With Trembling Fingers

[Guest guest]

> xyz

> Thu, 19 Aug 2004 16:41:37 -0700

> With Trembling Fingers

>

> WITH TREMBLING FINGERS

>

> By Hal Crowther

>

> I used to take a drink on occasion with a

> network newsman famed for

> his impenetrable calm -- his apparent pulse rate

> that of a large mammal

> in deep hibernation -- and in an avuncular moment he

> advised me that I'd

> do all right, in the long run, if I could only avoid

> the kind of

> journalism committed to the keyboard " with trembling

> fingers. " I

> recognized the wisdom of this advice and endeavored

> over the years to

> write as little as possible when my blood pressure

> was soaring and my

> face was streaked with tears.

>

>

> The lava flows of indignation ebb predictably with

> age and hardening

> arteries, and nearing three-score I thought I'd

> never have to take

> another tranquilizer -- or a double bourbon -- to

> keep my fingers steady

> on the keys. I never imagined 2004. It would be

> sophomoric to say that

> there was never a worse year to be an American. My

> own memory preserves

> the dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the

> consequences of 1941

> and 1929, and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived

> through all those

> dark years, might

> have added 1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great

> War in France that

> each failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back

> another generation or

> two and we encounter 1861.

> But if this is not the worst year yet to be an

> American, it's the worst

> year by far to be one of those hag-ridden wretches

> who comment on the

> American scene. The columnist who trades in snide

> one-liners flounders

> like a stupid comic with a tired audience; TV

> comedians and talk-show

> hosts who try to treat 2004 like any zany election

> year have

> become grotesque, almost loathsome. Our most

> serious, responsible

> newspaper columnists are so stunned by the

> disasterin Iraq that they've

> begun to quote poetry by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred

> Owen. They lower

> their voices; they sound like Army chaplains

> delivering eulogies over

> ranks of flag-draped coffins, under a hard rain from

> an

> iron sky. Yeats' " blood-dimmed tide is loosed. " The

> war news has already

> deteriorated from bad to tragic to pre-apocalyptic,

> which leaves no

> suitable category for these excruciating reports on

> the sexual torture

> of Iraqi prisoners. Fingers, be still. In less than

> a year, the morale

> of the occupying forces has sunk so low that murder,

> suicide, rape and

> sexual harassment have become alarming statistics,

> and now the warriors

> of democracy -- the emissaries of civilization --

> stand accused of every

> crime this side of cannibalism. Osama bin Laden has

> always anathematized

> America's culture, as well as its geopolitical

> influence. To him these

> atrocities are a sign of Allah's certain favor, a

> great moral victory, a

> vindication of his deepest anger and darkest crimes.

>

>

> Where does it go from here? The nightmare

> misadventure in Iraq is over,

> beyond the reach of any reasonable argument, though

> many more body bags

> will be filled. In Washington, chicken hawks will

> still be squawking

> about " digging in " and winning, but Vietnam proved

> conclusively that no

> modern war of occupation will ever be won.

> (Vietnam clip) Every occupation is doomed. The only

> way you " win " a war

> of occupation is the old-fashioned way, the way Rome

> finally defeated

> the Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave

> everyone else, raze

> the cities and sow the fields with salt.

> Otherwise the occupied people will fight you to the

> last peasant, and

> why shouldn't they? If our presidential election

> fails to dislodge the

> crazy bastards who annexed Baghdad, many of us in

> this country would

> welcome regime change by any intervention, human or

> divine. But if, say,

> the Chinese came in to rescue us -- Operation

> American Freedom --

> how long would any of us, left-wing or right, put up

> with an occupying

> army teaching us Chinese-style democracy? A

> guerrilla who opposes an

> invading army on his own soil is not a terrorist,

> he's a resistance

> fighter. In Iraq we're not fighting enemies but

> making enemies. As

> Richard Clarke and others have observed, every

> dollar, bullet and

> American life that we spend in Iraq is one that's

> not being spent in the

> war on terrorism.

> Every Iraqi, every Muslim we kill or torture or

> humiliate is a precious

> shot of adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda. The

> irreducible truth is that

> the invasion of Iraq was the worst

> blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of

> judgment, the most fateful,

> egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history

> of American foreign

> policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep

> watching. Apologists

> strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the

> similarities are stunning. In every action our

> soldiers kill innocent

> civilians, and in every other action apparent

> innocents kill our

> soldiers -- and there's never any way to sort them

> out. And now these

> acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais.

>

> Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency,

> the preposterous

> flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the USS

> Abraham Lincoln in

> front of the banner that read " Mission

> Accomplished, " the shaming truth

> is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was

> bound to go wrong, as

> many of us predicted it would go wrong -- if

> anything, more

> hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to

> prophesy. Iraq is an

> epic train wreck, and there's not a single American

> citizen who's going

> to walk away unscathed.

> The shame of this truth, of such a failure and so

> much deceit exposed,

> would have brought on mass resignations or votes of

> no confidence in any

> free country in the world. In Japan not long ago,

> there would have been

> ritual suicides, shamed officials disemboweling

> themselves with Samurai

> swords. Yet up to this point -- at least to the

> point where we see

> grinning soldiers taking pictures of each other over

> piles of naked

> Iraqis -- neither the president, the vice president

> nor any of the

> individuals who urged and designed this debacle have

> resigned or been

> terminated -- or even apologized. They have betrayed

> no familiarity with

> the concept of shame. Thousands of young Americans

> are dead, maimed or

> mutilated, XXX billions of dollars have been wasted

> and all we've gained

> is a billion new enemies and a mouthful of dust --

> of sand. Chaos

> reigns, but in

> the midst of it we have this presidential election.

> George Bush has

> defined himself as a war president, and it's fitting

> that the war should

> be his undoing. But even now the damned polls don't

> guarantee, or even

> indicate, his demise. Conventional wisdom says that

> an incumbent

> president with a $200 million war chest cannot be

> defeated, and that one

> who commands a live, bleeding, suffering army in the

> field is doubly

> invincible. By

> this logic, the most destructively incompetent

> president since Andrew

> Johnson will be rewarded with a second term. That

> would probably mean a

> military draft and more wars in the oil countries,

> and, under

> visionaries like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, a

> chance for the USA to

> emulate 19th-century Paraguay, which simultaneously

> declared war on

> Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and fought ferociously

> until 90% of the male

> population was dead. What hope then? Impeachment is

> impossible when the

> president's party controls both houses of Congress,

> though Watergate

> conspirator John Dean, who ought to know, claims in

> his new book that

> there are compelling legal arguments for a half

> dozen bills of

> impeachment against George W. Bush. Peer pressure?

> At the White House,

> world opinion gets no more respect than FBI memos or

> uncomfortable

> facts. Many Americans seem unaware that scarcely

> anyone on the planet

> Earth supported the Iraq adventure, no one anywhere

> except the 40-50

> million Republican loyalists who

> voted for George Bush in 2000. Among significant

> world leaders he

> recruited only Great Britain's Tony Blair -- whose

> career may be ruined

> because most Britons disagree with him -- and the

> abominable Ariel

> Sharon, that vile tub of blood and corruption who

> recently used

> air-to-ground missiles to assassinate a paraplegic

> in a wheelchair at

> the door of his mosque. (Palestinians quickly

> squandered any sympathy or

> moral advantage they gained from this atrocity by

> strapping a retarded

> 16-year-old into a suicide

> bomber's kit. Such is the condition of the human

> race in the Middle

> East, variously known as the Holy Land or the Cradle

> of Civilization.)

> Says Sharon, oleaginously, of Bush: " Something in

> his soul committed him

> to act with great courage against world terror. "

> The rest of the known

> world, along with the United Nations, has been dead

> set against us from

> the start. But they carry no weight. Thanks to our

> tax dollars and the

> well-fed, strong but not bulletproof bodies of our

> children -- though

> mostly children from lower-income families -- George

> Bush and his lethal

> team of oil pirates, Cold Warriors and Likudists

> commands the most

> formidable military machine on earth. No nation,

> with the possible

> exception of China, would ever dare to oppose them

> directly. But the

> Chinese aren't coming to save us. Nothing and no one

> can stop these

> people except you and me, and the other 100 million

> or so American

> citizens who may vote in the November election. This

> isn't your

> conventional election, the usual dim-witted,

> media-managed Mister

> America contest where candidates vie for charm and

> style points and

> hire image coaches to help them act more confident

> and presidential.

> This is a referendum on what is arguably the most

> dismal performance by

> any incumbent president and inarguably the biggest

> mistake. This is a

> referendum on George W. Bush, arguably the worst

> thing that has happened

> to the United States of America since the invention

> of the cathode ray

> tube. One problem with this referendum is that the

> case against George

> Bush is much too strong. Just to spell it out is to

> sound like a bitter

> partisan. I sit here on the 67th birthday of Saddam

> Hussein facing a

> haystack of incriminating evidence that comes almost

> to my armpit. What

> matters most, what signifies? Journalists used to

> look for the smoking

> gun, but this time we have the cannons of Waterloo,

> we have Gettysburg

> and Sevastopol, we have enough gunsmoke to cause

> asthma in heaven. I'm

> overwhelmed. Maybe I should light a match to this

> mountain of paper and

> immolate myself. On the near side of my haystack,

> among hundreds of

> quotes circled and statistics underlined, just one

> thing leaped out at

> me. A quote I had underlined was from the testimony

> of Hermann Goering

> at the Nuremberg trials, not long before Hitler's

> vice-fuhrer poisoned

> himself in his jail cell: " ... It is always a simple

> matter to drag

> people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist

> dictatorship, or a

> parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no

> voice, the people

> can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

> This is easy. All

> you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,

> and denounce the

> pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the

> country to danger. It

> works the same in every country. " Goering's dark

> wisdom gained weight

> when a friend called me and reported that Vice

> President Cheney was so

> violently partisan in his commencement speech at

> Westminster College in

> Missouri -- so rabid in his attacks on John Kerry as

> a anti-American

> peace-marching crypto-communist -- that the college

> president felt

> obliged to send the student body an email

> apologizing for Cheney's

> coarseness. If you think it's exceptionally

> shameless for a man who

> dodged Vietnam to play the patriot card against a

> decorated veteran,

> remember that Georgia Republicans played the same

> card, successfully,

> against Sen. Max Cleland, who suffered multiple

> amputations in Vietnam.

> In 2001 and 2002, George Bush and his Machiavelli,

> Karl Rove, approved

> political

> attack ads that showed the faces of Tom Daschle and

> other Democratic

> senators alongside the faces of Saddam Hussein and

> Osama bin Laden. And

> somewhere in hell, Goering and Goebbels toasted each

> other with a schnapps.

>

> Am I polarized? I've never been a registered

> Democrat, I'm sick of

> this two-party straitjacket, I wish to God it didn't

> take Yale and a

> major American fortune to create a presidential

> candidate. The only

> current Democratic leaders who show me any courage

> are Nancy Pelosi and

> old Bob Byrd -- Hillary Clinton has been especially

> cagey and

> gutless on this war -- and John Kerry himself may

> leave a lot to be

> desired. He deserves your vote not because of

> anything he ever did or

> promises to do, but simply because he did not make

> this sick mess in

> Iraq and owes no allegiance to the sinister

> characters who designed it.

> And because his own " place in history, " so important

> to the kind of men

> who run for president, would now rest entirely on

> his success in getting

> us out of it. Kerry made a courageous choice at

> least once in his life,

> when he came home with his ribbons and demonstrated

> against the war in

> Vietnam. But Sen. Kerry could turn out to be a

> stiff, a punk, an

> alcoholic, and he'd still be a colossal improvement

> over the man who

> turned Paul Wolfowitz loose in the Middle East. The

> myth that there was

> no real difference between Democrats and

> Republicans, which I once

> considered seriously and which Ralph Nader rode to

> national disaster

> four years ago, was shattered forever the day George

> Bush announced his

> cabinet and his appointments for the Department of

> Defense I'm aware

> that there are voters -- 40 million? -- who don't

> see it this way.I come

> from a family of veterans and commissioned officers;

> I understand

> patriots in wartime. If a spotted hyena stepped out

> of Air Force One

> wearing a baby-blue necktie, most Americans would

> salute and sing " Hail

> to the Chief. " President Bush cultivated his

> patriots by spending $46

> million on media in the month of March alone.

> Somehow I'm on his mailing

> list. (Is that because my late father, with the same

> name, was a

> registered Republican, or can Bush afford to mail

> his picture to every

> American with an established address?) Twice a week

> I

> open an appeal for cash to crush John Kerry and the

> quisling liberal

> conspiracy, and now I own six gorgeous color

> photographs of the

> president and his wife. I'm sure some of my

> neighbors frame the

> president's color photographs and fill those little

> blue envelopes he

> sends us with their hard-earned dollars.

>

> I struggle against the suspicion that so many of

> my fellow Americans

> are conceptually challenged. I want to reason with

> my neighbors; I want

> to engage these lost Americans. What makes you

> angry, neighbor? What

> arouses your suspicions? Does it bother you that

> this administration

> made terrorism a low priority, dismissed key

> intelligence that might

> have prevented the 9/11 catastrophe, then exploited

> it to justify the

> pre-planned destruction of Saddam Hussein, who had

> nothing to do with al

> Qaeda? All this is no longer conjecture, but direct

> reportage from

> cabinet-level meetings by the turncoat insiders

> Richard Clarke and Paul

> O'Neill. If the Pentagon ever thought Saddam had

> " weapons of mass

> destruction, " it was only because the Pentagon gave

> them to him. As

> Kevin Phillips recounts in American Dynasty,

> officials of the Reagan and

> first Bush

> administrations eagerly supplied Saddam with arms

> while he was using

> chemical weapons on the Kurds. They twice sent

> Donald Rumsfeld to court

> Saddam, in 1983 and 1984, when the dictator was in

> the glorious prime of

> his monsterhood.

>

> This scandal, concurrent with Iran-Contra, was

> briefly called

> " Iraqgate, " and, yes, among the names of those

> officials implicated

> you'll find most of the engineers of our current

> foreign policy. (They

> also signaled their fractious client, Saddam, that

> it might be all right

> to overrun part of Kuwait; you remember what

> happened when he tried to

> swallow it all.) Does any of this trouble you? Does

> it worry you that

> Dick Cheney, as president of the nefarious

> Halliburton Corporation, sold

> Iraq $73 million in oilfield services between 1997

> and 2000, even as he

> plotted with the Wolfowitz faction to whack

> Saddam? Or that Halliburton, with its CEO's seat

> still warm from

> Cheney's butt, was awarded unbid contracts worth up

> to $15 billion for

> the Iraq invasion, and currently earns a billion

> dollars a month from

> this bloody disaster? Not to mention its $27.4

> billion overcharge for

> our soldiers' food. These are facts, not partisan

> rhetoric. Do any of

> them even make you restless? The cynical game these

> shape-shifters have

> been playing in

> the Middle East is too Byzantine to unravel in 1,000

> pages of text. But

> the hypocrisy of the White House is palpable, and

> beggars belief. If

> there's one American who actually believes that

> Operation Iraqi Freedom

> was about democracy for the poor Iraqis, then you,

> my friend, are too

> dangerously stupid to be allowed near a voting

> booth. Does it bother you

> even a little that the personal fortunes of all four

> Bush brothers,

> including the president and the governor, were

> acquired about a half

> step ahead of the district attorney, and that the

> royal family of Saudi

> Arabia invested $1.476 billion in those and other

> Bush family

> enterprises? Or, as Paul Krugman points out, that

> it's much easier to

> establish

> links between the Bush and bin Laden families than

> any between the bin

> Ladens and Saddam Hussein. Do you know about Ahmad

> Chalabi, the

> administration's favorite Iraqi and current agent in

> Baghdad, whose

> personal fortune was established when he embezzled

> several hundred

> million from his own bank in Jordan and fled to

> London to avoid 22 years

> at hard labor? That's just a sampling from my

> haystack. Maybe I can

> reach you as an environmentalist, one who resents

> the gutting of key

> provisions in the Clean Air Act? My own Orange

> County, N.C., chiefly a

> rural area, was recently added to a national

> register of counties with

> dangerously polluted air. You say you vote for the

> president because

> you're a conservative. Are you sure? I thought

> conservatives believed in

> civil liberties, a weak federal executive, an

> inviolable Constitution, a

> balanced budget and an isolationist foreign policy.

> George Bush has an

> attorney general who drives the ACLU apoplectic and

> a vice president who

> demands more executive privilege (for his energy

> séances) than any

> elected official has ever received. The president

> wants a Constitutional

> amendment to protect marriage from homosexuals, of

> all things. Between

> tax cuts for his high-end supporters and three years

> playing God and

> Caesar in the

> Middle East, George Bush has simply emptied

> America's wallet with a $480

> billion federal deficit projected for 2004 and the

> tab on Iraq well over

> $100 billion and running.

> " A lot of so-called conservatives today don't know

> what the word means, "

> Barry Goldwater said in 1994, when the current cult

> of right-wing

> radicals and " neocons " had begun to define and

> assert themselves.

> Goldwater was my first political hero, before I was

> old enough to read

> his flaws. But his was the conservatism of the wolf

> -- the lone wolf --

> and this is the conservatism of sheep.

>

> All it takes to make a Bush conservative is a

> few slogans from talk

> radio and pickup truck bumpers, a sneer at

> " liberals " and maybe a

> name-dropping nod to Edmund Burke or John Locke,

> whom most of them have

> never read.

>

> Sheep and sheep only could be herded by a

> ludicrous but not harmless

> cretin like Rush Limbaugh, who has just compared the

> sexual abuse of

> Iraqi prisoners to " a college fraternity prank " (and

> who once called

> Chelsea Clinton " the family dog " -- you don't have

> to worry about shame

> when you have no brain). I don't think it's accurate

> to describe America

> as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or

> between liberals and

> conservatives. It's polarized between the people who

> believe George Bush

> and the people

> who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a

> state governed by the

> president's brother, a once-proud country has been

> delivered into the

> hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics, and

> thieves. The world pities

> or despises us, even as it fears us. What this

> election will test is the

> power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the

> truth

> and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against

> the public trust

> under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded,

> most cynical, most

> sophisticated political campaign in human history

> will be out trolling

> for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you.

>

>