Political Essays

Silencing Those Who Speak of Those Who Are Not Silent
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Think of ECD as a 1960’s mass sit-in updated for the Information Age. In addition to brick and mortar spaces, protestors also occupy virtual spaces, and instead of 100 participants there might be a million participants variously converging towards a single online “target” or diasporically seeding trans-global flash-mobs. That’s good news for “the people” out there yearning to have their voices heard in a world tending ever more towards corporate oligarchy, but it’s bad news too because “the evil ones” have access to the exact same technological power as the “good guys.” What’s more, the barbarians aren’t just at the gate; they are already inside it because everyone is everywhere and nowhere all at once. Read Essay

Voodoo Security?
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In other words, toss out Bush’s worst year out of four for which statistics are available (2001), and toss out Clinton’s worst year of his final six (1998) and Bush’s comparative record on fighting deaths related to international terrorism is worse by a factor of more than 4x. On average, the Johnny-come-world citizen has a 306% greater chance of dying as a consequence of international terrorism under Bush than under Clinton. And those numbers don’t even include attacks against soldiers in Iraq… Read Essay

Eyes Yet Wide Shut?
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The United States, apparently, has found a fall guy for all that’s wrong with our country. President Bush, the Emperor with no Clothes. That’s good news for Americans who prefer to look “out there” rather than “in here” for the source of our nation’s ills. While the national conscience has stirred, prodded by those unhappy judges of the collective superego, a cogent case can be made that we ourselves have been at least equally diligent spinners of the Emperor’s elusive threads. We are waking perhaps, but are those sand-specked eyes we rub yet wide shut? Read Essay

The Rapture List
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Back in November of 2005, just after the election, Bill O’Reilly invited terrorists to attack San Fransisco. Apparently he wasn’t much pleased that the city had banned army recruiting in schools. On his radio show he blasted the city:

…if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, were not going to do anything about it. Were going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco.

Interestingly and somewhat inscrutably, O’Reilly took exception to retorts from the “far left” anti-death movement that he ought not to invite wholesale destruction of entire city populations, including the 40 percent or so who had voted for the recruiting… Read Essay

On Clinton, Hypocrisy & Me
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Clinton, as far as I’m concerned, knew none of us were perfect and wanted us all to be better; and to to be better together. And Bush? Well, with Bush there’s no room for us to get better because he’s already the best. He doesn’t believe he’s made any mistakes. He is already perfect. And we, as a country, are trapped by that perfection whereas Clinton’s imperfection and his own striving to be better helped make us all better… Read Essay

What Did We Know and When Did We Know It?
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After reviewing that correspondence, what most strikes me with respect to current day rhetoric, even more so than the continuing lack of transparency and seemingly deliberate obfuscation of the Bush “cabal,” is the constant Democratic refrain these days that “we didn’t know then the things we know now.” By and large I see more clearly than ever, after reviewing my own thinking, and knowing that I was not alone, that we did know then much of what we now know, or at least we knew enough then to know that we weren’t sure. The truth was out there, or at least plausible alternative views were, for anyone willing to look for it beyond the Bush Administration spoon-fed front pages of the New York Times… Read Essay

The Things We Really Thought and Said Before the Iraq War
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On March 3, 2003, just prior to the U.S. liberation of Iraq I sent out an appeal encouraging friends and family to sign a petition in support of continued diplomacy backed by force. Two days later I received a somewhat accusatory, certainly scathing, reply from a male relative, in which he told me in ad hominemly spiced form, that it was easy to backseat quarterback up on high from the safe perch I occupied, but that Bush knew things I did not know and we as a country needed to trust him; that Bush had to act because the risk of not acting was too great; and that, in any case, we would be greeted by the Iraquis with bouquets of flowers. I responded in great detail to his email on March 7, 2003… Read Essay

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