Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
To understand why Americans are paying over four dollars a gallon for gas, and what we could be paying in the future, there are a few factors which are seemingly obvious to anyone who cares to look, but which are not automatically equated by the average American as having anything to do with the price at the pump.
As we enter the long summer days of the general election, the tradition in American politics is for the candidates to run as hard as they can to the vaunted "middle of the road." What this may mean is that by Election Day, the foreign policy positions on Iraq of John McCain and Barack Obama are going to get a lot closer and indeed may be different mainly in philosophy (rather than in substance) by November.
This is a shocking claim to make, but I think events will bear me out. I think either candidates' plan, by the end of the campaign, will merge toward a consensus: "We're going to leave Iraq as fast as events on the ground make it possible, while still leaving some troops behind."
"It doesn't take a lot of talent to intercept a surface-to-air missile with your own airplane."
I can just feel the rage building from the right wing echo chamber -- "Another Wes Clark smear of John McCain!!" Unfortunately, that quote comes from McCain himself. Which just goes to show, McCain might be protesting a little too much here.
Wes Clark is not a swiftboater. His comments on Face The Nation last weekend did not question McCain's medals, question his service record, question his injuries under fire, and was not an insult to every soldier who has ever won the Purple Heart. Republicans did do all that to John Kerry, four years ago. Remember them waving fingers with little bandages imprinted with tiny Purple Hearts at their national convention? That is what "dishonoring" or "attacking" a candidate's service records looks like. But you certainly wouldn't know it listening to some folks out there, most of them Republicans.
For the first time in the general election campaign, I am ready to take a look at the electoral map and do some electoral math. Now, we're still pretty far out from Election Day, so likely any of these guesses will be laughably wrong when it rolls around. But we've got to start somewhere.
Before we get to crystal ball gazing, though, we have to clean up some old business here. I ran a contest (right before the Pennsylvania primaries) to see who could predict the outcome of the Democratic nomination race most accurately. Since the race has been over for weeks, and since I have been remiss in announcing winners, I'd like to kick off the general election prognosticating by giving the winners and near-winners from the primary campaign their due.
Rather than beginning with my usual chatty yet absolutely riveting introductory remarks (ahem), the preface to today's column will be an introduction (for some) and a reintroduction (for others). Note: If you already know what this column is all about, then you can skip directly to this week's awards, as the only new thing I'm about to say here is that there will be no FTP column next week, it being the Fourth of July. And I plan to be otherwise engaged, with a hamburger fresh off the grill and a cold beer fresh from the ice chest.
President Bush is in the news today declaring, in essence, that North Korea need no longer be considered as part of his "Axis Of Evil." With absolutely no proof whatsoever, Congress is now supposed to remove North Korea from the list of countries which are considered state sponsors of terrorism. So much for all that fiery rhetoric Bush used to use about terrorism.
No, that's not a typo in the title. Because President George Bush may (to his own party's dismay, incidentally) wind up being remembered as "Mister Precedent," and not as "Mister President."
George Bush's term in office will be remembered for the precedents it set, particularly in relation to the power of the presidency, and the separation of powers between the three branches of American government. Vice President Dick Cheney has been at the forefront of this effort to "restore power" to the presidency, which he believes was unjustly taken from the office in the aftermath of Richard Nixon and Watergate.
This naked power grab has taken many forms. The most obvious, of course, is Bush and Cheney's assertion that because "we're at war" (even though, technically, we aren't), His Highness The President can do whatever he feels like -- and it's legal by definition. Somehow the words "commander in chief" in the Constitution are supposed to be read "when we're at war, the president cannot be questioned or restrained in any way, shape, or form." Since we're "at war" Bush can do any damn thing he pleases -- torture people, kidnap people anywhere on earth, send people to other countries to be tortured, eavesdrop on anyone he wishes without having a judge sign off on it, hold anyone in the world prisoner endlessly, and all the shameful rest of it -- and the Constitution and any international agreements we've signed (like the Geneva Conventions) are suddenly and magically no longer in effect.
One might think that this column, after sinking pretty low on the juvenile-humor scale yesterday, would rise above such cheap humor today. One would be wrong. Today, this column sinks even lower. Consider this a warning. Perhaps by tomorrow this column can reclaim the heights of seriousness to which you, dear reader, have become accustomed... but for today, this is just too good to pass up.
From the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle today comes a story on the continuing efforts of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco. "Wow," one might think, "that's a pretty gosh-darned patriotic name!" If one met this group on the street, one would also think "there's a patriotic bunch of folks," since they routinely dress up as Uncle Sam and wave big flags and have patriotic music playing on their boom box. However, this would depend entirely on one's definition of "patriotic."
Personally, it fits mine -- but you will have to judge for yourself.
George Carlin (and Lenny Bruce before him) fought the ingrained Puritanism in America in the best way they knew how. I consider both to be pioneers and patriots for the First Amendment. Now that Carlin is gone, someone else will be needed to pick up this torch and carry it onward.
Carlin's famous "seven words you can never say on television" pointed out how corporate America can be cowed by self-proclaimed defenders of family values into censoring themselves. You would think, with cable television and the internet, that we've come a long way since then. But we really haven't.
Anyone who thinks that the treatment Barack Obama has gotten from the media during this campaign is remotely the same as the treatment John McCain has received just has not been paying much attention. Because this pro-McCain prejudice has been both pervasive and unremarked-upon throughout almost the entire news media during the entire campaign season. McCain has even joked that the media is "his base" of support. It was a funny line, but there is an enormous truth at its core: the media has been hard on Obama but unbelievably light on John McCain. And this has to stop. Now. Because the election might just hinge on the media's portrayal of the two, so now is the time to point out the uneven nature of the press coverage to date on the two candidates. In time for the mainstream media to correct itself before the general election season really heats up.
