HELIOLITH

This isn’t essentially a political blog. I try not to dwell on the mind-numbingly vicious violence in the world today like this article on the military abuse of children in Iraq that ran on 8/01/04 from the Scottish Sunday Herald.

Nonetheless, today I feel compelled to respond to the snafu in current events, directly attributable to our current administration. Here’s an excerpt of a letter to the editor from today’s opinion page in the NY Times that expresses clear disillusionment with our leadership.

John Morley wrote, “I live in northern New Jersey and work in Midtown Manhattan, near the Citicorp Center. I was listening carefully to Tom Ridge’s warning, as the sites he was mentioning for possible attacks basically encompassed all of my daily life. Then he said, “We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror.” I realized that I was listening to a paid political announcement and turned the radio off. The credibility of the announcement had been reduced to zero.

One of the top stories today (8/2/04) was led by an article in the Washington Post written by Dan Eggen and Dana Priest, they write, “Ridge and other officials stressed Sunday the urgency of acting on the newly obtained information, but yesterday a range of officials made clear how dated much of the intelligence was.

The article quotes our eloquent president, “Bush said the alert shows “there’s an enemy which hates what we stand for… It’s serious business,” Bush said. “I mean, we wouldn’t be, you know, contacting authorities at the local level unless something was real.” Baffling that anyone would still be duped into believing that terrorism is about our lifestyle more than our government’s own history of violence. Our national discourse has strayed as Chomsky says, “…far off the spectrum of world opinion” so that disputing the motives or even raising the discussion of the motives for terrorism often brings reactionisary fear and animosity. But it’s okay for the president to blab on about them “hating our freedoms.” Since when is our president a social scientist, much less someone capable of understanding the psychology of terrorism? Lie enough about something you know little, and sure enough everyone will parrot your lies.

The war goes on, brutally, and we learn very little. Robert Fisk writes from Bagdhad, “This month’s death toll of Iraqis in Baghdad alone has now reached 700 - the worst month since the invasion ended. But we are not told.”

Meanwhile, back in the states (as that 50’s song goes) the American Library Association reports that the DOJ (Ashcroft?) is trying to get Libraries to DESTROY five publications the Department has deemed not “appropriate for external use,” thereby limiting access to those who have access to law libraries. Apparently he doesn’t want people learning, “how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation.”

I sincerely hope that it is true, as Ronald Reagan’s son (Ron Reagan) writes in Esquire, that an air of dissent is spreading rapidly in the mainstream mind. Even he noticed how, “items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans’ eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for [his] father and turn it to Bush’s advantage for the fall election. Ron doesn’t mince words:

Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.

Ron’s article (entitled “The case against George W. Bush” is scathing, and extremely well-written. The link above will take you to page 1 of 5, but if you prefer, jump straight to the end and read his conclusion. [edit 8/11/04 Thanks to Saheli* for bringing my attention to this amusing interview in the New York Times (from June) with Ron Reagan Jr. ]

As a sidenote, I added several counters at the bottom of the page that visually tally the dollars spent on this war and the lives lost, both Iraqi and American.