Caustically Optimistic

barbaric

I was spinning the phrase “we hold these truths to be self-evident” around in my head. I am convinced that most people hold something to be ‘true’ would also hold that truth to be self-evident. Separating ‘truth’ from ‘opinion’ and holding that most ‘truths’ are rather simple and opinions complex. This spinning came to a crashing halt when I considered the incredibly recent execution of Saddam Hussein.

I disagree with the death penalty and I would not have sought vengeance on Mr. Hussein through killing him. I can see that objectively under the legal system he was tried under – certainly not the one he allegedly committed the crimes under – that the crimes he committed warrant capital punishment. The personality of Mr. Hussein aside, I think executing him is a bad idea.

Keep in mind the same people who told us he committed these crimes also told us he had weapons of mass destruction and wrote terrible romance novels. I am not Republican bashing, or Bush bashing, leaders in both parties pushed this war and every government on Earth confirmed the ‘intelligence’ that justified this war. Considering their research skills and intelligence gathering capabilities I would be loathe to kill another human being based on their judgment.

I am alarmed that we were not better consumers of information, that we trusted political leaders and the media to the extent that we sent thousands to their deaths based on bad information. Conversely, I will not accept chiding from European friends whose media reported that the war was a bad a idea based on the intelligence – for all the faults of our own media, ours is independent of the government and that those governments and leaders had been bribed by Hussein or his government leaves them in question as well. I am basing that on a United Nation’s report, which could very well be the worse source of information on Earth.

What bothered me even more was the idea that we should have watched him killed on television. If I were to grant that he should have been killed based on fair laws and a fair trial – which I think a political leader of his stature would be unable to have, we could rustle up a jury and jurists enough to convince you that Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter were bad people and the same amount that would canonize them as saints (what we hold true depends on our point of view), I would still hold true to the idea that executing him would be wrong and watching it on television would be barbaric.

I often make the joke that whenever someone in the western media says something that offends the Islamic world – a place amazingly in touch with their sensitive side – that they need to dispute the label of ‘violent’ by rioting, lighting things on fire, tearing down statues of Ronald Mc Donald and Colonel Sanders, and killing Westerners in their country working for humanitarian organizations. I would not be without irony that we would combat the label of barbaric, imperialist crusaders not by stringing up the deposed leader but by showing this on television.

After balking at the idea of showing someone beheaded on Internet videos and it being shown on some news channels, why would we then put a hanging on television? I made the comment that they should put it on Pay-Per-View to subsidize the war. When another friend said they should let people spit on the body I submitted that we should charge people for doing that too. I am under the impression that you paid to go to the Coliseum in Rome, why not then in the District of Columbia?

This is, of course, colored by my aversion to the death penalty and blanket trust of the government – it is after all, made up of and chosen by people like you and me and I don’t trust you or I either.

The greater danger in my mind, however, is that we would make Saddam an even bigger symbol and perhaps even a martyr. He could be more dangerous dead than alive. If he were stashed away somewhere for the rest of his life he would gradually, over time, lose significance and influence over the hearts and minds of people but now he runs the risk of becoming a backwards Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, or anyone else unjustly killed who became a symbol for their causes that would rouse moderates to action who would have otherwise stayed put. Sometimes killing people makes them incredibly powerful and I am adverse to the idea of killing anyone else but certainly anyone who could gain from it.

Beware

Beware the Ides of March

those who deserve neither liberty nor security

I thought I had grown tired of the quote, by Franklin, that, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” I feel that it is oft misapplied in today’s world. In Franklin’s time, the enemies of the state, even of civil society, could not attack that which they opposed in the devastating ways that they could in today’s world. In 1760, when Franklin wrote that, a person could not walk into the middle of Manhattan with a backpack and destroy the entire island and everything for hundreds of miles. The world is profoundly more dangerous than it was a quarter millennia ago. In his time people had to be far more clever and inventive about how they gathered and communicated to avoid detection – today it is far easier to gather and disseminate information that it would have been in his time. When Franklin wrote that he had no idea what the world, the republic he founded, would come to – indeed when he wrote that he was a loyal son of the British Empire, bent on preserving it.

However, over the past year I have lost my stomach for the way we are fighting the war on terror. Sure, they destroyed a large section of Manhattan and the Pentagon. We were all terrified at the brazen assault on our real estate – but the attack was meant to undermine our way of life. In our reaction to that attack, we initially mortgaged our liberties in hopes of securing ourselves against another attack. Certainly, in four years, there has not been a serious attack on our soil – although our allies have been attacked as well.

However, the worst thing that has happened since September 2001 has been the erosions of liberties and debased behavior by our government – in what I honestly believe is a genuine desire to preserve the republic and its citizenry. Unfortunately, by undermining what our republic stands for it and what makes our way life so envied, our government has changed our society into something that is probably not worth preserving.

I do not just blame President and his cohorts, I also lay a great deal of blame – probably more – on the opposition senators who failed to oppose him, either out of fear of terror or political cowardice. Even if I were to merely blame the President, past presidents, Senators from both parties, whomever, blame would not fix our problems.

Essentially, this is why I think Senator Russ Feingold’s idea that we censure the President to be a bad idea. We need to look into the wiretapping, and everything else. Torture, the treatment of detainees, the legal status of Americans being held without charges, and everything else that has gone on and gone wrong.

I feel that if we censure the President he will be publicly humiliated, or punished and the republic will turn to the next problem without resolving it. I am not sure what should happen to the President or anyone responsible. Should they be impeached, censured, or put on trail? I really have no idea but in censuring the President, we are putting the issue to rest. I feel that is wholly inappropriate – he deserves his day in court and so do we.

I also feel that in the same sense that the President’s actions deserve great scrutiny that his opposition not receive a pass. The behavior of the Democrats can be likened to one of those accounts of absurd robberies wherein the homeowner’s negligence aided the thieves – they gave him the keys to the house, pointed out where all the valuables were kept, and helped him carry out what he wanted.

I share Senator Feingold’s feeling that something should be done, this should not be allowed to continue or happen again but before we make the mistake of fighting this war like ones before we need to look at everyone in our government critically and judge their actions.

In looking at the areas where the Senate should have been checking Executive power we see not only sins of omission but sins of commission. Senators Feingold and Rodham-Clinton are two of the five members of Congress (out of 535) – the only Democrats – that signed into the vault to read prewar intelligence. How many voted for the so-called Patriot Act? How many filibustered it?

No matter the President nor the situation, they will try to overstep their authority. Allegedly, the President has – because everyone deserves their day in court – and the same allegations have been made against every President. Clinton has admitted to it himself, the hallowed of the liberals, Jimmy “put on a sweater” Carter, begrudgingly admitted it himself.

It is the constitutional responsibility of the President to defend the republic – but within the bounds of the constitution. It is the responsibility of the Congress to make sure he stays within those bounds.

Let us bring President Bush to heel and prevent his successors from behaving as he has. First, we should get all the facts and all the culprits. Maybe in the end censure is all that is appropriate – certainly it would have been more appropriate for President Clinton – or maybe like Nixon, he needs to be swept from office.

The only thing we know for sure is that something should be done but we do not fully know about what. Until we know we should reserve punishment.

Paula Abdul takes what she can get.

My sister/roommate enjoys the show American Idol. I am not going to waste column inches mocking that show – but you must know that I find no cultural or aesthetic value in the program – and find it alarming that (1) more people vote on that show than for our leaders (2) I have become drawn in myself.

I love a disaster. Nothing beats someone else’s public humiliation to brighten your day. Many people espouse the idea that helping someone else or doing something selfless will brighten your day but I do that professionally and after a while, you need to mix things up. Someone falling on the ice or being involved in an injury free car wreck does the trick for me. With American Idol, I can sit on my couch and not endure glares from other rubber-neckers for pointing and laughing.

However, I remain alarmed at the fact that more people vote on American Idol than vote for President; that more people pay attention to the show than to what is going on in our world. I have come up with a plan to improve this situation.

In 2008, we will run the Presidential Election like American Idol. We will gather a triad of self-appointed experts and have auditions for the Presidency. Sure, Senator Hillary Rodham-Clinton is smart as a whip, but can she sing and dance? What is Senator John McCain’s vocal range?

More important than their ability to entertain us, how Presidential are they, really? We kind of get this in the Presidential Debates but at that point the parties have already picked to people whose only qualification seems to be ‘nothing better to do with my time’ and ‘unqualified for gainful employment.’ I judged debate rounds in college for money and I saw some amazing debates – but the Presidential debates reminded me of Longview Community College verses ITT Technical School – the summation is that four people with Alzheimer’s could have had a more coherent conversation and come to a much more astute and reasonable conclusion. I know a good debate when I see one, and there has not been a good Presidential Debate in my lifetime. It is more than speaking pretty (Kerry) and more than staying on topic (Bush).

Then, the experts could boil the potential candidates down to two pools – twelve Republicans and twelve Democrats – and then we could whittle them down week by week until we had a President. Whoever came in second could be Vice-President. I am sure more young people would vote if they did not have to do arcane things like register and wait in lines. If you could just text in “HRC” or “JMC” you might be more interested in the process.

This could also bring up the benefit of drawing out other candidates. John Kerry was really just Bush-Lite but had we had real, entertaining exposure to the people who are Presidential Quality we could have realized that Russ Feingold not only voted against the war but was the only, ONLY, Democrat to read the prewar intelligence and is John McCain’s traditional bipartisan playmate. George W. Bush would never have won a nomination if he had to speak in public, unscripted around people like Christie Todd Whitman or George Pataki.

This process would draw out people who are not Rock Stars like Clinton, McCain, or Rice, and are just as qualified – if not more qualified.

If nothing else, this seems like it could work just as well as the process we use now. How could it be worse? We need to know that they are Presidential, unscripted and under pressure, and that they can sing, dance, and stand up to Simon’s taunting.

my brother knows a man who met someone who knows Mel Gibson

Mom told me that they did a sonogram and it was a heart attack that started all the other problems. My father is in a hospital in the same city where Tom Cruise went to High School, which leads me to believe that since Tom Cruise has been there and is doing Katie Holmes’ sonograms that Tom Cruise also did my father’s sonogram.

Tom Cruise would not approve of my family. Half of us are on antipsychotic medications and the half that is not, should be. We do not exercise or eat right. Our family has one semiprofessional athlete and he is in shape for all of us. Why would I eat right and get in shape when I can pop a pill and get the same results?

And who is Tom Cruise kidding? He is clearly on something and so is Katie Holmes. Katie Holmes is my age and Tom Cruise is my father’s age, Tom Cruise should know all this having performed my father’s sonogram and he should also know that cradle robbing went out with hoped skirts and slavery.

He has a lot of nerve telling us to stop taking our medication, start exercising, and eating right. He is not Oprah. He is not even a doctor. He has no business telling us how to live our lives. I am sure Oprah is furious with him for this and that is how she was able to forgive him jumping on her couch. If he jumped on my couch, we would have boxed: old school, no gloves.

I really have no idea who he thinks he is. A man makes a couple of mediocre movies and we are all supposed to deal with his faux pious cult mumbo gumbo. And, yes, his movies are mediocre when he is acting and anyone could have played those roles, he did not bring any magic to the screen. Adrian Brody, now he has talent. Anyone that ugly that keep an audience’s attention has skill.

The point of this all is that since Tom Cruise performed my father’s sonogram and Tom Cruise knows Oprah I am only separated from God by two degrees (Dad-Tom Cruise-Oprah). I am that much closer now than I ever was before.

And yes, we are relieved and shocked to learn that dad even had a heart. It probably attacked him trying to get back out.

Harriet Miers

Am I the first person to notice that in this administration there is a pattern of people leading search committees eventually finding themselves? I know that two people do not a pattern make but it is rather curious that this is what ends up happening.

I would not have voted for John Roberts for Chief Justice because of his age. He has tremendous qualifications and while he served only a short time on the bench, he is a well-known scholar of the constitution. His appearances before the court, not to mention his success rate, show a great depth of knowledge and skill. I would have voted him an associate Justice; I would not have made him Chief. He is not Chief Justice and no one asked me anyway.

Today, we are presented with Harriet Miers as the nominee to replace Justice O’Connor on the bench. We are well assured by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D – NV) that she is a smart woman. However, I am sure that any woman with a J.D. from 1970 has to be pretty quick because that was not exactly the time when women were welcome in Law Schools or had been for a very long time. Let us not forget that the Belle of the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, was the first woman to graduate an Ivy League Law School – or at least one of the first to do so.

Without time on the bench, I have a hard time believing that she is qualified to be on the Supreme Court. I am sure she has all the skills and the temperament. I am sure she is conservative enough and smart enough but I do not think that someone who had never been a judge could be a very good one on the Supreme Court without first having been a judge somewhere else.

There is a bit of cronyism here to explore as well. It is a known fact that she is the President’s lawyer (and this will kill her) but there is something else that the good people at Jason Vertucio pointed out: she went to college with First Lady Laura Bush

Going to college with the First Lady is not a big deal, in and of itself, or that she smoked a lot of pot with First Lady Laura Bush, but the investigative team at Jason Vertucio found even more out: the woman is unmarried and has no children, which is not uncommon for a professional woman of her age but it goes deeper when it was discovered that she wears sandals. The worst kind of sandals: Birkenstocks.

Yes, this woman wears the Birkenstocks and that can mean only one thing. She is a militant, filthy, Nazi! She wears little German war machines on her feet and goosesteps around Washington, D.C. doing Lynne Cheney’s bidding and is set now to goosestep right up the steps of the Senate and then across the street into a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court.

We can rest assured: no one appointed this woman to her office because of her looks but because she puts out. She puts out in the worst possible way: the evil Nazi way. Left unchecked this woman will single handedly shut every abortion clinic after sterilizing all the poor people and telling girls then cannot go to school and must work in jobs soon to be outsourced to countries we cannot identify on maps because of No Child Left Behind, which has consequently impaired my ability to write a concise sentence before bearing the half-robot child of John Ashcroft to grow up and become the evilest Republican lawyer ever but not before reinstating the draft and sending all the brothers of said girls to go invade said country of the outsourced jobs – ostensibly to get said jobs back and fight ‘terrorism’ but really to keep them occupied so she does not have to share the XBOX 360 that you cannot afford on an Associate Justice’s salary – so stop asking for one from Clarence Thomas.

Livestrong

This weekend I was shouted down by the Greenpeace Lawyer at the tavern in Essex. He asked me if I knew what his color of “Live Strong” bracelet meant and luckily my sister knew, because not only am I ignorant of what your coloured bracelets mean I also think they are trite and just a bit tacky. My favorite by far is the little plastic bracelet that signifies supporting the Environment.

I may be wrong, but it seems to be that plastic is antithetical to environmentalism, especially plastic destined to take up space in a landfill until the Armageddon. The lawyer, who I agreed with in principle, was wearing one to say that he supports poverty because apparently ‘we are all in it together,’ especially lawyers rounding out a six week vacation on the east coast staying at an expensive hotel, bedecked in Lauren with a wife dripping in ‘bling.’ Elizabeth hit the nail squarely on the head when she said, “You are against poverty? Live with the poor, work with the poor, be poor.”

I am so tired of wealthy people shouting down at me from their ivory towers, in the trenches - not only below the poverty line my myself - working to improve the lives of everyone (by teaching), especially our future generations. I would have been offended by the lawyer had he not been so comical. Wealthy people, either get down here and get your hands dirty or shut the hell up.

What is my action plan? I am not Jonathan Kozol, who will rant away but refuse to offer any concrete ways to improve the lives of others beyond liberal ‘academic’ malaise and rhetoric. I have something I plan to do to change the world.

I am going to make those bracelets unfashionable by association. I will wear mine so people see how useless and tacky they are, if I am wearing one, do you really want to as well? I support those causes, no one is opposed to them, but I would prefer to see active work towards solutions of problems instead of passive fashions.

Hurricane Katrina - Political Reaction

(Reuters, Washington DC 1:12 AM EST)
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, politicians and partisans are lining up in the capital of the Republic to point fingers.

George W. Bush is scrambling to find where he can gain some political points from this nice distraction from Cindy Sheehan, the quagmire War in Iraq, and romantic overtures from Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). Surprised to find himself not in Crawford but at his place of employment he took the opportunity to use the microphone someone had left out on accident to address the press corps:

“I want the American people to know that we will find this Katrina, we will hunt her down and bring her to justice for this natural disaster, the largest our country has seen since the Kerry/Edwards Campaign or New Coke. New Orleans will take years to rebuild, giving me ample time to downplay people’s ideas to later claim them as my own.

I want the American people to know that this is the fault of the Democratic Party. Had Thomas Jefferson not bought Louisiana from Napoleon, we would not be in this ridiculous situation of having millions of people living on a flood plane. Only a Democrat would buy a city full of prostitutes, drunks, and Frenchmen.

To the people of New Orleans, I will divert millions of dollars that would have been spent teaching you to read maps so you would know that you were on a flood plane or that your mayor should have used to fix the levy to rebuilding your city. Jenna will be there to get hammered as soon as the bars open, Barbara too – she still hasn’t found a job!”

Michael Moore, (literally, figuratively, and simultaniously) the single largest contributor to global warming and threat to liberalism is searching for a way to claim that the Bush family is responsible for the disaster. Those of us who have completed college cannot understand the logic how someone is at once an evil genius and functionally retarded (leftists: pick one and stick with it). Apparently, dropping out a state college in Michigan is much harder than graduating from Yale and Harvard with better grades then the past three men to top the Democratic Presidential Ticket.

Moore was too busy for comment; it is apparently nearly impossible to find someone to lend a fully stocked ice cream truck to a slothful, overweight, faux-intellectual filmmaker TWICE. Really, why does that crackpot get a movie camera while I am relegated to the Blogosphere? I could make movies! Give me a camera, apparently, you don’t need to tell the truth in a documentary – you just need to hate someone a whole lot. What does Michael Moore have that I do not? One hundred pounds of lard, bad hair and a terrible wardrobe.

At time of press Senator Bill Frist (MD!) was seen with Karl Rove digging up the body of Thomas Jefferson so that he can take the heat for this disaster, Al Franken was still packing that extra chromosome and spewing half-truths while Ann Coulture was praying that Jesus would turn all that water in New Orleans into wine.

in black and white

Peter, who I am about to starting calling “Radio Free – Vatican” told me that, “Dude, the world isn’t black and white,” and I countered, “It is when you’re color blind.” That is, indeed, the story of my life. Here is the run down on our conversation, and where I am black and white:

Newt Gingrich is thinking of running for President, giving hope to fat, Lutheran kids who had sex with their geometry teacher with an absolute lack of social skills that they too will do something with their lives. However, in defense of this small demographic, please, Newt, do you think that being humiliated in front of the Republic once enough? Do you have to do this, again? You have to ask yourself, “How many times did he touch that hot stove before his mother viciously beat him out of the kitchen and back into his room where he wrote tawdry geometry proofs?”

Newt did something some thing most politicians only talk about: some thing. He did something while he was Speaker of the House and not many can claim that. After forty years, the Democrats had little to show for it and all of Bill Clinton’s accomplishments are rooted in the Contract With America. Newt may be social inept, but his revolution was why I could not vote for John Kerry in 2004 – what did John Kerry do as a legislator? Nothing, he never led and henceforth anyone leaving the Federal Legislature should have something to show for it if they want me to promote him or her to Commander In Chief. Bill Clinton’s legacy as President is putting the Republicans in control of the Congress, the Courts, and practically electing George W. Bush, twice.

French Women DO Get Fat

I read recently in The Atlantic Monthly that in Europe they use a different Body Mass Index (BMI) to determine obesity. If you use either the European or North American BMI you realize that per capita, they have the same amount of fat people in France or anywhere else in Europe as we do in the United States. So, to wit, French women do not get fat because they are already are.

I think that we have an obesity problem in the United States; anyone who has been to Kentucky knows this is true. Kentucky is the fattest state in the Republic and if we are the fattest place on Earth then Kentucky is the largest jurisdiction. No kidding, when I was visiting my parents at My Old Kentucky Home we went to Dairy Queen and there was a family of five taking up five booths because they could not fit in one.

The fault for the problem with obesity in America lies with Lane Bryant. Back in the day you could not get good looking clothing for fat people, or clothes that were stylish for the larger segment of the population. I had an aunt who was so fat that she had to make her own clothing. Now, with fashionable options for the super sized, there is no reason to lose weight. We make it too easy to be overweight and even acceptable.

I am not saying we should shame people into shape, but if we really cared about people would we allow them to wallow in unhealthiness? As someone who is overweight and was much more so, I know that it is not easy to lose weight but it is also not impossible. I think the worst thing we do for people at unhealthy weights is to facilitate and accept their problem.

In other news, Kipp and I have not won the lottery yet and we are already abusing the help.