Author: Charley Reese

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer

It’s been said often that while everyone is entitled

to his own opinion, no one is entitled to his own facts. Today, we

hear misstatements all the time. Some of them are deliberate lies. Some of them are

just mistakes.

A House committee has just exposed the terrible fact that Army officials fabricated a story about the death of Pat Tillman and lied through their teeth. The Army knew from day one that Tillman died from so-called friendly fire, but it was five weeks before Army officials got around to telling the family.

In the meantime, the Army falsified a citation to give him a Silver Star at his memorial service, which was turned into a media event — conveniently timed, his family now believes, to distract attention from the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison.

Tillman did not die fighting the enemy. He died from American bullets. The girl from West Virginia, Jessica Lynch, hailed as a female Rambo, in fact was knocked unconscious in a vehicle wreck before she ever had a chance to fire a shot. She woke up in an Iraqi hospital. To her credit, as soon as she recovered from her serious injuries, she always told the truth. The story had been spread by a “government source” that she had fought heroically until the last bullet.

Lies and faulty memories (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified under oath 71 times that he could not recall or recollect) should not be tolerated even by this pathologically tolerant society. Mistakes can be forgiven, but deliberate lies are hostile acts. The liar is trying to subvert your mind and manipulate you into a position favorable to him. Calling a man a liar was once an act that would prompt a duel, but today people seem to shrug it off.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently misstated some information about Saddam Hussein in his attempt to defend the president’s position. He said, for example, that Saddam fired “at our planes every day in defiance of U.N. resolutions.” Not true. The no-fly zones were never authorized or approved by the Security Council. They were imposed by George H.W. Bush.

After the end of Gulf War I, the CIA grossly miscalculated the damage done to Saddam’s army. Consequently, the CIA urged the Shiites and the Kurds to rise up in rebellion and finish off Saddam’s government. When Saddam’s army began to slaughter both the Shiites and the Kurds, an embarrassed U.S. hurriedly imposed the no-fly zones.

Graham said Hussein sent checks to the families of suicide bombers in Palestine. This is a partial truth. Saddam had been sending checks to the families of all Palestinians killed in the struggle for independence before the suicide-bombing tactic was taken up. He was not subsidizing terror. He was subsidizing the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation.

The members of the House and Senate have great resources available to them. Not only do they have large staffs, but there are also the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the great Library of Congress, and the Congressional Budget Office. It seems they should have no excuse for not getting their facts straight.

The problem is that most of them, most of the time, concentrate on getting reelected. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a contemptuous description of such people was “officeholders.” Seems mild, but it was meant to separate the statesmen from the politicians with no agenda but their own political welfare.

It’s impossible to have a legitimate debate about anything if the participants lie, don’t know the basic facts of the issue, or deliberately distort their opponents’ position. Self-government is the most difficult of all the forms of government, and it requires honesty on everyone’s part to function.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Dreamstime.com

About 260 million Americans decided that they had better things to do than to watch the recent Academy Awards show. That’s a good sign. It doesn’t matter if what they had better to do actually wasn’t any better than watching the Oscars show. It’s the lack of interest that counts.

The Academy Awards is actually a trade show, and it used to be held in a nightclub. Newspapers used to ignore it or bury it on an inside page. After all, it makes no difference whatsoever in our lives who gets a trade-show award. It makes no difference what they wear. Come to think of it, it makes no difference what they say.

Another good sign is a poll conducted by CNN that asked the question “Are you interested in the Anna Nicole Smith story?” Much to the embarrassment of Larry King, who had planned yet another entire hour devoted to the tramp’s death, 80 percent of the poll respondents said, “No.”

“I don’t believe it,” King huffed and went right on with his show. Television, which is in large part owned by entertainment conglomerates, has long blamed its own fascination with celebrity trivia on the public. It’s the old rationale: “We are only giving the stupid public what they demand.” The truth is that the public has no say in the matter and, I suspect, a great deal better taste.

Could it be that this hysterical fascination with celebrities is finally beginning to fade? Well, not if the entertainment conglomerates can help it, but I suspect more and more Americans are losing interest in the self-destructive and vulgar behavior of talentless airheads — if people ever had any interest in it in the first place.

America naturally has always had silly people with vulgar interests. When Stonewall Jackson’s chaplain, R.L. Dabney, observed that the only likely outcome of universal education was to create a mass market for trash literature, he wasn’t far off the mark.

It’s interesting to note that The Federalist Papers, a collection of articles arguing in favor of ratification of the U.S. Constitution, were written for local newspapers at the time. In other words, the authors saw no difficulty in the then-literate public understanding them. Some schools today defend the practice of not requiring high school students to read them on the grounds that they are “too difficult.”

Having once helped my wife grade the essays of a group of college freshmen, I don’t doubt that they are too difficult for the modern mind. These college freshmen had somehow survived Head Start, kindergarten, and 12 years of public education without learning how to spell, punctuate, or write an intelligible sentence. Thank God, I never had to meet any of them, but I suspect their conversation was equally illiterate.

Many Americans seem to have lost sight of the purpose of education. It is not to get a diploma or a piece of sheepskin. The purpose is to educate citizens so that they can contribute to running our complex society. I don’t know if teachers still say this, but my first-grade teacher often reminded us that while she taught, we had to learn. And learning is hard work. Since kids have the same 24-hour day as adults, the hours devoted to learning have to be subtracted from hours spent on other activities — and vice versa.

If I had my way, I’d segregate students by sex, make them all wear uniforms, and shave the heads of the boys. Sex and competition in appearance are distractions. I’d put them in a monastic, drab setting so that the only forms of entertainment were their textbooks and their lectures.

Obviously, I wouldn’t last a day in public education, so we might as well realize that one day we will wake up and find that our high-tech society is being run by Chinese, Muslims, Arabs, and others who still value education.

Of course, we will still have our AnnaNicole Smith and Britney Spears types.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Don’t Get Fooled Again

Credibility is a precious trait, but once it is lost, it’s darned difficult to restore. That’s the main problem of the Bush administration. After the outrageously false claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the White House has no credibility. Hence, its new claims that the Iranian government is supplying weapons to the insurgents in Iraq are rightly met with great skepticism.

I notice that some of the television news outlets have already fallen into the administration’s trap. In this case, the administration wants us to accept as fact that the weapons are from Iran but argue about whether they were sent with the complicity of the government. This is an easy argument for the administration to win, since the Iranian government is tightly controlled.

But the claim that the weapons came from Iran is not an established fact. Look at the peculiar circumstances of the briefing in Baghdad on the subject. Cameras and recorders were barred. Officials conducting the briefing are to remain anonymous. No direct evidence that the weapons came from Iran was presented. Instead, reporters were told that this was “inferred from other intelligence.”

One question I have that hasn’t been answered is why a mortar shell allegedly from Iran would have markings written in English. The English writing is plain to see in the photographs.

As for the claim that the U.S. has traced the serial numbers back to Iran, how does the United States have access to Iranian serial numbers? And why, presumably, were the numbers written in the system used by the West instead of in Farsi? (Part of the great fun of traveling in the Middle East on an expense account is to come home and dump a large package of receipts — all written in Arabic — on the company accountant’s desk. The glyphs used in Iran are known as East Arabic-Indic.)

The administration also made much of the fact that some of these munitions were what is known as shaped charges, which are designed to penetrate heavy armor. It was implied that this was new on the battlefield. In fact, shaped charges have been around for decades. Since Saddam Hussein had the fourth-largest army in the world before our wars and sanctions, it’s dead certain that there were tens of thousands of shaped charges in the form of tank and artillery rounds in his arsenals.

Here we come back to another strategic blunder. There were so few U.S. soldiers in Iraq that we lacked the manpower to guard and dispose of all of the arsenals we found. Many of these were looted. There are two things Iraq has never been short of: weapons and people who know how to use them.

Another reason for suspicion is the timing. Claims that Iran was sending weapons to Iraq surfaced 16 months ago. The British stopped making the claims for lack of evidence. So why did the Bush administration choose this particular time to make the charge, and why did it do so in such a way as to ensure skepticism? The way to restore credibility is to lay all the evidence out in a transparent manner and to say truthfully what is known and what is not known.

The American people must be careful not to let this administration lead them into yet another war, this time with Iran, with the same kinds of deception it used to justify the Iraq war.

Perhaps the Iranians are supplying some weapons to Shiite militias, but the Bush administration has yet to prove it.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. He writes for Lew Rockwell Syndicate.

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Opinion Viewpoint

No Conservative Party

The Republican Party is not now, never was, and never will be a conservative party. It is what it has always been: a representative of the rich and of big business.

It might have become a conservative party in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was nominated as the presidential candidate. The Rockefeller wing of the party, to which the Bush family has always been a part, conducted the most vicious character assassination campaign against Goldwater in modern political history. The liberal Rockefellerites preferred a crook from Texas to a conservative.

The Rockefeller wing never lost control of the party again, co-opting Nixon, Ford, and even Ronald Reagan, who was forced to take George Bush as his vice president. The Bush people, within two years, ran off nearly all of the original Reagan supporters.

There was a famous quote by James Baker, the first Bush’s hatchet man. He was quoted as saying: “Who else are the conservatives going to vote for?”

Well, Mr. Baker discovered that the conservatives had three choices in 1992. They could stay at home, they could vote for Ross Perot, or they could vote for Bill Clinton. I hope he thought of that while he watched Clinton’s inauguration.

The hard truth is that if you are a genuine political conservative, you don’t have a party. The Democrats are practically socialists; the Republicans are closer to corporate fascists. Neither one offers conservatives anything but rhetoric.

But let’s define our terms, because it is my belief that not many Americans today are really conservative. Political conservatism has nothing to do with such social issues as abortion or gay marriage. Those are moral and philosophical issues that properly belong to the state legislatures.

A true conservative recognizes that the Constitution is a binding contract that should be interpreted literally and in the context of the time at which it was written and ratified. A Constitution that means anything a judge says it means means nothing. Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party were the first to violate it in a blatant manner. One of Lincoln’s cronies referred to it as “a worthless piece of parchment.”

A true conservative is fiscally responsible. Laying debt and interest payments on posterity is neither conservative nor liberal. It is just obscenely irresponsible.

A true conservative believes in noninterference in the affairs of other countries. Regime change is a policy favored by fascists or communists, but it has nothing to do with American conservatism. Americans have the right to govern only one country — their own. Americans have an obligation to defend only one country — their own.

A true conservative believes in a free economy and that beyond protecting the public from force and fraud, the government should not interfere in private affairs.

There are a lot of other things that define a genuine conservative, but suffice it to say that the Republican Party, with its imperialistic foreign policy, its disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, its fiscal irresponsibility and its erosion of personal liberty, is not by any stretch of the imagination a conservative party.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea for people to sit down with a pencil and paper and list what they actually believe. Clarifying their own political philosophy might make them less susceptible to the demagoguery and political propaganda that characterize our present age.

When the Founding Fathers laid the burden of self-government on us, they didn’t do any favors for the ignorant and lazy-minded. Tom Jefferson observed that those who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. He writes for the Lew Rockwell Syndicate.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP

Vice President Dick Cheney said that the insurgents

in Iraq have increased the level of attacks to influence the outcome of

the midterm U.S. congressional elections.

President George W. Bush has said that victory for the Democrats

would mean “the terrorists win and America loses.”

Now there’s a pair of the sleaziest, dumbest statements ever to dribble out of the mouths of two hack politicians. The statements brand these men as demagogues without a conscience and without a lot of brains.

First and foremost, it is Cheney and Bush who are the poster boys on the al-Qaeda recruiting Web sites. The Iraqi people want us out of Iraq, but not al-Qaeda. As far asal-Qaeda is concerned, we are right where it wants us — occupying two Muslim countries and killing Muslims every day. The Bush administration is a dream come true for al-Qaeda because it makes all of al-Qaeda’s propaganda believable.

Cheney can be forgiven, of course, for the tactical nonsense of his statement, since he strenuously avoided ever serving his country in uniform. You might recall that he said he had more important things to do during the Vietnam War, as if those 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam didn’t. What an insult to America’s dead heroes Cheney’s statement was.

Senator John Kerry’s lame “botched” joke to college students that if they don’t study hard they will end up in Iraq was likewise an insult. What both of these men inadvertently revealed was their elitist attitude toward the rest of us American peasants.

To suppose that a disparate group of insurgents, mainly interested in killing each other, would have the tactical communications and control to modulate the number of American casualties based on the latest polling data in the U.S. is silly and absurd. A change of majorities in a midterm election is one of those arcane aspects of our system that even most Americans don’t understand. Fat chance anybody in Iraq would, and, as I’ve already said, al-Qaeda is quite happy with the Bush-Cheney team. Furthermore, of course, Bush and Cheney are not on the ballot, so even if Democrats take control of one or both houses, the foreign policy will stay the same.

Besides, where else would al-Qaeda find anybody who could blunder as many times as this pair of bozos? Bush equates victory for Republicans with victory over terrorists. Where are your victories, Mr. President? You failed to prevent the attack on the World Trade Center. That was your FBI, your CIA, and your immigration service that allowed those terrorists to enter the country, live openly, enroll in flight schools, and pull off their attack. Where is your victory?

Then you failed to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The leaders of both organizations still live, and five years after your invasion, Americans are still fighting in Afghanistan. Where is your victory?

Next, you lied the American people into an invasion of Iraq, and that has been a cluster-blunder from the day you prematurely proclaimed “mission accomplished.” That public-relations fiasco was more than three years and 2,800 dead Americans ago. Where is your victory? Where is even a tiny success? Many Iraqis are now saying they would rather have Saddam Hussein back than live in the chaos your blundering has caused.

Looking for victory or success or even for a strategy in the Bush administration is like looking for orchids in the desert. The wonders of mass marketing have given us two empty suits. Their intellectual cupboard is bare. Now facing an aroused American public, they have nothing to offer except slander and fantasy, both of which are probably the creations of master manipulator Karl Rove.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. He writes for the Lew Rockwell Syndicate.

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News News Feature

Bonked on the Head

President Bush has been bonked on the head by so many facts that refute his rhetoric in recent days, he must feel like he’s been caught in a West Texas hailstorm. But don’t worry about him. He’s a hardheaded man. I haven’t seen a fact yet that can get past his hair.

Even as the president has been putting a dent in the aviation-fuel inventory by flying around to tell Americans that they are safer because of the war in Iraq, out comes a National Intelligence Estimate and a couple of generals who say, “No, you’re not.”

As a number of people pointed out, even before the Iraq invasion in 2003, sending the Army to Iraq was the biggest favor Bush could possibly have granted to old Osama bin Laden. Invading a Muslim country and killing and abusing its people has been a great recruiting tool. There are now more insurgents than there were two years ago. There are now more attacks than there were two years ago.

A much-annoyed president ordered parts of the NIE to be declassified (part of it had been leaked). Actually, the NIE should never be classified in the first place. The American people and Congress have a right to know about the work product of our $40 billion-a-year intelligence industry. It’s mostly bureaucratic heifer dust anyway.

The only legitimate reason to classify anything is to prevent an enemy from learning in advance of troop movements or to protect a valuable source. Neither applies to the NIE.

But the prez wanted it declassified to get to one of those if-then scenarios so well loved in the Washington skunk works. The NIE says that if the jihadists are defeated in Iraq, then they might become discouraged and lose popularity.

This, of course, is a pair of suppositions without any supporting evidence. If we have not defeated the jihadists in three years at a cost of a quarter of a trillion dollars, what evidence is there to support the belief that we can defeat them in the future? And if we did defeat them, what evidence is there to support the supposition that they would become discouraged?

The Palestinians have been struggling with Israel and losing for decades, and they haven’t given up. We fought the “insurgents” in Vietnam for 10 years, dropping more high explosives on them than we used in World War II, and they didn’t get discouraged and give up. As a matter of fact, we got discouraged and gave up.

Use your noodle. Who do you think is more likely to get discouraged and give up? The insurgents, who are at home and whose supply line stretches around the corner, or the U.S., which has 147,000 troops at the end of a 7,000-mile supply line? It costs us far more to buy milk and bottled water for our troops than it does to make improvised explosives, since the bunglers in the Pentagon left Iraq littered with thousands of artillery shells. There were not enough troops to police them all up — though, of course, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, insisted we had all the troops we needed.

Already a majority of Americans don’t believe the war is worth it, and as the dollars keep pouring out and the bodies keep coming back, that figure will surely grow. On the other hand, nobody gets to vote as to whether the insurgents should continue to fight.

As my fictional hero, Gus McCrae of Lonesome Dove, would say, Congress has always been too leaky a bucket to put much faith in. It was Congress that pulled the plug on our troops in Vietnam and on the South Vietnamese government. It will eventually do the same in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As much as the windbags in Washington aspire to be an empire, they just don’t have the staying power of the Roman legions. President Bush, however, will leave office convinced he never made a single mistake in eight years. I’ve known sociopaths who feel the same way.

Charley Reese writes for King Features Syndicate.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Dreamstime.com Photo

Congressional Republicans, the pundits say, are running against fascism, which, of course, doesn’t exist in today’s world. That’s okay. The same buffoons are waging a war against terrorism, which they can’t even define.

My fondest hope for this political season is that every Republican senator and representative up for reelection is defeated. It’s not that the Democrats are any great prize, but they are marginally more intellectually honest than the Republicans.

Most Democrats are leftists and socialists, and most of their rhetoric reflects that, as do the issues they support. Most Republicans, however, are big fat hypocrites who campaign as conservatives when in fact, judged by their actions and their votes, they are no more conservative than Karl Marx.

A true conservative would balance the budget, would vote against all foreign aid, and would practice an isolationist foreign policy. A true conservative would make sure corporations pay their fair share of taxes, would cut out all subsidies to big business, and would take whatever steps were necessary to stop the shipping of manufacturing jobs overseas and the import of vast numbers of illegal aliens, who are a source of cheap labor.

Most of these windbags in both parties have only two skills: conning voters and raising money from lobbyists. Most of them couldn’t manage a small law firm or even run a successful hot-dog stand. As for foreign affairs, most of them don’t have a clue as to what’s going on outside their own country club and favorite fancy restaurants. They are mental and moral midgets.

Most of them neither speak nor read a foreign language. If they have traveled overseas it’s usually on paid-for VIP tours arranged by special-interest groups. They don’t read, most of them. In fact, aside from raising their own already bloated pay, they spend the majority of their time raising money for their next campaign. Very few of them have ever served in the armed forces.

There are a handful of good men and women in both parties, but if in doubt, always vote against the incumbent. If you judge contemporary politicians by their record, it’s abysmal. Congressional hearings have become largely a farce, where panel members make speeches rather than ask intelligent questions. They usually don’t start work until Tuesday and are out of there by Thursday afternoon or Friday. They have more holidays than Santa Claus. Therefore, it’s no surprise that they never, ever get their work done on time.

We are a nation of nearly 300 million people. It’s shameful that these 535 nabobs are the best we can do to run the government. Actually, they don’t run it. Special interests and the corporate elite run it. Congress has allowed both the judiciary and the executive branch to usurp most of its authority. Can you imagine a member of the executive branch telling a senator or representative that he or she can’t see something because it’s classified? Congress and the executive branch are coequal. Under our constitution, the president is not a higher office than that of a senator or a representative.

And all of them, Americans must never forget, are just the temporary hired help. They are not our lords and masters. They are hired help who are supposed to work within the strict limits set by the Constitution. Under our system, sovereignty rests with the people, not with the government. It’s too bad Americans have allowed government to encroach on their freedoms to the point that, according to some polls, some Americans are actually afraid of their own government.

Ah, if only the American people would dump 200 or 300 incumbents. That would send a 50-megaton political shock wave to Washington that would rattle the Washington Monument. You’d see a sudden and big change in the attitude of the surviving politicians.

These politicians don’t respect you. They think you are dumb (after all, you keep voting for them). Well, if they won’t respect you, then the next best thing is for them to fear you, and the way to do that is to demonstrate that their jobs are in perpetual jeopardy. Election Day can be a revolution if the American people choose to make it one.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. He writes for the Lew Rockwell Syndicate.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: AP

The two most dangerous leaders in the world are George W. Bush and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. The lights seem to be out upstairs in both men. Neither man can see the world as it really exists.

I wish to stress that point. It’s not a question of having a difference of opinion. Rational people can easily disagree
on what is the right policy. When people see things that are not there, however, reasoning and debate are useless. It’s like a demented person who believes someone is hiding in the trunk of the car. No amount of explanation will convince that person otherwise.

For the president to compare Osama bin Laden, a crank with maybe a thousand followers scattered around the globe, to Hitler and Lenin is preposterous, absurd, and even laughable. To suggest bin Laden could take over Iraq is even more so. We have 140,000 troops, a navy, and an air force, and we can’t take over Iraq. How in the name of heaven could bin Laden do it with no soldiers at all? He is, after all, a Sunni with only a small following among Sunnis, and the majority in Iraq is Shiite.

Human beings are controlled by their minds. We can’t pick up a pencil or scratch our ear without the brain first instructing the body to do so. The mind is our means of survival, and we survive by correctly identifying reality. Often when we fail to correctly identify reality, it kills us, as with the person who believes he can beat the train through the crossing.

Not only is this more serious than a difference of opinion, it is more serious than lying. Rational people can lie. The used-car salesman doesn’t really believe that the pickup truck with a squirrel tail on the antenna and Styrofoam dice hanging from the rearview mirror was previously owned by a retired kindergarten teacher. He just hopes you’re stupid enough to believe it.

Politicians lie all the time because they want to plant a distorted view of reality in your mind, lest you discover the truth about how worthless they are. I used to say the only difference between Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter was that when Nixon lied, he knew he was lying. Carter seemed to believe his own lies.

Let’s not play around. Am I saying the president is crazy? No, not in the clinical sense. But, if he believes that bin Laden, Hitler, and Lenin are comparable, if he truly believes he is leading the free world in the great ideological war of the 21st century, then he has cut his anchor chain and drifted off into the Sea of Delusion.

Karl Menninger, one of the most sensible psychiatrists, defined sanity as staying in touch with reality, but he pointed out that all people depart from reality on occasion. We do it when we dream, we do it when we fantasize, we do it when we become enraged, and we do it when we rationalize.

The president, I believe, is desperate to be what he knows he is not: a great man. He has fantasized that he is a second Winston Churchill leading the forces of democracy in a great crusade against the forces of darkness. The only trouble is, there is nobody out there in the dark.

Sure, bin Laden and his small band of followers hate our guts. So what? They are half-a-drop in the bucket of 6 billion people on the earth. Bush has so distorted his view of reality, he does not seem to realize that most of our “allies” in the Middle East are dictators, and the people he calls terrorists — Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah — participated in free elections.

Even his so-called war on terror is phony. You can’t wage a war against a tactic. Most of the groups he labels as terrorists are local groups with local grievances who don’t think twice about us.

We should remember the warning of Ayn Rand:

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.”

Charley Reese writes for King Features Syndicate. Tim Sampson will return next week.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Dreamstime.com Photo

To get a better idea of what ails the world, let’s use our imagination to transport ourselves into outer space. From there, we can look down on Earth not as an American or as a European but as a disinterested alien.

We see a collection of sovereign nations — some large, some small, some powerful and some weak. We also see that some of the powerful nations do not respect the sovereignty of some of the others.

For example, by what right do the United States and the Europeans tell Iran it cannot enrich uranium? Other nations enrich uranium. Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is therefore granted the right to enrich uranium. Where does the United States get off telling the Iranians they can’t do it?

Oh, the U.S. claims Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. Well, Iran denies that, and there is no proof to the contrary. But suppose Iran does want to build nuclear weapons. Why shouldn’t it? We have nukes. The British, the French, the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, and the Israelis all have nuclear weapons. Why wouldn’t Iran want them? For that matter, what right does anyone have to tell the North Koreans they can’t have nukes and can’t even test their missiles? Everybody else tests their missiles.

What you see is that the United States and some of the European states are still trying to run the world to suit themselves, even though formal colonialism has long been dead. President Bush seems to think that he has the right to engineer regime change in any country he chooses. The U.S. record on regime change is poor. One reason so many Iranians hate us is because we engineered a regime change in the 1950s that threw out their elected nationalist leader and replaced him with the shah. A lot of Iranians were executed, tortured, and imprisoned before the Iranian people could finally get rid of him.

What right do we have to tell Syria and Iran that they can’t supply arms to Hezbollah? We supply arms to Israel and our other allies. In fact, we are probably the world’s largest arms peddler.

I don’t think the world will know peace until all the nations of the world agree to respect each other’s sovereignty. That means no sanctions, no externally arranged coups, no invasions, no refusals to talk. We would do much better if we talked to the Iranians and North Koreans and, while acknowledging their right to nuclear technology, offered incentives — including a security guarantee — not to develop it. You know, of course, that the U.S. refuses to talk to the Iranians and the North Koreans and has refused their requests for security guarantees. Countries don’t like to be “dissed” any more than individuals do.

I’ve been accused by some right-wingers of not liking America. As usual, they have it wrong. I love America, but I don’t like this present administration one bit. I think the Bushies exhibit a dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance, and they act in a reckless manner. They ignore what they should pay attention to and pay attention to what they should ignore.

Bush seems intent on pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. If he persists, he will likely unleash a regional war, the consequences of which will be catastrophic.

What have we gotten for our $300 billion, our 2,600 dead, our 8,000 seriously maimed in Bush’s ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Stability? Don’t make me laugh. Security? America is hated in more parts of the world today than at any time in its history. What has Bush done right?

Before you resurrect the slogan “Stay the course,” remember that one of the definitions of insanity is to keep doing the wrong thing. Let’s face it, folks: We elected ourselves a disaster. Bush didn’t understand the world when he was elected, he doesn’t now, and when he goes home to Crawford, Texas, he will still be puzzled by it all.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. He writes for King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Grounded

I don’t consider it an inconvenience for air travelers to pack their liquids in their checked suitcases. In fact, it would speed everything up if passengers were forbidden any carry-on luggage.

One reason it takes so long to get off one of those aluminum rolls with wings is because people drag on so much carry-on luggage and stuff it in the overhead compartments. Then when the plane lands, they block the aisle while they try to unstuff it. It would suit me fine if the only thing you could carry on would be whatever fits into a sandwich bag.

It might also simplify security procedures if everyone traveled nude. Yes, it might not be aesthetically pleasing or even hygienic, but it would simplify the jobs of the Transportation Security Administration employees. Besides, hygiene and a passenger plane are a contradiction in terms anyway.

My solution is that I just don’t travel by air unless it is absolutely unavoidable. Flying, which used to be a pleasant experience, has now become the equivalent of riding a Greyhound bus. Airlines pack you in like sardines, and, of course, just getting to the airport and on the plane is a time-eater and an ordeal. My idea of luxury travel would be to have a chauffeur, but absent that, I prefer to drive.

Yes, I know that, statistically, flying is alleged to be safer than driving, but statistics just count and measure. They don’t prove anything except that many people are gullible in the face of numbers. More people survive automobile accidents than airplane crashes, just as more people die on jogging tracks and in hospitals than in tobacco shops.

Besides, we’ve all seen the decline in the quality of working people. Whatever you hire somebody to do, you’re almost sure to have to call him back out to do it right. Why do people assume that aircraft mechanics, alone among the population, are highly skilled and super-conscientious? When I used to fly a lot, I always avoided airlines that were wrangling with their mechanics over wages. Happy mechanics are the key component of a safe airline.

Brother Dave Gardner used to tell a story about a businessman who had never flown before. He was forced to do so by circumstances, and sure enough, the plane hit heavy weather. Lightning flashed all around, and the plane bounced so much that stuff fell out of the overheads. The man, scared out of his wits, prayed out loud, “Lord, let me land safely and I’ll give you half of everything I have.”

The bad weather passed, and the plane landed safely. As the businessman was getting off, a preacher who had been sitting behind him tapped him on the shoulder. “Brother, I heard you say if you got down safely you’d give the Lord half of all you own, and I know you want to begin right now.”

“No,” the businessman replied. “I made a better deal with the Lord. I promised him that if I ever get on another plane, I’ll give him all of it.”

A friend of mine who used to be a pilot on a major airline before he got bored and started flying for drug dealers, told me that on a late-night flight to Los Angeles, the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer all fell asleep. Usually, one of them stayed awake. The plane, on automatic pilot, sailed right over L.A. and headed out over the Pacific Ocean. They had flown 50 miles before a flight controller in the tower screaming into the radio woke them up. They turned the plane around, and the passengers never knew what had happened.

The bottom line is that though I was born in the Industrial Age, I don’t have any faith in machines or in the people who build them and maintain them. Dumb machines were bad enough, but dumb machines built and maintained by a dumbed-down population are worse.

Since I can’t avoid either, I prefer to use a machine that operates on the ground rather than at 30,000 feet. At least when it breaks, I won’t.