Tag: George W. Bush

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At Large Opinion

Oh, My God!

Ginni Thomas (Photo: Wikimedia | Gage Skidmore)

It really is unbelievable, when you think about it. You have to wonder how this can possibly be happening in 2022. Women are being treated like chattel — their bodies controlled by the state as though they were livestock, their gender and sexuality no longer their own.

I’m talking, of course, about Afghanistan’s autocratic Taliban rulers, who last week ordered all Afghan women to wear body-covering burkas in public. The decree further mandated that women leave their homes only when necessary, even when wearing a burka. Male relatives will also face punishment — including possible jail time — if women in their family violate the dress code.

It was seen as a hard shift by the Taliban government, one that confirmed the worst fears of human rights activists. It is a cruel and absurd level of oppression and misogyny, but what do you expect when government and religious ideology are combined? It’s so distressing.

Meanwhile, in the United States of America, the Supreme Court (where six of the nine justices are Catholic) appears to be ready to overturn Roe v. Wade and thereby legalize religious-based laws banning or restricting abortion in 26 states (and counting). Seventy percent of Americans oppose making abortion illegal again, but this is a case where “majority rule” is truly a joke. As Republicans learned long ago: Control the judges and you control the law.

The problem, of course, is not necessarily that the justices are Catholic — liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor is Catholic, for example — the problem is that the five judges in question have been vetted and brought to the fore by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, which opposes abortion rights. Presidents G.W. Bush and Donald Trump (both of whom lost the popular vote) followed their recommendations, and here we are. It’s been the Federalists’ stated goal to overturn Roe v. Wade for 50 years, and it looks like they’re about to succeed.

John Gehring, Catholic program director at the Washington-based clergy network Faith in Public Life, was interviewed by the AP: “The Catholic intellectual tradition has produced giants of liberal thought as well, but in recent decades the right has done a better job building institutions that nurture pathways to power.” No kidding.

And let’s not forget the Evangelical Christians’ contribution to this pending fustercluck. David Talcott, professor of philosophy at King’s College and an expert in Christian sexual ethics, told vox.com: “Conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals have become allies of certain kinds, each defending the interests of other, a theological and philosophical overlap between the two.” Indeed.

I’m no religious expert, but I am sure of one thing: What we’re talking about here is, at its core, sexual repression. Abortion is just one spoke in the traditional religious shame-wheel that also includes opposition to sex without marriage, LGBTQ rights (including gay marriage), contraception, masturbation, etc. — pretty much anything involving fun sexy-time — because their god has decreed that sex is not for f**king around. It’s for baby-making. The guilt is just an added feature, not a bug.

It’s no accident that when contraception became readily available to women via the pill, the sexual revolution followed, and Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. The religious right and their Republican groomers have been working to turn back the clock ever since. Can’t have women acting all uppity, after all. They need to learn their place and make some damn babies. The conservatives played the long game — stacking the courts — and it looks like they may finally pull it off. Much to their regret, I predict.

There are two principal theories about the now-infamous leak that made Justice Samuel Alito’s preliminary majority opinion public: 1) A liberal justice or associate leaked it to provoke alarm among progressives and arouse the base for the midterms. 2) A conservative justice or associate leaked it to prevent any of the five in the majority from being able to back away from their initial opinion on subsequent votes.

Ironically, both results will probably happen. As for the leaker? If I were a betting man, I’d put money on Mrs. Clarence Thomas.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Enter the Prosecutor

In 40 years of covering Washington politics, I have never seen anything like President Trump’s amazing rise to power. I have seen presidents laid low by botched Congressional investigations that lead to special prosecutors. That’s why I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

Spoiler Alert: This political thriller ends with the president’s top aides striking plea bargains with federal prosecutors to reduce prison sentences.

Juan Williams

The U.S. has a rich recent history of special prosecutors. The odds are rising that one more is coming to look into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The dwindling trust in the GOP majority in Congress to conduct such a probe is due to the fading credibility of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican chairman of that panel, Senator Richard Burr, is widely perceived as a Trump acolyte. 

When FBI director James Comey announced shortly before last year’s election that his agents had reopened their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Burr bragged there is “not a separation between me and Donald Trump.”

Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, was slow to bury Burr with a call for a special prosecutor, perhaps seeking to avoid charges that he was politicizing the probe. But on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer made that call. A special prosecutor was necessary, he asserted, to probe “whether the Trump campaign was complicit in working with the Russians to influence the election.”

Now Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Susan Collins, are starting to peel away. Graham has said that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian diplomats, “then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor.”

On cue, last week Sessions had to recuse himself from the FBI’s probes into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia after The Washington Post revealed he met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. twice last year. Those details seemed to contradict sworn testimony he gave during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

If trust in the Senate probe is weak, then the credibility of any House investigation is even weaker. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) served with Sessions on Trump’s presidential transition team. Nunes was also one of the lawmakers actively recruited by Reince Priebus to counter stories about Trump’s ties to Russia. In a rambling press conference last week, he said he did not want the committee’s investigation to turn into a “witch hunt” and warned of “McCarthyism,” where innocent Americans were “haul[ed] before Congress.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the committee, further diminished trust in any House probe when he said last week that the FBI director refused to share with the committee more than “a fraction of what the FBI knows.”

Last week, we learned that the Trump White House Counsel’s office issued a memo to all White House staff instructing them to preserve all documents related to Russia. If history is a guide, all that is left now is for public pressure to build on the GOP and the special prosecutor to be named.

Here’s a quick look at that history: During the Iran-Contra affair, President Reagan tried to put the scandal behind him by agreeing to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh. Walsh indicted several of Reagan’s top aides, including Defense Secretary Caspar “Cap” Weinberger.

During President Clinton’s first term, shady controversies from his time as governor of Arkansas led to the appointment of the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and set the stage for the Monica Lewinsky sex story that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.

President George W. Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, recused himself from a White House probe. His deputy then appointed an independent special counsel to find out who leaked the name of a CIA agent. That special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, won the conviction of the Vice President’s chief of staff,  Lewis “Scooter” Libby. 

Senator John McCain said that he has “more hope than belief” that the GOP Congress will properly investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. “Have no doubt, what the Russians tried to do to our election could have destroyed democracy,” McCain said.

Julius Caesar feared the Ides of March with good reason. As the middle of the month approaches, President Trump and his GOP supporters will be under fearsome pressure to go along with the naming of a special prosecutor.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

In The Age Of Trump, Remember The Killian Documents

As news organizations and the public struggle to come to grips with salacious new information about Donald Trump contained in a 35-page dossier released this wee by Buzzfeed, it’s a good time to think back to the 2004 campaign between John Kerry and George W. Bush.

Early in that year, The Memphis Flyer’s Jackson Baker broke a story alleging that then-President George W. Bush had, back in the 1970s, taken unauthorized leave of an Alabama Air National Guard unit that he had sought a transfer to from his regular Texas Guard unit in order to spend time working on a political campaign.

This information was an open secret among the former Alabama Air Guard members that Baker used as his sources. Indeed, several of them had heard of the forthcoming transfer to their unit of Bush, son of the prominent political figure and future President George H.W. Bush, and a Guard pilot whose well-deserved reputation as a hell-raiser had traveled far and wide in Guard circles.

These pilots had actively awaited his coming. But, three of them told Baker categorically and for the record, Lt. George W. Bush had never turned up at any point for the entire year of his supposed assignment to their
Guard base. Meanwhile, there was no dearth of Bush-sightings during the ongoing (and ultimately losing) U.S. Senate campaign, elsewhere in Alabama, of Bush-family friend Winton “Red” Blount.

Though rumors of Bush’s year-long no-show at the Alabama air base had been floating about the Internet, Baker’s Flyer story first put the concept, and the concrete first-person evidence for it, firmly into the public record, and thus set the stage for the remarkable series of events that followed.

As the 2004 campaign ground on, neither Bush nor Kerry was able to gain a clear advantage. Then, in September, Democrats got a gift: CBS TV’s 60 Minutes 2 obtained letters from Texas Air Guard commander Col. Jerry B. Killian that seemingly provided further documentary evidence of the allegations against Bush.

Democrats trumpeted the new evidence, presented by Dan Rather himself, as proof that the Commander-In-Chief was unfit for office. But within days, the story began to unravel. Commenters on internet message boards attached to conservative blogs Little Green Footballs and Powerline quickly produced convincing evidence that the Killian Documents were forgeries.

For weeks, the internet and news media were consumed with discussions of the minutiae of the command structure of 1970’s air units and the capabilities of vintage typewriters. Eventually, CBS acknowledged that the Killian Document were likely forged. Dan Rather lost his job, and George W. Bush was reelected.

After the election, not much thought was given to the provenance of the Killian Documents or what effect they had on the course of history. The source of the apparent forgery was never uncovered. But who would produce a forgery like this, and why? And how did semi-anonymous internet commenters know exactly where to look for proof of a forgery when experts CBS hired thought they were authentic?

Surely,Republicans argued, the forgery was done by political opponents of President Bush to discredit him during a tight election. But there was another interpretation of the story. What if the Killian Documents were forged by someone in the Bush campaign — a couple of famous (or infamous) Dirty Tricksters come to mind — and selectively leaked to Rather’s producers at 60 Minutes?

Then, when Rather took the bait, the debunking information was leaked to Bush’s supporters, who amplified it across their numerous media channels., eventually discrediting the campaign’s most hostile media source on television. Regardless, the reveal of the Killian Documents was to shift public debate away from Bush’s character — and the first-evidence evidence of his dereliction from Alabama Air Guard pilots — and onto the truth or untruth of the documents themselves

The publication by Buzzfeed of the new intelligence dossier filled with shocking accusations about Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russia and the possibility that Putin’s intelligence agency the FSB has sexually explicit blackmail material on the Republican has thrown the country into an uproar. But there are enough parallels to the Killian Documents incident to raise red flags for the news consumer and publisher alike.

First, the Killian documents and the Trump dossier both told Democrats and other critics exactly what they wanted to hear at a time when they were most desperate to hear it. Accusations that Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on the bed President Obama had once slept in were like catnip to Democrats and the left. Left-leaning social media has been a golden shower of pee jokes for going on 48 hours now.

Second, claims that the dossier was forged popped up on the anonymous message board 4chan within hours of Buzzfeed’s publication. Third, as the story gets bogged down in minutiae and side avenues, the central topic of discussion—is Trump fatally compromised by Russian intelligence?—is being pushed aside in favor of profiles of Christopher Steele, the MI6 agent who allegedly compiled the dossier, amid speculation about the authenticity of the most malicious claims.

The dossier had been passed around to major media outlets for months, all of whom — perhaps having learned the lessons of the Killian Documents — decided not to publish before the issue of authenticity could be verified. After the existence of the dossier was mentioned in a footnote to the CIA/FBI/NSA briefing to Obama, Trump, and Congress on Russian interference in the election, CNN reported on the existence of the docs and Buzzfeed jumped at the chance for a scoop, thus opening the media floodgates.

If the dossier is indeed a black propaganda operation designed to take the heat off Trump, it’s well designed, as were the Killian “letters.” Col. Killian’s son described the contents and form of the apparently forged letters from his father as askillful mixture of truth and fiction.

Associating the really important information about Trump — that, inadvertently or otherwise, he’s a possible Russian intelligence asset about to assume the office of the Presidency — with false information appealing to the preconceptions of his political opponents could have the net effect of neutralizing the issue of potential treasonous behavior with his supporters and the media at large.

Even more dangerously, sewing doubt as to the authenticity of the mainstream news outlets reporting on the story opens up new lines of attack for the Trump team. Already, the President-elect has used the story to accuse CNN of being “fake news”, a term originally coined to describe amateur propaganda designed as Facebook clickbait

Strategic uses of forgeries is nothing new to the world’s intelligence agencies. The Protocols Of The Elders of Zion was a widely circulated fake manuscript produced by Tsarist Russia’s secret police to justify the prosecution of Jews at the turn of the 20th century, for example. In 2002, the Niger Uranium documents were proved to be forgeries designed to help push the US into invading Iraq.

Yet the media and the left remain in deep denial about the nature of CIA and KGB-derived gambits they are facing. The 2015 film Truth, based on an account by Dan Rather’s producer Marla Mapes, showed that the victims of the Killian scam still believe the letters to be authentic.

This article may sound like a paranoid liberal conspiracy theory, but this whole election cycle has exceeded the wildest dreams of even the most crazed of the tin-foil-hat brigade. The Killian Documents gambit is just one arrow in the quiver of the sophisticated and unscrupulous media operators who seek to control the national conversation in these dangerous times. For media consumers, the lesson is, be suspicious of everything, especially if it confirms your biases.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Joey Hack’s post, “Questions Raised by Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man'” …

The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is that in 1974, Prozac had only just been invented. It wasn’t until years later that it went into wide circulation.

OakTree

He should be wearing a piano key necktie in that photo. And why is Billy Joel brandishing a Telecaster, anyway?

Packrat

I love that moment when he hits that soaring final chorus in “Piano Man,” and dozens of catheters come flying onto the stage.

Mark

Who cares about all the damn metaphors in “Piano Man”? I understood what he was saying. I also remember when Billy and his small group played to a packed house at the old Lafayette’s Music Room at Overton Square in the early 1970s. I listened to it live on FM-100. Billy loved Memphis, and Memphis loved Billy. He became a superstar almost overnight after that show.

Paul Scates

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Another City/Suburban Battle” …

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but did the city not determine that South Cordova was going to lose money for the city immediately after annexing it? I’ve been saying for a while that the annexation strategy is and has been failing.

If you were to do a postmortem on the annexations, I believe you’d find that even the ones that at first were profitable for the city likely are no longer profitable.

The big problem the city has is that the minute it annexes an area, property values in the area drop. So any business case the city did based on the potential tax revenue of the annexed area was wrong if they didn’t assume that the pool of funds would be reduced after annexation. Knowing how most governments operate, I doubt that kind of analysis was ever done on any of the annexations.

GroveReb84

Mark Luttrell: 26%; George Flinn: 11%; Brian Kelsey: 9%; David Kustoff: 8%; Tom Leatherwood: 7%; Steve Basar: 1%; Undecided: 38%.

Given the choice of the above, it’s easy to see why Undecided is winning.

B

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “Medium Cool” …

Maybe the Flyer is too “cool” to educate themselves on Trump’s policies, but you can read them here if you can find time between comparing IPA’s: donaldjtrump.com/positions.

Clyde

Dubya was cool to a certain segment of the country — largely the same segment that loves Trump, and for many of the same reasons. The difference is that many of the people who voted for Dubya but weren’t fond of his cool trusted that his handlers would actually run the country for him. They don’t have the same trust with Trump. They know he’ll surround himself with yes-men and do whatever he damn well pleases, and that’s what scares them.

Hillary Clinton’s cool is 10th-grade math teacher cool — the teacher everybody hates after the first day of class, but toward the end of the year decide she’s all right, and by the time they graduate, remember her quite fondly as one of the best teachers they ever had.

Jeff

Bruce, you’ve gone too far. How dare you insult the noble brotherhood of “Siding Salesmen.”

I prefer to think of Trump as more like the guy who owns a bunch of sleazy and failed businesses and has the audacity to show up uninvited to the party, referring to himself as a “Business Genius, and VERY, very rich to boot.”

Oh … Wait a minute. Never mind.

So maybe we can just call him what he is: the turd in the punch bowl of the 2016 election year. And that’s not cool.

John Shouse

I dunno, I have sat in a bar with John Kerry and voted for him anyway.

CL Mullins

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Trump vs. Sanders? It Could Happen.

Is Donald Trump trying to win my vote? I ask because the Orange One has been making some statements lately that are almost, well, progressive. Most notable was his recent attack on the most holy of Republican shibboleths, that “George W. Bush kept us safe” from terrorism during his presidency.

Trump contended, as have many Democrats and liberals since 2001, that Bush shouldn’t get a pass on the 9/11 attacks, because he was warned repeatedly about Osama bin Laden’s plans to strike the U.S. and ignored them. As Trump put it: “That’s [like saying] the other team scored 19 runs in the first inning, but after that, we played well. I don’t think so.” Zing.

In last Saturday night’s debate, Trump also defended Planned Parenthood, saying that the organization does some “good things for women’s health.” You could almost see the other GOP candidates’ heads explode. Trump is the honey badger candidate. He really doesn’t give a sh*t. And therein lies his power, as the GOP party establishment is discovering, much to its horror. A lot of folks aren’t buying the usual party lines this year.

Things aren’t much different on the Democratic side, as maverick “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders continues to disrupt Hillary Clinton’s second preordained waltz to that party’s nomination. The feisty septuagenarian is winning votes from a coalition of old hippies, social leftists, and perhaps most surprisingly, young people.

But it really isn’t that surprising when you remember that a major plank in Bernie’s platform is free tuition at public universities. This message resonates powerfully for the millions of twenty-somethings who’ve left college with a massive tuition-loan debt hanging over their lives.

It remains to be seen whether Trump and Sanders can sustain momentum through the eight-month slog of primaries ahead, but it’s not unprecedented for a candidate from the far wings of either party to grab the nomination. Barry Goldwater carried the flag for GOP ultra-conservatives in 1964 and got trounced by Lyndon Johnson. The pendulum swung the other way in 1972, as left-wing Democrats threw the nomination to George McGovern, who got destroyed by Richard Nixon. The American electorate usually breaks to the center.

But there could be another dynamic in play. Trump flirted again this week with running as a third-party candidate if the GOP didn’t “treat him fairly.” You don’t have to go too far back in history to see how that development can alter a presidential election: See Ross Perot, circa 1992, or Ralph Nader, circa 2000. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were the beneficiaries of those quixotic ego trips.

It’s still possible, of course, that both parties will eventually pick a “safe” candidate, which could lead to another Bush vs. Clinton race. (Please, no.) But it’s also possible that we could get a contest between Sanders and Trump, which would be equal parts mind-boggling, entertaining, and terrifying.

Super Tuesday is only two weeks away. If you want to have a say in the electoral process, please vote. The stakes have seldom been higher. Or weirder.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The True Story of Truth

When you call your movie Truth, you’re setting a pretty high bar —especially if your setting is a time when truth was in short supply.

Truth is based on a memoir by Mary Mapes, a CBS news producer who was instrumental in breaking two stories of the Bush era: the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the so-called Killian documents scandal, where she and Dan Rather uncovered letters proving that then-president George W. Bush had gone AWOL from his Air National Guard unit during the Vietnam War. The former story got her a Peabody Award. The latter got her fired when it turned out the documents were fake. Maybe. That’s the rub in Truth and the source of the possible unintentional irony of the title.

The film is a bit of a throwback. The story is told primarily with dialogue, and it expects the viewer to bring a little knowledge of recent history to the party. It’s kind of like All the President’s Men, only the good guys lose. The cast is killer: Cate Blanchett stars as Mapes, Robert Redford plays Dan Rather, and the supporting cast includes Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, and, best of them all, Stacy Keach as Bill Burkett, the ultimate source of the controversial letters. The story opens with Mapes and her team, fresh off the prisoner abuse story, which put the Bush administration on the defensive and eroded public trust in the team running the Iraq War, contemplating what to do next. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are in the process of undermining Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam military record. But Mapes has heard Bush never even showed up for much of the stateside Air National Guard duty he pulled to avoid being deployed, and so she goes searching for proof, which is too-conveniently delivered to her.

In the film, passing reference is made to Mapes hearing rumors about the story during the 2000 campaign. But in fact, the story came from work done by Memphis Flyer political reporter Jackson Baker, who wrote about it in these pages in February, 2004, seven months before the ill-fated 60 Minutes report aired. Baker quoted Memphian Bob Mintz, a FedEx pilot who had flown in Bush’s Air National Guard unit in Alabama, who claimed that he had never seen the future president on the base. Baker confirmed the story with fellow pilot Paul Bishop. The Flyer story was ignored for months until The Boston Globe and The New York Time‘s Nicholas Kristof interviewed Mintz, setting the CBS investigation in motion. But Baker’s role in uncovering the story has gone unremarked until the website Raw Story reprinted the original column last week.

 “It used to piss me off. It’s probably a good thing for my piece of mind that I’d stopped thinking about it long ago,” Baker says. “There’s a sequel to this unjust oversight that’s almost too much! In those days I was a regular stringer for Time magazine, and, when the Rather debacle occurred, the magazine’s New York office delegated me to try to track down the source of the information that the ill-fated but well-intentioned (and well-aimed) CBS anchor had acted on in his late-campaign Bush story of 2004. I checked back through various layers of the likely daisy chain and finally got in touch with a Texas media guy who played a key role in getting the story to the national sources that ended up with it, including Rather. And where did this guy get his info? ‘Why….’ he sputtered, in obvious confusion. ‘Why, from you! It was your story in The Memphis Flyer!’ (SIGH!) I had found the mysterious Ur-source, and it was me. It’s worth noting, by the way, that my account relied totally on Mintz and two other first-person National Guard witnesses on the scene in Alabama—no documents, suspect or otherwise. If the big boys had restricted themselves to the information in my story, Rather and Mapes would have kept their jobs, and Bush might have lost his.”

Truth is ultimately about old-guard media giants ambushed by the Bushes’ ruthless black-propaganda operation. Even at this late date, it never seems to occur to anyone involved that the story might be true, but the letters they were using for proof might be fakes planted to destroy their credibility. It’s a solidly-made movie, but you may come away from it wondering who, if anyone, has a claim on truth in the 21st century.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Presidency for Sale

Gerald Ford was very briefly vice president of the United States and, following the resignation of Richard Nixon, somewhat less briefly president of the United States. He was an affable fellow, strangely guileless and yet a groundbreaker at what now gets little recognition: He was the first ex-president to sell the presidency.

Within a year of leaving office (1977), Ford had earned something like $1 million. He sat on corporate boards (20th Century Fox, for instance) and made paid speeches. He was available for conventions, meetings, and, I was told, the opening of a shopping center. A modest man of once-modest means, he soon had a home near Palm Springs and another one near Vail, where he liked to ski.

The shocking thing is how not shocking any of this now is — although Bill Clinton might be shocked at how little Ford made. Once upon a time, presidents left office and led monkish lives. They were not expected to accept outside income — except for book royalties, of course — and virtually none of them did. (Calvin Coolidge wrote a newspaper column, no way to get rich.)

Until 1958, former presidents did not even get a pension. (It’s now a bit more than $200,000 annually.) That changed when Congress took pity on Harry Truman and awarded him and Herbert Hoover pensions and funds for staff. Dwight Eisenhower left the White House with a nice nest egg. He had made a small fortune with his World War II memoir, Crusade in Europe, for which the government gave him a sweetheart tax deal.

John Kennedy followed Ike into the White House, and he, in turn, was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson. LBJ might have been a man of elastic morality, but he pretty much kept to his ranch, wrote the required memoir, and abjured buckraking.

Richard Nixon wrote books and sold a TV interview to David Frost, but paid speeches were not his thing.

Then came Ford, and everything changed. Skipping Jimmy Carter, who adhered to the Old Way, Ronald Reagan picked up where Ford left off. He made two speeches in Japan for $2 million. George H.W. Bush also gave paid speeches, but no one has raked it in quite like Bill Clinton and, of course, Hillary Clinton. The figures are astounding, virtual GDPs of small nations, some of which have given one Clinton or another a dictator’s ransom to say a few words.

A Nigerian newspaper group paid Bill Clinton $700,000 for a single speech. I’m sure it did wonders for circulation. The amounts for the Clintons are impressive indeed. Bill Clinton reported being paid more than $104 million from 2001 through 2012, just for speeches. He has become a very wealthy man, and I suppose I should say more power to him.

But while the numbers are astonishing, they are also troubling. Unless money ain’t money no more, someone is buying and someone is selling. The question is: What? Mostly, I would think, bragging rights. The nice people at Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase did not pay to hear Hillary Clinton because they were getting privileged information. (It’s rare that anyone gets any information at all out of her.) What they were buying was proximity, the chance to take a selfie with her. These are groupies in Guccis, and they go off confiding to others what Clinton has confided to them — which is what was in the morning newspapers anyway. It would be cheaper to buy the paper.

There is nothing illegal in any of this. But it is troubling. The figures are so huge that one can speculate that a future president might curry favor with the awesome rich as a way of ensuring a voluptuous retirement. I mean, why make enemies out of people who will gladly pay you to say nothing much — and fly you on a private jet just to say it? It’s a nice life.

Jerry Ford also got on the boards of Shearson/American Express, Beneficial Corporation of New Jersey, and other companies and soon became rich. I suspect no one hired him for his expertise or his business acumen, asking him about interest-rate swaps, buybacks, or, in 20th Century Fox’s case, whether to open a movie in the summer or wait for the Christmas crowd. He sold what they were buying, which was the prestige of the presidency. As a result, it has less and less.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (March 26, 2015)

CREDIT: Reuters | Lee Celano

Reuters | Lee Celano

Robert Durst

HBO struck gold with the six-part documentary, The Jinx:
The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Especially during the jaw-dropping finale, when the alleged triple-murderer was heard off-camera, muttering to himself into a hot microphone what sounded like a confession. Durst’s arrest the day after the show’s finale created such white-hot news coverage that I don’t think I’d be revealing any secrets to offer a short synopsis. Durst is the estranged heir to one of the richest real-estate firms in New York, which manages 1 World Trade Center, among other high-rent properties. His personal wealth is estimated at $100 million. In 1982, Durst’s first wife disappeared and her body was never found. Though suspected of murder, Durst remained free until the investigation was reopened in 2000.

The day before Durst’s closest confidant was to be interviewed about the case by prosecutors in Los Angeles, she was found murdered execution-style in her home. Fleeing to Galveston, Texas, Durst rented a $300-a-month room and disguised himself as a mute woman.

In 2001, Durst was arrested for killing his 71-year-old neighbor and dismembering the corpse, which he placed in several garbage bags and scattered in Galveston Bay. Celebrity attorney Dick DeGuerin, who not-so-successfully represented David Koresh during the Waco standoff, admitted that Durst cut up the body, but said that it was postmortem, after a struggle over a gun. The jury decided that Durst acted in self-defense when the gun went off, so the slicing and dicing was moot, and he got off. They never found the head.

Durst agreed to take part in hours of interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, ostensibly to deflect blame and set the record straight. In the series’ final episode, after being confronted with damning evidence, Durst retired to the men’s room, forgetting he was still wearing a live microphone and said, “There it is. I’m caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” The day after the final episode aired, Durst was arrested in a New Orleans hotel with $40,000 in cash, a loaded revolver, his passport and original birth certificate, an over-the-head latex mask, and five ounces of pot.

He will most assuredly be arraigned in Los Angeles for murder, so if you enjoyed the documentary, just wait until the trial. Some of the greatest entertainment L.A. produces comes from their live broadcasts of criminal trials. Look at what they’ve given us over the years: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, the cops who beat Rodney King, Phil Spector, and Dr. Conrad Murray. But the Robert Durst show will be the trial of this early century. This will be too salacious not to televise.

HBO’s ratings were far too good not to continue this series. We know that we live in a violent country and that there are killers who walk among us — some of them mass murderers. The Durst case took over three decades to unravel, which proves that justice is sometimes late in arriving, but you never know when it will come knocking at your door.

The authorities already know the identities of some others who have committed terrible atrocities, and yet they walk free. Their names are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and Tenet. They met in secrecy, concocting a story to sell to the American people about why the Iraq War was absolutely necessary on the pretense of weapons of mass destruction, a term of their own invention.

They invaded and occupied a nation that had not harmed us, then sent over the U.S. Viceroy, “Jerry” Bremer, who disbanded the Iraqi army and barred former members of Saddam’s political party from government, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of men out of work. These two dumbass decisions led directly to insurgency, chaos, sectarian civil war, and the birth of ISIS. The cost of the Iraq War is immeasurable in both dollars and human lives. So where are all the warmongers now? They’re all wealthy and serve on corporate boards and think tanks. Some are professors at prestigious universities. Bremer lives in Vermont, painting rural landscapes while dabbling in French cuisine. Cheney made a fortune in “blind trust” stocks from no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries. The rest advise the current Republican Party. No one but Cheney’s flunky, Scooter Libby, ever faced criminal charges concerning the war, but rumblings about legal recourse have been growing louder across the globe.

In 2012, the Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal convicted Bush, Cheney, and six others in absentia for war crimes. Torture victims told of mistreatment by U.S. soldiers and contractors who used some of the same practices that Japanese were executed for after WWII. Transcripts of the trial were sent to the International Criminal Court, which may never act, but the Durst case proved there’s no statute of limitations on atrocities.

Then, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, I know of a cozy, tropical prison down in Cuba that’s just perfect for detaining war criminals. Imagine the ratings if they televised that trial.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (March 12, 2015)

Sometimes I think I get a general sense of what’s about to happen. I’m no Edgar Cayce or anything, but I can often imagine the effect that results from the cause. If you disregard my absolute certainty that Al Gore would be president in 2000, my predictions have more often been right than wrong. Even back in 2006, when Hillary Clinton was all but being crowned as the next Democratic presidential candidate, I wrote that two years was an eternity for another candidate to emerge to challenge the presumptive nominee, and one certainly did.

The historical inevitability of Barack Obama couldn’t be stopped, even by the ugly campaign the Clintons ran against him. Hillary’s failed campaign left a lingering resentment among certain Democrats over her scatter-shot tactics and baseless accusations. Her term as Obama’s secretary of state revived her reputation for competence, regardless of the fake “scandals” the GOP tried to lay at her feet. Hillary is probably the most-qualified, best-informed candidate to seek the presidency in decades, and polls have shown the country’s willingness to elect a female president. So let me go out on a limb and make a prediction, then two years from now, you can check back and see if I was correct. Hillary Clinton will not only fail to win the presidency, she won’t even get the Democratic nomination.

A lightning rod for controversy, Hillary can instantly become so exasperated that she unleashes a public barrage of ill-inspired quotable soundbites that only provide ammunition for her enemies. It’s been pretty much settled that the entire Benghazi witch-hunt was merely a concoction of right-wing operatives out to do her damage, but frustrated by idiotic questions over whether to call the tragedy a “terrorist attack,” or a “spontaneous protest,” Hillary spouted, “At this point, what difference does it make?” When stripped of its context, right-wing pundits found her remarks to be pure gold, and the almost defunct House Select Committee on Benghazi has become suddenly reanimated, subpoenaing thousands of her newly controversial emails.

Hillary has a history of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Remember when she said she wasn’t going to be a typical first lady, sitting home and baking cookies or “standing by her man,” as the popular song went. The accompanying outrage forced her to go out and profess her love of country music and apologize to Tammy Wynette and America’s housewives. And when the Gennifer Flowers scandal came along, she did stand by her man after all.

While in the White House, she was accused of everything from murder to drug smuggling, as well as being “secretive.” Then she did herself no favors by having her previously requested Rose Law Firm billing statements, said to be long lost, turn up one day in a White House office drawer. Hillary parlayed Bill’s inexcusable sexual betrayal into a senate seat from New York, where she learned the art of “triangulation” — taking the absolute middle ground between two opposing points of view. In this capacity, Clinton voted her approval for the Iraqi War; co-sponsored an anti-flag burning amendment, even though she’s a lawyer and knew that the Supreme Court had already ruled the act was a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment; and voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, opening the door for U.S. attacks on Iran. During Hillary’s senate career, every controversial vote seemed to be made with a political calculation.

This latest kerfuffle about Hillary using her private email account to conduct government business is another stink-bomb attack by her adversaries that won’t amount to much, yet she insists on making it worse for herself. Already believed in certain quarters to be someone who cuts corners or makes her own rules, Hillary set up her own private server, registered to a fictitious name and routed it back to her New York home. She didn’t break any laws, but she bent the rules. The former secretary has announced that she is eager to turn over her emails for scrutiny, but only those pertaining to the business of the State Department. This allows her to exercise more control over physical access and furthers the perception that she has something to hide. At some point, Hillary will also have to justify accepting donations by foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state.

It’s enough to give you a case of pre-Clinton Fatigue. Two years is a lifetime for a presumptive nominee to coast, and there are bound to be more gaffes and temper explosions. When Hillary alienates enough members of her own party, the Democrats may be forced to turn to someone else. The GOP will likely nominate a Tea Party extremist as their candidate. Why shouldn’t the Dems offer a true liberal and a fighter for the underdog instead of another blue-dog? Elizabeth Warren insists she’s not running for president. So did Barack Obama before he was finally convinced that his hour of destiny had arrived.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

“Pay Any Price”

No single review or interview can do justice to Pay Any Price, the new book by James Risen that is the antithesis of what routinely passes for journalism about the “war on terror.” Instead of evasive tunnel vision, the book offers big-picture acuity, focusing on realities that are pervasive and vastly destructive.

Published this week, Pay Any Price throws down an urgent gauntlet. We should pick it up. After 13 years of militarized zealotry and fear-mongering in the name of fighting terrorism, the book — subtitled Greed, Power, and Endless War — zeros in on immense horrors being perpetrated in the name of national security.

As an investigative reporter for The New York Times, Risen has been battling dominant power structures for a long time. His new book is an instant landmark in the best of post-9/11 journalism. It’s also a wise response to repressive moves against him by the Bush and Obama administrations.

For more than six years — under threat of jail — Risen has refused to comply with subpoenas demanding that he identify sources for his reporting on a stupid and dangerous CIA operation.

A brief afterword in his new book summarizes Risen’s struggles with the Bush and Obama Justice Departments. He also provides a blunt account of his long-running conflicts with the Times hierarchy, which delayed some of his reporting for years — or spiked it outright — under intense White House pressure.

Self-censorship and internalization of official worldviews continue to plague the Washington press corps. In sharp contrast, Risen’s stubborn independence enables Pay Any Price to combine rigorous reporting with rare candor.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

• “Obama performed a neat political trick: He took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own. In the process, Obama normalized the post-9/11 measures that Bush had implemented on a haphazard, emergency basis. Obama’s great achievement — or great sin — was to make the national security state permanent.”

• “In fact, as trillions of dollars have poured into the nation’s new homeland security-industrial complex, the corporate leaders at its vanguard can rightly be considered the true winners of the war on terror.”

• “There is an entire class of wealthy company owners, corporate executives, and investors who have gotten rich by enabling the American government to turn to the dark side. But they have done so quietly… The new quiet oligarchs just keep making money… They are the beneficiaries of one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history.”

• “The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.”

• “Of all the abuses America has suffered at the hands of the government in its endless war on terror, possibly the worst has been the war on truth. On the one hand, the executive branch has vastly expanded what it wants to know: something of a vast gathering of previously private truths. On the other hand, it has ruined lives to stop the public from gaining any insight into its dark arts, waging a war on truth. It all began at the NSA.”

Fittingly, the book closes with a powerful chapter about the government’s extreme actions against whistleblowers. After all, whistleblowing and independent journalism are dire threats to the secrecy and deception that fuel the “war on terror.”

Now, Risen is in the national spotlight at a time when the U.S. government is launching yet another spiral of carnage for perpetual war. As a profound book, Pay Any Price has arrived with enormous potential to serve as a catalyst for deeper understanding and stronger opposition to abhorrent government policies.