Peg Kerr's Journal

ajodasso is right: Olbermann eats Bush for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (Click the link for Special Comment: Bush Interview Unforgiveable.)

Blistering.

So there's this dude somewhere--in Washington, wasn't it? Did a speech or something? Some people are still listening to him? Somewhere?

I'm sure I'll read about it tomorrow. Maybe. Or I'll catch up with it next week. Or next month. Or whenever I have a convenient hour. I suspect, however, that that waxing the cat might seem more important. If I had a cat.

Or maybe I'll catch up with it never. That would probably be better for my blood pressure.

Edited to add: lsanderson has helpfully summarized the speech for me so that I don't have to bother reading it: "We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."

*cracks up*

Bush Seeks to Ban Marriage Between Fictitious Gay Characters

Harry Potter Revelation Prompts President’s Move

Just days after "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling revealed that the popular professor character Albus Dumbledore was gay, President George W. Bush told the nation that he would seek a ban on fictitious gay weddings.

In a nationally televised address last night, Mr. Bush said that he devote the rest of his term in office to obtaining a constitutional amendment banning marriage between fictitious gay characters.

"In order to protect the sanctity of marriage in the real world, we must first protect the sanctity of marriage in fiction," Mr. Bush said. "This is the most pressing goal of my Administration – even more important than bombing Iran."

While the president’s address was for the most part consistent with his earlier statements on gay marriage, it was uncharacteristic in that it demonstrated an awareness of books.

And in attacking the Mr. Dumbledore’s right to wed, Mr. Bush may have raised the ire of one of the most militant constituencies in the U.S.: Harry Potter fans.

Jude Ralston, 34, one of over 5,000 Potter devotees who dressed as Dumbledore to protest the president’s speech outside the White House last night, said that Mr. Bush could be playing with fire: "Harry Potter fans take these things very seriously, and we don’t have anything else going on in our lives."

As for Dumbledore’s gayness, Mr. Ralston said that he had overlooked obvious clues the first time he read the books: "I, like, totally missed that scene in the airport bathroom."

Edited to add: Oh yes--and for those who honestly wondered there for a moment, this is a satire. See here.

(Pretty sad, no, when that isn't immediately obvious to anyone thinking about the Prez and what he might say or do?)

Written by AMANDA WITHERELL Illustration by Mirissa NeffM

There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.

The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals "enemy combatants," or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.

Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.

While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories: the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.

"I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading," writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.

For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts," which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. "We need to broaden our understanding of censorship," he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: "The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this."

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.

Click here to see the list, starting with "Goodbye, Habeus Corpus." This was certainly an eye-opening read--yes, I hadn't heard of a number of these stories.

Thanks to sleigh for the link to this article, A Country Ruled By Faith.

More on George Bush's ongoing campaign to become our nation's dictator:

The nation's governors, protesting what they call an unprecedented shift in authority from the states to the federal government, will urge Congress today to block legislation that would allow the president to take control of National Guard forces in the event of a natural disaster or threat to homeland security.
In a sharply worded letter that will be transmitted to Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress this morning, the governors ask that a House-Senate conference committee remove a provision included in the House-passed version of the National Defense Authorization Act giving the president such authority.

"This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors as commanders and chief of the Guard to the federal government," the governors' letter says. Read the rest here

From the editorial page:

In 1949, the United States ratified the Geneva Conventions, which set forth minimal standards for the treatment of war prisoners. In 1996 and 1997, Congress enacted and expanded the War Crimes Act, which makes it a crime to violate the conventions. From 2002 to 2006, the Bush administration insisted the conventions did not apply to foreigners captured in Afghanistan. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the conventions do apply. This month the administration drafted changes it will propose to the War Crimes Act that would decriminalize most of the conduct used to degrade and humiliate detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
According to the Associated Press, which obtained a copy of part of the plan, "One section of the draft would outlaw torture and cruel treatment, but it does not contain prohibitions from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions against 'outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.' " Another section, it reported, would apply the legislation retroactively.

If you'd bet that this is about senior military and civilian officials of the Bush administration getting concerned that they might be prosecuted, you'd probably win the pot. That is certainly how it looks: Stripped of their "Geneva Conventions don't apply" defense, officials involved in authorizing a whole set of aggressive interrogation techniques now worry about being forced to spend humiliating, degrading time in the court dock.

This effort to rewrite the War Crimes Act would be outrage enough for that reason, but there are even larger risks: The United States would be seen as de-ratifying part of the conventions, thus giving every country, every tinhorn leader justifiable reason to humiliate U.S. soldiers they capture in the future. Just as problematic is the additional tarnish this would throw on the U.S. reputation among the world's people who believe in fair play, in the rules of war and in the United States' leadership of the brigade pushing those good causes. Any way you cut it, this is a bad idea. Congress should give it a quick burial. Link to the editorial here"

Bush is attempting to gut the Constitution he took an oath to defend.

What is it going to take to stop this man? I believe that Arlen Specter is planning on holding hearings on the NSA signing statements issue. Is there anyone else who is going to show some guts and stand up to stop this dictatorial power grab? When/how can the Supreme Court step in to restore the balance of power? Is the damage to our system of government reversable?

WHY WILL NOBODY STOP HIM? Is it too already late? Help!

[Here is Terri Gross of NPR's Fresh Air interviewing the author (click the "Listen" button).]

I have been thinking a lot about martyrdom. A number of things have prompted this. I happened to pick up a book last night in the church library, as I was waiting for Fiona's confirmation class to finish, which recorded people's last words before death, including many martyrs' last words. Someone pointed out the recent anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, and I thought about Timothy McVeigh's burning passion, his conviction that when he went to his death, he was a martyr, striking a blow in revenge for the Branch Davidian martyrs. There is the Zacharias Moussoui trial, which I posted about previously. I was thinking more about his wish to be a martyr. I started thinking about Flight 93, since they ended the prosecution's case by playing the black box recording.

I have always wanted to understand the inexplicable, the point of view of the unknowable other that I cannot agree with myself. I know that Moussoui gloated as he listened to that recording of the last of Flight 93's doomed struggle. I remember in the weeks after that terrible day, our firm brought a human resources consultant to come in to talk to us about what happened that day. I remember I said during that meeting that I was reading the news compulsively, trying to understand. Trying to make sense. "Don't try," she said, "It doesn't make any sense at all."

But human beings hunger for meaning, to make a story that makes sense out of the baffling events of history. To understand the terrible, the unexplainable. We see that particularly with Flight 93. It was the one crumb of comfort we had in the midst of all that horror, and we claimed the passengers' heroism for our own. At least the terrorists didn't achieve all their goals. We rose up. We overturned their plans. We seized the day and saved the White House, or the Capitol. We died not as victims but as fighters. We did that.

I have thought about how American consoled themselves with the Flight 93 story. I have certainly seen how some have tried to use Flight 93 for their own purposes. President Bush tried to take the story and make it his: "Remember how the passengers decided to re-take the plane. They took a vote. They took a vote." [Insert speechifying about the virtues of democracy here]. Remember how he decided to co-opt Todd Beamer's catch phrase, "Let's roll"? [Which actually may be inaccurate: the September 11 commission tentatively concluded that he might have been saying "Roll it," meaning, roll the beverage cart forward to slam the cockpit doors.] I was angry at Bush for trying to take the passengers' heroism and drape it about himself, but I understood entirely his reason for doing so. Flight 93 was a powerful myth, and the President needed whatever tools of power he had at hand to help move a grieving nation forward. [Pity he chose to drive us forward to make war on a country that had NOTHING TO DO with September 11, but that's another post.]

Anyway, I had also read about and thought extensively about what the hijackers told themselves about martyrdom, when they planned their mission, when the leaders of Al-Quaeda talked about their mission afterwards. They were striking a blow for jihad. They were attacking the hated infidel. They were dying in glory. I know that the hijackers reasoned to themselves that the Muslims they killed in the World Trade Center (the ones they killed) would be counted by Allah as martyrs, too, to the jihad cause.

But I realized today that I have not thought much about what Al-Qaeda thinks about Flight 93. Do they see it as their failure? Do they look at the story of how those passengers rose up and wonder -- uh, did we maybe mistake what Allah thinks about all this? If we were right about all this, how did Allah overset our plans with this one flight?

No, I realized. When Al-Qaeda reads the transcript (and perhaps the Al-Qaeda sympathizers across the Middle East) they are not paying the slightest bit of attention to Todd Beamer praying the Lord's Prayer with a Verizon operator, or the desperate attempts of the passengers to ram open the cockpit doors.

No, they are too busy admiring how the hijackers, the jihadists, as they struck a blow against the infidels, died saying over and over Allah Akbar. It wasn't until today that I realized that both sides were laying claim to the myth for themselves, saying exactly the same thing about Flight 93: They died with a prayer on their lips; they failed, but they died fighting for Our Side.

The Flight 93 movie will be opening next week. The trailer moved me to tears (see it here, website is here).

Should I go see it? Should you?

Here is an interesting editorial upon the question. By all accounts, it is an extremely respectful treatment, made with the full support of the passengers' families, done by a director, Paul Greengrass, who has done a good job with very difficult emotionally-fraught work before, notably "Bloody Sunday," a documentary-style drama about a 1972 civil rights march in Northern Ireland in which 13 people were killed. The studio has said that they will donate 10% of the opening weekend gross to the Flight 93 memorial. [Edited to add: here is an article about the pains that the movie makers took. The pilot and co-pilots were played by actual United pilots. Two of the five flight attendant actresses were actual former flight attendants. Ben Sliney, the head of the FAA's Command Center on that day, who was actually reporting for his first day of work at that job on September 11, played himself, as did other FAA workers. Here is another article about the politics of making the film.]

Should it be seen? There is the temptation to use that story, even perhaps twisting it a little in the process to enhance the passengers' heroism, because it is so desperately powerful, resonating deeply in the gut. Offering us the seductive consolation of vicarious heroism, too. Example: The movie's slogan is, "Forty people sat down as strangers. They rose up as one." Which is very powerful, true. And yet, if you can manage to look at it coldly as a claim, that is probably not true. We don't know if indeed all the passengers voted to attack, and there were probably at least some that weren't rushing down that aisle, but cringing back, doing nothing more than hoping desperately that somehow, against all odds, that others would save them and they would survive.

And yet, and yet--there were still those who fought, knowing that hope was slim to nonexistant. You who have read my journal for a long time know how I love Lord of the Rings. One of the things that Tolkien admired most about Anglo-Saxon culture was the courage that they honored in battle, that rises up when all hope is lost. He wrote about that in the tale of the battle of Helm's Deep:

"The end will not be long," said the King. "But I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap...When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm's horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride then with me, son of Arathorn? Maybe we will cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song--if any be left to sing of us hereafter."

"I will ride with you," said Aragorn.

I am sure Todd Beamer would have followed Theoden. And Tom Burnett, Jr. And Mark Bingham. And Jeremy Glick, brandishing his butter knife. And Cee Cee Lyles, flinging her pots of boiling water. The LA Times article linked above reasons, then, that for our culture, the Flight 93 movie is like the ballad, the song, that Theoden longed to have told of his end, after his death. Understanding it that way, I think I can go see it. [Remembering, however, that as far as the other side is concerned, we're the orcs.]

Read a fuller account of the story of Flight 93 here.

[Poll #713397]

And for further thinking on this, I recommend that you go re-read the chapter "Foregathering Song" in Diane Duane's novel Deep Wizardry. That is absolutely the best artistic response I ever saw to the story of Flight 93. Written sixteen years before it happened.

alfreda89 is right: This speech by journalist Bill Moyers deserves a wider audience. Among the people he quotes is Berry Goldwater, lifelong conservative and former senator of Arizona. Stay with me until the end:

"The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of Constitutional liberty, an independent legislature free from any influence other than that of the people . . . representative government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at large, not by those who give the most money. Electors must believe their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their allegiance to the people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of interest groups who speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole community."

What is Moyers talking about? He is laying bare the means by which we have been betrayed. We thought we were sending honest people to Washington to make changes--but we have sent the whores into Babylon. They are owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by lobbyists, by corporate bigwigs, by the top 1% of income earners in our society--people who become richer as the middle class becomes poorer.

Please take a moment to read his speech. It's long, but worth your time--and it's broken into four sections, so you can bookmark it and return to it.

http://www.publicampaign.org/savingdemocracy/

Noted, without comment, the State of the Union Drinking Game.

Just so you're ready, so to speak.

(for further reading, see comments on posts here and here.)