DragonFlight

It’s hard to express just how disgusted I get when hearing this “loyalty to the President while he is still in office” crap! We’ve repeatedly been the recipients of this faulty logic as various former members of the Bush Administration have been unabashedly attacked for saying anything negative about their previous employer, the President and his staff – names such as Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Joseph Wilson, and now Scott McClellan come to mind. How clearly can it be stated -- The loyalty of any government employee is ultimately to the United States of America, not to any politicians or leaders, or to the offices they hold! Any government office is only as important as the person who holds it. Though the oath taken by the President is to the nation, and the oath of the military is to the President, the implication of the latter is that the President will be loyal to the nation. If he is not, that oath, and any loyalty to him is forfeit.

I’m surely hopeful this is self-explanatory, and that there is no need to iterate Common Sense Ethics 101. I’m appalled that there is an existing mindset that insists one be loyal to one’s boss, rather than to truth and integrity. One of the reasons I stopped watching any and all Mafia movies years ago is because I got terminally fed up with hearing about their dubious “loyalty and honor,” and it’s “just business.” My answer to this absurd nonsense is best articulated by Charles Dickens: "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" What a concept!

It’s amusing to listen to all the White House and right wing pundits in all their present perplexity. Why didn’t former Presidential Press Secretary McClellan speak out before? How dare he say anything while the President is still in office? Why is he speaking out now at this critical time before the 2008 national elections? This isn’t the Scott McClellan I knew. It’s all so puzzling. Yada yada yada. And, I find it quite intriguing that the whole right wing seems to be equally and collectively puzzled at the same time. Is this just a major coincidence?

Perhaps all these pundits weren’t aware of the Scott McClellan that grew a pair, the man who decided that truth and integrity trump loyalty to people who don’t deserve it. And maybe he believes the American people should be informed about the observations and perceptions of a Bush insider before the 2008 election while it might do some good, especially since John McCain is running as a Bush clone. Will McCain be hurt by all this? I certainly hope so! Also, it takes time to write a book; it is not something that is accomplished overnight.

Some claim McClellan didn’t know enough. Well, he sure was closer to this presidency and the goings on in the White House than Bob Woodward, whose unflattering take on the Bush Administration in “State of Denial: Bush at War Part III,” has been taken quite seriously. I’ve also heard other pundits exclaim that there is nothing new in McClellan’s revelations. What McClellan has accomplished, and which is extremely important, is to affirm all the other works that have exposed the corruption in this White House. His position as a White House insider and close Bush loyalist gives great import to what he has to say.

Though I didn’t care much for Scott McClellan while he was the Press Secretary, the reason was because he represented nothing more than a Bush mouthpiece. And though I didn’t believe he came off as particularly accomplished while holding that position, compared to Dana Perino he appears in retrospect quite brilliant. In her, we have a Press Secretary who didn’t even know about the Cuban Missile Crisis; this gives her a political IQ of about room temperature. One has to wonder how often she is being lied to by her bosses? Perhaps, to McClellan’s credit, he often appeared as less than certain because he was indeed conflicted. He was very loyal to a man he still says he admires, but at the same time he was beginning to smell the rot of fish emanating from the oval office. And this had to be greatly exacerbated by being the person called upon to sell that same rotten fish to the American public. Not an easy or comfortable sell, at least not for a man of conscience.

Perhaps McClellan is now exonerating himself. It takes great courage and integrity at this juncture to do what he has done. At the moment, he is a man without many friends. Those blind Bush Loyalists and serial liars still defending this miserable Administration certainly have no love for McClellan today, and there are still many who look upon him with distaste, remembering his performance as the Administrations lap dog/liaison person. I for one, am extremely grateful that he has come out and affirmed what so many of us have known for quite a few years now, and that which so many others continue to expose, namely that Bush et al lied about reasons for invading Iraq, and blithely disseminated misinformation and chronic misdirection to justify same.

In their defense, the White House gives us the latest rationale for invading a sovereign nation without real cause – the policy of “Imperialistic Democracy,” which McClellan labels, “a philosophy of coercive democracy.” There have been so many justifications/rationalizations for this war. First there was the Hussein has WMDs mantra. (Well of course he had chemical and biological agents, the ones we supplied him with in the 1980s.The nuclear threat along with the “mushroom cloud” turned out to be totally bogus.) Then we had the “Saddam Hussein is an evil man and has evil sons” argument.This was followed by Operation Iraqi Freedom. Bush actually had the temerity to publicly and embarrassingly state that it is “better to fight our enemies in Iraq than here.” I wonder just how many Iraqis appreciated that we were fighting in their nation, and allowing their nation to be destroyed, their citizens to be killed and maimed, so that we didn’t have to fight “our war” in our own country, all the while doing it in the name of “Iraqi freedom?” How’s that for farcical and outrageous?

It’s high time that people in this nation “get” that you can’t force democracy on any nation. Democracy only occurs when the people themselves are ready for it, and they themselves are the motivating force to make it happen.

Personally, I want to say thank you Mr. McClellan. I’m still angry that you allowed yourself to look the other way when you were Press Secretary, and that you waited so long to reveal the truth, or that it took you so long to perceive it. But, I’m so very grateful that you not only finally had your necessary epiphany in time to inform the people of this nation before the next national election, but that you have the extreme courage to go public with it. It’s never too late to find out “What Happened!”

Though Mr. McClellan will lose some friends, he has gained my admiration, as well as all others who are desperate for the truth at a time when that has become a dirty word. George Orwell so accurately stated, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Thank you Mr. McClellan for setting the proper example!

I can only hope that Colin Powell and several others who have participated firsthand in the worst presidency in our history will also grow a pair and follow Scott McClellan’s example, and while it can still make a difference! A citizen’s loyalty should be to the United States of America, not to the temporary occupants of government agencies… PERIOD!

Posted by Stephen at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Ap-pease vt ap-peased; ap-peasing 1 : to bring to a state of peace or quiet : CALM 2 : to cause to subside : ALLAY (~ his hunger) 3 PACIFY, CONCILIATE; esp : to buy off (an aggressor) by concessions usu. at the sacrifice of principles

Talk vb 1 : to deliver or express in speech : UTTER 2 : to make the subject of conversation or discourse : DISCUSS (~business) 3 : to influence, affect, or cause by talking (~ into agreeing) 4 : to use (a language) for conversing or communicating : SPEAK ~ vi 1 a : to express or exchange ideas by means of spoken words b : to convey information or communicate in any way (as with signs or sounds) 2 : to use speech : SPEAK…

Do talk and appeasement mean the same thing? Obviously not! In actuality, they are not even close in meaning, yet the political dialogue of the last few days has been saturated with some people attempting to equate them for us dummies. Gratefully, these few have been called on it, and with great umbrage!

Regardless of which side, or even extreme, of the political spectrum one identifies with, the continual lies, misrepresentations, sound bytes and "bull____," as Senator Joseph Biden so eloquently phrased it, employed in political campaigns, get quite exasperating and terminally weary. There is a nation to run, a citizenry to take care of, a world to improve, and there is no time, nor should there be the inclination, to continually listen to the self-serving rhetoric of political snake oil salesmen, whose main concern is neither of those aforementioned needs, so much as their own aggrandizement and accumulation of wealth and power.

It’s hard enough to discern truth when we have artificially labeled values such as liberalism and conservatism to deal with. The fact is, most of us lie somewhere between the extremes, leaving the true radicals and even nutcases to occupy those niches. I would imagine that most of us are not interested in allowing the extremists of either nature to actually run the nation in our name. Most of us still have more common sense than that.

President Bush last Thursday, while speaking before the Israeli Knesset, decided to drop an inappropriate political bomb by mentioning that there are “some” desirous of talking to terrorists in a fashion similar to the way Nazi appeasers dealt with Hitler before World War II:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

The White House was later quick to deny that Bush was in any way referring to Barack Obama in his remarks, but one really needs an IQ short of triple digits to believe that.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was quick on the uptake (some speculate that it was suspiciously “too quick”). In a remark to reporters he stated, “Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain.'’

When McCain was asked if he believed Senator Obama was an appeaser, he stated, “I think that Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terrorism, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, that wants to wipe Israel off the map, who denies the Holocaust. That’s what I think Senator Obama ought to explain to the American people.'’

The remarks by The President and Senator McCain were in themselves bad enough, mixing (purposely in my opinion) the meanings of, or implying a similarity between, the words talk and appease, but the icing on the cake was to come later on Chris Matthew’s TV program “Hardball” on May 15, 2008 during an interview with right wing talk radio host Kevin James. This exchange perfectly exemplifies the dangers of how political misinformation is so easily disseminated when such implicitly agreed upon misuse of words and concepts are allowed. It became quickly apparent that James neither knew the meaning of appeasement, nor had any clue exactly why Neville Chamberlain was guilty of it. And yet, this in no way deterred James from repeatedly and erroneously painting Barack Obama with the label of appeaser.

What is the real danger here? Just as we have experienced in recent elections, there are all too many voters in the United States willing and able to pick up on sound bytes to use as political campaign mantras, even when they are clueless as to the factual content of that information. I praise Chris Matthews for becoming exasperated enough to repeatedly nail Kevin James to the wall for his misstatements and accusations towards Senator Obama. It’s about time that more in the media started taking their job seriously, and not allowing faux pundits to simply blather on with impunity. As Matthews stated, referring to James’ remarks:

“You don’t know what you’re talking about…And the problem is that you don’t understand that there is a difference between talking to the enemy and appeasing. What Neville Chamberlain did wrong, most people would say, is not talking to Hitler, but giving him half of Czechoslovakia in `38. That’s what he did wrong, not talking to someone… Appeasement is giving away things to the enemy… This is pathetic. He doesn’t even know what Chamberlain did at Munich. He’s as bad as the White House Press Secretary that doesn’t even know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was. We are talking about people with blank slates in terms of history.”

Barack Obama later challenged both the President and Senator McCain to debate foreign policy issues, something I await with great anticipation. McCain has had it quite easy up till now, as the Flip Flop King and overall Panderer. When Obama is officially the Democrat nominee we will finally see how McCain fares when challenged face to face by someone smarter, more informed and more emotionally mature.

In the meantime, let’s demand that words be used as they are defined, and in the proper context. America faces the consequences of beginning the 21st Century on the wrong foot, compliments of the Bush Mob, and can ill afford any continuance of the same nonsense. Ultimately, you and I will determine America’s ability to cope with the challenges of this century; we are after all, the electorate…still…I think?!?

Posted by Stephen at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

In the wake of the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic primaries, it becomes quite apparent that barring any totally unforeseen circumstances, Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee. I see no way Hillary Clinton can get the nomination unless the super delegates decide to totally ignore the will of the people in the primary states, which is quite unlikely.

Finally the time rapidly approaches to address the real question, namely, is America ready, willing, and able to vote for a Black male as President of the United States? An election process beginning as the search to pick the most qualified candidate for president must inevitably end by testing the climate of racism in America. Ironically, the Democratic theme during the primaries as well as the upcoming national elections will be the necessity of change, an obvious approach after seven long and seriously flawed years of the Bush Administration and an enabling Congress. Any Democratic candidate would be running on a platform of change. Ironically, Barack Obama represents a whole lot more than mere political change. He is a Black man in a nation that historically and presently continues to be a hot bed of racism and discrimination. America, ready or not, has reached a critical nexus point in its history, and racism can no longer remain on the back burner.

The nation is in dire need of change, something even Republicans not in terminal denial will admit. America is literally stuck in a resource-vamped quagmire in Iraq and the Middle East, which has resulted in a huge negative shift in world opinion toward the United States. The nation has been rocked by numerous political, governmental, moral, ethical and financial scandals. There is an economic crisis that many experts fear is only going to get worse, sooner rather than later. The value of the dollar steadily drops as gasoline prices and inflation skyrocket, and the real victims are everyone in America not independently wealthy, namely, everyone else. Is there a huge need for change? Do kangaroos hop?

The political approach and ideals of Barack Obama do appear to represent the needed change, but does he perhaps epitomize a lot more change than many Americans are ready for? He himself IS change, the first Black person to come within reach of being president, a reality that directly touches the heart of prejudice and discrimination in America. Though many are desperately desirous of political change, are they also willing to transcend deeply ingrained prejudices and attitudes in order to put an African-American in the White House in order to accomplish that change?

With the end of the Democratic primary now in sight, and the steady approach of the national election, the issue of electability of an African-American candidate must now be addressed. Unquestionably, many Hillary Clinton supporters are longtime loyal Clinton fans, along with many women anxious to see the first woman elected president. No doubt many of these people are also convinced that she would make a good president, yet how many are voting for her because they will not vote for an African-American? In a national election, how many will vote for John McCain because they are incapable of voting for a Black man?

These questions can no longer be ignored. A lot of Americans are ready to fire the Republicans, and others are tired of the old political ploys of the Clintons, and many are willing and able to vote for Barack Obama. How many, however, will be motivated more by issues of race than politics? The real question as we steadily approach the national election is how many will not vote for a Black man, period? We may not want to look at this aspect of the present election cycle, and may inwardly cringe at doing so, but there is ultimately no way to avoid it.

Many desperately believing the Democrats must take the White House in 2008, are asking themselves if Barack Obama can be elected in white America. Many who dislike the present day Republican party and John McCain may be considering voting Republican, simply because their racism trumps their political wisdom. Will Barack Obama be able to convince those still challenged by racial issues that his qualifications, and the present needs of the nation trump their prejudice?

Will the nation finally move on and become a place where, who a person is, determined by their thoughts and actions, is more important than something as arbitrary as the color of their skin, or any other characteristic that is beyond their control?

This will test the mettle of America, as a people and a nation. Where do you stand?

Posted by Stephen at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)