Venting the Spleen, Ch 847

I know I promised to try to avoid these political rants, but I can’t lay off this. Someone please tell me how a guy like Richard Clark can serve Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton AND Bush 43 and when he finally gets so fed up with it that he quits, everyone just ignores his side of the story.

How about Colin Powell? A guy many thought might be our nation’s first black president. Gone without a trace. Here’s a guy who flushes more integrity, patriotism and public service every time he visits the men’s room than our current president will ever have, and he’s dismissed under less than favorable conditions and no one bothers to listen to his side of the story.

And how about ignoring John McCain’s input on treatment of prisoners of war... or whatever they’re called by the Bush administration. It can’t be a war on terror if the prisoners aren’t prisoners of war!? AGGHHHHH!

Add to that former President Clinton’s discussion with Chris Wallace and a number of things seem so crystal clear, so diamond bullet to the forehead obvious, that I simply am at a loss to guess how anyone can still claim that Bush will ever be remembered for anything other than stealing the title from Warren Harding as the nation’s worst president.

One thing that this whole Bush 43 mess should clear up once and for all is the myth of a liberal bias by the news media. As if it weren’t obvious before, now every station has made Clinton out to be some crazed lunatic through careful editing of his passionate, but measured, appropriate and long overdue response to Chris Wallace’s loose play of the Fox party line. (don’t bother commenting on it if you haven’t watched the entire interview... catch it on YouTube before Fox files their copyright suits-they sure as hell don’t want anyone forming their own opinions on this thing before they’ve edited it) Ha! but they already DID edit it and Clinton still appears to have done nothing more than call Wallace for strutting a little too boldly with his radical right rhetoric. All Clinton did was ask Wallace why he didn’t ask the same questions of the Bush administration... the very same question I’ve been asking about this so-called liberal media since the Bush-Gore campaign started.

And now the Prez is up to his old tricks... tricks he continues to use because no one in the press calls him on them... because Chris Wallace doesn’t ask him questions like he asked Clinton. In refuting claims in a US intelligence report that the GWOT makes America less safe AND diverts resources from initiatives that would make the world a better place, the president says, “to say that mounting an offensive against them over there before they get us over here makes America less safe is a mistake.”

But the real mistake is in never defining who “them” are and never explaining where the “there” is. OK, the “there” is Iraq for now, but why?

That’s the president’s mistake. Our mistake, and the mistake of the media is in never forcing the Prez to answer that question. It’s gotten to the point where Jon Stewart and Bill Clinton on Fox are the only people on TV willing to actually get beyond the sound bites which don’t ever actually answer the question.

The media has gotten so bold in their pro-right stance that Chris Wallace nearly tripped himself with his strut in trying to put Clinton on the spot. I don’t know who Wallace thought he was interviewing... maybe some Democratic pawn like Allan Colmes? but the look on his face when Clinton actually answered the question was precious. The smirk that Clinton referred to quickly turned into one of those smiles that fails to hide the fear behind it. There was no easy way for Wallace to stop Clinton from answering the sandbag of a question Wallace dumped in his lap. When the answer didn’t turn out like Wallace had hoped, Wallace appeared to have wet himself. Wallace then tried to pretend he actually wanted to talk about Clinton’s Global Initiative but he’d already opened the can and the worms were a spillin’.

I thought it would be cool to see Clinton in the news again talking about something other than Monica, but did the news stations report anything at all that Wallace brought up? No, instead they all put together clips of the meanest looking faces Clinton made and ran that as though the big story was that he got upset... no handshake at the end, no mention of Clinton’s support for Bush’s goals, just sensationalist footage of an appropriate reaction dramatized for better ratings and right-wing favor.

So my question, and it’s the same one I’ve been asking since the Gore Bush campaigns, and the same one Clinton asked Wallace, is when will the rest of the world start asking the same questions of Bush that they’ve asked of his opponents and critics? When will following Teddy Roosevelt’s definition of patriotism become patriotic again instead of being twisted into being anti-American? When will the public and the press demand of Bush and his war the same level of scrutiny that Clinton faced about an affair that he had? When will Bush be called on the carpet for releasing prisoners to terrorist states, but keeping others in our custody without charges? When will someone force him to explain how ignoring the Geneva Convention demonstrates our commitment to humane treatment or how it endangers our soldiers? When will he actually be forced to make the connection between Cheney’s assertions that Iraq was the place to stop the 911 terrorists and his more recent statements denying such a connection was ever made? We’ve got the footage of it... the Daily Show plays it pretty frequently!! There's no spin necessary. Why is Comedy Central the only station where such blatant flip-floppery gets aired?

This isn’t about who had sex with who in an office, it’s about billions of US dollars and thousands of peoples’ lives. Why was Clinton hounded by congress for 6 months but Bush gets off with a couple shallow questions that he doesn’t even answer? It’s about squandered budgets and the complete loss of integrity as a nation. It’s about lies and flip-flopping on issues that really matter to national security (blowjobs in the oval office were only a matter of national security when the right needed something against the left).

Why is it when Bush is accused, the questions go away, but Clinton can still do no right? I really feel let down by the partisan blindness that has allowed Bush to squander so much of what was great about this country. The country is stronger than that. It will outlive him, but the damage has been done. When will someone start asking about it in a larger forum than a blog?

I know of a guy who swore he was leaving the country if Bush was elected. He now lives in Japan. I thought that was childish...irresponsible... overreacting... ok, maybe I was a little jealous of the freedom to do something like that. The guy is a Navy vet. An officer. He’s seen the world and knows that in a big picture sense, there’s no place better than here, but the level of frustration that led him to finally do it is finally settling in with me. Not to that extent, but I can understand it better now. What I now know is that, in spite of the right wing swill about how great the economy is doing, I make the same money that I have for the past 10 years but everything costs more. It's the same for everyone I know. I spent a year away from my family while the guy who sent me away never left under similar circumstances when his country asked him to do so. Not only do people like me bear the brunt of what Bush is doing to this country, but we’re making him and his buddies richer in the process. I’m disgusted with it and all the idiots who believe it’s what this nation is about or that it's somehow healthy for us. I hope the middle and lower classes can stay afloat until 2008. When we go, the country will go with us.

Oh, and while I’m at it, I followed a guy home from my National Guard weekend two weeks ago who was driving a 1 ton Chevy truck with stickers on the back that said something like: “Buy Domestic Dumbass” and “It really does make a difference, buy American, Asshole.”

I’m not kidding... it was about as intelligent as that. Public vulgarity and all. So I made a point of riding his bumper until our paths diverted. The whole time I was thinking about how Toyota, the maker of my truck, has reinvested in the US by building a new truck plant in Texas (my truck was built at their new plant in Indiana) while GM has invested in China... billions of dollars in China and closed down plants here. And it occurred to me that his stickers were right. It really does make a difference. If you want to support US autoworkers, you’d better buy a Honda or a Toyota or a Nissan, cuz they’re the only companies investing any money in the US auto industry these days. The newest GM plant is in China and while Daimler-Chrysler moved their Jeep production into a new plant in Toledo, it only employs about a tenth of what the old plant did in its best days. The robots that build the Jeeps there now came from...??? hmmm, any guesses?

OK, that’s out of my system for a while. I have to get to bed.