderstood minority in this country, it is us poor, impotent bastards. I’m impotent, and I’m proud of it. Impotence is beautiful, baby!

Power to the impotent! Right on, baby!

You know, when I say impotent, I don’t mean merely limp. Disagreeable as it may be for a woman, a man may lust for other things. Something a little less transient than an erection. A sense of permanent worth. That’s what medicine was to me, my reason for being.

You know, Miss Drummond, when I was 34 I presented a paper before the annual convention of the Society of Clinical Investigation that pioneered the whole goddamn field of immunology. A breakthrough. I’m in all the textbooks.

I happen to be an eminent man, Miss Drummond. You know something else? I don’t give a goddamn. When I say impotent, I mean I’ve lost even my desire to work. That’s a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex.

I’ve lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved.

Well. It is all rubbish, isn’t it? Transplants. Antibodies. We manufacture genes. We can produce birth ectogenetically. We can practically clone people like carrots. And half the kids in this ghetto haven’t even been inoculated for polio!

We have established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever!

We cure nothing!

We heal nothing!

The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes.

That’s what I mean when I say impotent.

In discussions with people about why they think Dennis Kucinich is such a freak, one of the items that comes up is his “absurd” plan to develop a Cabinet-level position devoted to promoting peace. Goofy, eh?

Then, yesterday evening, I heard that the Portland City Council had considered a resolution supporting a current House bill to create the Department of Peace. The resolution passed unanimously.

PORTLAND CITY COUNCIL AGENDA

…

953 TIME CERTAIN: 9:30 AM – Declare support for a United States Department of Peace (Resolution introduced by Commissioner Saltzman)

From the PDF of the resolution:

WHEREAS, House Bill 808 proposing to create a United States Department of Peace and Nonviolence is currently pending before the United States House of Representatives; and

WHEREAS, the House Bill 808 proposed Department of Peace and Nonviolence will be a cabinet-level department in the executive branch of the U.S. Government dedicated to peacemaking and the study of conditions that are conducive to both domestic and international peace, and headed by a Secretary of Peace, an advisor to the President on issues that are both domestic and international in scope; and

…

WHEREAS, the proposed Department of Peace and Nonviolence will establish a National Peace Day urging all citizens to observe and celebrate peace and endeavor to create peace on such day; and

WHEREAS, twenty-three cities have passed measures endorsing the proposed Department of Peace and Nonviolence; and

That sounds like it’s an absurd idea for sure. 67 co-sponsors as of today, including Oregon’s David Wu and Peter DeFazio.

Because nobody who ever says something like this will win the nomination:

It is time that the United States begin the process of withdrawing our troops, and allow a UN peacekeeping force to take over the reconstruction of Iraq.

Because nobody who ever says this will win the nomination:

This Administration has no exit strategy for removing US troops from harm’s way. It is now clear, that in their rush to war the Administration failed to adequately prepare for the post-invasion period.

Because nobody who said something like this on 25 July 2003 — more than four years, 3,000 US fatalities, unknown Iraqi casualties, and hundreds of billions of dollars ago — will win the nomination:

The United Nations must be brought in. Negotiations for an exit must begin now. An exit agreement with the United Nations must involve the US letting go of the contracting process.

The UN must also take over management, accounting and distribution to the Iraqi people of Iraq’s oil profits. Additionally, a transition from UN control to self-determined governing structure by and for the Iraqi people must be planned. Finally the Administration, which unwisely ordered the bombing, must fund the reconstruction.

We must act now to remove US troops from harm’s way. While some are calling to send more troops into harm’s way, I believe this is wrong. It is time to get the US out and the UN in.

My analysis of the way in which the AP and New York Times reported preliminary fatality figures for July 2007 as some sort of indicator of a change in the situation on the ground in Iraq was featured in a post by Middle East expert Juan Cole yesterday.

I can’t think of any particular significance to the figure aside from its sheer size, but 5 August 2007 is the 1,600th day since the invasion of Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein from turning over WMDs that didn’t exist to al-Qaeda terrorists he had no operational contact with.

The address of the White House is “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”.

1,600 kHz is the top end of the commercial AM radio bandwidth.

In the year 1600, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed and the future King Charles I of England was born.