The Weekly Screed

Shilling for Frank Rich

I want a job like the job Frank Rich has got.  Rich no doubt makes a very fine living writing a column for the New York Times once a week.  While most of the columnists for the Times toil to contribute about 800 words twice a week, Rich writes a longer column than the others, so I guess he only has to do one a week.  But the few hundred extra words seem to give Frank Rich the room he needs to paint some very clear pictures.

Frank Rich lives at the intersection of politics and culture.  His job amounts to monitoring the news, and then commenting on how the various media report the news.  And somehow, he manages to put it all together, and find the shreds of the truth that are drowned but by the static.  His columns have a very high "signal to noise ratio."  That's why sitting down and reading Frank Rich is one of the highlights of my Sundays. 

So I'm just going to pass on a link to Frank Rich's column from this past Sunday's Times, where he weighs in on Cindy Sheehan, Bush's vacation, Pat Robertson (just Who Would Jesus Assassinate?) and the simmering cesspool we've made out of Iraq.

What I found most compelling about this particular column -- and the reason I feel compelled to pass it on -- is that Rich has the temerity to say what a lot of people in my circle are loathe to admit:

"It isn't just Mr. Bush who is in a tight corner now. Ms. Sheehan's protest was the catalyst for a new national argument about the war that managed to expose both the intellectual bankruptcy of its remaining supporters on the right and the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place."

Yes folks, the Democrats have just as much culpability for this mess as Bush and the neo-cons who pull his strings:

"If there's a moment that could stand for the Democrats' irrelevance it came on July 14, the day Americans woke up to learn of the suicide bomber in Baghdad who killed as many as 27 people, nearly all of them children gathered around American troops. In Washington that day, the presumptive presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held a press conference vowing to protect American children from the fantasy violence of video games."

Here is the link to Rich's August 28 column: 

Op-Ed Columnist:  The Vietnamization of Bush's Vacation

So read that and see if it doesn't make you start to think -- as I've been saying all along (haven't I?): that with a (very) few exceptions, the Democrats are just as responsible for this war as W and his neo-con-cronies.  Both parties in Congress bought into it, hook line and sinker.  Not a one of 'em had the presence of mind to see they wuz bein' snookered, or to scratch beneath the surface of the WMD "intelligence" to see that the fix was in.  Least of all the guy we wound up running against the prime perpetrator in last year's election. 

Me... I'm starting to lose patience with this whole political duopoly, which looks more and more every day like the the two sides of the plutocracy.  What's so sacred about the "two-party" system, when both parties are in fact the opposite sides of the same coin? 

What'd that Jefferson guy say about "When in the course of human events..." ??

Anyway, that's my opinion, and it should be yours, too.

--PS

Before It's Too Late in Iraq

I always liked Wes Clark, I thought his military experience would give him the credibility to send Bush back to Crawford in the 2004 election. Instead we wound up with the very vulnerable John Kerry ("I voted for the war before I voted against it") as the Democratic nominee.

Here, General Clark chimes in on the bubbling quagmire President "Mission Accomplished" has gotten us into, and articulates a comprehensive approach to making it all better.

It's hard to argue with his initial premise:

"More than half the American people now believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They're right. But it would also be a mistake to pull out now, or to start pulling out or to set a date certain for pulling out. Instead we need a strategy to create a stable, democratizing and peaceful state in Iraq -- a strategy the administration has failed to develop and articulate."

That's pretty much how I feel about the whole situation: starting the war was a mistake of epic proportions, but we just can't turn our backs on the fuck-up now. But it is going to take more than simplistic rhetoric delivered before hand-picked audiences to fix the mess.

And it is for sure going to take more thought than W's current line, which simply stated now amounts to "the killing and death must continue in order to justify the killing and death we and the Iraqi people have endured so far."

President Bush, let me introduce you to General Clark:

Link: Before It's Too Late in Iraq.

Something's In The Air...

... But It's Not On The Airwaves.

That's the title of an "underground" music video by spoken word artist Chris Chandler that I think you all might find entertaining. 

Chris was a client of sorts back in the 90s, when Songs.com handled online marketing for Silverwolf Records, the company that released Chris's first CD, "Generica."   

Chris Chandler is hardly your typical singer-songwriter.  He might be the first to tell you, he can't really sing, and his pieces are not really "songs" though they are frequently put to music.  And I'm not sure, but I think he's finally given up trying to play guitar. 

But whatever you call his art, Chris Chandler's commenatries on American politics and culture are among the most biting, incisive, and original work I've ever encountered.  Among my favorite Chris Chandler "lyrics" is this excerpt from a track on 'Generica' called "Elvis," in which I think he rather succinctly sums up the late 20th/early 21st century American ethos:

"You see, we... are like Elvis. In the seventies. Puffy and bloated, wheezing our way through our set, heaving our way across the world stage, the fans still scream for more, failing to notice any decline. The world wants what we have, but America has left the building."

In his video, Chris comments on the difference between the current "anti-war" environment and the Vietnam-related movement of the 1960s... the title of the piece pretty much tells it all, but I don't want to spoil it for you.  So just aim your web browser to:

There's Something In the Air... But It's  Not On the Airwaves

...scroll down to "Windows Media" or "Quicktime," choose a player, click on the link, and launch the video. 

See if you don't agree with his premise...

Anyway, that's my opinion, and it should be yours, too...

--PS

E.L. Doctorow on "The Unfeeling President"

Novelist E.L. Doctorw (Ragtime) writes in the East Hampton Star:

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

Link to the rest of Doctorow's essay: East Hampton Star - In the News.

Maybe Racial Profiling Isn't Such A Bad Thing Afterall

It just depends on which profiles you're considering:

Link: The Famous ROPMA.NET Muzzie Terrorism Quiz.

Networking & The News from Crawford

Hello again,

One of my "correspondents" sent me an amusing little ditty about W in Crawford and I'm just passing it on below.

However, the real reason I'm showing up in your e-mail today is to ask: Do any of you subscribe to either Netflix or Yahoo Music? If so, I'd like to get you in my "friends" networks on those services.

For those of you not familiar with either service: Netflix is an Internet-based DVD rental service. For a flat monthly fee, you can watch all the DVDs you want. You go online and tell them what movies you want to watch, and the disks show up in your mailbox; when you're done, you put the disk back in the mail and a coupla/few days later, the next movie in your list arrives. Depending on the level of your service, you can keep three or eight (or more) DVDs at any one time and for as long as you want.

I think Yahoo Music is, the future of music distribution. For another flat monthly fee (the introductory price is presently $60/yr = roughly the cost of a whole four CDs), you get virtually unlimited access to a truly impressive library of music. In addition to whatever is in current release, I've been finding a gold mine of old rarities. For example, yesterday I found recordings by Tim Hardin that I haven't heard for years. I've been listening to all kinds of stuff that I would not otherwise have heard were I not subscribed to such a service. And there is a "to-go" function that lets me transfer tracks to a portable player so I can listen in my car, etc. (Unfortunately the file format is not compatible with my iPod, but that's a subject for a whole separate rant one of these days...).

Anyway, both of these services offer "networking" capabilities that allow friends to tell each other what they're watching and listening to, and I would like to expand my networks by including any of you who might subscribe.

In Netflix, there is "Friends" function. You invite people in to your "friends" network using their e-mail address, which in our case is "[email protected]" If you're a Netflix subscriber, either invite us into your network, or send me your e-mail address and I'll invite you into mine.

With Yahoo Music, you share stuff via the Yahoo Messenger, which I find I'm using a lot more these days than the old AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). On Yahoo, I'm "[email protected]" -- if any of you use that service, please add me to your buddy list; And, by all means, check out the Yahoo Music Service, it's absolutely the most economical way to access a vast library of music.

So please, let me know if you are using either of these services, and let's connect-and-share through them.

- - - - - - - - -

Now then, the news from Crawford, TX, from www.borowitzreport.com , with thanks to PJ Wright for passing it on: