Newt Gingrich is a public man with a public record. He lives in a glass house, but he revels in throwing stones. His most recent target has been Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. To ABC radios’ Robert Marcus Wilson, he said her recent press conference on the CIA’s use of torture was "the most despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort I've seen in my lifetime. … She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior." I am no fan of Speaker Pelosi, as I wrote in my blog October 9, 2008, but Newt Gingrich is in no position to throw stones at Nancy Pelosi. Despicable? Dishonest? Vicious? Gingrich, as aggressive, nasty, and hypocritical as Rush Limbaugh, lives in a glass house. A quick look at his record as a human being and as Speaker of the House reveals narrowness of mind, sexual hypocrisy, and unethical behavior.
Gingrich’s viciousness is clear to all in one of his more famous statementsd to Republican Party members: "I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but lousy in politics." He wants Republicans to be nasty, and he encourages his fellow party members to avoid neatness, obedience, loyalty, and faithfulness.
As for viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, Gingrich is a star Republican who virtually shut down the government in 1995. He is also the victim of his own compulsive logorrhea. As Speaker of the House of Representatives, he refused to submit a revised Federal budget allowing previously approved appropriations to expire on schedule, thus causing parts of the Federal government to shut down for lack of funds. He claimed the Republicans only wanted to slow the rate of increase in government spending. However, his motor mouth led him to reveal that his adamantine budget position was in part due to his being insulted by President Clinton, who made Gingrich sit in the rear of Air Force One on the return trip from Yizhak Rabin’s funeral in Israel. You can’t get any narrower than Newt Gingrich.
As for dishonesty, Gingrich should remember his own sins before casting the first stone at Nancy Pelosi. But he has a very short memory, or he must believe that no one else remembers the ethics investigations of his actions while Speaker of the House. Gingrich claimed tax-exempt status for a college course that he had run for obviously political purposes. During the investigation, he was forced to admit to providing inaccurate statements about the college course. He agreed to pay $300,000 for the cost of the investigation, despite denying the charges over misuse of tax-exempt funds. The House Ethics Committee concluded that inaccurate information supplied to investigators represented "intentional or ... reckless" disregard of House rules. For more about Gingrich’s dishonesty, begin your internet search with Wilkipedia.
Let us also remember the dishonor he brought on himself and his family when it was revealed that he was having an extramarital affair during the height of the congressional investigation of President Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Let us also remember that he has married three times, and that he told his first wife of his plans to divorce her as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from cancer. Let us also remember that the thrice-married Newt Gingrich (reminds me of Rudy Giuliani) has just joined that bedrock of family values and sanctity of marriage, the Roman Catholic Church.
Gingrich writes the same way he speaks. Aggressively, nastily, and often inaccurately. He wrote about Nancy Pelosi in the conservative newsletter, Human Events, "The person who is No. 2 in line to be commander in chief can't have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. America can't afford it." What makes the statement aggressive and nasty is the inaccuracy. Nancy Pelosi does not have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. She supported the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. To my chagrin, she even refused to allow an impeachment process to begin in the House of Representatives. Bush and Cheney, by their own words, admitted to having committed war crimes, and should have been impeached. But New Gingrich forgot Pelosi’s positions and shot his mouth off for the narrowest of political purposes. He loves the media spotlight.
And there he stands, center stage, and not just on Fox News or MSNBC. The ABC network loves the man; he is great for ratings. So, since we are stuck with this windbag, I suggest that the only thing we can to do is laugh at him. Laugh at him just as we do at clowns. Laugh at him just as we do self-important dottores and pantalones from the commedia dell’arte. Laugh at him, just as Mel Brooks, in The Producers, laughs at Adolf Hitler
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Noble, Noble Cruelty
The front page of The New York Times, May 14, 2009, shows a photograph of Explorer Scouts participating in a program that trains them to kill terrorists. Jennifer Steinhauer reported for the Times that the training could involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as facing down terrorists and taking out active shooters who bring gunfire and and death to college campuses. In a simulation raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout. "Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he’ll shut up." As A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy said in the article, "This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl. It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boys Scouts."
A knee in the back and taking out shooters on campus is the path to honor and bravery. Is it a path to a merit badge? In any case, violence is now noble, and its practitioners see themselves as self-sacrificing knights.
America is medieval. It is saturated with cruelty justified by paranoia and xenophobia. So saturated, in fact, that the United States government cannot face the truth that under the Bush administration, it committed crimes against humanity when it tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the aptly named "black sites" all over the world.
President Obama wants to close the book on the Bush administration, but many, myself included, want to keep it open on the page where George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condaleeza Rice are proven to be sadists in the worst tradition of Tomás Torquemada.
This late 15th-century Dominican friar, called by one contemporary, "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order," sought to protect Christianity by burning people at the stake, forcing confessions by torture, and hounding Jews and Muslims out of Spain.
Cheney, the American Torquemada, has been making the talk show circuit, hammering the heretics who still believe that torture is illegal, claiming that President Obama has made America safe for terrorists and trying to preempt any investigation of his national security activities while in office. He, along with George W. Bush, denied that the US was using torture to get intelligence from prisonders, then when the torture became public knowledge, they first said it was a matter of a few bad apples disobeying orders, then they started to justify it.
As they sought information to protect the Homeland (at least they didn’t call it the Fatherland), Bush and Cheney worked hard to be the saviors of their country. They tortured detainees to get information that they claimed would prevent another terrorist attack.
They would not tell us what information they had gained through waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, because doing so would reveal sensitive intelligence sources. Presumably that would lead to the deaths of spies loyal to us, the strengthening of terrorist cells, and finally more terrorist attacks. However, after seven years of Bush-Cheney intelligence gathering, Osama ben Laden still roams freely, and stories of American torture are used to recruit new suicide bombers for al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas.
Despite the blackout on the intelligence gathered from detainees, information about many suspected terrorists have been handed over to journalists. One example is Captain James Yee, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and Muslim Chaplin in the US Army. Yee was assigned to the Guantanamo Bay prison. In 2003, while going home on leave, he made headlines when he was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, because, according to government agents, he was carrying suspicious documents. He was then subjected to the same treatment as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: the agents shackled and blindfolded him and jammed soundproof earmuffs over his ears. He was taken to a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he spent 76 days in solitary confinement. Eventually he was charged with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. These are capital offenses.
Despite all the media hoopla and the posturing by the Bush administration and the military, no evidence against him was ever presented. In 2004 all the criminal charges were dropped, and Yee was released from custody. Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, Commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, cited national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence, and reportedly made his decision after consultation with government lawyers and intelligence officials.
Miller’s statement implied that the evidence against Yee, if presented in a court of law, would have shown him to be a dangerous spy. For our protection, the general released a person he believed to be a dangerous man back into our society.
Yee resigned from the military. His purported danger to our security was ignored by the US Army when it granted Yee an honorable discharge and awarded him a medal for "exceptional meritorious conduct."
Richard Cheney yammers on, as does Rush Limbaugh. Bush and Rumsfeld remain silent, as do the former Justice Department lawyers who worked hard to convince them that the wrongs they all committed were right. Despite the torture, the lies, the twisted logic, the romantic assertions of patriotism, Osama ben Laden is still at large.
Maybe they should turn over all anti-terrorist activities to the Boy Scouts.
A knee in the back and taking out shooters on campus is the path to honor and bravery. Is it a path to a merit badge? In any case, violence is now noble, and its practitioners see themselves as self-sacrificing knights.
America is medieval. It is saturated with cruelty justified by paranoia and xenophobia. So saturated, in fact, that the United States government cannot face the truth that under the Bush administration, it committed crimes against humanity when it tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the aptly named "black sites" all over the world.
President Obama wants to close the book on the Bush administration, but many, myself included, want to keep it open on the page where George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condaleeza Rice are proven to be sadists in the worst tradition of Tomás Torquemada.
This late 15th-century Dominican friar, called by one contemporary, "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order," sought to protect Christianity by burning people at the stake, forcing confessions by torture, and hounding Jews and Muslims out of Spain.
Cheney, the American Torquemada, has been making the talk show circuit, hammering the heretics who still believe that torture is illegal, claiming that President Obama has made America safe for terrorists and trying to preempt any investigation of his national security activities while in office. He, along with George W. Bush, denied that the US was using torture to get intelligence from prisonders, then when the torture became public knowledge, they first said it was a matter of a few bad apples disobeying orders, then they started to justify it.
As they sought information to protect the Homeland (at least they didn’t call it the Fatherland), Bush and Cheney worked hard to be the saviors of their country. They tortured detainees to get information that they claimed would prevent another terrorist attack.
They would not tell us what information they had gained through waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, because doing so would reveal sensitive intelligence sources. Presumably that would lead to the deaths of spies loyal to us, the strengthening of terrorist cells, and finally more terrorist attacks. However, after seven years of Bush-Cheney intelligence gathering, Osama ben Laden still roams freely, and stories of American torture are used to recruit new suicide bombers for al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas.
Despite the blackout on the intelligence gathered from detainees, information about many suspected terrorists have been handed over to journalists. One example is Captain James Yee, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and Muslim Chaplin in the US Army. Yee was assigned to the Guantanamo Bay prison. In 2003, while going home on leave, he made headlines when he was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, because, according to government agents, he was carrying suspicious documents. He was then subjected to the same treatment as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay: the agents shackled and blindfolded him and jammed soundproof earmuffs over his ears. He was taken to a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he spent 76 days in solitary confinement. Eventually he was charged with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. These are capital offenses.
Despite all the media hoopla and the posturing by the Bush administration and the military, no evidence against him was ever presented. In 2004 all the criminal charges were dropped, and Yee was released from custody. Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, Commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, cited national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence, and reportedly made his decision after consultation with government lawyers and intelligence officials.
Miller’s statement implied that the evidence against Yee, if presented in a court of law, would have shown him to be a dangerous spy. For our protection, the general released a person he believed to be a dangerous man back into our society.
Yee resigned from the military. His purported danger to our security was ignored by the US Army when it granted Yee an honorable discharge and awarded him a medal for "exceptional meritorious conduct."
Richard Cheney yammers on, as does Rush Limbaugh. Bush and Rumsfeld remain silent, as do the former Justice Department lawyers who worked hard to convince them that the wrongs they all committed were right. Despite the torture, the lies, the twisted logic, the romantic assertions of patriotism, Osama ben Laden is still at large.
Maybe they should turn over all anti-terrorist activities to the Boy Scouts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)