Oil is on the boil and the dollar is in the toilet. Why aren’t those people in prison? All of them!
My niece Morgan just had her tonsils out. I think it was probably harder on her parents than on her. Hope you get well soon, sweetheart.
My beloved Honda lost its transmission last week. I’ve been driving a crappy rental for over a week. Anything past 120 kph and the front end starts to vibrate. They’ve promised me I’ll get mine back this coming Tuesday but only after I sign over the last several years of my life to pay for it. I miss my car.
It’s been a busy month and the holiday season hasn’t even started yet. I spent the Eid at the American University of Sharjah campus with David, Lorin and Reynan. It was a nice, quiet restful time. Lorin is really getting into this cooking thing. On Friday night she made lasagna, which was great. Lorin’s friend Eva joined us. I hadn’t met her before but had heard Lorin speak of her a lot. She’s an equestrian and a journalist and works for Princess Haya’s office in Dubai. Then, on Saturday night, Lorin baked lamb, which is one of my favorites. It was her first attempt and it turned out brilliantly. Pat, the head of libraries for Zayed U., joined us and we had a very nice evening. Pat brought a rhubarb crumble, which I’d never had before, and it was very tasty. David and I watched a lot of rugby, including the England win over France. Great game.
Susan, ex-embassy, flew in for a short visit. George threw a small dinner party for her. It was a good evening. Badda and Asli were there. Asli was getting ready to fly back to the States and Huntington for a quick visit. It’s strange being able to talk to someone here about Huntington and different places and even a few people we know in common there. Susan really looked well and is planning her retirement from the Army and looking forward to it a lot, from what I could tell.
Enma threw a nice dinner party about a week or so back. Glynnis and her son James were visiting from the UK. Enma cooked a whopping big beef roast and it was to die for. Barry and Catherine, Steve and Leah and Hannah and I ravaged that beef carcass in under an hour. Lots of talk and laughing and drinking, the usual.
Last Friday we had a goodbye dinner for Chris and his wife, Pam. I worked with Chris at Operations for several years and he has decided to retire to Cyprus. Rich chose the Fairmont in Dubai for the venue. It’s pretty posh, that hotel. Since my car is in the shop, Sam drove us down. That was also so that I could drink and not have to drive back. Major Patrick and Major Bruno, the French contingent, were there. Hadn’t seen Bruno in over a year or so, but he’s looking well. Rich was there without Stephanie, who was ill. Alan and Charlie were there. Charlie looks great and is making new career plans.
There are a few new pix posted in the Family Reunion and Birthdays albums. There’s also a new album with a few pix from the goodbye dinner for Chris at the Fairmont.
I’ve been using a new search engine Mininova ( http://www.mininova.org/ ) that works in conjunction with BitLord, to get music. It’s great. It has a lot of older music on it as well as classical and jazz. There’s also a list of the most popular downloads of the day on the home page.
I just discovered a new search type site called stumbleupon. Just Google stumbleupon, download the toolbar and give yourself a user name. They email you a password and then you set up the site by ticking off your interests. It’s also a networking site, as well. I haven’t really had a chance to fully explore it yet, but it looks cool.
Oh, almost forgot, Ian Rankin is going to be in Abu Dhabi on Nov. 10 at the Abu Dhabi Mall, Jashanmal Book Shop to sign his new book, Exit Music. I read somewhere that he kills Rebus off in this one. I will not be happy, still I want to get him to sign the book for me.
I’m going to dump several links here at the end. They’ve been accumulating since my last post.
Israel’s rising right wing by Gregory Levey
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/09/gaydamak_bibi/
(It worries me more that the crazy Israeli’s have the bomb. How about you?)
The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us by Frank Rich
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html?_r=1&ex=1193112000&en=9d6f60099c11a72b&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin
(I’ve never read the book, The Good Germans, but from what I understand it’s about the general German population, while not avid Hitlerites, who just “went along” with it all. That’s the USA in 2007. A country of “Good Germans.”)
Dissent From The Front Lines by Robert Scheer
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071016_dissent_from_the_front_lines/
Iran: Why I Am Still Worried by Mike Farrell
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/24/iran-why-am-i-still-worried/#more-22765
(Remember Mike “BJ” Farrell from MASH? He’s not the only one who’s worried.)
Electoral Dysfunction by Eugene Robinson
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071025_electoral_dysfunction/
I’m Dressing Up as a Melting Polar Ice Cap by Bill Maher
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/27/fear/
This last one I am posting in its entirety because of its importance. Remember Scott Ritter who was looking for WMD before the Iraq war. Read this and learn something.
On the Eve of Destruction
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071022_on_the_eve_of_destruction/
Posted on Oct 22, 2007
By Scott Ritter
Don’t worry, the White House is telling us. The world’s most powerful leader was simply making a rhetorical point. At a White House press conference last week, just in case you haven’t heard, President Bush informed the American people that he had told world leaders “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” World War III. That is certainly some rhetorical point, especially coming from the man singularly most capable of making such an event reality.
Pundits have raised their eyebrows and comics are busy writing jokes, but the president’s reference to Armageddon, no matter how cavalierly uttered and subsequently brushed away, suggests an alarming context. Some might note that the comment was simply an offhand response to a reporter’s question, the kind of free-thinking scenario that baffles Bush so. In a way, this makes what the president said even more disturbing, since we now have an insight into the vision, and related terminology, which hovers just below the horizon in the brain of George W. Bush.
When I was a weapons inspector with the United Nations, there was a jostling that took place at the end of each day, when decisions needed to be made and authorization documents needed to be signed. In an environment of competing agendas, each of us who championed a position sought to be the “last man in,” namely the person who got to imprint the executive chairman (our decision maker) with the final point of view for the day. Failure to do so could find an inspection or point of investigation sidetracked for days or weeks after the executive chairman became distracted by a competing vision. I understand the concept of “imprinting,” and have seen it in action. What is clear from the president’s remarks is that, far from an innocent rhetorical fumble, his words, and the context in which he employed them, are a clear indication of the imprinting which is taking place behind the scenes at the White House. If the president mentions World War III in the context of Iran’s nuclear program, one can be certain that this is the very sort of discussion that is taking place in the Oval Office. A critical question, therefore, is who was the last person to “imprint” the president prior to his public allusion to World War III? During his press conference, Bush noted that he awaited the opportunity to confer with his defense secretary, Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice following their recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. So clearly the president hadn’t been imprinted recently by either of the principle players in the formulation of defense and foreign policy. The suspects, then, are quickly whittled down to three: National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Vice President Dick Cheney, and God. Hadley is a long-established neoconservative thinker who has for the most part operated “in the shadows” when it comes to the formulation of Iran policy in the Bush administration. In 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Hadley (then the deputy national security adviser) instituted what has been referred to as the “Hadley Rules,” a corollary of which is that no move will be made which alters the ideological positioning of Iran as a mortal enemy of the United States. These “rules” shut down every effort undertaken by Iran to seek a moderation of relations between it and the United States, and prohibited American policymakers from responding favorably to Iranian offers to assist with the fight against al-Qaida; they also blocked the grand offer of May 2003 in which Iran outlined a dramatic diplomatic initiative, including a normalization of relations with Israel. The Hadley Rules are at play today, in an even more nefarious manner, with the National Security Council becoming involved in the muzzling of former Bush administration officials who are speaking out on the issue of Iran. Hadley is blocking Flynt Leverett, formerly of the National Security Council, from publishing an Op-Ed piece critical of the Bush administration on the grounds that any insight into the machinations of policymaking (or lack thereof) somehow strengthens Iran’s hand. Leverett’s article would simply underscore the fact that the Bush administration has spurned every opportunity to improve relations with Iran while deliberately exaggerating the threat to U.S. interests posed by the Iranian theocracy. The silencing of informed critics is in keeping with Hadley’s deliberate policy obfuscation. There is still no official policy in place within the administration concerning Iran. While a more sober-minded national security bureaucracy works to marginalize the hawkish posturing of the neocons, the administration has decided that the best policy is in fact no policy, which is a policy decision in its own right. Hadley has forgone the normal procedures of governance, in which decisions impacting the nation are written down, using official channels, and made subject to review and oversight by those legally and constitutionally mandated and obligated to do so. A policy of no policy results in secret policy, which means, according to Hadley himself, the Bush administration simply does whatever it wants to, regardless. In the case of Iran, this means pushing for regime change in Tehran at any cost, even if it means World War III. But Hadley is simply a facilitator, bureaucratic “grease” to ease policy formulated elsewhere down the gullet of a national security infrastructure increasingly kept in the dark about the true intent of the Bush administration when it comes to Iran. With the Department of State and the Pentagon now considered unfriendly ground by the remaining hard-core neoconservative thinkers still in power, policy formulation is more and more concentrated in the person of Vice President Cheney and the constitutionally nebulous “Office of the Vice President.”
Cheney and his cohorts have constructed a never-never land of oversight deniability, claiming immunity from both executive and legislative checks and balances. With an unchallenged ability to classify anything and everything as secret, and then claim that there is no authority inherent in government to oversee that which has been thus classified, the Office of the Vice President has transformed itself into a free republic’s worst nightmare, assuming Caesar-like dictatorial authority over almost every aspect of American national security policy at home and abroad. From torture to illegal wiretapping, to arms control (or lack of it) to Iran, Dick Cheney is the undisputed center of policy power in America today. While there are some who will claim that in this time of post-9/11 crisis such a process of bureaucratic streamlining is essential for the common good, the reality is far different.
It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this has never been truer than in the case of Cheney. What Cheney is doing behind his shield of secrecy can be simply defined: planning and implementing a preemptive war of aggression. During the Nuremberg tribunal in the aftermath of World War II, the chief American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, stated, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Today, we have a vice president who articulates publicly about global conflict, and who speaks in not-so-veiled language about a looming Armageddon. If there is such a future for America and the world, let one thing be certain; World War III, as postulated by Dick Cheney, would be an elective war, and not a conflict of tragic necessity. This makes the crime even greater.
Sadly, Judge Jackson’s words are but an empty shell. The global community lacks a legally binding definition of what constitutes a war of aggression, or even an act of aggression. But that isn’t the point. America should never find itself in a position where it is being judged by the global community regarding the legality of its actions. Judge Jackson established a precedent of jurisprudence concerning aggression based upon American principles and values, something the international community endorsed. The fact that current American indifference to the rule of law prevents the international community from certifying a definition of criminality when it comes to aggression, whether it be parsed as “war” or simply an “act,” does not change the fact that the Bush administration, in the person of Dick Cheney, is actively engaged in the committing of the “supreme [war] crime,” which makes Cheney the supreme war criminal. If the world is not empowered to judge him as such, then let the mantle of judgment fall to the American people. Through their elected representatives in Congress, they should not only bring this reign of unrestrained abuse of power to an end, but ensure that such abuse never again is attempted by an American official by holding to account, to the full extent of the law, those who have trampled on the Constitution of the United States and the ideals and principles it enshrines.
But what use is the rule of law, even if fairly and properly implemented, if in the end he who is entrusted with executive power takes his instructions from an even higher authority? President Bush’s relationship with “God” (or that which he refers to as God) is a matter of public record. The president himself has stated that “God speaks through me” (he acknowledged this before a group of Amish in Pennsylvania in the summer of 2004). Exactly how God speaks through him, and what precisely God says, is not a matter of speculation. According to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, President Bush told him and others that “God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.” As such, at least in the president’s mind, God has ordered Bush to transform himself into a modern incarnation of St. Michael, smiting all that is evil before him. “We are in a conflict between good and evil. And America will call evil by its name,” the president told West Point cadets in a speech in 2002.
The matter of how and when an individual chooses to practice his faith, or lack thereof, is a deeply personal matter, one which should be kept from public discourse. For a president to so openly impose his personal religious beliefs, as Bush has done, on American policy formulation and implementation represents a fundamental departure from not only constitutional intent concerning the separation of church and state but also constitutional mandate concerning the imposition of checks and balances required by the American system of governance. The increasing embrace by this president of the notion of a unitary executive takes on an even more sinister aspect when one realizes that not only does the Bush administration seek to nullify the will of the people through the shackling of the people’s representatives in Congress, but that the president has forgone even the appearance of constitutional constraint by evoking the word of his personal deity, as expressed through his person, as the highest form of consultation on a matter as serious as war. As such, the president has made his faith, and how he practices it, a subject not only of public curiosity but of national survival.
That George W. Bush is a born-again Christian is not a national secret. Neither is the fact that his brand of Christianity, evangelicalism, embraces the notion of the “end of days,” the coming of the Apocalypse as foretold (so they say) in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible. President Bush’s frequent reference to “the evil one” suggests that he not only believes in the Antichrist but actively proselytizes on the Antichrist’s physical presence on Earth at this time. If one takes in the writing and speeches of those in the evangelical community today concerning the “rapture,” the numerous references to the current situation in the Middle East, especially on the events unfolding around Iran and its nuclear program, make it very clear that, at least in the minds of these evangelicals, there is a clear link between the “end of days” prophesy and U.S.-Iran policy. That James Dobson, one of the most powerful and influential evangelical voices in America today, would be invited to the White House with like-minded clergy to discuss President Bush’s Iran policy is absurd unless one makes the link between Bush’s personal faith, the extreme religious beliefs of Dobson and the potential of Armageddon-like conflict (World War III). At this point, the absurd becomes unthinkable, except it is all too real.
Thomas Jefferson, one of our nation’s greatest founders, made the separation of church and state an underlying principle upon which the United States was built. This separation was all-inclusive, meaning that not only should government stay out of religion, but likewise religion should be excluded from government. “I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to Francis Hopkinson in 1789. “Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” If only President Bush would abide by such wisdom, avoiding the addictive narcotic of religious fervor when carrying out the people’s business. Instead, he chooses as his drug one which threatens to destroy us all in a conflagration derived not from celestial intervention but individual ignorance and arrogance. Again Jefferson, in a letter written in 1825: “It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”
Nightmares, more aptly, unless something can be done to change the direction Bush and Dobson are taking us. The problem is that far too many Americans openly espouse not only the faith of George W. Bush but also the underlying philosophy which permits this faith to be intertwined with the governance of the land. “God bless America” has become a rallying cry for this crowd, and those too ignorant and/or afraid to speak out in opposition. If this statement has merit, what does it say for the 6.8 billion others in the world today who are not Americans? That God condemns them? The American embrace of divine destiny is not unique in history (one only has to recall that the belt buckles of the German army during World War II read “God is with us"). But for a nation born of the age of reason to collectively fall victim to the most base of fear-induced theology is a clear indication that America currently fails to live up to its founding principles. Rather than turning to Dobson and his ilk for guidance in these troubled times, Americans would be well served to reflect on President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, delivered in the middle of a horrific civil war which makes all of the conflict America finds itself in today pale in comparison:
“Both [North and South] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. ... The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ... [T]hat He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”
God is not on our side, or the side of any single nation or people. To believe such is the ultimate expression of national hubris. To invoke such, if one is a true believer, is to embrace sacrilege and heresy. This, of course, is an individual right, granted as an extension of religious freedom. But it is not a collective right, nor is it a right born of governance, especially in a land protected by the separation of church and state.
The issue of Iran is a national problem which requires a collective debate, discussion and dialogue inclusive of all the facts, and stripped of all ideology and theocracy which would seek to deny reasoned thought conducted within a framework of accepted laws and ideals. It is grossly irresponsible of an American president to invoke the imagery of World War III without first sharing with the American people the framework of thought that produced such a comparison. Such openness will not be forthcoming from this administration or president. Not in the form of Stephen Hadley’s policy of no policy, designed with intent to avoid and subvert both bureaucratic and legislative process and oversight, or Dick Cheney’s secret government within a government, operating above and beyond the law and in a manner which violates both legal and moral norms and values, and certainly not in the president’s own private conversations with “God,” either directly or through the medium of lunatic evangelicals who embrace the termination of all we stand for, and especially the future of our next generation, in a fiery holocaust born from the fraudulent writings of centuries past. The processes which compelled George W. Bush to speak of a World War III are intentionally not transparent to the American people. The president has much to explain, and it would be incumbent upon every venue of civic and public pressure to demand that such an explanation be forthcoming in the near future. The stakes regarding Iran have always been high, but never more so than when a nation’s leader invokes the end of days as a solution.
Cheers and take care.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Last Week of Ramadan
I forgot to mention on my last post that there are new pics. Just follow the link for Jack’s Pictures and there is an album from birthday parties of September.
Tomorrow starts the last working week of Ramadan. There will a short holiday, an Eid, and then back to work on the regular schedule. I’ll probably head up to Sharjah and invade David and Lorin for the Eid holiday. What I should do is lock myself up in my flat and start cleaning out and throwing away. I am such a pack rat.
I just finished reading the latest Rebus entry, The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin. The Rebus series is one of my favorites. There is never a bad Rebus novel. This one is set at the G8 conference held in Scotland and also includes the London subway bombings that occurred at the same time. They all keep referring to Rebus’ impending retirement. Mr. Rankin, please, don’t.
Watched the last episode of Season 3 of “Lost” on Thursday night. I know some people have given up on the series, but I still find it one of the more intelligent things on TV. It ended with a supposed “flash forward” to when Jack and Kate are off the island, rescued. What I don’t understand is that in the flash forward Jack made mention of his father being “downstairs” in the hospital. I thought the old drunk was dead. More mystery? Oh, and Charley apparently drowned. Charley was one of my favs, I’ll miss him.
Here are some links to some things I’ve read this week. Some are important and should be read ASAP.
How the Democrats Blew It by Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/10/02/democrats/
Israel’s Toy Soldiers by Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071001_israels_toy_soldiers/
Why Don’t They Like Us as Much as They Used to by Anne Applebaum
http://www.slate.com/id/2175026/
My Christian Daughter Says I’m Going to Hell by Cary Tennis
http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/10/04/christianity/
Milton Viorst on “The Israel Lobby”
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20071004_milton_viorst_on_the_israel_lobby/
Time to Weigh in on the Israel Lobby Debate by Daniel Levy
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/oct/05/time_to_weigh_in_on_the_israel_lobby_debate
Have a good week. Cheers.
Tomorrow starts the last working week of Ramadan. There will a short holiday, an Eid, and then back to work on the regular schedule. I’ll probably head up to Sharjah and invade David and Lorin for the Eid holiday. What I should do is lock myself up in my flat and start cleaning out and throwing away. I am such a pack rat.
I just finished reading the latest Rebus entry, The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin. The Rebus series is one of my favorites. There is never a bad Rebus novel. This one is set at the G8 conference held in Scotland and also includes the London subway bombings that occurred at the same time. They all keep referring to Rebus’ impending retirement. Mr. Rankin, please, don’t.
Watched the last episode of Season 3 of “Lost” on Thursday night. I know some people have given up on the series, but I still find it one of the more intelligent things on TV. It ended with a supposed “flash forward” to when Jack and Kate are off the island, rescued. What I don’t understand is that in the flash forward Jack made mention of his father being “downstairs” in the hospital. I thought the old drunk was dead. More mystery? Oh, and Charley apparently drowned. Charley was one of my favs, I’ll miss him.
Here are some links to some things I’ve read this week. Some are important and should be read ASAP.
How the Democrats Blew It by Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/10/02/democrats/
Israel’s Toy Soldiers by Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071001_israels_toy_soldiers/
Why Don’t They Like Us as Much as They Used to by Anne Applebaum
http://www.slate.com/id/2175026/
My Christian Daughter Says I’m Going to Hell by Cary Tennis
http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2007/10/04/christianity/
Milton Viorst on “The Israel Lobby”
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20071004_milton_viorst_on_the_israel_lobby/
Time to Weigh in on the Israel Lobby Debate by Daniel Levy
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/oct/05/time_to_weigh_in_on_the_israel_lobby_debate
Have a good week. Cheers.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
53
Yeah, yeah. It’s just a number. You look the same. You don’t feel any different. You don’t want to remember it. None of your friends will let you forget it and you make sure that everyone knows anyway because in some weird way you want the attention. Still.
It’s been two successive weekends of birthday parties. It seems like the bulk of my friends all come from the Snow Belt so September seems to be the most popular month for birthdays.
Last weekend George and I endured a 2-hour gridlock traffic jam on Emirates Highway to reach David and Lorin’s. The jam started just before Dubai Airport and continued all the way to the National Paints Flyover. I guess I’m going to have to break down and buy the new Salik toll chip for my car and start going there on Sheikh Zayed Highway. Anyway, it was practically Iftar time when we reached the American University (AUS) campus in Sharjah. I hadn’t had lunch or my nap. I’m not sure which one I missed the most.
We had a tentative plan to go check out the bowling lanes on campus, but none of us were really in the mood. We ate dinner in a café at the student center and had coffee after at Starbuck’s then went back to David and Lorin’s for a quiet wind-up to the day by sitting in the garden and smoking cigarettes.
The birthday party was on Friday night. David Ritchie, Wendy Merkley and I were the birthday kids. George, Reynon, Daphne and Janine were the guests. Lorin cooked my special request—burgers, and they were great, as usual. Daphne is a librarian at AUS who had worked for several years at HTC Women’s in Al Ain. She knew Val and yes, Val, you were talked about, but it was all fond memories. You are still missed. Janine is new to the campus, having arrived a few months before from Florida. She’s very interesting and entertaining. She worked her way through college as a singer and has a wonderful voice. Her gift to David was a song from Sweeney Todd. It was a great moment. Then we opened gifts and had cake and there was the usual wind down.
My actual birthday was on the 25th, Tuesday and I did nothing to really mark the day. I worked and took a few phone calls from friends. Later in the week Thursday was admin day at work, so we were off. I went to Carrefour and bought myself a birthday gift, a new stereo. David and Lorin and Reynon arrived early Thursday evening. We taxied over to Phil and Enma’s for another birthday party with Leah, David and I as the birthday kids. Enma cooked my request, lamb. She makes a killer leg of lamb. Guests included Phil, Enma (actually they were the hosts), Leah, Steve and daughter Hannah, David, Lorin and Reynon, Miguel and friend and me. We had a great time. Drinking and talking and laughing, as we usually do. Dinner was fantastic and was followed by cake. And there were a few more presents to open as well.
On Friday George hosted a brunch for David, Lorin, Reynon and I at his flat. We arrived about noon and ate shortly after. The food was wonderful. I’d made no requests and hadn’t been asked to either. We ate and talked and ate more before David and Lorin and Reynon had to return to Sharjah.
This upcoming weekend is going to be spent at home doing nothing but watching TV, reading and spending some time online. Oh yeah, and listening to my new stereo.
There were also family & friends birthdays back in the States. I told you, September is a busy months for births. My Mom turned 70 on 8 September, the day of the Marshall-WVU football grudge match. Rosie Dickson, with whom I’ve lost touch, had her birthday on 22 September. My nephew, Tyson, had his birthday the same day as mine, 25 September and my niece, Shannon, had hers two days later on the 27th. Marcia Davis, still a close friend from grad school in Brattleboring, had her birthday today, 30 September. It gets pretty cold in January.
Bits & Pieces.
James Lee Burke is one of the outstanding American authors (in my opinion). I finished his Pegasus Descending about a week ago and it is beautifully written. I wish I could write like that.
The last book of my 52nd year was A History of the Amish by Steven M. Nolt. Don’t ask me why. I bought it in the summer of ’06 when we visited Amish country in Ohio. I still don’t get it.
The first book of my 53rd year was Promise Me by Harlan Coben. I loved Coben’s early career series of novels featuring Myron Bolitar, a sports agent who solves mysteries. He left Myron behind several years ago to write other things and this novel marked the return of Myron. It was worth the wait. Reading it was like catching up with an old friend, which was what I needed to start year 53.
Below are some links to some stories you should be aware of. Most of them seem to be struggling to answer the question can America survive the rest of Bush-Cheney. At this point, I well and truly don’t know.
Iraq Will Have to Wait by Scott Ritter
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070927_ritter_stop_iran_war/
The US Military Role in Preventing Bombing of Iran by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/28/military_iran/
The War President “At Peace” With Himself by Joe Conason
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/09/28/aznar_iraq/
Twilight Zone-The Children of 5767 by Gideon Levy
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/907708.html
Shifting Targets by Seymour M. Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh
It’s been two successive weekends of birthday parties. It seems like the bulk of my friends all come from the Snow Belt so September seems to be the most popular month for birthdays.
Last weekend George and I endured a 2-hour gridlock traffic jam on Emirates Highway to reach David and Lorin’s. The jam started just before Dubai Airport and continued all the way to the National Paints Flyover. I guess I’m going to have to break down and buy the new Salik toll chip for my car and start going there on Sheikh Zayed Highway. Anyway, it was practically Iftar time when we reached the American University (AUS) campus in Sharjah. I hadn’t had lunch or my nap. I’m not sure which one I missed the most.
We had a tentative plan to go check out the bowling lanes on campus, but none of us were really in the mood. We ate dinner in a café at the student center and had coffee after at Starbuck’s then went back to David and Lorin’s for a quiet wind-up to the day by sitting in the garden and smoking cigarettes.
The birthday party was on Friday night. David Ritchie, Wendy Merkley and I were the birthday kids. George, Reynon, Daphne and Janine were the guests. Lorin cooked my special request—burgers, and they were great, as usual. Daphne is a librarian at AUS who had worked for several years at HTC Women’s in Al Ain. She knew Val and yes, Val, you were talked about, but it was all fond memories. You are still missed. Janine is new to the campus, having arrived a few months before from Florida. She’s very interesting and entertaining. She worked her way through college as a singer and has a wonderful voice. Her gift to David was a song from Sweeney Todd. It was a great moment. Then we opened gifts and had cake and there was the usual wind down.
My actual birthday was on the 25th, Tuesday and I did nothing to really mark the day. I worked and took a few phone calls from friends. Later in the week Thursday was admin day at work, so we were off. I went to Carrefour and bought myself a birthday gift, a new stereo. David and Lorin and Reynon arrived early Thursday evening. We taxied over to Phil and Enma’s for another birthday party with Leah, David and I as the birthday kids. Enma cooked my request, lamb. She makes a killer leg of lamb. Guests included Phil, Enma (actually they were the hosts), Leah, Steve and daughter Hannah, David, Lorin and Reynon, Miguel and friend and me. We had a great time. Drinking and talking and laughing, as we usually do. Dinner was fantastic and was followed by cake. And there were a few more presents to open as well.
On Friday George hosted a brunch for David, Lorin, Reynon and I at his flat. We arrived about noon and ate shortly after. The food was wonderful. I’d made no requests and hadn’t been asked to either. We ate and talked and ate more before David and Lorin and Reynon had to return to Sharjah.
This upcoming weekend is going to be spent at home doing nothing but watching TV, reading and spending some time online. Oh yeah, and listening to my new stereo.
There were also family & friends birthdays back in the States. I told you, September is a busy months for births. My Mom turned 70 on 8 September, the day of the Marshall-WVU football grudge match. Rosie Dickson, with whom I’ve lost touch, had her birthday on 22 September. My nephew, Tyson, had his birthday the same day as mine, 25 September and my niece, Shannon, had hers two days later on the 27th. Marcia Davis, still a close friend from grad school in Brattleboring, had her birthday today, 30 September. It gets pretty cold in January.
Bits & Pieces.
James Lee Burke is one of the outstanding American authors (in my opinion). I finished his Pegasus Descending about a week ago and it is beautifully written. I wish I could write like that.
The last book of my 52nd year was A History of the Amish by Steven M. Nolt. Don’t ask me why. I bought it in the summer of ’06 when we visited Amish country in Ohio. I still don’t get it.
The first book of my 53rd year was Promise Me by Harlan Coben. I loved Coben’s early career series of novels featuring Myron Bolitar, a sports agent who solves mysteries. He left Myron behind several years ago to write other things and this novel marked the return of Myron. It was worth the wait. Reading it was like catching up with an old friend, which was what I needed to start year 53.
Below are some links to some stories you should be aware of. Most of them seem to be struggling to answer the question can America survive the rest of Bush-Cheney. At this point, I well and truly don’t know.
Iraq Will Have to Wait by Scott Ritter
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070927_ritter_stop_iran_war/
The US Military Role in Preventing Bombing of Iran by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/28/military_iran/
The War President “At Peace” With Himself by Joe Conason
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/09/28/aznar_iraq/
Twilight Zone-The Children of 5767 by Gideon Levy
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/907708.html
Shifting Targets by Seymour M. Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Post Vacation Post
I’ve been back home in Abu Dhabi a little over two weeks now. I can’t say I’ve been too busy to post anything, just too lazy and not really in the mood. A little bit of post-vacation blues to go through, I guess. Also, I was finishing Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, which I’d started just before I left the States. It was a massive book, over 1000 pages and difficult, at times, to keep up with. Where I’d grown tired and bored with his Mason and Dixon and put it down unfinished, this one refused to let go of me. I finished it last night and as I closed the book I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d read, what he’d been trying to say and if I had wasted my time. I still haven’t decided.
Ramadan starts on Thursday and I hope to make a full post over the first weekend of Ramadan. Things slow down here. In the meantime, here are some links I’ve been mining over the past couple of weeks. I have also copied and posted two very important full-length pieces that I read today on Salon, along with links to them to the Salon site. This is an anniversary, you know, but exactly of what, I couldn’t say.
BTW, new vacation pictures have been posted on Jack’s Pictures.
Siegman on Israel
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001039
Why did Gonzales resign? By Sidney Blumenthal
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/08/27/gonzales_resignation/
The Waning Power of the War Myth by Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/08/28/war_myth/
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/04/addington/
Bush Knew Saddam Had No Weapons
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/09/11/911_lessons/
The real lessons of 9/11
The attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character.
By Gary Kamiya
Sep. 11, 2007 Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his "war on terror." He has incessantly linked the words "al-Qaida" and "Iraq," a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' "anxiously awaited" evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.
Petraeus' evaluation can only be "anxiously awaited" by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we've been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush's mighty-me, will insist that we're making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that "we're kicking ass" in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.
So let's forget the absurd debate about "progress" and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam's Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions -- not just about why we can't bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place. Those questions lead directly to 9/11, and the ideas and assumptions behind our response to it.
The real reason that Congress cannot bring itself to end the war in Iraq, and incredibly, may be prepared to start another one in Iran, has little to do with benchmarks or body counts. The real reason is that even after the Iraq debacle, the American establishment -- meaning the government and the mainstream media -- has not questioned the emotions and ideology that drove Bush's crusade.
Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush's reaction to 9/11 was to declare a "war on terror," of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the "front line." The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush's "war on terror" was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead. The establishment has now turned against the Iraq front, but it has not questioned the "war on terror" itself, or the assumptions on which it is based.
Bush's, and America's, response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed for two reasons: It was atavistic and instinctive, and it was based on a distorted, ignorant and bigoted view of the Arab/Muslim world. These two founding errors are qualitatively different: The first involves emotions, the second ideas. But mixed together, they created a lethal cocktail. The grand justification of "spreading democracy in the Middle East" merely provided a palatable cover for vengeance and racism.
Bush's America responded to 9/11 by lashing out. We chose vigilantism over justice, instinct over reason. Bush demanded that America play the role of the angry, righteous avenger, and America followed him. But we were not taking vengeance on the guy who attacked us but on somebody standing on the corner. The war was like the massacre in Haditha on a global scale.
There's a reason why Americans responded to Bush's demand and why Democrats have been afraid to challenge it. It's biological hard-wiring -- after you're hit, your instinct is to hit back. For conservatives, this instinct is not only natural but necessary. Hence the endless right-wing denunciations of war critics as wimps, girly-men and appeasers.
Gender images play a significant role. The right wing embraces a cartoonlike image of masculinity because it believes that only an alpha male can protect America from its enemies. (In a recent essay in the New York Times, Susan Faludi argued that such retrograde gender images have been used to construct the American self-image from the earliest days of our presence on this continent.) This is part of the reason that Bush has put forward Gen. Petraeus as the cheerleader for the war. Petraeus is the ultimate alpha male, right down to his rigorous workout routine. In the Hobbesian world of the conservative imagination, the big club rules, and he who puts down the club will be brained by another unfettered troglodyte, be it a communist or an "Islamofascist." Nature is red in tooth and claw, and those who dream of transcending nature or transforming it will be destroyed by it.
The fetishization of the "natural," of which instinct is only a part, is key to conservative thought. In the early '60s, conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan defended the right of individuals and states to practice segregation because that decision was instinctual and organic. They saw the federal government's attempt to outlaw segregation as artificial and coercive.
Of course, instincts play a vital role in human life: They underlie virtually all of our thoughts and actions. To ignore them is to fall into a deracinated world of sterile rationality. Lashing out is sometimes an effective way to defend yourself. But instinct is atavistic and often self-defeating. Higher-level mental functions came into existence to control and refine it. Both individuals and states have learned that they should not base their reactions merely on animal instincts. That's why law arose: to prevent every injury from turning into a destructive and endless feud. Retribution is a legitimate motive for punishment but only to a point. It is limited by the higher concept of justice. Justice not only prescribes the extent of the retribution that is morally acceptable, but insists that the context of the crime, including the criminal's history and state of mind, must be considered before meting out punishment.
Democrats have effectively challenged the reign of nature and instinct in the domestic realm. But they cower when it comes to war. They are afraid to criticize the irrational, instinctive nature of Bush's "war on terror" because they believe their political Achilles' heel is the perception that they are "weak on national security." They are afraid they'll be seen as wimps. Beaten down by Republican propaganda that asserts that America's only choice is between the GOP's macho John Wayne and the Democrats' dithering Hamlet, they pathetically don their cowboy hats and tank helmets, a tactic that actually reinforces the very image of weakness it is intended to dispel. Unchallenged by the Democrats, the right wing's master narrative about American power and the need to carry a big stick has carried the day.
Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot -- its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.
We attacked Iraq because of 9/11. That is the scandalous and surreal claim that reveals our fatal emotional-ideological flaw. Anyone who knew anything about the Middle East knew that Saddam Hussein, a secular tyrant, had nothing to with 9/11 or al-Qaida. War defenders like to claim they were "misled by bad intelligence" into thinking Saddam had WMD. But there was no new evidence that Saddam posed a threat. He was the same old Saddam. He only became frightening in light of our prejudice against Arabs and Muslims. Moreover, despite the appalling effectiveness of the 9/11 attacks, it was clear that al-Qaida posed no existential threat to either America or to the Middle East. As the invaluable analyst Juan Cole has pointed out, apocalyptic Salafi jihadists like al-Qaida were an isolated and weak force within the Arab-Muslim world -- or at least they were until Bush invaded Iraq.
The angry bigotry that drove the war rings out loud and clear in the right-wing battle cry: "They attacked us, so we had to attack them." The recent TV ads run by war supporters repeat this theme: "They attacked us," a narrator says as an image of the burning World Trade Center appears. "They won't stop in Iraq." The key word here, of course, is "they." Just who is "they"? For Bush's die-hard supporters, "they" simply means "Arabs and Muslims." Cretinous rabble-rousers like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage play to this crowd, demanding that we nuke the evil ragheads. For the establishment, "they" is not quite so explicitly racist. "They" refers not to all Arabs and Muslims, but only to the "bad" ones. The "bad" guys include al-Qaida, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the militant Palestinians. And, of course, it used to include Iraq (and may again). Anyone who makes this list is eligible for attack by the U.S.
What makes these wildly disparate entities so evil and so threatening that we're prepared to attack them without cause? Simply that they reject the U.S.-Israeli writ in the Middle East -- and that they're Arabs or Muslims. They are clearly not on our side, but they pose no significant military or economic threat to the U.S. In realpolitik terms, they are no more beyond the pale than many other dubious countries we do business with, from Venezuela to Nigeria to Russia to Saudi Arabia. No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East.
America's anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice has several causes. One of them derives from America's powerful identification with the one state that has always been at war with the Arab-Muslim world: Israel. For the establishment, it is axiomatic that America's and Israel's interests are identical, and that enemies of Israel must be enemies of the U.S. America has always identified more with Israel, the plucky underdog and home to Holocaust survivors, than with the Arabs and Muslims who threaten it. Since this view is held by right and left, Democrat and Republican alike, and criticizing it leads to accusations of anti-Semitism, it is difficult to challenge it. This is the reason why there has been almost no discussion in Congress over Bush's saber-rattling with Iran: Iran is Israel's most dangerous enemy, and that fact trumps all other considerations.
America's Israel-centric stance has helped determine the way we see the Arab-Muslim world, but it isn't the only factor. The rise of radical Islam, with its cult of martyrdom and terrifying terrorist attacks, exacerbated America's existing prejudices, flattening out the Arab-Muslim world into a monolithic entity. Our almost complete ignorance of Arabs and Islam, their history and the actual grievances that they have against the West, contributed to this flattening. Oil plays a role. But perhaps the most potent explanation of all is simply the fear of the Other: Islam is not in our cultural tradition, it stands apart, it's mysterious and ominous, and it is all too easy to project our fears on it.
One sure sign of cultural bias is the presence of high-flown concepts. Mission civilatrice, the White Man's burden, is inevitably accompanied by lofty rhetoric. Iraq was all about Grand Theory.
One of the neocons' main goals in invading Iraq was to "remake the Middle East" -- a weirdly grandiose, imperialist concept of the sort that doesn't apply anywhere except with Muslims. Only in the Middle East do lofty historical generalizations about why a world culture went wrong -- like those of the right-wing Arabist and White House favorite Bernard Lewis -- provide the intellectual underpinnings for unprovoked wars. Yes, the Arab-Muslim world has some serious problems, and yes, only a politically correct pedant would forbid all cultural generalizations. But when you go to war on the basis of those generalizations, you cross the line into colonialist prejudice.
The most lofty, abstract generalization of all is the insistence that this is a war of good vs. evil. "They" attacked us not because they had grievances or for any reasons that exist in the sublunary realm: They attacked simply because they were evil. Saddam would do the same because he, too, like Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, was evil. The "war on terror" is a crusade, a Holy War, whose essentially theological nature was summed up by the title of Richard Perle and David Frum's book, "An End to Evil." And once you're dealing with "evil," niggling distinctions -- between Sunni and Shiite, or secular and religious, or whether the country you want to invade had anything to do with attacking you -- can be dispensed with.
The failure of the American establishment to question such ideas, and its willingness to sign off on a war based on them, amounts to a kind of de facto bigotry: Kill one Arab, send a message to the rest of 'em. Attacking Iraq because of 9/11 made about as much sense as attacking Mozambique after the Watts riots. If we had done something that insane, we would be accused of being racists. We wouldn't be able to shake the accusation, no matter how much gobbledygook apologists came up with about bursting a "terrorism bubble" or the "pathologies of black culture." But when America did something equally insane and attacked Iraq in response to 9/11, no one accused it of racism. Instead, we got a lot of sophistry about "Islamofascism" and other Aquinas-like attempts to make 99 virgins dance on the head of a Baathist.
Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by "extremists," demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.
Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.
All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin.
-- By Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/09/11/dean/
"Broken Government"
I never thought that the GOP posed a threat to the well-being of our nation. But these days, I no longer recognize my old party.
By John W. Dean
Sep. 11, 2007 In almost four decades of involvement in national politics, much of them as a card-carrying Republican, I was never concerned that the GOP posed a threat to the well-being of our nation. Indeed, the idea would never have occurred to me, for in my experience the system took care of excesses, as it certainly did in the case of the president for whom I worked. But in recent years the system has changed, and is no longer self-correcting. Most of that change has come from Republicans, and much of it is based on their remarkably confrontational attitude, an attitude that has clearly worked for them. For example, I cannot imagine any Democratic president keeping cabinet officers as Bush has done with his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, men whom both Democrats and Republicans judged to be incompetent. Evidence that the system has changed is also apparent when a president can deliberately and openly violate the law -- as, for example, simply brushing aside serious statutory prohibitions against torture and electronic surveillance -- without any serious consequences. Similarly, but on a lesser scale, Alberto Gonzales faced no consequences when he politicized the Department of Justice as never before, allowing his aides to violate the prohibitions regarding hiring career civil servants based on their party affiliation, and then gave false public statements and testimony about the matter. When the Senate sought to pass a resolution expressing "no confidence" in the attorney general, the Republicans blocked it with a filibuster. The fact that Bush's Justice Department has become yet another political instrument should give Americans pause. This body was created by Congress to represent the interests of the people of the United States, not the Republican Party, but since the system of law no longer takes account when officials act outside the law (not to mention the Constitution), Republicans do so and get away with it.
In the past the White House (whether occupied by Republicans or Democrats) placed tight restrictions on who could contact the Department of Justice regarding pending business. It was typically limited to only the president, the vice president, the White House chief of staff and White House counsel, who were authorized to speak with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general or the top assistant and associate attorneys general. However, in the Bush White House no less than a startling 471 White House aides are authorized to speak with 30 senior Justice Department officials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Bush administration has made the Justice Department a political extension of the White House in the area of law enforcement, which is unprecedented and seriously dilutes the credibility of the government when it goes to court. It will take years to depoliticize the Justice Department, and countless nonpolitical career attorneys -- including some of the most experienced and able men and women ever to serve in the department -- have left because of the way Bush's people run it. Ironically, when Republicans find Democratic officials with even a toe across the line, they raise unmitigated hell for that official. But when a Republican official crosses the line, Republicans close ranks around the miscreant, as they have done with the former chief of staff to the vice president, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Libby, a sophisticated Washington attorney, leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity. Libby had leaked her name as part of the effort to discredit Valerie Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, who had traveled to Niger to determine for the CIA if Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium -- a claim that would be made by the Bush White House. When Ambassador Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed putting the lie to that claim, Scooter Libby led the attack against him, notwithstanding the fact that he was telling the truth. One of his tactics was to claim that Wilson's wife, a covert CIA operative, had sent him on a boondoggle. Libby, as Cheney's national security adviser, was quite familiar with the potentially dire circumstances of leaking the identity of a covert agent. When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (the U.S. Attorney in Chicago) was appointed to investigate, Libby lied to the FBI and then to the grand jury about how he had learned of Valerie Wilson's CIA connection, claiming a newsman had told him, when, in fact, he had been told by the vice president. Although Special Counsel Fitzgerald found no criminal statute had been violated in leaking Valerie Wilson's name, he indicted and convicted Scooter Libby for false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. Even before federal judge Reggie Walton (a Bush appointee) sentenced Libby to 30 months in prison and a $250,000 fine, Republicans were demanding that Bush pardon him.
Republicans have offered an array of explanation and justifications for a Libby pardon, but when one cuts through the smoke, what they are really arguing is that one of their own should not be punished criminally. It is an absurd position. Conservatives once claimed they stood for law and order, and that no person was above the law, but their words belie their true beliefs as expressed in their actions. Frankly, I hoped that Bush would pardon Libby, as it would have served as a particularly egregious and conspicuous example of the Republican double standard -- the authoritarian's "do as I say, not as I do" mentality. Voters understand hypocrisy, and another solid abuse of process (and power) could only help the Democrats get back into the White House.
Having watched the GOP's evolution as it embraced the radicalism of authoritarian conservatism, slowly ceding control to its most strident faction, the authoritarian conservatives, I can no longer recognize the party. These new conservative leaders have not only sought to turn back the clock, but to return to a time before the Enlightenment when there were no clocks. As former vice president Al Gore nicely stated it, the Republicans have undertaken an "assault on reason." Indeed, they have rejected their own reasoned philosophy by ignoring conservatism's teachings -- based on well-documented history -- about the dangers of concentrations of power. They have done so by focusing on the presidency as the institution in which they wish to concentrate the enormous powers of the federal government. Nixon led the way, and Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II learned from his mistakes. Nixon scowled as he scolded and secretly investigated his opponents in the name of national security; his GOP successors have smiled and reassured Americans they are operating to protect them as they have proceeded to convert the American presidency into an elective monarchy, with its own high council, which was once known as the federal judiciary.
Fortunately, the power of the authoritarian conservatism that has so dominated the Bush/Cheney presidency is waning, although it is not likely there will ever be less than about one in four Americans who will follow such authoritarian leadership without question. For authoritarian conservatism to win another presidential contest, its candidate would have to attract independent voters in addition to their hardcore base. But polling of independents reveals that they have largely become disgusted with the Republicans, and lean heavily toward the Democrats. In surveying all of the Republican contenders for the GOP nomination, I have found that to the man, they all are far more authoritarian than even the most authoritarian of the Democrats. This raises the almost certain likelihood that, regardless of how great a distance any of these GOP candidates might attempt to place between himself and the Bush/Cheney presidency during a general election campaign, in fact, if elected he is going to continue in the vein that has already caused this nation so much trouble. (There is no doubt that the GOP will select an authoritarian standard-bearer, because these are the people who are most active in the primaries and the most devoted workers in the general election. It is almost impossible for a non-authoritarian to win the Republican nomination, as the party is now structured.)
As I was writing this closing section an old friend from the Nixon White House called. Now retired, he is a lifelong Republican who told me that he voted for Bush and Cheney twice, because he knows them both personally. He asked how my new book was coming, and when I told him the title, he remarked, "I'll say the government's broken." After we discussed it, he asked how I planned to end the book, since the election was still a good distance away. I told him I was contemplating ending midsentence and immediately fading to black -- the way HBO did in the final episode of the Sopranos, but that I would settle for a nice quote from him, on the record. He explained that he constantly has to bite his tongue, and the reason he does not speak out more is because one of his sons is in an important (nonpolitical) government post, and we both know that Republicans will seek revenge wherever they can find it. How about an off-the-record comment? I asked. That he agreed to.
"Just tell your readers that you have a source who knows a lot about the Republican party from long experience, that he knows all the key movers and shakers, and he has a bit of advice: People should not vote for any Republican, because they're dangerous, dishonest and self-serving. While I once believed that Governor George Wallace had it right, that there was not a dime's worth of difference in the parties; that is not longer true. I have come to realize the Democrats really do care about people who most need help from government; Republicans care most about those who will only get richer because of government help. The government is truly broken, particularly in dealing with national security, and another four years, and heaven forbid not eight years, under the Republicans, and our grandchildren will have to build a new government, because the one we have will be unrecognizable and unworkable."
These comments summed up our current situation -- and our possible future -- as eloquently as anything I could have wished.
-- By John W. Dean
Ramadan starts on Thursday and I hope to make a full post over the first weekend of Ramadan. Things slow down here. In the meantime, here are some links I’ve been mining over the past couple of weeks. I have also copied and posted two very important full-length pieces that I read today on Salon, along with links to them to the Salon site. This is an anniversary, you know, but exactly of what, I couldn’t say.
BTW, new vacation pictures have been posted on Jack’s Pictures.
Siegman on Israel
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90001039
Why did Gonzales resign? By Sidney Blumenthal
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/08/27/gonzales_resignation/
The Waning Power of the War Myth by Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/08/28/war_myth/
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/04/addington/
Bush Knew Saddam Had No Weapons
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/09/11/911_lessons/
The real lessons of 9/11
The attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character.
By Gary Kamiya
Sep. 11, 2007 Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his "war on terror." He has incessantly linked the words "al-Qaida" and "Iraq," a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' "anxiously awaited" evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.
Petraeus' evaluation can only be "anxiously awaited" by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we've been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush's mighty-me, will insist that we're making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that "we're kicking ass" in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.
So let's forget the absurd debate about "progress" and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam's Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions -- not just about why we can't bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place. Those questions lead directly to 9/11, and the ideas and assumptions behind our response to it.
The real reason that Congress cannot bring itself to end the war in Iraq, and incredibly, may be prepared to start another one in Iran, has little to do with benchmarks or body counts. The real reason is that even after the Iraq debacle, the American establishment -- meaning the government and the mainstream media -- has not questioned the emotions and ideology that drove Bush's crusade.
Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush's reaction to 9/11 was to declare a "war on terror," of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the "front line." The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush's "war on terror" was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead. The establishment has now turned against the Iraq front, but it has not questioned the "war on terror" itself, or the assumptions on which it is based.
Bush's, and America's, response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed for two reasons: It was atavistic and instinctive, and it was based on a distorted, ignorant and bigoted view of the Arab/Muslim world. These two founding errors are qualitatively different: The first involves emotions, the second ideas. But mixed together, they created a lethal cocktail. The grand justification of "spreading democracy in the Middle East" merely provided a palatable cover for vengeance and racism.
Bush's America responded to 9/11 by lashing out. We chose vigilantism over justice, instinct over reason. Bush demanded that America play the role of the angry, righteous avenger, and America followed him. But we were not taking vengeance on the guy who attacked us but on somebody standing on the corner. The war was like the massacre in Haditha on a global scale.
There's a reason why Americans responded to Bush's demand and why Democrats have been afraid to challenge it. It's biological hard-wiring -- after you're hit, your instinct is to hit back. For conservatives, this instinct is not only natural but necessary. Hence the endless right-wing denunciations of war critics as wimps, girly-men and appeasers.
Gender images play a significant role. The right wing embraces a cartoonlike image of masculinity because it believes that only an alpha male can protect America from its enemies. (In a recent essay in the New York Times, Susan Faludi argued that such retrograde gender images have been used to construct the American self-image from the earliest days of our presence on this continent.) This is part of the reason that Bush has put forward Gen. Petraeus as the cheerleader for the war. Petraeus is the ultimate alpha male, right down to his rigorous workout routine. In the Hobbesian world of the conservative imagination, the big club rules, and he who puts down the club will be brained by another unfettered troglodyte, be it a communist or an "Islamofascist." Nature is red in tooth and claw, and those who dream of transcending nature or transforming it will be destroyed by it.
The fetishization of the "natural," of which instinct is only a part, is key to conservative thought. In the early '60s, conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan defended the right of individuals and states to practice segregation because that decision was instinctual and organic. They saw the federal government's attempt to outlaw segregation as artificial and coercive.
Of course, instincts play a vital role in human life: They underlie virtually all of our thoughts and actions. To ignore them is to fall into a deracinated world of sterile rationality. Lashing out is sometimes an effective way to defend yourself. But instinct is atavistic and often self-defeating. Higher-level mental functions came into existence to control and refine it. Both individuals and states have learned that they should not base their reactions merely on animal instincts. That's why law arose: to prevent every injury from turning into a destructive and endless feud. Retribution is a legitimate motive for punishment but only to a point. It is limited by the higher concept of justice. Justice not only prescribes the extent of the retribution that is morally acceptable, but insists that the context of the crime, including the criminal's history and state of mind, must be considered before meting out punishment.
Democrats have effectively challenged the reign of nature and instinct in the domestic realm. But they cower when it comes to war. They are afraid to criticize the irrational, instinctive nature of Bush's "war on terror" because they believe their political Achilles' heel is the perception that they are "weak on national security." They are afraid they'll be seen as wimps. Beaten down by Republican propaganda that asserts that America's only choice is between the GOP's macho John Wayne and the Democrats' dithering Hamlet, they pathetically don their cowboy hats and tank helmets, a tactic that actually reinforces the very image of weakness it is intended to dispel. Unchallenged by the Democrats, the right wing's master narrative about American power and the need to carry a big stick has carried the day.
Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot -- its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.
We attacked Iraq because of 9/11. That is the scandalous and surreal claim that reveals our fatal emotional-ideological flaw. Anyone who knew anything about the Middle East knew that Saddam Hussein, a secular tyrant, had nothing to with 9/11 or al-Qaida. War defenders like to claim they were "misled by bad intelligence" into thinking Saddam had WMD. But there was no new evidence that Saddam posed a threat. He was the same old Saddam. He only became frightening in light of our prejudice against Arabs and Muslims. Moreover, despite the appalling effectiveness of the 9/11 attacks, it was clear that al-Qaida posed no existential threat to either America or to the Middle East. As the invaluable analyst Juan Cole has pointed out, apocalyptic Salafi jihadists like al-Qaida were an isolated and weak force within the Arab-Muslim world -- or at least they were until Bush invaded Iraq.
The angry bigotry that drove the war rings out loud and clear in the right-wing battle cry: "They attacked us, so we had to attack them." The recent TV ads run by war supporters repeat this theme: "They attacked us," a narrator says as an image of the burning World Trade Center appears. "They won't stop in Iraq." The key word here, of course, is "they." Just who is "they"? For Bush's die-hard supporters, "they" simply means "Arabs and Muslims." Cretinous rabble-rousers like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage play to this crowd, demanding that we nuke the evil ragheads. For the establishment, "they" is not quite so explicitly racist. "They" refers not to all Arabs and Muslims, but only to the "bad" ones. The "bad" guys include al-Qaida, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the militant Palestinians. And, of course, it used to include Iraq (and may again). Anyone who makes this list is eligible for attack by the U.S.
What makes these wildly disparate entities so evil and so threatening that we're prepared to attack them without cause? Simply that they reject the U.S.-Israeli writ in the Middle East -- and that they're Arabs or Muslims. They are clearly not on our side, but they pose no significant military or economic threat to the U.S. In realpolitik terms, they are no more beyond the pale than many other dubious countries we do business with, from Venezuela to Nigeria to Russia to Saudi Arabia. No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East.
America's anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice has several causes. One of them derives from America's powerful identification with the one state that has always been at war with the Arab-Muslim world: Israel. For the establishment, it is axiomatic that America's and Israel's interests are identical, and that enemies of Israel must be enemies of the U.S. America has always identified more with Israel, the plucky underdog and home to Holocaust survivors, than with the Arabs and Muslims who threaten it. Since this view is held by right and left, Democrat and Republican alike, and criticizing it leads to accusations of anti-Semitism, it is difficult to challenge it. This is the reason why there has been almost no discussion in Congress over Bush's saber-rattling with Iran: Iran is Israel's most dangerous enemy, and that fact trumps all other considerations.
America's Israel-centric stance has helped determine the way we see the Arab-Muslim world, but it isn't the only factor. The rise of radical Islam, with its cult of martyrdom and terrifying terrorist attacks, exacerbated America's existing prejudices, flattening out the Arab-Muslim world into a monolithic entity. Our almost complete ignorance of Arabs and Islam, their history and the actual grievances that they have against the West, contributed to this flattening. Oil plays a role. But perhaps the most potent explanation of all is simply the fear of the Other: Islam is not in our cultural tradition, it stands apart, it's mysterious and ominous, and it is all too easy to project our fears on it.
One sure sign of cultural bias is the presence of high-flown concepts. Mission civilatrice, the White Man's burden, is inevitably accompanied by lofty rhetoric. Iraq was all about Grand Theory.
One of the neocons' main goals in invading Iraq was to "remake the Middle East" -- a weirdly grandiose, imperialist concept of the sort that doesn't apply anywhere except with Muslims. Only in the Middle East do lofty historical generalizations about why a world culture went wrong -- like those of the right-wing Arabist and White House favorite Bernard Lewis -- provide the intellectual underpinnings for unprovoked wars. Yes, the Arab-Muslim world has some serious problems, and yes, only a politically correct pedant would forbid all cultural generalizations. But when you go to war on the basis of those generalizations, you cross the line into colonialist prejudice.
The most lofty, abstract generalization of all is the insistence that this is a war of good vs. evil. "They" attacked us not because they had grievances or for any reasons that exist in the sublunary realm: They attacked simply because they were evil. Saddam would do the same because he, too, like Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, was evil. The "war on terror" is a crusade, a Holy War, whose essentially theological nature was summed up by the title of Richard Perle and David Frum's book, "An End to Evil." And once you're dealing with "evil," niggling distinctions -- between Sunni and Shiite, or secular and religious, or whether the country you want to invade had anything to do with attacking you -- can be dispensed with.
The failure of the American establishment to question such ideas, and its willingness to sign off on a war based on them, amounts to a kind of de facto bigotry: Kill one Arab, send a message to the rest of 'em. Attacking Iraq because of 9/11 made about as much sense as attacking Mozambique after the Watts riots. If we had done something that insane, we would be accused of being racists. We wouldn't be able to shake the accusation, no matter how much gobbledygook apologists came up with about bursting a "terrorism bubble" or the "pathologies of black culture." But when America did something equally insane and attacked Iraq in response to 9/11, no one accused it of racism. Instead, we got a lot of sophistry about "Islamofascism" and other Aquinas-like attempts to make 99 virgins dance on the head of a Baathist.
Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by "extremists," demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.
Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.
All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin.
-- By Gary Kamiya
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/09/11/dean/
"Broken Government"
I never thought that the GOP posed a threat to the well-being of our nation. But these days, I no longer recognize my old party.
By John W. Dean
Sep. 11, 2007 In almost four decades of involvement in national politics, much of them as a card-carrying Republican, I was never concerned that the GOP posed a threat to the well-being of our nation. Indeed, the idea would never have occurred to me, for in my experience the system took care of excesses, as it certainly did in the case of the president for whom I worked. But in recent years the system has changed, and is no longer self-correcting. Most of that change has come from Republicans, and much of it is based on their remarkably confrontational attitude, an attitude that has clearly worked for them. For example, I cannot imagine any Democratic president keeping cabinet officers as Bush has done with his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, men whom both Democrats and Republicans judged to be incompetent. Evidence that the system has changed is also apparent when a president can deliberately and openly violate the law -- as, for example, simply brushing aside serious statutory prohibitions against torture and electronic surveillance -- without any serious consequences. Similarly, but on a lesser scale, Alberto Gonzales faced no consequences when he politicized the Department of Justice as never before, allowing his aides to violate the prohibitions regarding hiring career civil servants based on their party affiliation, and then gave false public statements and testimony about the matter. When the Senate sought to pass a resolution expressing "no confidence" in the attorney general, the Republicans blocked it with a filibuster. The fact that Bush's Justice Department has become yet another political instrument should give Americans pause. This body was created by Congress to represent the interests of the people of the United States, not the Republican Party, but since the system of law no longer takes account when officials act outside the law (not to mention the Constitution), Republicans do so and get away with it.
In the past the White House (whether occupied by Republicans or Democrats) placed tight restrictions on who could contact the Department of Justice regarding pending business. It was typically limited to only the president, the vice president, the White House chief of staff and White House counsel, who were authorized to speak with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general or the top assistant and associate attorneys general. However, in the Bush White House no less than a startling 471 White House aides are authorized to speak with 30 senior Justice Department officials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Bush administration has made the Justice Department a political extension of the White House in the area of law enforcement, which is unprecedented and seriously dilutes the credibility of the government when it goes to court. It will take years to depoliticize the Justice Department, and countless nonpolitical career attorneys -- including some of the most experienced and able men and women ever to serve in the department -- have left because of the way Bush's people run it. Ironically, when Republicans find Democratic officials with even a toe across the line, they raise unmitigated hell for that official. But when a Republican official crosses the line, Republicans close ranks around the miscreant, as they have done with the former chief of staff to the vice president, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Libby, a sophisticated Washington attorney, leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity. Libby had leaked her name as part of the effort to discredit Valerie Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, who had traveled to Niger to determine for the CIA if Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium -- a claim that would be made by the Bush White House. When Ambassador Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed putting the lie to that claim, Scooter Libby led the attack against him, notwithstanding the fact that he was telling the truth. One of his tactics was to claim that Wilson's wife, a covert CIA operative, had sent him on a boondoggle. Libby, as Cheney's national security adviser, was quite familiar with the potentially dire circumstances of leaking the identity of a covert agent. When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (the U.S. Attorney in Chicago) was appointed to investigate, Libby lied to the FBI and then to the grand jury about how he had learned of Valerie Wilson's CIA connection, claiming a newsman had told him, when, in fact, he had been told by the vice president. Although Special Counsel Fitzgerald found no criminal statute had been violated in leaking Valerie Wilson's name, he indicted and convicted Scooter Libby for false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. Even before federal judge Reggie Walton (a Bush appointee) sentenced Libby to 30 months in prison and a $250,000 fine, Republicans were demanding that Bush pardon him.
Republicans have offered an array of explanation and justifications for a Libby pardon, but when one cuts through the smoke, what they are really arguing is that one of their own should not be punished criminally. It is an absurd position. Conservatives once claimed they stood for law and order, and that no person was above the law, but their words belie their true beliefs as expressed in their actions. Frankly, I hoped that Bush would pardon Libby, as it would have served as a particularly egregious and conspicuous example of the Republican double standard -- the authoritarian's "do as I say, not as I do" mentality. Voters understand hypocrisy, and another solid abuse of process (and power) could only help the Democrats get back into the White House.
Having watched the GOP's evolution as it embraced the radicalism of authoritarian conservatism, slowly ceding control to its most strident faction, the authoritarian conservatives, I can no longer recognize the party. These new conservative leaders have not only sought to turn back the clock, but to return to a time before the Enlightenment when there were no clocks. As former vice president Al Gore nicely stated it, the Republicans have undertaken an "assault on reason." Indeed, they have rejected their own reasoned philosophy by ignoring conservatism's teachings -- based on well-documented history -- about the dangers of concentrations of power. They have done so by focusing on the presidency as the institution in which they wish to concentrate the enormous powers of the federal government. Nixon led the way, and Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II learned from his mistakes. Nixon scowled as he scolded and secretly investigated his opponents in the name of national security; his GOP successors have smiled and reassured Americans they are operating to protect them as they have proceeded to convert the American presidency into an elective monarchy, with its own high council, which was once known as the federal judiciary.
Fortunately, the power of the authoritarian conservatism that has so dominated the Bush/Cheney presidency is waning, although it is not likely there will ever be less than about one in four Americans who will follow such authoritarian leadership without question. For authoritarian conservatism to win another presidential contest, its candidate would have to attract independent voters in addition to their hardcore base. But polling of independents reveals that they have largely become disgusted with the Republicans, and lean heavily toward the Democrats. In surveying all of the Republican contenders for the GOP nomination, I have found that to the man, they all are far more authoritarian than even the most authoritarian of the Democrats. This raises the almost certain likelihood that, regardless of how great a distance any of these GOP candidates might attempt to place between himself and the Bush/Cheney presidency during a general election campaign, in fact, if elected he is going to continue in the vein that has already caused this nation so much trouble. (There is no doubt that the GOP will select an authoritarian standard-bearer, because these are the people who are most active in the primaries and the most devoted workers in the general election. It is almost impossible for a non-authoritarian to win the Republican nomination, as the party is now structured.)
As I was writing this closing section an old friend from the Nixon White House called. Now retired, he is a lifelong Republican who told me that he voted for Bush and Cheney twice, because he knows them both personally. He asked how my new book was coming, and when I told him the title, he remarked, "I'll say the government's broken." After we discussed it, he asked how I planned to end the book, since the election was still a good distance away. I told him I was contemplating ending midsentence and immediately fading to black -- the way HBO did in the final episode of the Sopranos, but that I would settle for a nice quote from him, on the record. He explained that he constantly has to bite his tongue, and the reason he does not speak out more is because one of his sons is in an important (nonpolitical) government post, and we both know that Republicans will seek revenge wherever they can find it. How about an off-the-record comment? I asked. That he agreed to.
"Just tell your readers that you have a source who knows a lot about the Republican party from long experience, that he knows all the key movers and shakers, and he has a bit of advice: People should not vote for any Republican, because they're dangerous, dishonest and self-serving. While I once believed that Governor George Wallace had it right, that there was not a dime's worth of difference in the parties; that is not longer true. I have come to realize the Democrats really do care about people who most need help from government; Republicans care most about those who will only get richer because of government help. The government is truly broken, particularly in dealing with national security, and another four years, and heaven forbid not eight years, under the Republicans, and our grandchildren will have to build a new government, because the one we have will be unrecognizable and unworkable."
These comments summed up our current situation -- and our possible future -- as eloquently as anything I could have wished.
-- By John W. Dean
Monday, August 20, 2007
Vacation 2007 Wrap
Okay, a week from today will find me back at work. Vacation is almost at an end. Overall, it’s been a very good month. A lot of it has been about reconnecting with family.
It started with a day on my own in Knoxville. It was my first visit there and from what little I saw of it, it seemed like a nice enough city. Next came the Baker Family Reunion in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It was a big success and it felt really good to get to know my Aunt and Cousins again and to get to meet their children. The only thing I wanted to do on that trip which I didn’t do was to go horseback riding.
Once back in West Virginia it was the usual situation of there being just enough to do to keep me busy and also enough free time to enjoy the pool and read. I visited with my Dad’s side of the family down in Ceredo, the little village on the Ohio River where I grew up. That included my great Aunt Sissy (my grandmother’s sister), Uncle Pat (Dad’s brother) and my cousins Norma Jean and Kyle. I visited with them twice. Uncle Pat gave us homegrown tomatoes, corn, cucumbers and cabbage. Things fresh from the garden really do taste better—it’s not a psyche thing either.
There was shopping to do at the Huntington Mall and downtown. There were new restaurants to try and some old ones to return to. Rocco’s 21 Club made for a nice meal and we saw Dancing With The Stars people there. Went to the movies and saw “The Bourne Ultimatum” and thought it was good for an action pic. Visited with some of Mom’s neighbors here in Island Estates. It’s never really that difficult to fill a day when I come home.
There was the Marilyn Monroe exhibit at the Huntington Galleries. We took Morgan, my 7-year old niece and introduced her to Marilyn. We took a trip up to Tamarack near Beckley and shopped the arts and crafts there after we had trout cooked by the Greenbrier Resort. We visited the new arts and crafts shop that opened in downtown Huntington called The Downtown Depot. They offer local artists, wood carvers, potters, photographers, glass blowers, etc. a place to sell their art.
I was really looking forward to flying to Boston and meeting up with Bronagh and Betsy and driving around Massachusetts and Brattleboro, Vermont, where we had first met in graduate school about 17 years ago. I was just putting my shirt on that Friday morning when the phone rang and an automated call told me my flight had been canceled. I rebooked a flight for 4 pm and switched on CNN. The reason the flight had been canceled was due to a security breach at the Charlotte airport. See, to get out of Huntington, you pretty much have to fly first to Charlotte and then onward. Anyway, I’d arranged with Jennifer to come by for me about 3 to take me to the airport. The woman (who was very nice and helpful btw) from the local USAir office called me about 12:20 and asked if I could get to the airport by 1. I knew I couldn’t and told her and she told me that my 4 flight was already showing 20 minutes late and that I couldn’t make my Charlotte connection to Boston. I canceled the trip and sulked my way up to the pool. I called Bronagh and Betsy the next day and they were having fun without me.
My brother-in-law Kent has a new boat and it’s killer. He took us out on the Ohio River twice. Both days the sun was out and the water was nice and warm. We went out yesterday, Saturday, and his father, Ken, and his Grandma Browning joined us on their pontoon boat. Ken does great grill and he cooked burgers and we swam and I got too much sun. Kent is an engineer for the Army Corps. Of Engineers and works on their river projects. He took us up near the Robert C. Byrd dam and showed us their dredging operation there. It was interesting watching them sucking the silt out of the shipping lanes and dumping it through this huge pipe to the other side of the river to let it drift on downriver.
Visited several times with my sister, Judy and her husband, Chuck. Judy has a new job and she seems to be a lot happier than I’ve seen her in awhile. One evening I took Judy, Mom, and our friend Carol out to Ironton, Ohio for dinner. A new steak house (Austyn’s) opened in the old railroad depot. It was heaving and we had an hour wait for a table. Carol knew of an old bar down by the river called The Fuzzy Duck. We walked across the parking lot and through the floodwall gates and there were like 30 hogs parked there and on the deck of the bar were their riders et al. There was some kind of biker convention going on in Ironton. We went in anyway and I got us drinks and we sat outside and watched the bikers and the river and talked and drank. The food at the restaurant was excellent, nothing fancy, just good eatin’.
Mom’s gone out of her way to cook some of my favorite foods. She’s sorta gotten out of the habit of cooking but she managed to put together several good meals. She cooked a turkey and we did an early Thanksgiving. Today she cooked meat loaf and Judy and Chuck joined us. We hit the pool after and my skin feels like it’s fried, especially after yesterday’s run on the river. Mom also makes great homemade barbeque and then she always does pinto beans and fresh kale. Kent also does a great grill and he did burgers for us one night at his and Jennifer’s house. I know I’ve definitely added a little to that spare tire around my waist.
I won’t be posting the pics from all of this until I get back to Abu Dhabi. Mom’s computer just doesn’t have the power. It barely hangs on so I can do this. Also, I have a political rant coming on and I’ll probably save that until I get back home. So, Thursday I fly home and Friday night I will sleep in my own bed again. I will have Saturday to recover from an 8-hour time zone leap and then back to work on Sunday. Wish me luck. Cheers.
Joe Klein Says Read This Now
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/19/20110/0110
It started with a day on my own in Knoxville. It was my first visit there and from what little I saw of it, it seemed like a nice enough city. Next came the Baker Family Reunion in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. It was a big success and it felt really good to get to know my Aunt and Cousins again and to get to meet their children. The only thing I wanted to do on that trip which I didn’t do was to go horseback riding.
Once back in West Virginia it was the usual situation of there being just enough to do to keep me busy and also enough free time to enjoy the pool and read. I visited with my Dad’s side of the family down in Ceredo, the little village on the Ohio River where I grew up. That included my great Aunt Sissy (my grandmother’s sister), Uncle Pat (Dad’s brother) and my cousins Norma Jean and Kyle. I visited with them twice. Uncle Pat gave us homegrown tomatoes, corn, cucumbers and cabbage. Things fresh from the garden really do taste better—it’s not a psyche thing either.
There was shopping to do at the Huntington Mall and downtown. There were new restaurants to try and some old ones to return to. Rocco’s 21 Club made for a nice meal and we saw Dancing With The Stars people there. Went to the movies and saw “The Bourne Ultimatum” and thought it was good for an action pic. Visited with some of Mom’s neighbors here in Island Estates. It’s never really that difficult to fill a day when I come home.
There was the Marilyn Monroe exhibit at the Huntington Galleries. We took Morgan, my 7-year old niece and introduced her to Marilyn. We took a trip up to Tamarack near Beckley and shopped the arts and crafts there after we had trout cooked by the Greenbrier Resort. We visited the new arts and crafts shop that opened in downtown Huntington called The Downtown Depot. They offer local artists, wood carvers, potters, photographers, glass blowers, etc. a place to sell their art.
I was really looking forward to flying to Boston and meeting up with Bronagh and Betsy and driving around Massachusetts and Brattleboro, Vermont, where we had first met in graduate school about 17 years ago. I was just putting my shirt on that Friday morning when the phone rang and an automated call told me my flight had been canceled. I rebooked a flight for 4 pm and switched on CNN. The reason the flight had been canceled was due to a security breach at the Charlotte airport. See, to get out of Huntington, you pretty much have to fly first to Charlotte and then onward. Anyway, I’d arranged with Jennifer to come by for me about 3 to take me to the airport. The woman (who was very nice and helpful btw) from the local USAir office called me about 12:20 and asked if I could get to the airport by 1. I knew I couldn’t and told her and she told me that my 4 flight was already showing 20 minutes late and that I couldn’t make my Charlotte connection to Boston. I canceled the trip and sulked my way up to the pool. I called Bronagh and Betsy the next day and they were having fun without me.
My brother-in-law Kent has a new boat and it’s killer. He took us out on the Ohio River twice. Both days the sun was out and the water was nice and warm. We went out yesterday, Saturday, and his father, Ken, and his Grandma Browning joined us on their pontoon boat. Ken does great grill and he cooked burgers and we swam and I got too much sun. Kent is an engineer for the Army Corps. Of Engineers and works on their river projects. He took us up near the Robert C. Byrd dam and showed us their dredging operation there. It was interesting watching them sucking the silt out of the shipping lanes and dumping it through this huge pipe to the other side of the river to let it drift on downriver.
Visited several times with my sister, Judy and her husband, Chuck. Judy has a new job and she seems to be a lot happier than I’ve seen her in awhile. One evening I took Judy, Mom, and our friend Carol out to Ironton, Ohio for dinner. A new steak house (Austyn’s) opened in the old railroad depot. It was heaving and we had an hour wait for a table. Carol knew of an old bar down by the river called The Fuzzy Duck. We walked across the parking lot and through the floodwall gates and there were like 30 hogs parked there and on the deck of the bar were their riders et al. There was some kind of biker convention going on in Ironton. We went in anyway and I got us drinks and we sat outside and watched the bikers and the river and talked and drank. The food at the restaurant was excellent, nothing fancy, just good eatin’.
Mom’s gone out of her way to cook some of my favorite foods. She’s sorta gotten out of the habit of cooking but she managed to put together several good meals. She cooked a turkey and we did an early Thanksgiving. Today she cooked meat loaf and Judy and Chuck joined us. We hit the pool after and my skin feels like it’s fried, especially after yesterday’s run on the river. Mom also makes great homemade barbeque and then she always does pinto beans and fresh kale. Kent also does a great grill and he did burgers for us one night at his and Jennifer’s house. I know I’ve definitely added a little to that spare tire around my waist.
I won’t be posting the pics from all of this until I get back to Abu Dhabi. Mom’s computer just doesn’t have the power. It barely hangs on so I can do this. Also, I have a political rant coming on and I’ll probably save that until I get back home. So, Thursday I fly home and Friday night I will sleep in my own bed again. I will have Saturday to recover from an 8-hour time zone leap and then back to work on Sunday. Wish me luck. Cheers.
Joe Klein Says Read This Now
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/19/20110/0110
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Baker Family Reunion 2007
I had a great time at the 2007 Baker Family Reunion. We arrived in Gatlinburg early Sunday afternoon. We drove to the office and couldn’t check in until 3 pm. As we waited a lot of people arrived and then Jennifer told me that the cabins weren’t located there by the office but were about a 15-minute drive away. Jennifer stayed in touch with Laura and Betty by phone through all of this. We finally got checked in and got directions and information about the bugs and the bears and piled back in the car to go to Pigeon Forge. Traffic was very heavy. We turned left at Traffic Light #6 and drove about 1.5 miles and then turned left and drove up a mountain until we found the cabin named “Mountain Retreat”. We sat inside and talked and waited for Laura to arrive with Betty, Evan, Jacob and Mallory. Jennifer manned the phone to give Laura directions on how to find the cabin. Once they arrived, we helped them unpack their car and Laura gave out our room assignments and then we carried stuff to our rooms. Laura, Jennifer and I then piled in the car and drove over to Wal-Mart for groceries. We filled two buggies. Drove that back to the cabin, unloaded the stuff and put it away then had a cold beer, meat pies (which Betty had brought on dry ice from Louisiana) and salad for dinner.
Monday we got up at a decent hour, got everyone fed and dressed and took off for Gatlinburg. Laura drove her big-ass car that talked to you to tell you which way to turn. She found a place to park. Jennifer was following in the van and followed suit. Gatlinburg is basically one street with a lot of tourist crap on it. We had lunch downtown. Laura took all the kids to Wacky Bear as secret shoppers. I shopped for a decent pair of shoes that I could wear rafting and horseback riding and which looked good with jeans. Towards the end of our day I found a pair of Top-Siders that were perfect. I also located and went to a liquor store to score a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. Laura rode with Mallory and I rode with Jacob up the mountain on a ski lift. It was cool and there was a beautiful view of the surrounding Smokey Mountains. We herded everyone back towards the cars and started for the cabin. Laura had been manning the phone with Liz and Mark (along with Micaela and Nathan) giving them directions to the cabin. We met them in the parking lot of Shoney’s at Traffic Light #6. Everyone hugged and greeted there in the parking lot and then they followed us up to the cabin. Laura and Micaela took the kids to Mr. Gati’s pizza for dinner while Mom, Betty, Mark, Liz, Jennifer and I ate at the Old Mill Restaurant. There was about a 30-minute wait for a table, but the food was good. I had trout, one of my favorites.
On Tuesday everyone, but Micaela, agreed to have a picnic at this spot that Laura knew of and the plan was to then hike up to a near-by waterfall after we ate. The sky looked threatening all along the drive and then as we pulled into the picnic area the sky opened up, along with some sound and light effects. Mom and Betty played statues under an umbrella and ate. I ate under a tree and got soaked. Finally, after about 30 minutes or so everyone was ready to leave. As we neared the waterfalls, Laura pulled off. Since everyone was already soaked, she wanted to go ahead and climb up to the waterfall. Betty, Mom, Jennifer and I declined and left with Evan to go back to the cabin. Jennifer and I fired up the hot tub and sat in it for about an hour and talked as it continued to pour the rain. Mom and Betty played Scrabble. Micaela sulked. Evan played. That evening was the birthday party for Evan and Jacob and Nathan. Liz, Laura and Betty had brought presents for all the kids. They tore through those gifts in bare minutes and they were very, very happy. The kids went off to play downstairs. Mom and Betty played Scrabble and I sat in along with Liz, I think. Jennifer watched.
Wednesday was Dollywood day. We all wore our Baker Family Reunion 2007 T-shirts that Liz had bought for us. It was a short drive from the cabin. The parking lots were full and we parked a mile or so from the main gate. A trolley came by and picked you up to take you to the main gate. We got our picture made and then grabbed maps of the place and I stood back while everyone made a plan of where and when to meet up. I slipped my music player into my ears, cranked up the music and headed up to Craftsmen Valley. It was a beautiful Tennessee early afternoon. There were some cool things up the valley, actually- glass blowers, wood carvers, pottery makers and Jennifer’s favorite, homemade pork rinds. I bumped into Betty and Mom as I was watching this rafting ride and talked them into doing it with me after lunch. We walked to the newly designated area to meet up with everyone else and then had lunch. After I finished lunch I went out to smoke and the kids came with me and there was a nearby pond where you could buy food for a quarter and feed the fish, ducks and turtles. They had a good time. All of us rode the water ride next. Betty didn’t know you got wet, but once she found out, she went anyway. Since there were 13 of us total and each tire held 6 people, I went as a single and rode with what I believe was a local family. It was still fun. Everyone split up again and I took Mom and Betty on the train ride around Dollywood. There was a breeze. After the train I took off on my own again, listening to music and looking for something else to do. There wasn’t much. I don’t like those rides that throw you around and upside down, too old, you know. I basically just wandered for about an hour or so, shopped a little, went into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and it started to just pour rain and it poured more. We all met up down around the gate and I remembered the pictures. We bought a few packages of those and then had to file out through the gift shop with everyone else. It was still pouring the rain and it seemed like the whole park had decided to leave at the same time so everyone was waiting for trolleys back to their cars. That part was a little miserable. Finally to the cars and back to the cabin and most of us opened beers. I organized dinner with Laura, in other words I called and ordered the pizzas. She and Micaela went to pick them up. After dinner was the now usual thing. The kids played downstairs. Mom and Betty played Scrabble.
Thursday was whitewater-rafting day. Mom and Betty stayed home with Evan. It was a long ride over to the river site, practically to the North Carolina state line. Everyone but Micaela and I did the lower rafting, for children. Micaela and I did the upper with class 3 and 4 rapids on them. The water was really wild in spots and several people fell off. Our guide was Jared and he was very good and patient. He said he’d been doing this for over seven years. I was a little bit nervous before we got started, but after the first set of rapids, I chilled out for the most part and had a fantastic time. By the time we got back to the offices, I was soaked. I bought a T-shirt because mine was drenched and dried off and put on my dry shorts and new T-shirt. Back to the cabin we went.
We showered and put on fresh clothes because I was taking Jennifer, Laura, Liz and Mark out to the Hard Rock for dinner. We left about 7:30. Jennifer drove. The Café was busy when we arrived but I used my All Access pass and got us a table before we’d even gotten a good start on our drinks. Evidently, Tennessee has a strange law that you must show an ID before you can be served alcohol, even if you look 50, it doesn’t matter, you have to show ID and if you don’t have ID then you can’t drink. America has become so rigid and filled with these ridiculous laws, most of them for stupid people. Anyway, working on my first vodka martini we hit the table and started scoping out the menus. We ordered the food and I ordered a second martini. I had the barbeque brisket and it turned out to be fabulous. I left them to go to the bar for a smoke. I returned and we chatted and got to know each other again. We hadn’t been together as a group like that for such a long time, if ever. Food came and I ordered a pint of beer. We ate and talked some more and laughed a lot about our respective families, which is a sure sign of love. Jennifer drove us home. Mom looked like she’d been tied behind a pick-up truck and drug for thirty miles. She and Betty had been watching all the children. Not long after we got back the Two Moms were tired and went to bed.
Friday was our last full day there. Jennifer and Morgan and I wanted to go horseback riding and Mallory and Nathan wanted to come along. Laura took the two Moms shopping. Liz and Mark took everyone else for another hike up to a waterfall. By the time we got to the stables, there was such a crowd that he told us there was a two-hour wait for riding. We didn’t have the time because we were meeting back up with everyone else for lunch. Morgan cried a little bit because she really wanted to ride. I really wanted to ride, too, but I thought it would look back if I cried. We got back in the car and started flipping through options. Jennifer hit on the Hillbilly Putt Putt. We stood in line for maybe 20 minutes and then rode a lift up the side of this mountain where they’ve carved out two miniature golf courses. We played eighteen holes of golf, laughing and carrying on like kids, which some of us were.
If Jennifer knew one thing about the Pigeon Forge area it was possible dining options. She is her father’s daughter. There was a place she knew called the Apple Barn and we were all meeting there for lunch. Liz and Mark had already eaten and they were coming later. The food at this place was really good and not faux homemade country cooking. We ate and shopped some in the gift store and then we all split up again. Mark and Liz took all the kids back to the cabin and then down to the swimming pool. Mom, Betty, Jennifer and I went to this huge Outlet Mall in Pigeon Forge. Laura and Micaela went there as well, but we never really met up with them. I went out on my own, listening to music and going into a few shops, but basically it’s just a rip-off. I mean the place is enormous, and filled with everything and nothing. Close to 5 o’clock I bumped into Betty and Mom and we wobbled back to where the car was parked, conveniently in front of a bar/grill. I saw some people sitting outside having what looked like a pint of iced cold beer. Betty was thinking along the same lines. Mom had iced tea. In a bit Laura and Micaela joined us and we had another beer. Liz and Mark and the kids had eaten so we just decided to eat there. What the hell, we were tired and a little hungry and just wanted to get it out of the way. Jennifer and I both ordered the seafood and it was horrific. It had definitely traveled and then sat, god only knows how long. I still ate mine because I’d paid for it and because I was hungry. Then it was back to the cabin to pack and get ready for Saturday blast-off. You MUST vacate the cabin by 10 am exactly or be fined.
Saturday morning was a little chaotic. I slept through some of it, as I’m sure surprises no one. Slammed down some coffee and a granola bar, showered, dressed, hauled stuff out to the van and drove off to meet everyone at the Old Mill Restaurant for a goodbye breakfast. And it was a great country breakfast. I took the boys out with me to see the ducks and have a cigarette while everyone finished up eating. Not long after everyone met in the parking lot and said goodbye. We all drove off looking for the interstate and our respective homes. It had been fun and I hope we all get the chance to do it again before we’re all on walkers.
I want to write more about the reunion, but it’s been all I could do to just get the details of the trip down. Vacation with your family can be a busy time, believe it or not. I want to write about my time here in West Virginia visiting family, etc. I’m flying up to Boston Friday to meet up with Bronagh and Betsy from grad school. There will be a post in that I’m sure. And then there is a definite political tirade coming. Stay tuned for all of it.
Here are a few links I thought you should read.
The three links below are regarding CNN correspondent in Iraq giving the straight poop on the results of the Surge.
Michael Ware: Surge is undermining the very government that America created
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/01/ware-surge-is-undermining-the-very-government-that-america-created/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/war-correspondent-respond_b_58769.html
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0707/31/acd.01.html
The Impeachment Dilemma by Scott Horton
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000697
Bush and Napoleon by Ed Bulliet
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/02/opinion/edbulliet.php
The greatest danger to American security after Bush and then Iran is Israel. Read this!
A New History Lesson in Israel by Rami G. Khouri
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/02/opinion/edkkhouri.php
Read this. Frightening to say the least!
Bush on the Couch by Coleen Rowley
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/dangers-of-a-cornered-geo_b_58429.html
Monday we got up at a decent hour, got everyone fed and dressed and took off for Gatlinburg. Laura drove her big-ass car that talked to you to tell you which way to turn. She found a place to park. Jennifer was following in the van and followed suit. Gatlinburg is basically one street with a lot of tourist crap on it. We had lunch downtown. Laura took all the kids to Wacky Bear as secret shoppers. I shopped for a decent pair of shoes that I could wear rafting and horseback riding and which looked good with jeans. Towards the end of our day I found a pair of Top-Siders that were perfect. I also located and went to a liquor store to score a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. Laura rode with Mallory and I rode with Jacob up the mountain on a ski lift. It was cool and there was a beautiful view of the surrounding Smokey Mountains. We herded everyone back towards the cars and started for the cabin. Laura had been manning the phone with Liz and Mark (along with Micaela and Nathan) giving them directions to the cabin. We met them in the parking lot of Shoney’s at Traffic Light #6. Everyone hugged and greeted there in the parking lot and then they followed us up to the cabin. Laura and Micaela took the kids to Mr. Gati’s pizza for dinner while Mom, Betty, Mark, Liz, Jennifer and I ate at the Old Mill Restaurant. There was about a 30-minute wait for a table, but the food was good. I had trout, one of my favorites.
On Tuesday everyone, but Micaela, agreed to have a picnic at this spot that Laura knew of and the plan was to then hike up to a near-by waterfall after we ate. The sky looked threatening all along the drive and then as we pulled into the picnic area the sky opened up, along with some sound and light effects. Mom and Betty played statues under an umbrella and ate. I ate under a tree and got soaked. Finally, after about 30 minutes or so everyone was ready to leave. As we neared the waterfalls, Laura pulled off. Since everyone was already soaked, she wanted to go ahead and climb up to the waterfall. Betty, Mom, Jennifer and I declined and left with Evan to go back to the cabin. Jennifer and I fired up the hot tub and sat in it for about an hour and talked as it continued to pour the rain. Mom and Betty played Scrabble. Micaela sulked. Evan played. That evening was the birthday party for Evan and Jacob and Nathan. Liz, Laura and Betty had brought presents for all the kids. They tore through those gifts in bare minutes and they were very, very happy. The kids went off to play downstairs. Mom and Betty played Scrabble and I sat in along with Liz, I think. Jennifer watched.
Wednesday was Dollywood day. We all wore our Baker Family Reunion 2007 T-shirts that Liz had bought for us. It was a short drive from the cabin. The parking lots were full and we parked a mile or so from the main gate. A trolley came by and picked you up to take you to the main gate. We got our picture made and then grabbed maps of the place and I stood back while everyone made a plan of where and when to meet up. I slipped my music player into my ears, cranked up the music and headed up to Craftsmen Valley. It was a beautiful Tennessee early afternoon. There were some cool things up the valley, actually- glass blowers, wood carvers, pottery makers and Jennifer’s favorite, homemade pork rinds. I bumped into Betty and Mom as I was watching this rafting ride and talked them into doing it with me after lunch. We walked to the newly designated area to meet up with everyone else and then had lunch. After I finished lunch I went out to smoke and the kids came with me and there was a nearby pond where you could buy food for a quarter and feed the fish, ducks and turtles. They had a good time. All of us rode the water ride next. Betty didn’t know you got wet, but once she found out, she went anyway. Since there were 13 of us total and each tire held 6 people, I went as a single and rode with what I believe was a local family. It was still fun. Everyone split up again and I took Mom and Betty on the train ride around Dollywood. There was a breeze. After the train I took off on my own again, listening to music and looking for something else to do. There wasn’t much. I don’t like those rides that throw you around and upside down, too old, you know. I basically just wandered for about an hour or so, shopped a little, went into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame and it started to just pour rain and it poured more. We all met up down around the gate and I remembered the pictures. We bought a few packages of those and then had to file out through the gift shop with everyone else. It was still pouring the rain and it seemed like the whole park had decided to leave at the same time so everyone was waiting for trolleys back to their cars. That part was a little miserable. Finally to the cars and back to the cabin and most of us opened beers. I organized dinner with Laura, in other words I called and ordered the pizzas. She and Micaela went to pick them up. After dinner was the now usual thing. The kids played downstairs. Mom and Betty played Scrabble.
Thursday was whitewater-rafting day. Mom and Betty stayed home with Evan. It was a long ride over to the river site, practically to the North Carolina state line. Everyone but Micaela and I did the lower rafting, for children. Micaela and I did the upper with class 3 and 4 rapids on them. The water was really wild in spots and several people fell off. Our guide was Jared and he was very good and patient. He said he’d been doing this for over seven years. I was a little bit nervous before we got started, but after the first set of rapids, I chilled out for the most part and had a fantastic time. By the time we got back to the offices, I was soaked. I bought a T-shirt because mine was drenched and dried off and put on my dry shorts and new T-shirt. Back to the cabin we went.
We showered and put on fresh clothes because I was taking Jennifer, Laura, Liz and Mark out to the Hard Rock for dinner. We left about 7:30. Jennifer drove. The Café was busy when we arrived but I used my All Access pass and got us a table before we’d even gotten a good start on our drinks. Evidently, Tennessee has a strange law that you must show an ID before you can be served alcohol, even if you look 50, it doesn’t matter, you have to show ID and if you don’t have ID then you can’t drink. America has become so rigid and filled with these ridiculous laws, most of them for stupid people. Anyway, working on my first vodka martini we hit the table and started scoping out the menus. We ordered the food and I ordered a second martini. I had the barbeque brisket and it turned out to be fabulous. I left them to go to the bar for a smoke. I returned and we chatted and got to know each other again. We hadn’t been together as a group like that for such a long time, if ever. Food came and I ordered a pint of beer. We ate and talked some more and laughed a lot about our respective families, which is a sure sign of love. Jennifer drove us home. Mom looked like she’d been tied behind a pick-up truck and drug for thirty miles. She and Betty had been watching all the children. Not long after we got back the Two Moms were tired and went to bed.
Friday was our last full day there. Jennifer and Morgan and I wanted to go horseback riding and Mallory and Nathan wanted to come along. Laura took the two Moms shopping. Liz and Mark took everyone else for another hike up to a waterfall. By the time we got to the stables, there was such a crowd that he told us there was a two-hour wait for riding. We didn’t have the time because we were meeting back up with everyone else for lunch. Morgan cried a little bit because she really wanted to ride. I really wanted to ride, too, but I thought it would look back if I cried. We got back in the car and started flipping through options. Jennifer hit on the Hillbilly Putt Putt. We stood in line for maybe 20 minutes and then rode a lift up the side of this mountain where they’ve carved out two miniature golf courses. We played eighteen holes of golf, laughing and carrying on like kids, which some of us were.
If Jennifer knew one thing about the Pigeon Forge area it was possible dining options. She is her father’s daughter. There was a place she knew called the Apple Barn and we were all meeting there for lunch. Liz and Mark had already eaten and they were coming later. The food at this place was really good and not faux homemade country cooking. We ate and shopped some in the gift store and then we all split up again. Mark and Liz took all the kids back to the cabin and then down to the swimming pool. Mom, Betty, Jennifer and I went to this huge Outlet Mall in Pigeon Forge. Laura and Micaela went there as well, but we never really met up with them. I went out on my own, listening to music and going into a few shops, but basically it’s just a rip-off. I mean the place is enormous, and filled with everything and nothing. Close to 5 o’clock I bumped into Betty and Mom and we wobbled back to where the car was parked, conveniently in front of a bar/grill. I saw some people sitting outside having what looked like a pint of iced cold beer. Betty was thinking along the same lines. Mom had iced tea. In a bit Laura and Micaela joined us and we had another beer. Liz and Mark and the kids had eaten so we just decided to eat there. What the hell, we were tired and a little hungry and just wanted to get it out of the way. Jennifer and I both ordered the seafood and it was horrific. It had definitely traveled and then sat, god only knows how long. I still ate mine because I’d paid for it and because I was hungry. Then it was back to the cabin to pack and get ready for Saturday blast-off. You MUST vacate the cabin by 10 am exactly or be fined.
Saturday morning was a little chaotic. I slept through some of it, as I’m sure surprises no one. Slammed down some coffee and a granola bar, showered, dressed, hauled stuff out to the van and drove off to meet everyone at the Old Mill Restaurant for a goodbye breakfast. And it was a great country breakfast. I took the boys out with me to see the ducks and have a cigarette while everyone finished up eating. Not long after everyone met in the parking lot and said goodbye. We all drove off looking for the interstate and our respective homes. It had been fun and I hope we all get the chance to do it again before we’re all on walkers.
I want to write more about the reunion, but it’s been all I could do to just get the details of the trip down. Vacation with your family can be a busy time, believe it or not. I want to write about my time here in West Virginia visiting family, etc. I’m flying up to Boston Friday to meet up with Bronagh and Betsy from grad school. There will be a post in that I’m sure. And then there is a definite political tirade coming. Stay tuned for all of it.
Here are a few links I thought you should read.
The three links below are regarding CNN correspondent in Iraq giving the straight poop on the results of the Surge.
Michael Ware: Surge is undermining the very government that America created
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/01/ware-surge-is-undermining-the-very-government-that-america-created/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-durang/war-correspondent-respond_b_58769.html
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0707/31/acd.01.html
The Impeachment Dilemma by Scott Horton
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000697
Bush and Napoleon by Ed Bulliet
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/02/opinion/edbulliet.php
The greatest danger to American security after Bush and then Iran is Israel. Read this!
A New History Lesson in Israel by Rami G. Khouri
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/02/opinion/edkkhouri.php
Read this. Frightening to say the least!
Bush on the Couch by Coleen Rowley
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/dangers-of-a-cornered-geo_b_58429.html
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
End Of July Sell-Out
It’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything here. I guess that’s not too bad. And it was a v. busy month. I should go back and check how many posts begin that way. Anyway, this is coming to you from Huntington, West Virginia. I’ll back up a little.
The day I left for the airport in Abu Dhabi was chaos and none of it of my making, really. Work was chaos for reasons I can’t divulge, you understand. George was supposed to pick me up at about 7 for a dinner party at Asli’s villa and then he’d take me on to the airport after, about 9 or so. The flight wasn’t until midnight, but I wanted to shop and use the open bar in the lounge, the usual. He didn’t arrive until almost 8 and was lost in my neighborhood. I talked him to my place on the mobile while I waited for him downstairs. Then, I was supposed to help navigate us to Asli’s villa and I was trying to do that and speak to my boss to make him aware of a problem George had discovered regarding work, of course. We drove around lost in Um Al Nar for about 30 minutes until we found the villa. Patricia and James were there, along with John and (my god I can’t think of her name, it begins with a B or an M and she’s Turkish) she was there, too. I met Asli’s daughter and her husband. Some other people from the embassy were there, but I forget their names. Had a little white wine and some dinner and got George to take me to the airport. John rode along to assist George. Got to the airport about 30 minutes late, which isn’t bad for George.
The airport was easy thanks to Golden Class Service and I dumped my stuff in the lounge and went shopping. No problems. Scoped out the bookstore, nothing to buy. Headed to the liquor store and found out that because of new regulations regarding liquids on flights, I couldn’t buy my usual two bottles of Jameson’s for the trip. I was shocked, shocked and thrown off my usual routine. I got a couple of carton of cigarettes and then moved on to the cologne shop. I bought a small bottle of Prada that fell under the new regulations for liquids and walked back to the lounge to consume some, Jameson’s. The Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt wasn’t bad except for the stopover in Kuwait City. The five hours in Frankfurt airport were pretty miserable, but at least there are smoking areas. The USAir flight to Charlotte was comfortable and I did manage a bit of sleep and also to snag one bottle of duty-free Chivas, which I had to stow in my checked luggage after I went through customs. I was only in the Charlotte airport for maybe an hour before they called my flight and I was off to Knoxville. Arrived Knoxville about 7 pm or so and seemed like I waited forever on my bags. I was so out of it. About 27 hours in airplanes and airports and very little sleep. Found a taxi and got to the Hilton. The taxi driver was very nice and very knowledgeable about things to do in Knoxville as well as in the Pigeon Forge area. I washed up in my room and stumbled down to the bar, The Pink Martini, and had a large vodka one followed by a hamburger with a pint of beer. Not long after that I was asleep.
Jet lag seems to get worse as I get older. I woke up about 5 or so and had a really hard time getting back to sleep. Next thing I knew it was 1 o’clock. The sky was blue and I thought the best way to wake up was at the pool. Out I went and had a dip. The water was pretty cold. I was hungry and found that there wasn’t room service at the pool. I went to the front desk and they said I could order it from my room and have it sent to the pool. That wasn’t exactly correct. I got room service on the phone and he told me that you couldn’t have glass at the pool. I got to the bottom line. I’m hungry and I want to eat at the pool, what can I have? The kid was bright. I can make you a club sandwich in a to-go box. I said great and went back to the pool. Not long after that, I ate. Then a mother came with two screaming children. Their screams hit my head on reverb and I stayed about another thirty minutes before I went up to shower.
After I got dressed, I went down to the Starbucks in the lobby for a coffee and then went on the computer. Checked mail and started reading some news. I tried to go to Salon and the net nanny told me it was blocked. I was stunned. They block Salon.com at the Hilton in Knoxville. Later I tried to go to The Huffington Post and it was also blocked by the net nanny. They block The Huffington Post at the Hilton in Knoxville. Finally, I twigged to something and googled the fascist Drudge Report, clicked on the link and went right there. Well, being jet-lagged and a little hung over I went up to the desk and argued with some clueless little southern Christian bimbo who assured me NO, the hotel was not just blocking liberal news sites but that the computer guy who did that was off today. I told that was exactly what was going on and said I’m not in this country much but that nothing surprises me here anymore. I vented a bit. I finished on the computer and then went out into the garden to have a cigarette and to finish off my coffee.
I wanted to get out and walk and see a little of the city. I asked the same bimbo at the desk and she directed me to the Old Market Square area, a few blocks away. I got my music player on and cranked it up loud and went walking. I found it easily and shopped in several places. I found a Jesus action figure with glow in the dark hands. I also bought a countdown calendar to Bush’s last day in office and a copper bracelet. I wanted some water so I went into this bar and ended up having to buy this expensive water in a bottle and I started to leave and she handed me a glass. I went out to sit on the patio and have a smoke. I looked at the glass as I was about to pour the expensive water into it and there was lipstick still on the rim. I just drank from the bottle. I still had the music cranked up and there were two other tables taken on an eight-table patio. I lit my cigarette and was enjoying the water and the cigarette and the music when this waitress bimbo with multiple piercings on her face told me “this is a non-smoking patio”. I laughed at her, of course, and questioned her seriousness. She said she was serious. I said, “I’ll go then,” and left the water and the dirty glass on the table and started walking again.
One street over I found an art cooperative, The Art Market Gallery. I still had the music cranked up when I entered and felt a tap on my shoulder after a minute or so and the woman told me that it was an art cooperative and they have details on all the artists and if I needed any help, just to ask. I thanked her and put the music back on. There were some brilliant pieces there. I spent about a hundred, but I could have spent a lot more. There’s always the baggage weight allowance on the fight home to consider. I bought a nice piece of pottery, a lovely turned wooden bowl, and a really cool hand-painted glass soap dish. After I left there I headed back to the hotel and dropped off my purchases and then walked over to the Sundome (I think that’s what it’s called) that is a remnant of when Knoxville hosted the World’s Fair about 20 years ago. You ride the elevator to the top and you get this great view of the park and parts of the city and the river. The mountains are really beautiful in the distance. I walked the park a bit more and had intentions to eat out somewhere but when I got back to the hotel I just decided to go back down to the same bar, where you can smoke, and order the BBQ sandwich. It was very good. After dinner it was upstairs to pack, watch a little TV and try to sleep early because my mother, sister and niece were picking me up early the next day to go on to Pigeon Forge for the Baker Family Reunion 2007.
I’m on vacation so I’m going to cut this up into several parts. Next part will be on the Baker Family Reunion 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. There is also a political rant coming on. Thus, the title of this post. I saw a Bill Maher comedy special on HBO at the Hilton. He said that he loves America; it’s Americans that he hates. I agree. The country is filled with sell-outs. From the minute you board any American carrier to come here you can see them. I’ll save my feelings on that for a later post.
This is a good piece on the next terror attack and what could happen.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/after-the-next-911_b_58264.html
I found this website and thought my friends back in the UAE would like it. You take a pic of someone parked like an asshole and post it on the website. Check it out.
http://www.youparklikeanasshole.com/
War, Chaos and Bush’s Faith by Gary Kamiyahttp://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/07/31/faith_war/
The day I left for the airport in Abu Dhabi was chaos and none of it of my making, really. Work was chaos for reasons I can’t divulge, you understand. George was supposed to pick me up at about 7 for a dinner party at Asli’s villa and then he’d take me on to the airport after, about 9 or so. The flight wasn’t until midnight, but I wanted to shop and use the open bar in the lounge, the usual. He didn’t arrive until almost 8 and was lost in my neighborhood. I talked him to my place on the mobile while I waited for him downstairs. Then, I was supposed to help navigate us to Asli’s villa and I was trying to do that and speak to my boss to make him aware of a problem George had discovered regarding work, of course. We drove around lost in Um Al Nar for about 30 minutes until we found the villa. Patricia and James were there, along with John and (my god I can’t think of her name, it begins with a B or an M and she’s Turkish) she was there, too. I met Asli’s daughter and her husband. Some other people from the embassy were there, but I forget their names. Had a little white wine and some dinner and got George to take me to the airport. John rode along to assist George. Got to the airport about 30 minutes late, which isn’t bad for George.
The airport was easy thanks to Golden Class Service and I dumped my stuff in the lounge and went shopping. No problems. Scoped out the bookstore, nothing to buy. Headed to the liquor store and found out that because of new regulations regarding liquids on flights, I couldn’t buy my usual two bottles of Jameson’s for the trip. I was shocked, shocked and thrown off my usual routine. I got a couple of carton of cigarettes and then moved on to the cologne shop. I bought a small bottle of Prada that fell under the new regulations for liquids and walked back to the lounge to consume some, Jameson’s. The Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt wasn’t bad except for the stopover in Kuwait City. The five hours in Frankfurt airport were pretty miserable, but at least there are smoking areas. The USAir flight to Charlotte was comfortable and I did manage a bit of sleep and also to snag one bottle of duty-free Chivas, which I had to stow in my checked luggage after I went through customs. I was only in the Charlotte airport for maybe an hour before they called my flight and I was off to Knoxville. Arrived Knoxville about 7 pm or so and seemed like I waited forever on my bags. I was so out of it. About 27 hours in airplanes and airports and very little sleep. Found a taxi and got to the Hilton. The taxi driver was very nice and very knowledgeable about things to do in Knoxville as well as in the Pigeon Forge area. I washed up in my room and stumbled down to the bar, The Pink Martini, and had a large vodka one followed by a hamburger with a pint of beer. Not long after that I was asleep.
Jet lag seems to get worse as I get older. I woke up about 5 or so and had a really hard time getting back to sleep. Next thing I knew it was 1 o’clock. The sky was blue and I thought the best way to wake up was at the pool. Out I went and had a dip. The water was pretty cold. I was hungry and found that there wasn’t room service at the pool. I went to the front desk and they said I could order it from my room and have it sent to the pool. That wasn’t exactly correct. I got room service on the phone and he told me that you couldn’t have glass at the pool. I got to the bottom line. I’m hungry and I want to eat at the pool, what can I have? The kid was bright. I can make you a club sandwich in a to-go box. I said great and went back to the pool. Not long after that, I ate. Then a mother came with two screaming children. Their screams hit my head on reverb and I stayed about another thirty minutes before I went up to shower.
After I got dressed, I went down to the Starbucks in the lobby for a coffee and then went on the computer. Checked mail and started reading some news. I tried to go to Salon and the net nanny told me it was blocked. I was stunned. They block Salon.com at the Hilton in Knoxville. Later I tried to go to The Huffington Post and it was also blocked by the net nanny. They block The Huffington Post at the Hilton in Knoxville. Finally, I twigged to something and googled the fascist Drudge Report, clicked on the link and went right there. Well, being jet-lagged and a little hung over I went up to the desk and argued with some clueless little southern Christian bimbo who assured me NO, the hotel was not just blocking liberal news sites but that the computer guy who did that was off today. I told that was exactly what was going on and said I’m not in this country much but that nothing surprises me here anymore. I vented a bit. I finished on the computer and then went out into the garden to have a cigarette and to finish off my coffee.
I wanted to get out and walk and see a little of the city. I asked the same bimbo at the desk and she directed me to the Old Market Square area, a few blocks away. I got my music player on and cranked it up loud and went walking. I found it easily and shopped in several places. I found a Jesus action figure with glow in the dark hands. I also bought a countdown calendar to Bush’s last day in office and a copper bracelet. I wanted some water so I went into this bar and ended up having to buy this expensive water in a bottle and I started to leave and she handed me a glass. I went out to sit on the patio and have a smoke. I looked at the glass as I was about to pour the expensive water into it and there was lipstick still on the rim. I just drank from the bottle. I still had the music cranked up and there were two other tables taken on an eight-table patio. I lit my cigarette and was enjoying the water and the cigarette and the music when this waitress bimbo with multiple piercings on her face told me “this is a non-smoking patio”. I laughed at her, of course, and questioned her seriousness. She said she was serious. I said, “I’ll go then,” and left the water and the dirty glass on the table and started walking again.
One street over I found an art cooperative, The Art Market Gallery. I still had the music cranked up when I entered and felt a tap on my shoulder after a minute or so and the woman told me that it was an art cooperative and they have details on all the artists and if I needed any help, just to ask. I thanked her and put the music back on. There were some brilliant pieces there. I spent about a hundred, but I could have spent a lot more. There’s always the baggage weight allowance on the fight home to consider. I bought a nice piece of pottery, a lovely turned wooden bowl, and a really cool hand-painted glass soap dish. After I left there I headed back to the hotel and dropped off my purchases and then walked over to the Sundome (I think that’s what it’s called) that is a remnant of when Knoxville hosted the World’s Fair about 20 years ago. You ride the elevator to the top and you get this great view of the park and parts of the city and the river. The mountains are really beautiful in the distance. I walked the park a bit more and had intentions to eat out somewhere but when I got back to the hotel I just decided to go back down to the same bar, where you can smoke, and order the BBQ sandwich. It was very good. After dinner it was upstairs to pack, watch a little TV and try to sleep early because my mother, sister and niece were picking me up early the next day to go on to Pigeon Forge for the Baker Family Reunion 2007.
I’m on vacation so I’m going to cut this up into several parts. Next part will be on the Baker Family Reunion 2007 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. There is also a political rant coming on. Thus, the title of this post. I saw a Bill Maher comedy special on HBO at the Hilton. He said that he loves America; it’s Americans that he hates. I agree. The country is filled with sell-outs. From the minute you board any American carrier to come here you can see them. I’ll save my feelings on that for a later post.
This is a good piece on the next terror attack and what could happen.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/after-the-next-911_b_58264.html
I found this website and thought my friends back in the UAE would like it. You take a pic of someone parked like an asshole and post it on the website. Check it out.
http://www.youparklikeanasshole.com/
War, Chaos and Bush’s Faith by Gary Kamiyahttp://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/07/31/faith_war/
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Socializing and Unsocializing
Saturday and car bombs in London and back to work tomorrow. This upcoming week will be a heavy one at work, I’m sure. Nothing to do but just duck my head and get through it. George, head of one program at the Institute, is probably going to be a bit pissed or disappointed with me, but I’ll get into that later.
Last weekend was say-goodbye-for-the-summer dinner with Phil, Enma, Steve, Leah and Hannah. I decided to taxi, for several reasons. I get tired of being in the car, for one thing, and also of having to drink responsibly so I can drive myself home safely. There’s a strategy involved in getting an evening taxi. Right now, evening prayer is about 7:30. You are not going to get a taxi around 7:30, no way. Then, after prayer, everyone and his brother are out on the street trying to flag a taxi. I opted to go early to Phil and Enma’s. The other day I waited 10 – 15 minutes in 110° weather for a taxi to take me down to Honda to pick up my car after its 120,000 km service. This time I walked out the door of my building and bam, there was an empty taxi. That’s how life is. It’s like when you get home from work or from out running errands and cannot find a parking place anywhere near the building so you park a street or so away, and then you walk up to the building and there’s an empty space right in front of the door and you sort of look back over there at your car and think about moving it, but just shake your head and walk on inside the building.
So, I arrived at Phil and Enma’s early. Everyone was already several ahead of me, but I caught up. We had a good time, as always. We talked about everything and nothing and laughed and ate takeaway from the Rainbow Steak House. Phil and Enma are off to Trinidad and then Venezuela to visit her parents. Steve and family are back to the UK to visit his family and then up to Scotland to visit Leah’s family. I have a little less than three weeks left before I’m out of here. Leah and Hannah got sleepy and Steve took them home around 9 or so. I hung out for about another hour talking to Phil and Enma and then I left. It was a nice evening.
Work was typically busy and chaotic last week. Due to new programs just coming online, we have to rework the entire September program of classes for the Institute. Hopefully with a few meetings this week, we’ll get that set up. Also have finals, etc. for three classes which will graduate on next Monday and that means a lot of paperwork. There was also a lot of outside testing last week, but that’s mostly George’s area.
Lorin had called me during the week and said they were coming to Abu Dhabi for Thursday night. She also mentioned that Wendy’s daughter, Kayla, had wanted her mother to get word to me that she had enjoyed meeting and talking to me at David and Lorin’s “Goodbye to B-01” party last month. Kayla is back in Canada getting ready to start her sophomore year of university this fall. Anyway, those exchanges led to Wendy coming down with David and Lorin on Thursday, which was great because I have a feeling that Wendy is becoming family and she’s very good people. Anyway, I had suggested that we all go to Hemingway’s for dinner and get a good burger and some beers.
George has had family visiting him for weeks. Frankly, I don’t see how he does it. He’s a better man than me, that’s for sure. Anyway, he invited me to a party at his place on Friday evening to meet his family and I was pretty sure it was something I wouldn’t make. George throws a great party and I attend when I’m in the mood for a party and think that I can be an entertaining guest. That’s not always the case, so I blow him off. I think it offends him and it’s not meant to. It’s just my nature. Anyway, I invited him and his family to Hemingway’s on Thursday to meet David and Lorin and Wendy and that way I could meet his family and I thought that would cover me. Then, Lorin called me back and told me that Rex (a librarian at the Petroleum Institute) wanted to join us and he was bringing two people. Now, I was up to a table for 12 and Hemingway’s doesn’t take reservations. I’d tried to use some wastuh and get my barber, Jihad, whose shop is at the Hilton where Hemingway’s is, to talk to someone about holding me a table, but they basically said no.
We’d scheduled to meet at 8. I left home about 7:20 and stopped at the petrol station to fill up and then headed on over to the Hilton, arriving about a quarter to 8. Luckily, Hemingway’s “back room” was empty and I spoke to the waiter and he started putting me together a table for 12. He finished about 8 and I ordered a beer and when it arrived I lit a cigarette. I know Lorin and I know George and I know they’re always running late, so I was expecting to sit and wait a bit. What was odd, though, was that the place started filling up and there’s me sitting alone at a table for 12 trying to look cool and comfortable and feeling very conspicuously alone. I think I pulled it off, but it felt really lonely at that huge table for about 15 – 20 minutes.
Everyone started arriving and I felt vindicated. I tweaked the seating and ended up sitting next to George and opposite his family. It was a fun evening. George’s family is sweet and real, just like George, and we hit it off from the start. Everyone talked and drank and ate and laughed and got acquainted and I really enjoyed myself. I took some of George’s family into the Jazz Bar to watch the Jazz Band. The place was heaving, so we had to stand, but the band was the same one that’s been there forever and they’re good. Then, George let everyone know that I probably wouldn’t be at the party on Friday and the pressure started. George knows me. Finally, I promised I would come and fully intended to join them for at least a few hours on Friday. Well, I didn’t.
We got back to my flat about 11:30 pm after Hemingway’s. We sat in the living room and caught up, because I’d spent the evening talking to George’s family. Wendy inspected the flat and I know it seemed like a big change from living on the American University of Sharjah campus. Wendy went to bed first, she had the spare room. David fell asleep on the sofa, as he usually does, and Lorin and I stayed up talking and drinking Paddy’s (Irish whiskey) until 4. We did major damage to that bottle. David and Lorin had my bedroom and I was on the sofa bed in the living room. David and Lorin and Wendy left about 5 pm the next day and I was feeling a bit under the weather. I got my bed back and turned on CNN and settled into my usual position and watched Breaking News about the car bombs in London. (I love London, it’s one of my favorite cities, and I have visited all those places they were talking about on the news.) I did shave and trim my moustache, etc. in preparation to go to George’s, but I just couldn’t pull myself off the bed to shower and dress and drive over there. It played on my mind a lot. Basically, I wasn’t in the mood to go to a party, any party. And what I wanted to do and needed to do was relax in bed and watch Lost and Grey’s Anatomy and House, which was what I did.
Still, tomorrow I will have to face George, but I’ll just tell him the truth and hope he understands.
Oh, btw, so far, the best CD of 2007 is Icky Thump by The White Stripes.
I received an email from my friend Mark Starr. He and his wife work in Kuwait and the email is the long story of this teacher who offended some Kuwaiti with wastuh by putting his son in detention and now is basically being held in the country and not allowed to leave. They put a travel ban on her so she can’t leave the country. The US Embassy can’t or won’t help her. It’s all very shameful. Either I will find a way to link to it or post the whole thing here later. It’s a very eye-opening story.
Below is a link to a story by one of our greatest journalists, Seymour M. Hersch, about the general who did the report on Abu Gharib. I can’t say it surprised me; it’s just typical American government under Bush. Read it tho, it’s an interesting piece.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=1
The General’s Report by Seymour M. Hersch
Last weekend was say-goodbye-for-the-summer dinner with Phil, Enma, Steve, Leah and Hannah. I decided to taxi, for several reasons. I get tired of being in the car, for one thing, and also of having to drink responsibly so I can drive myself home safely. There’s a strategy involved in getting an evening taxi. Right now, evening prayer is about 7:30. You are not going to get a taxi around 7:30, no way. Then, after prayer, everyone and his brother are out on the street trying to flag a taxi. I opted to go early to Phil and Enma’s. The other day I waited 10 – 15 minutes in 110° weather for a taxi to take me down to Honda to pick up my car after its 120,000 km service. This time I walked out the door of my building and bam, there was an empty taxi. That’s how life is. It’s like when you get home from work or from out running errands and cannot find a parking place anywhere near the building so you park a street or so away, and then you walk up to the building and there’s an empty space right in front of the door and you sort of look back over there at your car and think about moving it, but just shake your head and walk on inside the building.
So, I arrived at Phil and Enma’s early. Everyone was already several ahead of me, but I caught up. We had a good time, as always. We talked about everything and nothing and laughed and ate takeaway from the Rainbow Steak House. Phil and Enma are off to Trinidad and then Venezuela to visit her parents. Steve and family are back to the UK to visit his family and then up to Scotland to visit Leah’s family. I have a little less than three weeks left before I’m out of here. Leah and Hannah got sleepy and Steve took them home around 9 or so. I hung out for about another hour talking to Phil and Enma and then I left. It was a nice evening.
Work was typically busy and chaotic last week. Due to new programs just coming online, we have to rework the entire September program of classes for the Institute. Hopefully with a few meetings this week, we’ll get that set up. Also have finals, etc. for three classes which will graduate on next Monday and that means a lot of paperwork. There was also a lot of outside testing last week, but that’s mostly George’s area.
Lorin had called me during the week and said they were coming to Abu Dhabi for Thursday night. She also mentioned that Wendy’s daughter, Kayla, had wanted her mother to get word to me that she had enjoyed meeting and talking to me at David and Lorin’s “Goodbye to B-01” party last month. Kayla is back in Canada getting ready to start her sophomore year of university this fall. Anyway, those exchanges led to Wendy coming down with David and Lorin on Thursday, which was great because I have a feeling that Wendy is becoming family and she’s very good people. Anyway, I had suggested that we all go to Hemingway’s for dinner and get a good burger and some beers.
George has had family visiting him for weeks. Frankly, I don’t see how he does it. He’s a better man than me, that’s for sure. Anyway, he invited me to a party at his place on Friday evening to meet his family and I was pretty sure it was something I wouldn’t make. George throws a great party and I attend when I’m in the mood for a party and think that I can be an entertaining guest. That’s not always the case, so I blow him off. I think it offends him and it’s not meant to. It’s just my nature. Anyway, I invited him and his family to Hemingway’s on Thursday to meet David and Lorin and Wendy and that way I could meet his family and I thought that would cover me. Then, Lorin called me back and told me that Rex (a librarian at the Petroleum Institute) wanted to join us and he was bringing two people. Now, I was up to a table for 12 and Hemingway’s doesn’t take reservations. I’d tried to use some wastuh and get my barber, Jihad, whose shop is at the Hilton where Hemingway’s is, to talk to someone about holding me a table, but they basically said no.
We’d scheduled to meet at 8. I left home about 7:20 and stopped at the petrol station to fill up and then headed on over to the Hilton, arriving about a quarter to 8. Luckily, Hemingway’s “back room” was empty and I spoke to the waiter and he started putting me together a table for 12. He finished about 8 and I ordered a beer and when it arrived I lit a cigarette. I know Lorin and I know George and I know they’re always running late, so I was expecting to sit and wait a bit. What was odd, though, was that the place started filling up and there’s me sitting alone at a table for 12 trying to look cool and comfortable and feeling very conspicuously alone. I think I pulled it off, but it felt really lonely at that huge table for about 15 – 20 minutes.
Everyone started arriving and I felt vindicated. I tweaked the seating and ended up sitting next to George and opposite his family. It was a fun evening. George’s family is sweet and real, just like George, and we hit it off from the start. Everyone talked and drank and ate and laughed and got acquainted and I really enjoyed myself. I took some of George’s family into the Jazz Bar to watch the Jazz Band. The place was heaving, so we had to stand, but the band was the same one that’s been there forever and they’re good. Then, George let everyone know that I probably wouldn’t be at the party on Friday and the pressure started. George knows me. Finally, I promised I would come and fully intended to join them for at least a few hours on Friday. Well, I didn’t.
We got back to my flat about 11:30 pm after Hemingway’s. We sat in the living room and caught up, because I’d spent the evening talking to George’s family. Wendy inspected the flat and I know it seemed like a big change from living on the American University of Sharjah campus. Wendy went to bed first, she had the spare room. David fell asleep on the sofa, as he usually does, and Lorin and I stayed up talking and drinking Paddy’s (Irish whiskey) until 4. We did major damage to that bottle. David and Lorin had my bedroom and I was on the sofa bed in the living room. David and Lorin and Wendy left about 5 pm the next day and I was feeling a bit under the weather. I got my bed back and turned on CNN and settled into my usual position and watched Breaking News about the car bombs in London. (I love London, it’s one of my favorite cities, and I have visited all those places they were talking about on the news.) I did shave and trim my moustache, etc. in preparation to go to George’s, but I just couldn’t pull myself off the bed to shower and dress and drive over there. It played on my mind a lot. Basically, I wasn’t in the mood to go to a party, any party. And what I wanted to do and needed to do was relax in bed and watch Lost and Grey’s Anatomy and House, which was what I did.
Still, tomorrow I will have to face George, but I’ll just tell him the truth and hope he understands.
Oh, btw, so far, the best CD of 2007 is Icky Thump by The White Stripes.
I received an email from my friend Mark Starr. He and his wife work in Kuwait and the email is the long story of this teacher who offended some Kuwaiti with wastuh by putting his son in detention and now is basically being held in the country and not allowed to leave. They put a travel ban on her so she can’t leave the country. The US Embassy can’t or won’t help her. It’s all very shameful. Either I will find a way to link to it or post the whole thing here later. It’s a very eye-opening story.
Below is a link to a story by one of our greatest journalists, Seymour M. Hersch, about the general who did the report on Abu Gharib. I can’t say it surprised me; it’s just typical American government under Bush. Read it tho, it’s an interesting piece.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=1
The General’s Report by Seymour M. Hersch
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