The war in Iraq, the American war in Iraq is over, said the President tonight.

Phil Ochs had the same to say about Vietnam about 40 years ago — though he knew it was far from over. We all know the same is true about Iraq. Not only is that war far from over, but more than 50,ooo American troops remain there for God knows how much longer.

I’m not quite sure why Barack Obama even made his speech tonight. It changed nothing. And all it really accomplishes is to crank up a national conversation about what the hell it means that “combat operations” are over.

What really needs to be discussed, and what we are doomed to not grapple with as a nation until it is way too late, is why we ever invaded Iraq in the first place. However you assess the future of the non-war in Iraq, I think it fair to say 7 1/2 years after the invasion that the mission has been an unmitigated failure.

Not only have we not built a democratic Iraq, we have built an Iraq that can’t even put together a functioning government.

Violence still runs rampant.

Electricity is still spotty.

Ethnic divisions remain volatile and sure to explode again.

The religious fundamentalists are stronger than ever.

What there is of a government in Baghdad is now a firm ally of Iran — the exact opposite of what we said we desired.

“It’s the basket case of the Middle East,” says the anything but radical NBC correspondent Richard Engle of our regime in Iraq.

No domino effect of democratization has swept the Middle East.

The Israeli-Palestinian relationship is worse than it was before we occupied Iraq.

We have fewer friends in the region, not more.

We have transferred our troops to Afghanistan where we support a “government” headed by a fraudulent and deeply corrupt head of state and where the Taliban are surging.

For what did 4,000 Americans and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis die for?

Are the lives of the people of Afghanistan any better than the lives of Iraqis under Saddam?

Meanwhile, domestically, the chickies have come home to roost. We are faced with a domestic political war in which the Talk Radio Republican Party is poised to win back the House and roll stymie American politics for another decade. If I remember correctly, the Democrats won back Congress four years ago, not because they had any pro-active attractive program, but rather because the GOP had defaulted. Americans were sick of the war in Iraq and of Bush-Cheney and the Democrats were the only alternative in town.

Pelosi and Reid made a lot of noise about ending the war in Iraq and here we are almost a half decade later with an “end” that everyone knows is a joke. The war funding kept flowing with the Democrats controlling Congress. And once the White House was secured, the equally futile war in Afghanistan was escalated.

Bush drove the economy into a ditch, handing the Democrats a wonderful if opportunistic political opening and the Dems have failed to exploit it.

The result is that our two wars and our broken economy are now property of the Democrats. Didn’t and shouldn’t have been this way, but so it is. A clear failure of leadership.

I have no sympathy for the Democrats. Only scorn and disgust. They have now placed in a horrible position and are holding us hostage. And I rather resent it.

Their abdication, their inability to govern, to inspire their own base, to take even opportunistic advantage, now puts us in a tenuous, boxed-in position. With an enthusiasm gap of a whopping 25% in favor of the Republicans and with some polls showing an historic 10% generic congressional advantage for the GOP, we will be forced to vote for bankrupt Democrats in November merely to ward off a tsunami of wing-nuts flooding into Congress.

It’s a lose-lose proposition. At best, we come out of November with the status quo. At worse, we are in Hell.

But, meanwhile, the war is over.

Beckistan

As I said a few days ago, I was having some degree of difficulty processing the deeper meaning of tens or scores of thousands of Americans spending their Saturday by fancying charlatan Glenn Beck as Our Saviour.

Christopher Hitchens has come up with a compelling explanation that really resonates with me.  It’s all about “white self-pity.”

Says Hitch:

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Read the rest.

Update: Doug Henwood, who I mention later in this piece, has responded with his own new post.

Kevin Roderick at LAObserved has put up a hilarious post about the local Pacifica Radio, KPFK.  Readers of this blog know that I used to have a daily show there until a decade ago when “revolutionaries” took it over and have increasingly turned it into an electronic Albania.

Roderick’s post is a follow-up to a blog he did about 5 weeks ago about how the program director, Alan Minsky, warned the staff and volunteers of impending economic catastrophe and politely asked for volunteers to step forward to either surrender or shorten their programs.  He said he needed to introduce some updated programming that hopefully would generate more revenue and audience and he needed room in the schedule to do it.

You might ask, why would a manager ask instead of direct and just fire those who are dead wood?  Answer: because the station is dominated –both on staff and in its audience– by loonies who scream “fascist coup” if anybody’s special interest i.e. his or her program, is tinkered with.  Minsky is a nice guy but what a pathetic, groveling and demeaning position to put oneself in — to have to beg your subordinates to give up their positions!  Minsky himself is part of the problem. While he’s certainly among the smarter and more rational folks in the station, his pedigree was forged in the fever swamp of the Independent Media Center — a watering hole for True Believers. And he’s never quite outgrown it.

Well, you have probably guessed the payoff by now. Roderick reports this email coming from Minsky:

“Unfortunately, following my e-mail of one month ago in which I asked KPFK programmers, for the good of the station, to offer to shorten the length of their show or to move to a web-based show or to end their shows, not a single programmer stepped forward and made such a sacrifice,” writes Alan Minsky. As a result, he warns that the hammer is about to fall: “New voices need to be added to KPFK’s programming. In a week’s time some very difficult decisions will be made by KPFK management.”

Difficult? Since when is shooting fish in a barrel difficult?  With two or three hours of exception during a 168 hour week, you could pretty much randomly kill off any program and it would be improvement.  What’s going to be difficult, of course, are knee-jerkers who will go apopleptic and then  charge that racism, sexism, ageism, liberalism, fascism, and cystic fibrosis has swamped the purity of “people powered-radio.”

What we’re dealing with here is what former General Manager Mark Schubb calls “time slot sluts” — programmers who would do anything with anybody to retain their little slice of radio time. (Schubb, by the way, was inappropriately fired by the revolutionaries in 2002 and won several hundred thousand dollars in a legal settlement). There’s also an uncomfortable truth to be found here. KPFK and its programmers go on endlessly about how it is “community radio” that serves the people. ROFL

KPFK primarily, if not exclusively, serves its own programmers.  Period. Full stop. They are there for their own sake and nobody else’s.  Sort of like a mirror image of Glenn Beck.  The proof is the unanimous refusal by any of the programmers –95% of which are unpaid volunteers– to let go of the microphone so that the station itself can survive. What does that tell you? Fuck the people and “the community.”  Apparently, every single last programmer there thinks he or she is indispensable — a word and a concept they have apparently confused with the term “unlistenable.” And we’re talking in many cases about programmers who have been on the air 15, 20, 25 years or more without a fresh idea since Oliver North took his oath before congress.

Pacifica Radio is bleeding money and audience. Mostly because the programming sucks.Big Time.  And it sucks so bad that, for years now, its on air fundraising has become not only incessant, but chock a block with truther conspiracies and quack miracle medical cures.  It is a bleeding sore of the Left and makes you wonder about left-wing critics of The Media (why is the Left Media even worse than the MSM?).

By the way, there are some numbers that I have that are not in Roderick’s story.  Minsky’s memo is misleading as it refers to recent station growth from 120,000 to 180,000 cumulative listeners per week. But the station had 180,000 listeners twelve years ago and with a much weaker signal. What we are talking about is total stagnation. But it gets worse. The real way to measure listenership, however, is by Average Quarter Hour followers — people who tune in for at least 5 mins during an average 15 minute period. That’s very close to the number of people listening at any given moment.

According to figures I just saw, KPFK’s latest AQH is down to an all-time low of 1600 (in a signal area of 25 million people).  Two points of comparison. KPFK bottomed out at an AQH of  1800 in 1995 during a similar period of decay.  During Schubb’s management (1995-2002), he got those numbers to peak at about 7500-8000….which means, in reality, KPFK has about 20% of the audience it did a decade ago.  By contrast, successful public radio stations like KPCC can boast of an AQH 12-15 times bigger than KPFK while running, quite literally, about one or two percent of the wattage of Pacifica and thereby commanding a much smaller signal footprint. Nice work, comrades!

This is not just a problem at KPFK, but is rather a network-wide crisis.  Of the five Pacifica stations, two don’t even have recorded ratings because they haven’t paid the bill of the rating service! At this moment, all five positions of permanent station General Manager are open!

There’s been pretty much a conspiracy of silence on the Left about this. When the “revolutionaries” were in the process of taking over Pacifica a dozen years ago and Amy Goodman was scandalously using her air time to undermine her own network’s leadership and funding, the left media fell over each other to see who could more quickly (and falsely) condemn Pacifica for “corporatizing.” This was a damn lie exploited Goodman for personal gain, as it turns out, and never wanting to be outflanked on the left, the left blindly joined in the Pacifica bashing (with the honorable exception of The Progressive magazine which could smell something fishy and steered clear of the fight). At the time, I was working for The Nation and anchored Radio Nation which was produced out of KPFK.  And while the mag waffled around on the issue, not willing to defend the network that hosted its own program, it ultimately went into the tank for the loonies by running a partisan editorial supporting the bone-headed idea that Pacifica should have elected listener councils to manage programming (Of course, The Nation didn’t think this would be a workable idea for itself where two or three editors made and continue to make its own editorial decisions!).

Once the knuckle-head purists took over the network, and started destroying it, we’ve never again seen any sort of follow-up report in any  lefitst or “progressive” media circles, let alone among the left-of-center media criticism outfits like FAIR and Free Press. Not one in more than a decade.  The five stations have a market value of hundreds of millions of dollars, but the left turns a blind eye to ever scrutinizing this failing institution.

There was one breach in the wall a few weeks ago when lefty economist Doug Henwood, still a progammer at Pacifica’s WBAI, went public with his own horror report.  Read it here. I like Doug. He’s good guy and quite smart and he means well. But he’s about ten years too late. The game is already long over.

As the old joke about the Cuban government goes: The regime has already fallen. We’re just waiting on the official paper work. Or, if you prefer, what’s the sound of one lip flapping?

I will be the first to admit that I am confounded, confused and concerned that a couple of hundred thousand Americans find solace in former drunk and $32 million a year pinhead huckster Glenn Beck as the man who will redeem a Fallen America.  Even as demagogues go, he’s fourth rate. And that he is, as I said, primarily a huckster rather than a zealous ideologue ought to be dead obvious.

The great part, I suppose, about being 59 years old is that is no longer my job to save the world. And now, it seems, even trying to understand it is becoming an increasingly challenging if not futile task.

I will venture a few disjointed thoughts about it, however.

Let’s get one thing out of the way as quickly as possible. With all the talk of the Park 51 mosque being an insult to 9/11 families, the real desecration this week was a racialist-tinged right wing usurping the mantle, legacy and anniversary of the MLK speech. It’s both a fraud and an insult to our collective intelligence.

Second, I am not quite sure what word to use, but let’s say I have been “amused” by the pretzel-like verbiage used by the MSM to politely describe Beck’s on-the-Mall followers in polite and “balanced” terms.  It wasn’t exactly a torchlight Nuremberg rally. But then again, it wasn’t exactly something very wholesome or rational.

Sorry to be so judgmental, but if you are upset with the economy, if you don’t like big deficits, if you are tax-phobic and if you think Barack Obama isn’t up to the job of being president, well, then, that’s your right. But to believe that a TV jokester like  Beck and an obvious idiot like Sarah Palin are gonna save you, then, sorry, you’re just plain stupid as well.

Wait, Marc, are you willing to call 200,ooo Americans stupid?

Answer: Yes, I am. And a whole lot more.

I give some credit to Chris Good of The Atlantic who did a compelling job of describing what he saw out there on the Mall.  He counted four blacks out of 200,000. Surely, he was off by a factor of maybe 25.  Which changes nothing.

He also makes the point that this rally, with Beck channeling no one less than God himself, should put to rest the B.S. story line that there is no connection between the Christian Right and the Tea Party. Apparently, they are a same-sex couple.

That race-tinted demagogy  resonates at a time when America is in such an economic slump and a black man is sitting as president really should surprise no one. What I DO find disheartening is the coarseness and superficiality of it all.  If we had a rational Tory party in this country I would be a much happier person and we would all be better off — even though I personally would vehemently disagree with it.

Instead, we have … well, clowns. Very cynical clowns and buffoons leading this opposition.

Also, we have a lot of clowns and buffoons out there among “the people.” Especially, older, whiter, and resentful people. If you think for one moment that we saw today was manufactured by Fox News, you are dead wrong. Fox lubricated and revved up the event using its network as a mobilizing platform.  But, don’t let the yick-yacks who showed up for this farce off the hook.

It takes two to tango. And the dance we saw today was a death rattle of rational discourse.

Good night. And  may God  –or Glenn– bless you.

AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

Two points for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He re-stated, emphatically and unconditionally, his support for the so-called Ground Zero mosque ( a rather misleading misnomer that the media continues to blindly foster and repeat along with a whole of other crap):

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says not allowing a mosque to be built near ground zero would be “compromising our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.” The mayor made the comment Tuesday in an impassioned speech at a dinner in observance of Iftar, the daily meal in which Muslims break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Bloomberg says a compromise wouldn’t end the debate. He says the question would then become “how big should the no-mosque zone around the World Trade Center site be?”

This puts the Republican mayor in quite a different category than spineless Democrat Harry Reid (who said he opposed the mosque)  and the rather goofy Howard Dean (who says there should be a compromise — whatever that means).  As I said in a post last week, this issue is black and white, cut and dried. There is absolutely no reason to demand a compromise other than sheer ignorance, intolerance, bigotry or disingenuous “sensitivity.”

The mosque, itself, is little more than an asterisk. The controversy around it, however, has become a watershed political moment. If you like touchy-feeling language, it’s truly a teachable moment. We learn that Republicans, from lizards like Rick Lazio to human-turtle hybrids like Mitch McConnell, are shameless promoters of fear, ignorance and overt racism. We learn that Democrats, for the most part, are worthless in providing meaningful leadership in moments when it is really needed.

Indeed, depending which poll you prefer somewhere between a slim and overwhelming majority of Americans oppose the Park 51 Islamic Center. And so? We learn, that a lot of Americans are ignorant, bigoted or politically ill-served by our political class.  Poll Americans in 1955 about equal rights for Negroes and you would get a majority in opposition. Go back a hundred years and you get a majority in favor of chattel slavery.

That’s what political leadership is all about. It’s about getting out ahead of public opinion to shape it and enrich it — not to pander and to kow-tow to the lowest common denominator (which in this case is pretty damn low).  As Frank Rich said tonight on MSNBC, we’re currently fighting two wars at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in order to defend two nation states that are Islamic, in which there are thousands of mosques. So, we are willing to send our kids to die to defend a mosque in Kandahar but we won’t allow the construction of one in lower Manhattan?  Our leadership has failed. So has mass public opinion.

It’s aggravating and embarrassing.

It’s also classic deployment of bread and circuses.

We are quickly slipping into a double-dip recession. Some of the more pessimistic talk of a “mild depression.”  Millions have no work. Republicans and now a predictable but alarmingly increasing number of Democrats are shilling for the richest 3 percent of Americans, arguing to extend the Bush tax cuts — which will cost us quite literally trillions in deficits over the next decade.  We remain mired in two absolutely futile and unwinnable wars and while the U.S. “combat role” in Iraq has now ended, the war hasn’t and it seems crystal clear that we will keep tens of thousands of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan for the duration of most of our lifetimes.

And what are we debating? If Muslims have civil rights? If Sarah Palin picks winners or losers?

My favorite social critic, Neil Postman, wrote of the danger we faced from totalitarianism. Two models of such are found in modern literature, he noted. There is the Orwellian vision of 1984 in which Big Brother is always watching you. A competing vision is that of Brave New World in which Aldous Huxley describes a society marked by a citizenry that willingly, and often blissfully, worships and complies with Power. They voluntarily distract and amuse themselves with drugs and trivia, trading in their rights for entertainment.

Be advised.

On your left.

On your right.

Here are some of the bodies stacked up at the county morgue in Tucson.  Just a few of them.  There’s a whole lot more in the 50 foot refrigerated trailer now more or less permanently parked in front of the Pima County Morgue.  Indeed, as The L.A. Times reports, Arizona is now well on the way for breaking its own record of people dying to cross the border.  Probably more than 220 this year:

In 2007, a record 218 bodies were found in Pima County. This year, the death toll could be worse. Already, authorities have recovered the remains of 170 migrants…

July was the worst month of this year so far, with 59 people found dead. More than half of them died from heat-related causes. On July 15, the deadliest day of the month, seven bodies were found, among them the remains of Omar Luna Velasquez, 25. The high temperature that day was 108 degrees.

To accommodate the bodies in the summer heat, a 50-foot refrigerated trailer truck has been parked in the coroner’s receiving area

Now, I’ve been around long enough to know that most folks couldn’t give one hoot about a nameless Mexican who quite literally gets his or her brains fried while crossing the Sonoran desert.  Some probably think they deserve it.  But for those who lack decency and compassion for simple people running tremendous risks, let’s at least look at this mathematically.

The record number of deaths occurred in 2007 when the U.S. economy was still peaking. The already draconian border crackdown in effect at the time had created a labor shortage in the Southwest and anyone lucky enough to make it alive across the border could get a job that paid ten times more than a job in Mexico — provided any job could be found.

In the intervening three years, great swaths of the Holy Protective Wall have been constructed. Batteries of new sensors, infra-red cameras, physical and electronic barriers have been constructed.  Arizona has passed SEVERAL laws make life miserable, supposedly, for illegals. National Guard troops have been sent to the border. The number of Border Patrol agents have been nearly doubled.  All this at the cost of quite literally billions of dollars.

And yet….they keep coming, as Pete Wilson used to say. And they keep dying in record numbers.  All this in the midst of an economic downturn in the U.S. and a fierce and intimidating escalation of nativist frenzy in Arizona.

How many different ways can you spell FAIL?

My friend and all around wise man, Chuck Bowden, has put it best. “The mass immigration from Mexico will cease only when we lower American wages to the level of Vietnam.”

As long as there is a 20 x 1 rural pay difference between the two countries, you really think the bloviating rhetoric of a head case like Sheriff Joe Arpaio or a lout like John McCain is going to make even a dent in the flow? And now add in the mass murder going on in northern Mexico? You’d be nuts, NOT to try and get across the border.

Get real.

Here’s Bowden.

P.S. No one has written with more dark lyricism about the Season of Death (the summer border crossing period) than Luis Alberto Urrea in his classic work, The Devil’s Highway. Writes Urrea:

It is then that lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, strawberries are all ready to be picked. Arkansas chickens are ready to be plucked. Cows are waiting in Iowa and Nebraska to be ground into hamburger, and grills are ready in McDonald’s and Burger King and Wendy’s and Taco Bell for the ground meat to be cooked. KFC is waiting for its Mexican-plucked, Mexican-slaughtered chickens to be fried by Mexicans. And the western desert is waiting, too—its temperatures soaring, a fryer in its own right.

So, que prefieres? Regular or crispy?

Even before Fidel Castro (sort of) retired from public view four years ago, I suspected he was already losing it. I saw a couple of speeches he made in the early part of the decade where he not only went on and on at length (as he always did) but he downright rambled, veered way off topic, and then started repeating himself.

He’c clearly a guy who doesn’t know when to put a lid on it under the best of conditions. Now there’s pretty convincing evidence that El Maximo Lider has a scambled head.

Earlier this week, he took up three pages (out of total of eight!) in the daily fish wrapper, Granma, to heap praise and quote at length from a book pushing one of the all-time nut ball conspiracies i.e. that the secretive Bilderberg Group….runs the world!  And all this time I had mistakenly thought it was a loosely affiliated, elite economic class with shared interests.

The AP did a decent piece on this public display of goofiness, but there’s one mistake in the AP’s story. The Bilderberg conspiracy theory is 99% a favorite of the extreme right, often the anti-semitic right, and almost never shares up in the discourse of even the looniest lefty fringe  Here’s a few excerpts from the AP report:

Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.

The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.

Estulin’s work, “The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club,” argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.

Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a “fantastic story.”

Estulin’s book, as quoted by Castro, described “sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists” manipulating the public “to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self.”

The Bilderberg group’s website says its members have “nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern” once a year, but the group does nothing else…

The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to “control the masses” by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.

“The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself,” the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.

“In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population,” the excerpt said…..

This is first-class crap. Quite obviously.

There’s always been a strong anti-Semitic tinge to the Bilderberg conspiracy theory which was originally popularized by the John Birch Society. Nowadays, it’s a favorite of birthers, Birchers, and the folks who believe the Trilaterial Commission, the Illuminati and the Council on Foreign Relations also secretly run the world.

One point in favor of this conspiracy theory is that the Bilderberg Group meets for only 3 days a year. That’s not much time to plot running the entire world, which might explain why things are so effed up.

By the way, I don’t think Castro is anti-Semitic.

I think he’s senile.

Here we also have another example of the downside of dictatorship. It’s not just about stifling dissent and usurping power.  It’s also about snuffing out civic and intellectual life. Imagine being a 20 year old Cuban who must rely on one national daily newspaper run by the state. You wake up one day this week and find that the same Old Man who came to power almost 52 years ago eats up 40 percent of the day’s paper with a theory that not only has nothing to do with our life, but might as well been written by L. Ron Hubbard.

Very sad.

The hard part of life is having to balance those moments of great inspiration with those of ultimate disillusionment.  Case in point:  As part of my work as a prof at USC, I spent today on a journalism grad field trip to L.A.’s Skid Row.  There, amidst the squalor and poverty, was where I found great inspiration. Spending time with the lawyers, advocates, and street workers who battle all odds to win decency and rights for the most vulnerable and despised among us is to literally renew one’s faith in humanity.

But my high was short-lived. On the long drive back home I made the mistake of tuning into one of the XM political talk radio shows only to hear a LOT of folks argue against the now infamous Islamic cultural center/mosque to be erected two long blocks from Ground Zero.

Sorry, folks, but this is an open and closed issue. Our constitution and our professed ideals permit no (artificial, disgusting) “debate” on this issue.  Like Judge Wapner, I have read the complaints of the plaintiffs and  here is my ruling: to oppose the erection of the Islamic center is to classify oneself in the same ranks of overt anti-Semites, anti-Catholic bigots and advocates of Jim Crow.

Period.

There is an absolute, unqualified right to freedom of religion in this America and the more you oppose the mosque, the closer you come to demonstrating the exact and precise sort of religious intolerance (and ignorance) that motivates such outfits as Al Qaeda and the Taliban (OK, and Opus Dei).

And you’re hearing this from a self-professed “stone, cold atheist” who — at a certain level– is repulsed by any church, synagogue, temple or mosque. I rather share the inclination of the Catalonian anarchists who preferred to turn houses of worship into public outhouses. But such is democracy. If you want to build something to adore a God that does not exist, no skin off my rear (except I don’t think you should have tax-exempt status).

I have been sickened by the jibber-jabber of thinly-veiled racists and bigots who speak of the Hallowed Ground in lower Manhattan.  Should we also ban Japanese tourists from visiting Pearl Harbor? How about prohibiting Germans from entering any American synagogues?

I was delighted to hear Barack Obama endorse the building of the mosque. And I was, shall we say, deeply disappointed to hear him walk it back the next day.

Harry Reid has behaved in a despicable way. I am so pleased I don’t live in Nevada as I am not forced to decide whether to vote for an unprincipled jellyfish like him or abstain at the risk of replacing him a Mad Hatter Tea Partier.

Most repulsive to me, as a nominal Jew, has been the unspeakable but rather predictable posture of the Anti-Defamation League. I say predictable because the ADL has been running one of the greatest of scams for way too long, baldly capitalizing on the Holocaust while serving, primarily, as a lobby for the state of Israel.  Anti-semitism is charge no one wants to bear, and the ADL has cynically manipulated the issue and politcally blackmailed (and blackballed) way too many legitimate critics of Israel by smearing them as anti-Semites (yours truly included).

The ADL is no more a “civil rights” organization than I am a PR man for the Vatican.  But it gets away with political murder because no one wants to risk the scarlet letter of Anti-Semite.  If it WERE a true civil rights group, and especially given the legacy of persecution of Jews, the ADL would be on the front line of supporting the building of the mosque.

Shame, and double shame, on the ADL for being outflanked on this issue by none other than conservative Ted Olson.  A former high-ranking official of the Reagan and Dubya administrations, Olson served as counsel for the later in Bush v. Gore and he in private practice he defended Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. Most importantly, he was widowed by 9/11 when his wife, conservative commentator Barbara Olson, died in one of the highjacked planes. But Olson, unlike the ADL, has given his unqualified support to the building of the mosque. Good for him!

(Historical anecdote: there are many low points in the history of the ADL. One of the lowest came in 1982 when it bestowed its high-prestige Torch of Liberty award to the great Las Vegas humanitarian, Moe Dalitz. The chief operator of the Desert Inn, Brother Dalitz was also the unabashed point man for the Detroit Mob in Sin City.  A real mensch.)

UPDATE: We can now add Doctor Howard Dean to the Hall of Shame on this one.

–

Apropos of this bullshit “debate” on the mosque, it reminded me of the book What’s the Matter With Kansas, by my old pal Tom Frank. Most of you know the thesis of this book i.e. that working class Americans are diverted into voting against their own economic interests (i.e for Republicans) because they are galvanized to the Right by the manipulation of social issues. I like Tom’s book but also I like some of the criticism of it. First, while it’s indisputable that voting Republican is, indeed, against the interests of most working people it is somewhat dubious to argue that voting for Democrats is actually voting in their self-interest. Maybe, somewhat, sometimes. But not very convincingly. Which leads to the second, more profound, criticism: that precisely because both parties support pretty much the same economic system, identifying with this or that party on strictly social or moral or religious or racial issues is not so irrational; there should be no assumption that minor economic differences can trump profound ideological postures. I think we are seeing that now. Folks who, I agree, OUGHT to be worried as hell about stimulating economic growth, about jobs, costs of education and health, rebuilding our infrastructure, getting out of two catastrophic wars and domestic city-building rathertha  mythical foreign nation building are instead bent out of shape because some AY-rabs wanna build a mosque in New York, are not being misled or snookered by Republicans and conservatives. Nope. Sorry, there’s an easier explanation than that. They simply live with their heads deep, deep up their asses and no amount of economic populism is going to win them over to different positions.

I guess I’m sorta back from vacation but don’t want to accept it.  It will hit me tomorrow, I suppose, when I begin a week’s woth of grad orientation at USC before the classes I teach start on the 24th. Oh, well.

I do want to catch up with you on a few random thoughts and moments I had while up in the Eastern Sierras enjoying the spectacular natural beauty and trying to reel in a few trout.

One night this week at dinner in Mammoth with my wife, we started talking to the middle-aged couple sitting at the table next to us from Milan. We couldn’t resist trying out our rusty Italian and we did pretty well (considering we haven’t lived in Italy since 1979!).  The husband asked us if it was some sort of national holiday or something.  We answered that it wasn’t and was curious why he asked.

“It’s because everywhere we go around here we see so many American flags in the campgrounds and on the campers,” he said. “We thought maybe it was the anniversary of a war or something like that.”

Frankly, my wife and I had made the same observation as we tooled around Lakes Mary, George, Gull, June and others.  It was pretty common to see not just a flag decal, but several flapping editions of Old Glory erected alongside or on top of the tents and campers and RV’s that filled the camp sites.  More often than not, they were accompanied by somewhat predictable bumper stickers and decals praising the NRA, the Marines, God or trashing “Obummer” as I read on the sticker one pickup truck.

I’m an avid fisherman and know there is no ideological test for outdoor types. Though, without going too much out on a limb, I think it fair to say that self-proclaimed “outdoorsmen,” shooters, anglers and even RV’ers are disproportionately anti-government conservatives.

The ironies here are rather obvious. All of the flag-decorated campgrounds were government-owned and administered and are maintained and kept affordable by tax revenue, not tax cuts.  All these flag-wavers love the U.S. Forest Service and the Park Rangers (as I do) and they are also dependent on the tax dole. In more than 50 years of fishing I have never, ever heard one angler grumble about the relatively high cost of a state-issued fishing license (and you are quite the subject of peer stigma if you claim to have temporarily “forgotten” to renew your permit.) No one bitches about that sort of regulation.  Nor does anyone I have ever met out on the surf line, a sport fishing boat or on a lake think that the Fish and Game inspectors are Nazis because they will tag you $400 for an undersized fish.

So, like my Italian dinner mate, I had to wonder, what the hell are all the flags about? Do these folks think that there is something inherently patriotic about natural mountain beauty (if so, they’ve never been to Switzerland or even Canada)?  What is specifically American about camping? The Europeans do it, like crazy.  Frankly, I don’t get the flag waving.

I’m not offended by the sight of an American flag. No way.  But one of the reasons you go to the mountains is for the NATURAL beauty. To get away from the grayness and hum-drum of urban life. And to get away from the buzz and the noise of a wired world filled with partisan shouting and fist-shaking.  There’s a certain civil democracy and sense of friendly mutual aid out on the lake shore. There is, at least, I suppose, unless you happen to mention that you think national health care is a good idea.

And let’s not be disingenuous about this. Even those among us who deeply appreciate all that is good about America (along with its flaws), know that going out of your way to unravel a flag  nowadays, especially in a remote campground, has –more likely than not– a political edge to it. And an aggressive one at that.

Which brings me to the great and sobering book I’m currently reading. “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War” written by former career military officer Andrew Bacevich.  So far, this is a brilliant and grim semi-memoir of the “semiwarror” state we have been in since the close of WWII.  What Bacevich really drives home is how an entrenched war-making bureaucracy chugs along irrespective of who or what party is in office.  Not that all presidents are indentical or that there are no differences between Republicans and Democrats. But rather how no significant part of the political establishment is willing to question all of the underlying assumptions that drive the imperial impulse, the mythology of American exceptionalism, the iron-clad belief that overwhelming American power and its too frequent exercise is not only always a force for Good, but is an imperative for global security.

This, of course, is absurd. We speak of nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both of which are impossibilities. And both at the cost of not re-building Detroit or Oakland.

Yet, our politicians –of both parties–remain either complicit or hostage to a set of mythical principles that not only threaten peace, but are more than certain to bankrupt America, if they haven’t already.

Those shibboleths prevail not just because of the crassness of the political class (though so many of them and their friends directly benefit from their implementation). But they are also fed, in grand degree, from too much of an American population who also wants to live in fairy land. Even when they are out camping.

I hate seeing Hitch like this.

Meanwhile, I will fill you in some good books I’ve been reading this past week and that I heartily recommend:

– The Glass Rainbow by the inimitable James Lee Burke.  Absolutely wonderful with his lead character, Dave Robicheaux once again proving himself the most complex personality in modern crime fiction. I love reading these books in the pool with my Clete Purcel hat on (bought on Burke’s web site).

– The Politician by Andrew Young was a surprisingly well-written book. I expected a tabloid smear of John Edwards.  What I got was a deeply intelligent and devastating chronicle of a political operative’s journey from idealism into the veritable sewer operation run by Mr. and Mrs. Edwards.  You want to really see the seamy underside of American political life as well as the total ethical and moral bankruptcy of John and Elizabeth? This is for you.

– Methland by Nick Reding. Reding takes a wrecking ball to the mythologies of Little Town America and immerses deep into the ruinous world of crack and crystal meth. This is a not a scare’em book. It’s a meditation on globalization and the decline of rural America. And the rise of King Meth,

– Currently reading Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stores in American Journalism by Joseph Campbell. I’m having a great time with this deconstruction of all the self-serving B.S. of American journalism. Lovely. He takes apart Edward R. Murrow and documents how he was, um, four years late to the McCarthy story. Good night and not so good luck.

And, of course, there’s still  few thousand copies of my daughter Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s highly acclaimed Mad Men Unbuttoned. We were joyous today to have a friend send us a pic of it on display in the window of the legendary Samuel French store here in Jollywood.

Marie Antoinette

“Let them east cake,” she said. And they will. When former hedge fund trader Chelsea Clinton weds current hedge fund trader Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding tomorrow, the guests better damn well eat that cake. Latest estimates are that the wedding cake will cost between $12,000 and $20,000 (two years worth of  tuition at the University of California).

No, I’m not making that up. Don’t get too excited. The cake is just a small slice of the overall catering bill which is estimated to run 3/4 of a million dollars. Which, in turn, is hardly a cut into the overall Clinton nuptials budget that will run between $3-$6 million.

Sorry, I don’t  have proper sourcing to confirm whether the $250,ooo in jewels baby Chelsea will be wearing is included in that price tag or if these were merely personal baubles she picked up while helping to save the world when she toiled for the Avenue Capital Group.

ABC News reports: “the driveway at the lavish Astor Court Estate, a sprawling mansion built for John Jacob Astor IV where the ceremony will take place, is being widened to accommodate limousines. The portable toilets on site are equipped with hot water and music cost $15,000. Even the electricians working at the event will be high-classing, adhering to a tuxedo dress code.”

What we don’t know if any san culottes wearing red beanies and holding pitchforks will be amassing at the gates and shouting “Off with their heads!”

Hey, I know how important kids are. I have one. I was happy to put up a grand for her recent book party. I’ve told her I might even spend two to three times that amount on an eventual wedding (mine, by the way cost $45 in 1974 and is still in effect).

We know that a) Bill Clinton is stinking rich and b) I loathe the Clintons. Those two facts declared, how can this revolting display of over-the-top opulence be put on such garish display by a couple who, supposedly, are mere public officials and not be loudly condemned?

Obama was criticized for making a wisecrack about how in these rough times it might not be a good idea to go blow a lot of money in Vegas.  Given what the Clintons are doing, they should consider themselves lucky they don’t get frog marched to the Place Concord by a howling mob of the unemployed.

This is the week that Congressional Democrats are all over the tube crying crocodile tears over unemployment benefits running out for those who have been idle for 99 weeks — while they pack their bags to go on congressional vacation.  We’ve got Charlie Rangel on public display with his hands caught in 13 different cookie jars — and he won’t resign.

In the midst of this pubic atmosphere of crisis and austerity, we have the Clintons onstage strutting exactly like the narcissistic aristocrats they have, in fact, become.

Bill Clinton who farts around the world, weeping over the homeless in Haiti and the AIDS-stricken in Africa.  Get me an air sick bag, please.  These folks couldn’t have had a quiet, homey wedding and made a big public announcement that in the name of Chelsea he was donating $6m to the Haitian homeless?  But that wouldn’t be the Bill Clinton we really know, would it?

Further, I am sure we will soon find that it isn’t even his money. Dollars to donuts you can bet it came from some sheik (not chic) pal of his in the Emirates.

A final point:  Clinton, as an ex-president, a man out of office, has the right, I suppose, to enrich himself any sleazy way he can find. But Chelsea is the daughter of the sitting Secretary of State of the United States. What message does this send?

Good grief.

P.S. I don’t let Chelsea off the hook here. She is not just an off-limit politician’s kid. She’s a 30 year old woman who has clearly inherited the family’s moral  gene pool.  She could have simply said, “No.”

Here’s my long feature piece in The Nation about John McCain’s fight to win renomination to the Senate.  Here’s the lede:

Rob Haney’s got a big problem. After a stint in the Air Force and a thirty-year career with IBM, Haney is now a full-time political activist. And he can’t decide who he viscerally hates and fears more: the hierarchy of the Catholic Church or Senator John McCain.

It’s a toughie for him. This is the sort of middle-of-the-night quandary that might bedevil a liberal secular humanist. Or some sort of atheist progressive Democrat. Haney, however, is the elected chair of the Republican Party of Maricopa County, which includes Arizona’s capital, the fifth-biggest city in the United States. And whatever one thinks of John McCain, spending a half-hour or so with Haney boldly underlines the challenges the former GOP presidential candidate is facing in his August 24 primary battle against ultraconservative challenger and former Congressman J.D. Hayworth.

Read the whole thing here. Please.

Bradley Manning

Courage deserves support.

We don’t know what role if any Manning played in the current Wikileak strategy.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration has launched a full-scale shakedown aimed at hunting down the leakers. This is really disgraceful and a classic case of wanting to kill the messenger. NOBODY has been able to point to how a single data point in the Wikileaks documents have compromised in any way national security or any individual soldier.  What it has exposed is the futility of a dead-ended policy. The administration should be spending its time and resources figuring out how to get the hell out of Afghanistan and what to do about the double-agents in the Pakistani regime rather than trying to persecute the person or persons who conducted the PUBLIC SERVICE of making these shameful documents public.

Thanks to the six year archive of secret documents on the war in Afghanistan released by Wikileaks and amalgamated by three newspapers, we now know what a hopeless mess we are mired in (if we didn’t know that before). NO question this is the modern equivalent to The Pentagon Papers.  This time around the information comes, mostly we are told, from a now-detained 22 year old U.S. Army intelligence analyst. His reward: prison.

The New York Times, one of three papers given access to the archive by the whistle-blower web site, sums up its findings:

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

The material comes to light as Congress and the public grow increasingly skeptical of the deepening involvement in Afghanistan and its chances for success as next year’s deadline to begin withdrawing troops looms.

The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

And much, much more. The key element, I think, is the debunking of the fantastic notion that our allies in the Pakistani government are really our allies. We pour blood and treasure into fighting the Taliban while we give billions to a Pakistani establishment that backs the same folks. As the Times says it:

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

The question here is not factual, but rather political. We have a Democratic administration in power backed by a Democratic congress.  What hope do we have that this bombshell information will have any real political repercussions. The last thing I heard about this was from Hillary Clinton about a week ago reassuring her friends that our Summer 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan was really no deadline at all.

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Here’s one  sideshow irony that strikes me about the process of this story. The old Curmudgeon line is that the Web is a parasite that could not exist if it didn’t have MSM content to regurgitate.  You know the whole song and dance: “Who’s going to pay for the real reporting etc. etc”   Seems to me that this Afghan papers bombshell is that story mostly in reverse.  Here we have Wikileaks scooping up all of the hard data and The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were allowed to, um, aggregate it! Ok, that might be a bit harsh. No question that the Times produced some real value added and professionally compiled the info, edited and further reported it. But the basic point remains: the original journalistic source here is Wikileaks.  So, maybe we have found by accident a new future for newspapers: to help us propagate data collected by ordinary and extraordinary folks on the Web!

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Just saw the season opener of Mad Men and reveled in its darkness. We’re into late 1964 now and the main characters seem on the verge of being eclipsed by the times, sort of out of synch with the changing world around them.  More to come.  In the meantime, yes, yes, you can still order a copy of my daughter’s now highly acclaimed Mad Men Unbuttoned.

(Natasha is the one on the left. She doesn’t like hats.)

I warned you all that I would be spending this week shamelessly promoting my daughter Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned book. I’m holding to my word. A father’s prerogative.

First of all, thanks to all those who participated in our giveaway contest. I said the first 15 but actually I let it get to 25. So books in the mail by Monday. Promise.

Just wanted to fill you in on the latest hype, thank you.

We had a great turnout at Natasha’s book party last night in West Hollywood on the rooftop of the iconic Formosa Cafe. Maybe about 150 folks.

Our loyal commenter and supporter, Rob Grocholski, wrote up a nice report on Randy’s “Beautiful Horizons” blog. Thanks, Rob!

GuestofaGuest.com has a boffo photo gallery from the party here and here.

Mikey P. from Townlow.com has a superb slide show from the party. And a couple of photo galleries here and here.

Pandora from Fishbowl L.A. took some cool pix and offered up this report.

Very nice to have The New Yorker praise your daughter. And they did, right here.

The Daily Beast ran a cool excerpt on Natasha’s take on Don Draper’s sex appeal.

TheWrap.com put out a beautiful spread and excerpt.  So did Pastemagazine.com

New Hampshire Public Radio has a great podcast interview with the child.

Interview magazine interviews Natasha.

The Week magazine listed one of her essays as one of the five most provocative about Mad Men.

Lemondrop.com consulted with Natasha on how to best throw a Mad Men party.

The Oregonian had some nice things to say about the book. So did The San Jose Mercury News in its review.  The Oakland Tribune picked up the same piece. The Toronto Globe and Mail has a nice mention. Brand X from The Los Angeles Times had a somewhat more mixed review. That’s forgiven, it’s hard to concentrate when your mother ship is radically listing   But they did spell her name right and that’s all that counts.

We’re having fun.

Excuse me for being a bit preoccupied, but today is publication day for my daughter Natasha’s book. It’s getting great reviews and sales are brisk. And this is where I am unabashedly putting all my energies for the next week.

I want to make my readers an offer they can’t possibly refuse:

The first fifteen readers who buy the book online and who email me the order confirmation and their address, will receive from me –free of charge– a signed copy of my L.A. Times best-seller memoir on Chile, Pinochet and Me.  Email me your info at marc.cooper@usc.edu

Also, for SoCal locals. Remember our book launch party is this Thursday night, 7:30 p.m. on the rooftop at the Formosa Cafe in West Hollywood. Everyone welcome.

How comforting it is to read the spectacular Washington Post series on America’s sprawling spy and intelligence network.

We learn, among many other things:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

I think it’s the last sentence which is most disheartening. Beyond the obvious boondoggle and the war-on-terror-profiteering, we have created an “intelligence” network so vast in scope that it, logically, cannot be intelligent. Or responsive. Or coordinated. Or coherent. But it sure looks like a great way to make big bucks. Nearly 2,000 private companies directly involved in intelligence and counter-terrorism. And almost a million people with “top secret” clearance and a much larger number with only “secret” status.

You tell me the odds. One in a million that the network is infiltrated? Even those vastly overstated odds means we’ve got two or three top Al Qaeda agents working inside our counter-terrorism circles. Reduce the odds to a more realistic scale and we’ll come up with dozens playing on both sides of the street.

The good news: if you want to report suspicious activity to a proper authority, just throw a rock on a crowded street and you’ve got an excellent chance of getting the attention of someone with top secret clearance.

Of course, this will all be cleaned up if the Democrats hang onto the House. Not to worry.