DragonFlight

I’m all in favor of family values -- things like home, marriage, family. They sound like a great idea. Lately however, I’m wondering if I’ve had it all wrong; or is it someone else that has it wrong?

For years we have been told, by Republicans, they represent “the party of family values.” No kidding! Karl Rove even insisted Republicans campaign on moral and religious issues. After all, they have to run against the evil, hedonistic and Godless “liberals.” It would appear however, that is coming back to haunt them, and big time! Suddenly, here we are again, drawn into the midst of just one more Republican sex scandal, perhaps the one that will “break the camels back,” and there appears to be no end in sight.

Today, it is Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), arrested in June for allegedly soliciting a plainclothes police officer, who was at the time investigating complaints of lewd behavior in a public restroom at a Minnesota airport. Craig later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct, but now claims it was all a “misunderstanding.” Imagine pleading guilty in such a situation, especially as a US Senator, and one who has been suspected of such behavior in the past. The only likely misunderstanding was that he didn’t believe it would later become public.

Even as I type, listening to the TV in the background, I hear Senator Craig telling his side of the story. Some of the clips I’m catching in the background include “I did nothing wrong…In June I overreacted and made a wrong decision…I chose to plead guilty to a lesser charge in hopes of making it go away…I am not gay, I never have been gay…I regret the decision to plead guilty…Furthermore I should have not kept this arrest from my friends. I should have told my family and my friends about it,” and, of course, he believes he should have spoken to an attorney.

I’d imagine an innocent person in such a situation would have disclosed at the time “I didn’t do anything wrong.” I don't think that person, knowing themself to be innocent, would later state, I should have gotten a lawyer. And I sincerely doubt they would have still been "overreacting" almost a month after the arrest, as they went to court, plead guilty to a lesser charge while still having not gotten any advice from their family or friends. Would you plead guilty if you really didn’t mean it? This sounds like a major Doooh to me!

Craig says he has not yet decided whether or not he will run again for office, apparently waiting to see how the dust will settle. I predict, considering the evidence already released, coupled with such a puzzling public denial, he will not even finish his latest term, nonetheless run for another. Hardball’s Chris Matthews said Craig stands to expose himself as a “deviate and world class hypocrite.” Perhaps Matthews is referring to the fact that Craig has voted in Congress against gay marriage, against gays and lesbians in the military, and against abortion, and seems himself to hold his own behavior to a different standard.

But I’m digressing from the main point, which is the extraordinarily long and recent string of such scandals. Unfortunately, this is just the last known incident involving our “family value” leaders.

Just recently, Senator David Vitter (R-LA), a regional chairman for Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign was linked with the “DC Madam’s” escort service. Vitter later said, "This was a very serious sin in my past for which I am, of course, completely responsible. Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and from my wife in confession and marriage counseling."

This wasn’t the first setback to Giuliani’s campaign. A month earlier, South Carolina Treasurer Thomas Ravenel, the state chairman for his campaign, had been indicted on federal cocaine charges.

Florida State Representative Bob Allen was arrested for allegedly offering sex for money to an undercover police officer in a Titusville city park. Allen quickly resigned as one of Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) top political strategists.

On September 21, 2006, Congressman Mark Foley, Chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, resigned because he was accused of sending sexually explicit messages to minors. Soon thereafter in a statement he said, “I am deeply sorry and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent.”

Later in 2006, and according to CNN, “The Rev. Ted Haggard agreed Saturday to resign as leader of the megachurch he started in his basement more than 20 years ago after its independent investigative board said he was guilty of "sexually immoral conduct." After a few weeks of intensive therapy, Haggard reassured us he is “completely heterosexual.” Sound familiar?

We all recall the Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-NM) scandal that rocked the nation in 2005. Besides receiving huge sums of money for political favors, it was also alleged that he had been trading favors for sex. Besides being sentenced to prison, Cunningham has also been sentenced to receiving his $40,000 Congressional pension at the taxpayer’s expense. Go figure!

And of course, the story goes well beyond sex and sexuality, it strikes at the very center of the core issue, which is, of course, power and corruption.

Michael Kinsley posted an interesting article on December 2005 entitled “Corrupt Intentions: What Cunningham’s Misdeeds Illustrate About Conservative Washington. In it he states, “By the 20th anniversary of their arrival, when an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court ruling gave them complete control of the government at last, the conservatives had lost any stomach for tearing down the government. George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was more like an apology than an ideology. Meanwhile Tom DeLay—the real boss in Congress—openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress. This warning would be meaningless, of course, unless the opposite was also true: If you hire Republican lobbyists, you and they will have influence over Congress. And darned if DeLay didn't turn out to be exactly right about this!”

I love that reference to Bush and “compassionate conservatism.”

This article in it’s entirety can be viewed at http://www.slate.com/id/2131370/
It comes as no shock to me there is a large iceberg out there with sexual indiscretion occupying only the tip. This is a story as old as human history.

What is really puzzling, is how and why so many Americans continue to allow those running for, and holding office in this nation, to talk the walk, without requiring them to walk that talk. How many scandals will it take, before some people realize they are being lied to, and not just once, but over and over? Men are human; I don’t expect them to be otherwise. As long as they continue to be guided by their lower brain, sex and scandals will remain linked. This doesn’t concern me; I understand it, and don’t judge the behavior to be all that unusual, considering the source. What I do take exception with is the chronic and habitual predilection for hypocrisy in our leaders and those that aspire to leadership!

I resent people pretending to be moral by the standards of our Judeo-Christian ethic in order to get the support of others, all the while not holding themselves to those standards. I further resent these people creating the illusion they represent some moral high ground, so they can bash their opponents in order to beat them up at election time. And, I don’t like that they hide behind dishonest and phony labels such as “the moral majority” and "the party of family values” in order to dupe their constituents, and attack all that disagree with them.

I’m starting to deeply resent those Americans who are not catching on to this dog and pony show, which results in handing our government over to those more concerned with self-gain than the national welfare. If people are going to call themselves “patriotic” and “good Americans” and truly wish to preserve this nation and the values fostered by our Founding Fathers, it’s time they starting putting the needs of the nation before their allegiance to party. It is that blind allegiance that allows people to believe any kind of outrageous statements made about those who are “not us,” while trusting in the blatant lies and hypocrisies of those claiming to be like them, yet who are only really interested in power, power and more power!

I have news for a few. Liberal does not mean “uncaring and Godless,” and conservative does not mean "moral and righteous!” It’s time to judge our leaders, as well as “all” people, on who and what they are, and not the words that flow from their mouths as smoothy as hissing from a snake. It’s the attachment to values by rote, rather than true conviction that allows people to be swayed by the Snake Oil salesmen disguised as paragons of virtue and morality. Words are cheap. A man is defined by his actions, not what comes out of his mouth.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
~ Voltaire

Posted by Stephen at 07:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Dick Cheney, a man purported by Bob Woodward in “State of Denial” to have told Don Rumsfeld, soon after he took the job as Secretary of Defense under George Bush to “get it right this time,” apparently was also saying “do as I say, not as I do.” You have to sometimes wonder why, in this age of video recording, when just about everything a public official says at one time might come back to haunt him at another, that fact is so often ignored.

The latest YouTube rage making the rounds on the Internet is something you just "ain’t gonna believe." We have Dick Cheney in a 1994 interview giving very persuasive reasons why we couldn’t and shouldn’t have gone into Baghdad and toppled the central government in Iraq during the first Gulf War -- reasons that were just as valid in 2003 as they were back then, and still are. To see and listen to the actual video go to Cheney interview . I'm going to post the short interview in it’s entirety right here as well, because it's so interesting to see in print, and I couldn’t find it printed anywhere else.

Interviewer: “Do you think that US, or UN forces should have moved into Baghdad?”

Cheney: “No.”

Interviewer: “Why?”

Cheney: “Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anyone else with us. It would have been a US occupation of Iraq. Remember the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait, were willing to invade Iraq. Uh, once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, than what are you going to put in its place?

That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Uh, part of it uh, the Syrians would like to have to the west, uh, part of it, eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim – fought over it for eight years.

In the north you've got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Uh, everyone was impressed with the fact that, uh, we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But For the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn’t a cheap war .

And the question for the President in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was, uh, not very many, and I think we got it right.”

In all fairness to Mr. Cheney he does state on December 22, 2003, “In a sense, 9/11 changed everything for us. 9/11 forced us to think in new ways about threats to the United States, about our vulnerabilities, about who our enemies were, about what kind of military strategy we needed in order to defend ourselves…”

We can all agree 9/11 did change many things, yet there are certain things it did not change. It did not alter the consequences of actually invading and occupying Iraq. It was still going to be a quagmire, especially since Cheney and Rumsfeld did not seem to heed Cheney’s 1994 assessment. Instead,they were rather cavalier, and threw all caution to the wind. Believing we would “be treated as liberators,” they acted more like Don Quixote assaulting windmills than professionals hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.

Gone apparently was the previous concern about American casualties (what’s the body count now?). Gone was the concern that it was a volatile part of the world, and gone was serious consideration of the consequences of taking down the central government in Iraq, with the possibility of “seeing pieces of Iraq fly off.”

In response to Stephen F. Hayes, author of "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President," attempting to use the “everything changed after 9/11” argument on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart eloquently stated “But, the Space-Time Continuum hadn’t altered.” In other words, nothing concerning the consequences of invading Iraq and taking out the central government had altered in the least.

I don’t disagree Saddam Hussein was a dangerous man, and a potential threat at some point; he certainly had several axes to grind, and oil revenues to help. Perhaps, even though 9/11 had nothing to do with Iraq, or Hussein, and no connection between Hussein and Al-Qaeda was actually substantiated whatsoever (although this was another point on which we catch Cheney on video frequently, and on both sides of that question), the need to focus more on people like Hussein did increase.

If it had been "truly" decided that Hussein had to be toppled, it should have been done covertly. If the CIA couldn’t take it on, perhaps the Mossad would have. The old argument you don’t specifically go after leaders of other nations because of the threat of setting dangerous precedent, doesn’t hold water in this instance. How many times have we heard President Bush exclaim “we’d rather fight our enemies over there (in Iraq), than to fight them here (in the US).

Being intent on inviting the slaughter of thousands of Iraqis because of our presence in their nation, as opposed to catalyzing a possible attack against himself simply by going after their leader, seems rather brash. How in good conscience can any person who is willing to make targets of tens of thousands, not be willing to put himself at risk instead? It’s sure a hell of a double standard! I don’t condone going after leaders (or nations), but perhaps if more of them challenged each other instead of using us as pawns, it might put an end to war?

As citizens of a nation, it behooves us to scrutinize this “very” closely. Do our leaders really believe it’s better to sacrifice us (as troops), and the citizens of other natons, rather than confront any risk themselves? I seem to recall a time historically when the leaders of nations led their troops into battle, and at the head of their armies; now it seems they just start the wars, and call the shots safely from the very distant sidelines, not even behind the lines! Stupid us!!! I guess David Hannum (no it wasn’t actually P. T. Barnum) was correct -- “there is a sucker born every minute,” but "who’d a thunk" so many of us were among them?

So, here we are stuck in that quagmire anyway, and the present American body count is over 3,700, with probably ten times that wounded (many seriously), and no end in sight. If only the 2003 Dick Cheney had trusted the 1994 Dick Cheney!

Karl Rove convinced many that John Kerry was a flip-flopper. Imagine if Rove had been on the other side and Cheney had been the target!

Posted by Stephen at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

A nation with a universal health care program provides complete medical care for every citizen in that nation, regardless of their financial status, present or past health history or pre-existing conditions. Such coverage denies no one, and it limits no health treatments or procedures for any reason, providing all that is necessary to help a patient. Drugs are supplied at no cost, or extremely low cost. All the major industrialized nations have universal health care, except one, in fact the richest nation in the world, namely the United States of America.

The reason the USA does not provide universal health care is simple. During the Nixon administration it was decided to treat health care as a business, not as a service. Why? As we all know, businesses exist for the bottom line, namely profit. The formula was simple – More health care provides less profit; less health care creates more profit. Thus, begun the practice of denying health care rather than supplying it; and the HMOs, and treatment denial by non-medically trained bureaucrats was born – very good for business, very bad for the citizens. I guess they figured no one would ever notice.

Imagine a health care provider forced to make medical decisions based on how much a particular treatment will cost them to provide, rather than what is necessary for the well being of the patient. If you can imagine that, you understand why health care should not be a business, and profit should not be any part of the picture.

How might this affect you? If you are one of the lucky Americans with some form of health coverage, and not one of the unlucky 40-50 million without it, the scenario might play out like this. Your doctor sees you in his office and reaches some conclusions about your present health condition, and how it might be best treated. He leaves you in the examination room, and comes back a bit later. Perhaps he lays out a course of treatment which includes some sophisticated testing, or drug therapy, or maybe a certain procedure or even surgery is suggested. All seems well, and just might be.

On the other hand, he might come back, and suggest some alternatives which are less extensive, or involve more routine testing or just some low level pharmaceutical treatment along with a “let’s wait and see what happens” attitude. And, doctors just love to give pills for pain rather than make realistic attempts at solving the problem causing it; masking symptoms is so much easier and cheaper.

It’s quite likely that when the doctor left you alone in that treatment room he/she or someone in that office went to call your health insurance provider to find out if they would authorize such and such a treatment. Chances are also good they spoke with a person with no real feel for you personally, your history or medical condition. But, chances are GREAT, that whatever decision is reached just might be based on what that insurance company feels they may or not want to spend on treating you, rather than what you need. You might never know if the doctor wanted to do one thing, but was forced to do much less because you were not approved for a more expensive procedure.

"But," you say, “my policy expressly covers this or that treatment.” Perhaps you thought it does, but have you read all the fine print in your policy? Are there any exclusions for some pre-existing condition, or did you perhaps forget to complete your medical history perfectly, or is there a caveat allowing the insurance company to declare something an experimental treatment, and deny care because of that, even if it has been successfully tried on many others?

These are just a few examples of many ways in which a health provider, a company to which you have been faithfully paying your dues for however long, might legally weasel out of their agreement with you. I’m not going to go into the huge number of similar examples. Look into that yourself. But know this. Your health provider is a business, and as such they are more interested in their own bottom line than your welfare.

When you suggest universal health care to all too many, their faces contort with horror, they might turn red, and they choke out something about the terrors of “socialized medicine,” as if there could be nothing worse on the planet than anything with a label of socialism attached to it. Even the horrors of death, war, pestilence and famine pale along side the idea of the government providing a service, paid for by taxes, and given freely to the populace. God forbid, this would also mean those previously mentioned 40-50 million would also be taken care of. Why do they deserve to be healthy? They can’t afford it?

Of course, while so many decry the evils of socialism, they might be forgetting about some very successful government run programs that do already exist in the USA, such as universal police and fire protection, universal access to lending libraries, postal service (if you never purchase a stamp you will still have mail delivered to you) medicare (with some problems, but basically helping millions quite successfully), and oh yes, lest I forget, public education for all.

Some insist the government can’t run anything properly, yet they do quite well in the areas mentioned above, considering the size and complexity of a nation of over 300 million people. And, considering the present for-profit and broken state of the health care industry in the USA, for those WITH insurance, I can’t imagine how it could be run much worse, by any entity.

Others want everything run by private enterprise. Imagine the Fire and Police departments checking your financial status and coverage before answering your 911 call.

As for higher taxes to pay for universal health care. So what? Considering that one uncovered or denied health crisis can set you and your family back for the rest of your lives, it’s not much of a sacrifice. And, it’s not like those paying for health insurance already, aren’t putting out a large sum of money each and every month. Americans need to stop whining about taxes for a change and be more concerned about just what that money is buying for them. I personally would prefer to have total health care benefits than a bridge to nowhere in Alaska, or a neverending war that is ravishing the national coffers.

Please really think about it. All-inclusive health care should be an entitlement for "every" citizen of the United States, and not run as a business more concerned with making money for shareholders, administrators and "public officials" than providing adequate care for those in need of it - Amen!

Posted by Stephen at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)