Author: Molly Ivins

I hate to raise such an ugly possibility, but have you considered lunacy as an explanation? Craziness would make a certain amount of sense. I mean, you announce you are going to militarize the Mexican border, but you assure the president of Mexico you are not militarizing the border. You announce you are sending the National Guard, but then you assure everyone it’s not very many soldiers and just for a little while.

Militarizing the border is a terrible idea. Do we have a State Department? Are they sentient? How much do you want to infuriate Mexico when it’s sitting on quite a bit of oil? Bush knows what the most likely outcome of this move will be. He was governor during the political firestorm that ensued when a Marine taking part in anti-drug patrols on the border shot and killed Esequiel Hernandez, an innocent goat-herder from Redford, Texas. That’s the definition of crazy — repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

I suppose politics could explain it, too. It’s quite possible that lunacy and politics are closely related. It’s still damned hard cheese for the Guard, though. The Guard is heavily deployed in Iraq, currently providing 20 percent of those serving there. Some soldiers are sent back for multiple tours. Lieutenant General James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, said the Reserve is rapidly degenerating into “a broken force” and is “in grave danger of being unable to meet other operational requirements.” Happy hurricane season to you, too. The Guard is also short on equipment and falling short on recruiting goals.

But right-wingers are unhappy with Bush right now, and this is a strong, red-meat gesture that will make them happy, even if it does nothing to shut down the border. You want to shut down illegal immigration? You want to use the military as po lice? Make it illegal to hire undocumented workers and put the National Guard into enforcing that. Then rewrite NAFTA and invest in Mexico.

Meanwhile, further proof that the Republicans are cuckoo comes to us with the passage of another $70 billion tax cut for the rich. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the average middle-income household will get a $20 tax cut, while those making more than $1 million a year will get nearly $42,000.

Both President Bush and Veep Cheney are still going around claiming if you cut taxes, your tax revenues increase. No, they don’t. Now we’re just in Whackoville. Their own economists tell them it’s not true, but they go about claiming it is with the same desperate tenacity they clung to false tales of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How pathetic.

Speaking of lunacy, the saddest report from Iraq is that American soldiers showing signs of psychological distress and depression are being kept on active duty, increasing the risk of suicide. The Hartford Courant reports that even soldiers who have already been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome are kept on duty. This has led to an increase in the numbers of suicides — 22 soldiers in 2005. And as I have reported before, the military is unprepared to deal with the flood of head cases coming back from Iraq. How many ways can we mistreat our own soldiers, while the right makes this elaborate show of devotion to “the troops”?

The consistent pattern that runs through all these problems is the failure to distinguish fantasy from reality. Mexican immigrants keep crossing the border because they can get jobs here — and most of those jobs are provided by companies whose CEOs support Bush. That’s where he can have an impact on the problem, should he choose to do so.

The $70 billion tax cut is part of a continuing right-wing fantasy going back to the Laffer Curve. Of course, clinging to demonstrably false economic precepts is understandable when you benefit from them, but at some point reality does intervene.

As for the Iraq fantasy and those who pushed it through lies, disinformation, and bending intelligence — isn’t there a law against that?

In general, I’m against kicking ’em when they’re down … unless really awful people are involved. I figured Tom DeLay is so awful plenty of people would gang up on him and I could pass.

Imagine my surprise when the toughest question one famous TV tough guy could come up with was “Do you think you invested too much in the Republican Party?” Another inquired whether or not DeLay could think of any mistakes he’d made. I waited with bated breath for the immortal “I wish I could learn not to work so hard,” but no, he couldn’t think of a single one.

Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay came to power promising to restore democracy to the House of Representatives, supposedly suffering from then-Speaker Jim Wright’s tyrannical regime. Even after the Republicans drove Wright from office, however, bipartisanship was out of the question for DeLay. In the budget fight and government shutdown of 1995, DeLay rejected compromise and famously said, “It’s time for all-out war.”

I never minded DeLay being a tough guy. It was his syrupy claims to carry the banner for Christianity that I found offensive as he frog-marched the House toward being a cash-operated special-interest machine. The idea of putting pressure on lobbyists to give only to Republicans, pressuring lobbying firms into hiring only Republicans, and then letting lobbyists sit at the table during committee meetings where legislation was written screamed overt corruption.

Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich turned the House of Representatives — “the people’s House” — into a pay-for-play machine for corporations (put in enough money, get your special tax exemption, get your earmarked government contract, get your trade legislation and your environmental exemption, get rid of safety regulation).

I’d like to address the idea that what DeLay did was only “payback” for the alleged sins of Jim Wright and then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho: It’s a great way to rationalize misbehavior, even if the misbehavior is as disproportionate as Wright’s ethical peccadillo is when compared to the open corruption of DeLay’s “K Street Project,” selling Congress to the lobbyists.

To get a real sense of DeLay’s cynicism and recklessness, forget the stuff the press loves, like the free golfing trip to St. Andrew’s. Instead, take note of the following example:

The Northern Marianas Islands are a U.S. protectorate (so it can label goods “Made in the USA”) in the Pacific used as a sort of labor gulag, with workers imported from China and elsewhere being paid pitiful wages. Jack Abramoff had a contract with the government of the Marianas to lobby against stopping the flow of immigrant labor to the islands and to prevent a minimum-wage bill from getting to the floor of the House.

The islands are home to classic sweatshops. In 1996 and 1997, Abramoff billed the Marianas for 187 contacts with DeLay’s office, including 16 meetings with DeLay. In December 1997, DeLay, his wife, and their daughter went on an Abramoff-arranged jaunt to the Marianas. DeLay brunched with the Marianas’ largest private employer, textile magnate Willie Tan.

Tan had to settle a U.S. Labor Department lawsuit alleging workplace violations. According to the book The Hammer by Lou Dubose and Jan Reid, among the violations common on the islands is the forbidding of women to work when they are pregnant, which led to a high abortion rate.

DeLay didn’t have time to look into such allegations since he was busy playing golf and attending a dinner in his honor sponsored by Tan’s company. According to The Washington Post, it was at this dinner that DeLay called Abramoff “one of my closest and dearest friends.” He also reminded those present of his promise that no minimum-wage or immigration legislation affecting the Marianas would be passed.

“Stand firm,” he added. “Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator.” He then went with Tan to see a cockfight.

This is why DeLay’s professions of Christianity make me sick. He was there. He could have talked to the workers. Instead, he chose to walk with the powerful and do real harm to the very people Jesus mandated we especially care for.

With the Bush administration, it’s important to have in mind the old carnival con game: Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it.

Among the many curious aspects of the administration’s approval of the Dubai Ports World takeover of operations at six major ports (and as many as 21) is this exemption from normally routine restrictions: The agreement does not require DP World to keep copies of its business records on U.S. soil, which would place them within the jurisdiction of American courts. Nor does it require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government. So what’s that about?

It makes DP World harder to sue and less subject to American regulation. The lovely thing about the ports deal causing such a commotion is that it allows us to bring attention to this fairly obscure provision, which is, in fact, part of a wave of similar special exemptions that’s starting to turn into a flood.

Here’s an example of how it works: Just before Christmas last year, in a spectacular example of a straight power play, Senate majority leader Bill Frist and House speaker Dennis Hastert pulled off a backroom legislative deal to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits. The language was slipped into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of the House-Senate conference committee meeting on the bill.

Lots of players were outraged at the short-circuiting of the legislative process. “It is a travesty,” said Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. Representative David Obey, who had specifically checked to make sure the language was not included, was enraged, calling Frist and Hastert “a couple of musclemen in Congress who think they have the right to tell everybody else that they have to do their bidding.” Representative Dan Burton said succinctly, “It sucks.”

The way this was done was outrageous, but so is what it did. Frist has received over $270,000 in contributions from the drug industry and has long advocated liability protection for vaccine makers. The provision allows the secretary of health and human services to issue a declaration of a public health emergency, or threat of an emergency, or declaration of “credible risk” of an emergency in the future, thereby protecting the industry against lawsuits involving the manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration, or use of vaccines or other drugs.

In order to prove injury from a drug, a person would have to prove “willful misconduct,” not just actual harm.

But this putrid performance is part of a much larger pattern to protect corporations from the consequences of the damage they cause. The Los Angeles Times reports:

“The highway safety agency … is backing auto industry efforts to stop California and other states from regulating tailpipe emissions.”

“The Justice Department helped industry groups overturn a pollution-control rule in Southern California that would have required cleaner-running buses, garbage trucks, and other fleet vehicles.”

“The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has repeatedly sided with national banks to fend off enforcement of consumer protection laws passed by California, New York, and other states.”

Because of repeated problems with roof-crush incidents that have crippled drivers in rollover accidents, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at last proposed a beefed-up safety standard for car roofs — but the proposal also provides legal protection for the manufacturers from future roof-crush lawsuits. So your car roof may be less liable to crush during a rollover, but if it does and leaves you paraplegic, you won’t be able to sue.

Sometimes I’m not sure what planet these people live on. Would a fine, upstanding American corporation actually make a product that would hurt someone? Knowingly? Would they ever lie to cover it up after they find out about the problem and continue manufacturing whatever it is until forced to stop? Well, would they do that if it was really, really profitable? Could that happen in our great nation?

The trouble with the people who write The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page is that they never read their own newspaper, which still does the best job of business reporting anywhere. Business interests have done a splendid job of vilifying trial lawyers and pretending the only people hurt by limiting the right to sue are trial lawyers.

Look, the trial lawyer is not the one in a wheelchair after a roof-crush rollover leaves someone paraplegic. Do you drive a car?

Reform follows scandal as night the day, except in these sorry times when it appears we may not get a nickel’s worth of reform out of the entire Jack Abramoff saga. Sickening. A real waste of a splendid scandal. When else do politicians ever get around to fixing huge ethical holes in the roof except when they’re caught red-handed? Do not let this mess go to waste! Call now, and demand reform!

Sheesh. Tom DeLay gets indicted, and all the Republicans can think of is a $20 gift ban. Forget the people talking about “lobby reform.” The lobby does not need to be reformed. Congress needs to be reformed. This is about congressional corruption, and it is not limited to the surface stuff like taking free meals, hotels, and trips. This is about corruption that bites deep into the process of making laws in the public interest. The root of the rot is money (surprise!), and the only way to get control of the money is through public campaign financing.

As long as the special interests pay to elect the pols, we will have government of the special interests, by the special interests, and for the special interests. Pols will always dance with them what brung them. We have to fix the system so that when they are elected, they’ve got no one to dance with but us, the people — we don’t want them owing anyone but the public. So the most useful reform bill is being offered by Representative David Obey (D-Wis.) and Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.): public campaign financing. We, the citizens, put up the money to elect the pols. This bill won’t cost us money; the savings will be staggering.

We’re also looking for a way to control the system of earmarks, which has gotten completely out of hand. “The rush to revise ethics laws in the wake of the Jack Abramoff political corruption scandal has turned into more of a saunter,” reports The Washington Post. The Republicans keep dicking around with the gift ban idea (opposed by those stalwarts who claim “you couldn’t accept a T-shirt from your local high school”).

But the best anti-reformer is Representative John Boehner (R-Ohio), the new House majority leader, elected as a “reformer” (puh-leeze), a man after Tom DeLay’s heart. Boehner argues that gift and travel bans would amount to members of Congress being “treated like children.” (Actually, children are seldom offered golfing vacations.)

The lobbyists, of course, have pulled together to work against efforts to control them. Fish gotta swim; birds gotta fly. Tom Susman, chair of the ethics committee of the American League of Lobbyists, is reported in Legal Times as saying a gift ban would lead to “unnecessarily awkward dividing lines between lobbyists and members.” God forbid.

The House Democratic leadership has proposed reinforcing a gift and travel ban with an attempt to control earmarks by prohibiting “dead of night” provisions — inserting language into a law without a chance for review. Members would be given 24 hours to read bills (which they don’t, but their staffs can).

The cosmetic fixes — gift ban, travel ban, disclosure, and slowing the revolving door between staff, Congress, and the lobby — cannot stop the effects of the K Street Project. That’s the cozy arrangement whereby lobbyists are Republican activists and Republican activists are lobbyists, and they underwrite campaigns in return for special privileges under the law — tax exemptions, regulatory relief, tariff dispositions, etc.

One of the most dangerous things about this whole corrupt system is that people who are given special privileges inevitably come to regard them not as special but as natural and right and will fight furiously if you try to take them away.

Those who remember when conservatives called for fiscal restraint may get sour amusement from the situation. But what is truly not funny is the pathetic spectacle of the United States of America, a nation with the greatest political legacy the world has ever known, letting itself be gnawed to death by the greed in a corrupt system that can be so easily fixed.

Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas — “What’s the fine for shooting a lawyer?” — and so forth. Dick Cheney’s shooting of Harry Whittington is fraught with irony. It’s not as though the ground in Texas is littered with liberal Republicans. I think the vice president winged the only one we’ve got.

Not that I accuse Whittington of being an actual liberal — only by Texas Republican standards, and that sets the bar at about the height of a matchbook. Nevertheless, Whittington is seriously civilized, particularly on the issues of crime, punishment, and prisons. He served on both the Texas Board of Corrections and on the bonding authority that builds prisons. As he has often said: “Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants.”

In the day, whenever there was an especially bad case of new-ignoramus-in-the-legislature — a “lock ’em all up and throw away the key” type — the senior members used to send the prison-happy neophyte to see Whittington for a little basic education on the cost of prisons.

When Whittington was the chairman of the Texas Public Finance Authority, he had a devastating set of numbers on the demand for more, more, more prison beds. As Whittington was wont to point out, the only thing prisons are good for is segregating violent people from the rest of society, and most of them belong in psychiatric hospitals to begin with. The severity of sentences has no effect on crime.

I am not trying to make a big deal out of a simple hunting accident for partisan purposes. I just thought it was a good chance to pay tribute to old Harry, a thoroughly decent man. However, I was offended by the never-our-fault White House spin team. Cheney adviser Mary Matalin said of her boss, “He was not careless or incautious [and did not] violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.” Of course he did, Ms. Matalin. He shot Harry Whittington.

Which brings us to one of the many paradoxes of the Bush administration, which claims to be creating “the responsibility society.” It’s hard to think of a crowd less likely to take responsibility for anything they have done or not done than this bunch. They’re certainly good at preaching responsibility to others — and blaming other people for everything that goes wrong on their watch.

Of course, the Cheney shooting was an accident. But is it an accident if your home and your life are destroyed by the flood following a hurricane? Especially if the flood was caused by failed levees, a government responsibility?

Is it an accident if you are born with a clubfoot and your parents are too poor to pay for the operation to fix it? Is there any societal responsibility in such a case?

Is it an accident when your manufacturing job gets shipped overseas and all you can find to replace it is a low-wage job at the big-box store with no health insurance, and your kid breaks his leg, and you can’t pay the bill, so you have to declare bankruptcy under a new law that leaves you broke for good, with no chance of ever getting out of debt? Or was all of that caused by government policy?

Cheney has a curious, shifting history on issues of blame and responsibility. He was vice chair of the congressional committee that spent 11 months investigating the Iran-Contra affair and the author of its minority report. The 500-page majority report concluded the entire affair “was characterized by pervasive dishonesty and inordinate secrecy.” But Cheney’s report said the Reagan administration’s repeated breaking of the law were “mistakes in judgment and nothing more.”

Those of you who saw Cheney’s interview with Jim Lehrer last week may recall the passage on Darfur in western Sudan that ended with this:

Lehrer: “It’s still happening. There are now 2,000,000 people homeless.”

Cheney: “Still happening, correct.”

Lehrer: “Hundreds of thousands of people have died, and — so you’re satisfied the U.S. is doing everything it can do?”

Cheney: “I am satisfied we’re doing everything we can do.”

His head still tilts more to the right when he lies.

I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation, and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Senator Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to relearn it. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times. There are times a country is so tired of bull that only the truth can provide relief.

If no one in conventional-wisdom politics has the courage to speak up and say what needs to be said, then you go out and find some obscure junior senator from Minnesota with the guts to do it. In 1968, Gene McCarthy was the little boy who said out loud, “Look, the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.” Bobby Kennedy — rough, tough Bobby Kennedy — didn’t do it. Just this quiet man, trained by Benedictines, who liked to quote poetry.

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy’s sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) thinks the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people wants single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favors raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favors repealing Bush’s tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do “whatever it takes” to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall-profits tax. That is the center, you fools! WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway: “First, you have to win elections.” Can’t you even read the damn polls?

Here’s a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, “There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008.”

This supposedly pits Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, emboldened by “a string of bad news from the Middle East … into calling for premature retreat from Iraq,” versus those pragmatic folk like Emanuel, Steny Hoyer, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Joe Lieberman.

Oh come on, people — get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war, from the lies that led us into it to the lies they continue to dump on us daily.

Bush, Cheney, and company will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. I’ve said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were “German dogs.” They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The minute someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. That, or you could just piss on them elegantly, as Representative John Murtha did. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless “string of bad news.”

Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can’t get up and fight, we’ll find someone who can.

You can only sit around wringing your hands and moaning about what a mess the Bushies have made of America for so long. Sooner or later, even the gloomiest doom-meisters are bound to get beaned by an acorn on the noggin, leading to the startling and productive thought, “So, what could we do that would make things better?”

The program would start with a long, long list of things that need to be undone: repeal the bankruptcy bill, repeal tax breaks for the rich, and fix the farm bill, the transportation bill, the energy bill, etc. Or you could start with a list of gentle suggestions, such as:

Making a rude jerk with a bad temper ambassador to the United Nations, probably not a good idea; putting a veterinarian in charge of women’s health policy, maybe not; making someone with a background in Arabian horses the disaster-relief czar, possibly needs reconsideration; invading a Middle Eastern country that posed no threat and had no connection to 9/11 … hmmm, perhaps not a shrewdie.

But that’s still not stepping up to the plate to take a swing at the always-relevant question, “What the hell do we do now?” Yes, we should follow the First Rule of Holes and stop digging. True, we need to go back to doing a lot of things we used to before George W. Bush “won” that remarkable “election” in 2000. And we need to come up with solutions to the problems this man has created.

We need a plan to get out of Iraq. I think Bob Herbert had a good idea when he suggested a serious proposal for withdrawal of American forces over a reasonable (reasonably short) period of time, coupled with a broader national security plan that focuses on al-Qaeda-type terrorism and domestic security.

One of the many problems created by the invasion of Iraq is that it took our eyes off fighting terrorism and dragged us into this endless struggle between the Shiities, Sunnis, and Kurds. We’re supposed to be fighting terrorism, and the single most useful tool for that purpose is international cooperation. Which means there is a lot of rebuilding to be done.

The go-it-alone, f***-everybody-else Bush foreign policy will require long, hard, serious repair work. We need a beefed-up State Department and a new emphasis on human rights, complete with an acknowledgement of our errors in this regard. We also need beefed-up intelligence — tracking terrorists and their money, their plans, and their people requires a combination of good intelligence work and good detective work.

That, in turn, requires a whole lot of smart Americans who are fluent in Arabic — needed at the State Department, the CIA, and the FBI, just for starters. Isn’t it lucky we have them, right here at hand? Of course, we will also need some repair work done with the Arab-American community, since it has not exactly been treated with the full rights to which every American citizen is entitled. Perhaps we should start a Bureau of Damage Control.

Next, the economy is in need of repair. We’re obviously spending ourselves into deep doo-doo as fast as we can. Since Republicans decided they needed to make Democrats look like cheapskates in the pork-barrel spending department, there’s lots of thrifty, prudent stuff Democrats can do to fix that — and think how surprised everyone will be to see them do it.

Another big chunk of what’s wrong with the economy can be solved by fixing health care. In case you haven’t noticed, major employers and high-wage industries are increasingly choosing to locate in Canada instead of the United States. And what have they got that we haven’t besides more snow and never getting excited? National health insurance.

Yep, that ol’ debbil “socialized medicine,” against which the right wing has so long and so relentlessly inveighed, is now the darling pet of huge corporations. Not only is it good for General Motors, folks, the rest of us need it desperately too. In case you haven’t noticed, our health-care system is falling apart.

This dandy list of Good Ideas on How To Fix Things will be continued.

Molly Ivins writes for Creators Syndicate.