to see in all directions at the same time

I know I talk about this a lot, but seriously, as a veteran in this country, you just can't win.

I've mentioned before how I'm not eligible for the GI Bill because I had the lack of foresight to get hurt too soon into my enlistment, and I'm not eligible for Vocational Rehabilitation's help with education expenses because I'm too injured to be a productive member of society worth investing in, and now, today, I learned that I am also not eligible for a waiver for residency requirements in the state I grew up in. I was away for too long after I enlisted, and they only take pity on veterans of the Korean War, not any conflict more recent.

Korean War vets are all what, 70 years old or so now? Totally the people who habitually enroll at a community college.

And now the news is full of how smart McCain is to say that the US needs to threaten and/or attack Russia because the president of Georgia is a moron and started a war. OK, maybe that's not the best analysis of the situation (ObWi has much better). But still. The longer I identify as a veteran, the more I think that this disconnect between the realities of military experience and the ideals that run our foreign policy is the sickness that will bring down the American empire. That anyone who refuses to admit our military's limitations isn't laughed off the national stage- that this is instead seen as proof that he is a foreign policy heavyweight- astounds me.

Sometimes I wonder if it might not be better for our country to experience disaster and defeat. Not that I want tragedy, not the human cost of it. But we have been so successful in recent history (Iraq notwithstanding) that too large a number of our political philosophers no longer have any basis in reality, and that is incredibly dangerous, not only for us, but for the rest of the world.

And this urge to pretend that our military is always strong and gleaming and made up of invincible cartoon commandos, really sucks for veterans. I am so so sick of this constant battle for benefits.

A short, ugly dose of political reality

So the Supreme Court recently decided a case, Boumediene, regarding the rights non-citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay have to challenge their detainment in court. Pretty basic habeas corpus stuff, and I think the decision was made correctly: the Supreme Court ruled that in fact our government does not have the right to hold people indefinitely without charge. Western civilization has acknowledged this right for at least the past, what, 800 years? (Wikipedia says since the 12th century) and I'm glad we're not going to throw it out just yet.

Of course the neocons are freaking out. Glenn Greenwald has a nice bit on John Yoo's take on the case; the best quote is "It takes an indescribably authoritarian mind to believe that one's own Government should have the power to put people in cages for life without having to provide them any meaningful opportunity to prove that they did not do what they are accused of." Yoo, apparently, like the rest of the Bush administration, is just that kind of authoritarian mind.

McCain, too, disagrees with the Boumediene decision. Here's Time's reproduction of his campaign's official statement. The core of it is this quote: "The United States Supreme Court yesterday rendered a decision which I think is one of the worst decisions in the history of this country."

John McCain's America is one where the government can put people in prison for life without any kind of trial or court action. His statement against Boumediene is a statement against the founding principles of the Constitution and is against everything our nation stands for. Maybe its hyperbole, but I'm strongly tempted to say that anyone who votes for this man is a traitor, and I find it greatly distressing that he is a major candidate for President.

Our Dear Leader

I've seen this a lot of places on my reading list lately: Shakesville, ginmar, Sadly, No!, Obsidian Wings just off the top of my head- I guess it's a popular news item this week. I don't really have anything new to say about it that hasn't been said better by others, but I couldn't resist adding my voice to the chorus.

It amazes me that at this point anyone can sincerely think that President Bush deserves to finish his term in the White House instead of in a dank prison cell somewhere. Well, I guess you could make a decent argument for incarcerating him in a high-security mental ward, since there's evidence that the man is clinically insane.

Here's the quote, via Politico, the site that did the interview:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"

He gave up golf. To "be in solidarity as best [he] can" with the families of soldiers who've died in the war he started for nothing, with the soldiers who will spend the rest of their lives dealing with prosthetic limbs and phantom pain and life-altering nightmares of death because of his ignorance and incompetence and vanity, he gave up golf.

Fuck.

Not an original thought in my head

From Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, by Robert Draper (though the clumsy use of elipses is all me):

Early on the afternoon of February 18, 1998, Bush [who was running for reelection as governor of Texas] and Karen Hughes arrived at a juvenile prison in Marlin, Texas...While the TV cameras rolled, one boy after the next recited his litany of criminality- I'm Jimmy, I'm from Mineral Springs, at the age of thirteen I did steal the next door neighbor's car and I did run over my grandma with it, which did cripple her permanently- followed by his acknowledgment that he, rather than society, was to blame and his pledge to do better.

This was the Responsibility Era personified, as Bush well knew. It was also exploitative, and he knew that as well. This prefab moment was about winning votes... when the last preselected urchin had concluded his recitation, Bush and everyone else sat there for an uncomfortable moment as if at the end of a bad blind date, searching for something nice to say about a thoroughly meaningless encounter.

A scrawny fifteen-year-old black kid raised his hand.

"Can I ask the governor a question?" said the boy, a petty thief from Tyler named Johnny Demon Baulkmon.... "What do you think about us now?"

...[Bush's] words, when he found them, sounded almost confessional: "You look like kids I see every day. And I'm impressed by the way you're handling yourselves here. I think you can succeed. The state of Texas still loves you all. We haven't given up on you. But we love you enough to punish you when you break the law."

That was the answer to the question.

A strange euphoria overtook Bush and the other adults in the dormitory. Something had just taken place here that did not ordinarily occur, either in youth prisons or on the campaign trail. A sense of institutions humanized, of possibility....

[Karen Hughes] began to work the Marlin tableau into his speeches, in language that one seldom heard from the lips of any politician, much less a conservative: "Each of us holds a piece of the promise of America. That young man at the jail in Marlin wasn't sure. He wasn't sure the promise was meant for him. He didn't know whether he still had a shot. Yet some spark was alive. He was willing to risk asking the governor, What do you think of me? He meant, Is there hope for me? Do I have potential? Can I make it? Do I own a piece of the promise of America? In the mightiest and wealthiest and free-est nation in the world, he still wasn't sure. And that's a tragedy."

(Johnny Baulkmon "still wasn't sure" for a reason, as it turned out. Some time after his chance encounter with George W. Bush, the boy was raped by another juvenile offender. Though the meeting in Marlin would become a centerpiece of Bush's nomination-acceptance speech in 2000, Baulkmon did not learn of his fleeting fame until years later. Apparently unconvinced by "the promise of America," he would become an adult petty criminal. In 2006, from a Beaumont prison visitation room Johnny Baulkmon would appraise Bush thus: "He doesn't care about anything but himself. He's complete trash, a horrible evil person.")

Our Strategy in Iraq is Revealed

President Bush's reaction to the presentations given by Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker has been surprisingly deft. Not that he's not capable of feeding his cronies talking points and then crafting his own speeches all as part of a master plan; most politicians can do that. What surprises me is how utterly sly he must have been to put this plan together so far in advance.

Clearly, the lesson Bush and Co. took from the Republican defeat in 2006 was that the White House had to provide political cover for Republicans in 2008 or the Republican Party was toast. Of course, the big issue that needed to be covered was the Iraq War, specifically, why American boys were still dying over there instead of living at home with their families. Large majorities of Americans want the war to be over with, want our troops to come home; this is what the Democrats at least pretended to offer, and that's why the Democrats got elected in 2006.

Bush's plan- the surge- seemed totally counter-intuitive when he introduced it. Not only was it not a good idea militarily for a dozen reasons, it also contradicted what every sane person wanted. It turns out, though, that this plan was complete genius. By increasing soldier levels in Iraq to the maximum the military could handle, and then decreasing again to the prior level over the course of 18 months or so, Bush ended up with exactly what he wanted: his propaganda mill will spin this as Bringing the Troops Home while leaving exactly the same number of soldiers in Iraq that were there in 2006.

Even the newspaper headlines are calling this reversion to the situation we had before the surge "troop cuts;" the LA Times headline reads, "Bush says he'll start bringing troops home before Christmas." Who's heart wouldn't lift after reading a headline like that? This masterfully re-defines the situation as a petty political debate about how many troops we should withdraw, and when. For people who don't read their newspapers entirely, who don't troll the internet for clues to what really went on behind all the spin that gets spewed out, it will seem like the President has agreed to leave Iraq, when of course he's done nothing of the sort.

It's almost enough to make me wonder if that stupid smirk Bush always wears is just a tactic to make his enemies underestimate him. He has clearly out-maneuvered the Democrats this time. It's too bad all his slyness is being used to harm the country he swore to serve, instead of to protect and nurture it.

Impending Doom

This kind of worries me. From what I've seen, which isn't all that much, the reactions of the people who know about it have been rather extreme. I guess that isn't all that surprising seeing how the other big news lately is that the Under-Secretary of Defense thinks that Sen. Clinton and anyone else who talks about anything to do with ever withdrawing from Iraq, or mentions anything critical of the war, is basically committing treason. Some people, including the guy I got the original link from, a poster at CrooksandLiars.com, think the Bush administration is laying out the groundwork for freezing the assets of people who dare to disagree with them in public. The more paranoid who responded compared these actions to the takeover of Germany by the Nazis in the 1930s.

I would be more skeptical if Glenn Greenwald hadn't just outlined for me the way the President and his cronies have been setting up a legal doctrine that prohibits prosecution of anyone in the executive branch, ever. Executive privilege is turning into a pretty scary beast pretty damn quickly.

So just in case the betrayal of the American Revolution is right around the corner, I'd like to say a few things.

President George W. Bush has betrayed the American people, and most particularly the American military, with his incompetence. He started a war that he should have known was a damned stupid idea, and he not only continued that war out of stiff necked pride and willful blindness, but he condemned America to a hugely wasteful disaster through his inability to run a practical operation. There were a lot of people pulling for this war, some of them for very bad reasons, and there is enough blame to tar the multitudes who had a hand in this farce. Certainly people like Cheney, Wolfowitz and so on are not blameless. But the ultimate responsibility lies with George W. Bush.

When you become Commander in Chief, Bush is fond of claiming, it means you can do any damn thing you want to. And that's true, in a limited arena. You have the power of life and death over every soldier the US can put on the field. Soldiers take a solemn oath to obey your commands, an oath hundreds of thousands of them would rather die than betray. President Bush has seen that as a liberating condition; he has claimed the power those oaths give as an absolute power, that frees him to do whatever the hell he pleases. What he has missed is the terrible responsibility that comes with that power. When you can order a good man to his death, you absolutely must be right. Your decisions must be perfect. Any mistake, even a well intentioned and carefully thought out mistake, damns you. The oath of every American soldier requires the President to take serious and sober responsibility for his orders. Not only must he try hard to get things right, he must also get them fucking right. And really, he hasn't done either.

More eloquent and accurate people than myself have outlined the case against Bush, so let me just say that I support it. He ought to be impeached; there are a dozen things to impeach him for, every one of them more significant and serious than the last impeachment our country undertook. This administration is so corrupt, so rotten and foul that no one who has ever worked for our current President should be allowed to work in a government position ever again. The stench of Bush's betrayal of my beloved country must be washed out.

I believe this because I believe in America. Not the swaggering Texan version of America that is nothing more than a group of people who are 'my' group of people just because they are, just because they live next to me and look like me and talk like me and I'm unable to grasp concepts larger than basic primitive tribalism. My America is an idea. An idea about a government that can be fair and just and designed for the benefit of every citizen, not just those few who happen to be rich and powerful. My America is place where there are no royalty, there are no kings, and the country is held together not by some personality cult but by a rational system of law. In my America, thought is not dangerous. Punishment is not meted out before a crime is committed, there is no state of emergency that can justify indefinite imprisonment and torture of those who have been convicted of no crime. In my America, you can speak without fear and be secure in your freedom.