Discontented Soul

An Empty Exercise in Deceit
by John Nichols
Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by The Nation

President Bush has not lost his flair for irony.
Just as the President hit the point in his second inaugural address where he declared to the dissidents of the world that "when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you," authorities were removing peaceful protesters from the regal one's line of sight.
It was a similar juxtaposition of lofty rhetoric and less-than-lofty deeds that made the first term of the Bush presidency so unsettling to thinking people in the United States and abroad. And nothing in Thursday's inaugural ceremony suggested that the second term would be any better. Even as American forces remained mired in the quagmire of Iraq into which they were led by the Bush Administration's deliberate misreading of intelligence information, the President offered no indication whatsoever that he had learned from the mistakes and misdeeds of his first term.
Bush's lack of self-reflection belied the occasionally humble notes struck during his twenty-minute address. And it called into question the speech's bold assertions:
"Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen," said Bush, who declared, "America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling." Sounds great. But should anyone read that as an abandonment of the doctrine of preemptive war that served as an excuse for the unilateral invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq during the President's first term? The President provided no such indication, and his record recommends the most extreme skepticism.
"We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny," Bush said as he specifically addressed dissidents around the world, urging them to resist oppression and issuing that ringing promise that, "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." Does this mean that when challenges are mounted to the oppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or elsewhere, the United States will take the side of the rebels? Can we expect the United States to impose trade sanctions on China because of that country's brutal occupation of Tibet, its jailing of dissidents and its smashing of movements for trade unionism, religious freedom and democracy? If the leaders of Russia continue to dismantle that country's freedoms, will that put them on the wrong side of the United States? The sad truth is that Bush's Republican allies continue to ridicule former President Jimmy Carter for attempting to use economic sanctions and other diplomatic tools to oppose tyranny.
"America's influence is considerable, and we will use it competently in freedom's cause," the President announced. That's a reasonable sentiment. But should anyone take this as an acknowledgment that poor planning, self-delusion and isolation from the world made the Iraq occupation the mess that it is? Or that the United States will now set a different course? Read Sy Hersh's latest report in The New Yorker on maneuvering within the Administration to launch a guaranteed-to-be-disastrous war with Iran and you will have a hard time believing that competence and common sense have won out.
Speaking of what he called the "essential work at home," the President said he was determined to "make our society more just and equal." But how does he reconcile that pledge with the growing gap between rich and poor, assaults on affirmative action programs that allow victims of past discrimination to get an equal footing in society, and scheming to dismantle the safety-net protections of Social Security, Medicare and other programs?
The President affirmed his faith in "the durable wisdom of the Constitution." That's a fine choice of words. But does that mean that a second Bush Administration will begin dismantling the Patriot Act and other policies that undermine constitutional protections? Does that mean that he will refuse to nominate anyone to the federal bench who does not respect the Constitution's well-defined right of privacy--particularly as it relates to a woman's right to choose?
It would be appealing to take George W. Bush at his word. But, considering his track record, that is not an option. In fact, if history is a guide, the one guarantee we have is that Bush's words will not match his deeds. And his inaugural address will be remembered as nothing more than an empty exercise in deceit.
John Nichols is author of the book Cheney, Dick: The Man Who Is President.

The Empire of Vulgarity
by Mike Carlton
Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804.
The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.
Difficult to know what was more repellent: the estimated $US40 million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by Republican fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer crassness of its excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own Iraq war...

[A respected elder talkshow host here in Australia coined a slogan - Keep the Dream Alive - which simultaneously means nothing and everything. It can appeal to the Nazi whose "Dream" is racial purity as much as to the Communist, with his/her "Dream" of a classless society]

Choose Whose Words You Use

Get a hold of yourself and frame your own debate
by Mira Ptacin
Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

...what [Conservative politicians had] brilliantly done was mastered the art form of framing the debate.
Lines of Reasoning
If you hope to dominate an argument, (or manipulate an audience), learning how to use this tool can skyrocket you to the moon. Allow me to blow your mind: The technique of 'framing' is a kind of communication tool that creates the structure for a message that will be the topic of the debate. To frame a debate, you pick the subject matter and you pick the words you use to communicate. Then, you manipulate the words you're using for your own benefit. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science and a master of the framing domain, gives the example of the republican's argument for 'tax relief'. For there to be 'relief', Lakoff states, there must be an affliction, an afflicted party harmed by the affliction, and a reliever who takes the affliction away and is therefore a hero. 'If anybody tries to stop the 'reliever' he's a villain wanting the suffering to go on. Add 'tax' to the mix and you have a metaphorical frame: Taxation as an affliction, the taxpayer as the afflicted party, the president as the hero, and the Democrats as the villains.' The tax relief frame is an instance of a rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief).
Wordplay
This kind of propaganda has been around for quite some time and it's part of the reason republicans are dominating the political platform. In 1971, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published the book 'Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.' In this slim pamphlet, Noam Chomsky took a critical look at American propaganda efforts and the effects of their empty slogans. 'Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state,' Chomsky said, 'and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States.'
For instance, look at the vacuous phrases that have been thrown into common vernacular in the past several years: War on Terror, America Under Attack, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Axis of Evil, liberating the Iraqis, spreading freedom, WMDs, collateral damage, liberty, patriotism, insurgents, etc. The republicans have worked very effectively by mobilizing American opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like Americanism. That's the whole point of framing the debate. Who doesn't want freedom? Or, as Chomsky sites, 'Support our troops.' Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against yellow ribbons?! The debate framers have created a slogan that nobody's going to be against and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. 'It's a crucial value that diverts your attention from a question that does mean something. So if you have people arguing about support for the troops, you've won.' These bland slogans make sure the republicans don't have wacky liberals around to disrupt promotion of things like freedom and relief with their talk about recounts and the environment. But this is important to us---as consumers, as parents, as teachers, as neighbors, as citizens---because our government and the corporations that run it are manipulating and dominating us with these popular empty slogans.
Put Down Your Ping Pong Paddle
... My solution was putting down my weapon and moving on. As Lakoff says, 'As soon as they set the topic ... you're dead.' Like the Democrats [and the Australian Labor Party] proved this year, by accepting the words and frames of your opponent you're only complementing their argument. Lakoff is right - we need to put down our ping pong paddles and start developing our own vocabulary. It's a collective action and it's going to take people working together to stand up, but reframing is essential. Next time you turn on your television, pay attention to the buzz words that Fox or MSNBC are spouting at you. They're scary, they're sexy, they're exciting, but they're empty. Don't use them ever again. Social Security? How about 'Unsocial Security'? Spreading freedom? Try changing it to 'Spreading capitalism.' Unless the frame of the debate is changed, progressives have little chance of turning over the political fortunes of the United States of America.
Mira Ptacin is assistant editor at CommonDreams.org.

Queer Eye for the Straight Cartoon Guy
by Jill Rachel Jacobs
Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

The world is in turmoil. War, terrorism and the recent tsunami that knocked the world off its axis have not only permeated the news, but left many of us in a state of perpetual devastation. And of course, let’s not forget Jen and Brad. Indeed, these are tough times.
That’s why the timing of the latest gay hysteria alert from the religious right is all the more confusing. This time they’re going after Spongebob Squarepants. And this time they’ve gone too far...

Was Election 2004 Our Last Chance to Hold Bush in Check?
by Byron Williams
Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by Working For Change

Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I'm grateful. - President George Bush, January 16, 2005 Washington Post interview
I was shocked to learn that the 2004 election was the American people's single, solitary moment to hold the current administration accountable for its actions. As the president begins his second term, know that you blew your one and only chance at holding him accountable.
With the passing of the accountability moment there can be no more comments from the peanut gallery. If there are families and friends of our soldiers who have some growing doubt about our mission in Iraq, tough!
In a very linear, and I do mean linear, sense the president is correct. Accountability is, indeed, what elections involving incumbents is about. By the margin of roughly 119,000 individuals in Ohio, the American people believed that the president's record warranted an additional four years...

Oh, Sandy, why do you treat us all like frightened children who need Daddy’s reassurance? When Uncle George tells us to expect the advent of “a time of fire” when the US will spread “freedom” to all the world by force if necessary, why do you pat us on the head and tell us to go back to sleep, ‘cos Uncle George doesn’t really mean what he says?
He does, you know! This crackpot is the most dangerous “leader” the world has yet seen, John Calvin with a neutron bomb, a man who thinks he has a hotline to god, and who would turn the planet into a cinder if he believed that Jee-zus had commanded him to do so.
No wonder Uncle George has appointed the Grinning Death’s Head [Condoleezza Rice] as Secretary of State. What better face for the funny brown people of the Middle East to see as they face the Apocalypse!

Torture Scandal Began Far Above 'Rotten Apples.'
by Scott Horton
Published on Thursday, January 20, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times

"This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed … were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."
Most people who hear this quote today assume it was uttered by a senior officer of the Bush administration. Instead, it comes from one of history's greatest mass murderers, Rudolf Hoess, the SS commandant at Auschwitz. Such a confusion demonstrates the depth of the United States' moral dilemma in its treatment of detainees in the war on terror...

Let's Bring Tea
by Thom Hartmann

Published on Thursday, January 20, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

...Every generation, it is often said, must relearn the lessons of history. This generation is getting a crash course.
Shall we have a government of, by, and for We, the People? Or shall we be governed by a powerful elite made up of the super-rich, multi-national corporations, and well-paid shills who do their bidding?
It seems that the shift from FDR's vision of We the People to Reagan's vision of corporate governance has only happened in the past thirty years - when Reagan, in his first inaugural address, declared war on We the People by saying, Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
But it's really a battle that's gone back to 1762, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote The Social Contract, and directly challenged - for the first time in nearly two thousand years - the idea that people must be governed by a powerful father-figure King, Pope, or Feudal Lord...

What Is Wrong with Torture
by Jonathan Schell

Published on Thursday, January 20, 2005 by TomDispatch.com

...More striking were the arguments against torture by those skeptical of the nomination [of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney-General]. Two dominated. One was that torture hurts the image of the United States in the world. In the words of Senator Lindsey Graham, "I can tell you that it is a club that our enemies use, and we need to take that club out of their hand." Or in the words of Senator Herb Kohl, "winning the hearts and minds of the Arab world is vital to our success in the war on terror," and "Photographs that have come out of Abu Ghraib have undoubtedly hurt those efforts." The second argument was that enemy forces would torture U.S. forces in retaliation. In Biden's words, "This is about the safety and security of American forces." Even Gonzales, who declined at every opportunity to repudiate the policies that had led to the torture, was ready to agree that Abu Ghraib had harmed the image of the United States.
But are these the fundamental reasons that torture is unacceptable? Can this nation now understand pain only if it is experienced by Americans or, through some chain of consequences, it rebounds upon the United States? Have all the people in the world but Americans become invisible to Americans?
Torture is not wrong because someone else thinks it is wrong or because others, in retaliation for torture by Americans, may torture Americans. It is the torture that is wrong. Torture is wrong because it inflicts unspeakable pain upon the body of a fellow human being who is entirely at our mercy. The tortured person is bound and helpless. The torturer stands over him with his instruments. There is no question of "unilateral disarmament," because the victim bears no arms, lacking even the use of the two arms he was born with. The inequality is total. To abuse or kill a person in such a circumstance is as radical a denial of common humanity as is possible. It is repugnant to learn that one's country's military forces are engaging in torture. It is worse to learn that the torture is widespread. It is worse still to learn that the torture was rationalized and sanctioned in long memorandums written by people at the highest level of the government. But worst of all would be ratification of this record by a vote to confirm one of its chief authors to the highest legal office in the executive branch of the government.
Torture destroys the soul of the torturer even as it destroys the body of his victim. The boundary between humane treatment of prisoners and torture is perhaps the clearest boundary in existence between civilization and barbarism. Whether the elected representatives of the people of the United States are now ready to cross that line is the deepest question before the Senate as it votes on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales.

So, the “Coalition of the Killing, er, Shilling, er, Willing” has brought freedom and hope to the people of Iraq. What do you mean — the freedom to talk like a born-again hayseed president, and the hope of having a McDonalds in every village?
Seriously though, it would be nice if the children had the freedom to play with the fear of crewcut-headed Marines jabbering at them in the accents of Dumpville, Alabama and shooting at them if they don’t obey, and if each village had the hope of possessing a water/sewerage system at least equal to ACTEW’s [ACTEW is this city-state's utilities corporation, which like the curate's egg, is "good in parts"].
“Yankee Go Home” is a damn good slogan. If I had my way you’d all be on the first plane out of Oz too, with your sycophantic sympathizers on the next!

Inaugural Fear in a Year of War
by Pierre Tristam

Published on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

...President Bush, our neo-New Dealer, is reaping too much unfair criticism for the way he's going about his second inaugural. He spent the entire electoral season describing a country at war, describing himself as a "war president," comparing the war on terror to World War II, and wearing designer-fatigues in front of troops perfectly trained to die for his messianic fancies. Yet here he is, about to preside over the most lavish inaugural celebration in history (not counting a few imperial coronations of the Roman and Napoleonic sort)...

Justice for Abu Ghraib? U.S. on Trial
by Reed Brody
Published on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 by the International Herald Tribune

The conviction of Specialist Charles Graner for atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is a first step toward accountability for the detainee abuse scandal, but it must not be the end of the process...

A Televisual Fairyland

by George Monbiot

Published on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 by the Guardian/UK

...The role of the media corporations in the [capitalist west] is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won't be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalize the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not.
So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the [Government], and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become [leader] must first learn to live in fairyland.

Anti-War Words Ring True Today
by Kevin Danaher and Tony Newman

... In this time of great national decision-making we can truly honor the memory of this great American by pondering his profound words regarding war and U.S. foreign policy...

Our Velvet Revolution
by Doris 'Granny D' Haddock

Published on Published on Monday, January 17, 2005 by CommonDreams.org

...we have it made. Yes, it is a problem that we ... use a third of the world's resources, and that global pollution and the balance of our trade are all completely unsustainable, and that we can only get the cheap resources we desire by destroying democracies around the world and installing dictators to whom we can dictate; and all this sowing of bitterness is a harvest of terrorism now and to come, but we can at least live for today in our freedom and our happiness. We, empire's debutantes, need not look out our plantation house window to the slave quarters in the distance, when the same window will give us our beautiful reflection. But the small, everyday injustices of a population must flow somewhere; indeed, they gather into great rivers that flow through capitols and pentagons, where the selfish energies combine and become the bombs and machine-gun roar and rattle of our bloody agents in the world. Our vote every four years is a weak ceremony of little importance compared to how we live our personal lives, which empowers either good or evil in the world.
But as for our freedom, what do we have left of it? No man or woman is free whose life is built upon the suffering of others. Slavery enslaves the master more than the slave, for the master is enslaved in mind as well as body. And so we take off our shoes at the airport and are too dumbed-down to think why, and we send our children to factory schools that are the abattoirs of their tender imaginations and grand potentials, and we are too hypnotized to think much of it. We bow our heads to our bosses, without the clear minds to mourn for our human dignity, for we dare not miss a paycheck or else the credit card and mortgage bales on our backs will come crushing down on us, and that is all that matters, we have been programmed to believe‚ not think.
Our lives have been stolen; we have no place to go, no meaningful choices--only meaningless, consumer choices. Decide to live the life of a poet, or a farmer, or a vagabond, or a philosopher, and count the cost of that. Can you afford it--can you afford freedom? Are you free to make big changes in your life, or do you have too many obligations to others? Financial entanglements have come to define human relationships, so that the elite may prosper.
Was it not ever so? Did not the frontier farmers and the townspeople feel the constraints of their position, their obligations to family, church, community? They did so. I remember this life. It was imperfect, but it was different than today: people chose their oppressions and built lives. They were pawns in their own schemes and social hierarchies, and the fodder for the wars of the elites, but there was a sense of freedom that is missing now. Today's oppressions have organized in some inhuman way that serves against our interests and against the interests of society itself more permanently and aggressively. It is evidenced in so many new ways, from unnecessary wars built upon great lies, to election frauds and the dismantling of social programs by the device of other great lies, and the creation of permanent war so that power over us may be extended forever in ways small and grave: our shoes are to come off at the airport, our children are to be shot and blown up, and our debt is to be the great burden that keeps the bales upon our backs and all of us in our places. There is, in other words, a permanently vicious aspect to life today that was only an occasional visitor to us before‚ when the wars came, when the union contract expired. The boot of greedy oppression is now always at our necks, it seems. And, like medical companies who own Congress or oil companies who own White Houses, it seem to have become the nature of the beast‚ widely understood and generally, if grudgingly, accepted.
But the pursuit of happiness?...