There are days when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates makes you glad there's a guy in that office who's at least trying to keep Dick Cheney and the Crazies in their box. Other days, Gates says stuff that makes you want to scream. When he warned recently against a risk of "creeping militarization of some aspects of U.S. foreign policy," I wanted to scream "Yo, Rip van Winkle! Eisenhower told us all about it 47 years ago."
It must have had a dreamlike quality to it: a summer's day in Washington, the tanks and troops on the street accompanied by officers like George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower, led by none other than General Douglas MacArthur. America's Caesar was wearing a full salad bowl of ribbons and medals, magnificent astride a great horse; to the impoverished veterans he was riding to meet, he must have looked like a mighty warrior of a bygone era. Then, to their horror, the Chief of Staff of the US Army ordered his infantry to fix bayonets, his cavalry to draw sabers, and his tanks to move forward.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, we're tonight's historiorant finds Depression-hit vets of the First World War encamped in a Hooverville in Washington during the summer of 1932. I'm not saying it contains lessons to be learned about the interrelationships of Republican presidents, veterans, economic depression, and violent authoritarianism, but as St. Colbert once said, "I can't help it if the facts have a liberal bias."
Yeah, I know. Today we are still obsessing about the Pennsylvania primary. But eventually we will officially have our nominee, and maybe then we can focus on our opponent John McCain. Today Eugene Robinson offers some assistance in a piece entitled Not Quite Like Ike.
The piece shows Robinson's perspicacity as well s glimpses of his wicked sense of humor.For those too young to remember, Eisenhower's '52 campaign slogan was "I Like Ike." And Robinson begins with a very good frame. He wonders how the Republican will be able to sell McCain (after of course, our candidates stop doing the job for him). He notes the tendency of some to make the Eisenhower comparison and then after saying they'd first have to destroy the history books offers this:
McCain served his country courageously, getting shot down over Vietnam and spending years as a prisoner of war. All that Ike did was, um, save the world. I'm seeing a slight imbalance here.
From the Left Bank of the Potomac www.rayabernathy.com Earlier this week, President Bush gave an all-too-familiar thumbs down to an appeal by a bi-partisan delegation of the nation’s governors to "increase spending on roads, bridges and other public works" as an economic stimulus. www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/26govs.html? Just a week ago in an address to a national "Pathway to Prosperity" conference on infrastructure at Iona College in New York, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney dramatized how badly seven years of such rejections from Bush have damaged the backbone of our country.
Words are the beginning, but they are only as effective as the actions people take to put them into place. Calls to actions have fallen on deaf ears before, and if they fall on deaf ears long enough we call them eloquent, but empty rhetoric. We call them pretty words and good speeches.
Those who do not dream or would project dreams as idle fantasies for fools are doomed to live out their own dreams of defeatism.
What is the meaning of bipartisanship now? Young people have never seen it, and the rest of us are forgetting what it looks like.
I have some thoughts based on having breathed and paid a little attention for a certain number of years. Perhaps a broad view of the subject will spark a productive discussion.
Yesterday, Figgins and I heard Senator Ted Kennedy endorse Senator Barack Obama, as his choice for the Democrat Party's 2008 Presidential Nominee. Kennedy did an expert job with what I recognized as an old-style-politics approach to whip the audience into a frenzy. To me, this approach magnified the irony of the current "Change Candidate" exulting in the endorsement of a man who has been in the U.S. Senate since 1962. But, whip them into a frenzy he did. The challenge for Figgins and I, as we listened, was trying to find substance in Kennedy's passion-evoking rhetoric. For us, this reached its peak when Kennedy described Obama by saying, "... he also has an uncommon capacity to appeal to the better angels of our nature." At that, we just cocked our heads and looked at each other. Though neither of us said a word, you could tell we were both thinking, "What the heck does that mean?!"
http://afewdayswithfiggins.blogspot....
Opportunity Cost is the highest value good or service you can no longer afford because of a decision you have made. If you have 5 dollars and spend 2 dollars on candy, you can no longer afford a 4 dollar sandwich. Forgive this simplified (and somewhat inaccurate) explanation (I am neither an economist nor do I play one in the classroom), but hopefully it will enable to grasp the import of what Iraq has cost the world:
Consider that, according to sources like Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs, the Worldwatch Institute, and the United Nations, with that same money the world could:
Eliminate extreme poverty around the world (cost $135 billion in the first year, rising to $195 billion by 2015.)
Achieve universal literacy (cost $5 billion a year.)
Immunize every child in the world against deadly diseases (cost $1.3 billion a year.)
Ensure developing countries have enough money to fight the AIDS epidemic (cost $15 billion per year.)
Wikipedia tells us that the concept of a "permanent war economy" originated in 1944. Such a war economy, it was predicted, would be one in which there would be a post-WWII arms race. It was argued at the time that:
the USA would retain the character of a war economy; even in peacetime, American military expenditures would remain large, reducing the percentage of unemployed compared to the 1930s.
The concept was also used by U.S. businessman and Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson to refer to an institutionalized war economy, a semi-command-type economy which is directed by corporation executives, based on military industry, and funded by state social spending...whereby the collusion between militarism and war profiteering are manifest as a permanently subsidized industry.
Wilson warned at the close of the war that the U.S. must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a "permanent war economy." Wilson was made Secretary of Defense under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was largely instrumental in reforming the Pentagon as an instrument for facilitating a closer relationship between the military and industry.
Bill Clinton may have run a dandy domestic policy during his first term, but his foreign policy was a bust. Somalia and Rwanda were two of his worst moments. The appointments of Les Aspin as Secretary of Defense and James Woolsey as Director of CIA, in retrospect, were busts. And then there was the debacle of National Security Adviser Tony Lake (who so happens to be Obama's foreign policy guru) who reprised the role of Nero and fiddled while Rwanda was consumed in an inferno of ethnic cleansing.
This is a reproduction of the text and image of an actual WWII propaganda poster. Our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents knew that every war is, practically speaking, a war about oil.
“Speak to the past, and the past shall teach thee.” ~ Inscription on the Caspersen Wing of the John Carter Brown Library
Americans, her allies, and those we have yet to formally declare an adversary awaken each day to a world of glory. In the dawn, we hear only the gentle sound of songbirds. The rustling of leaves also hums in our ears. A silence fills the morning air. It is the tune of tranquility.
Some elections are much more important than others. Some elections have not only a winner and a loser, but a mandate that can extend into the future for a generation or more. Three such elections were those of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Each of these elections defined an era.
Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Roosevelt Era, Richard Nixon in the Kennedy era, and Bill Clinton in the Reagan Era all played somewhat similar and internally contradictory roles: they both limited and extended the public mandate that the major President of the opposition party of their era had won. They were Presidencies of limited dissent from the consensus of their era that to a substantial degree wound up reinforcing the ideological framework of their era.
Here it is; the declaration signed in 1954, expanding the traditional November 11 Armistice Day remembrance of our veterans to "pay appropriate homage to the veterans of all its wars who have contributed so much to the preservation of this Nation..." All veterans, regardless of race, religion or politics. This honoring of the men and women who risked their lives, whether willingly or by conscription, in service of their country, had no caveats.
I just read a speech by a noted politician that sums up pretty well my feelings about what this war in Iraq (and potentially Iran) and this administration's fearmongering are leading us to. Let's see if you can guess who made this speech reflecting on the legacy of the outgoing administration:
It is an era that democrats would probably prefer forgotten.
Sputnik Mania was shown at an NYC doc festival tonight, and I highly recommend it.
The period parallels what we have now, but an inversion - an interpositive.
It all started when a a tiny satillite flew over the country back in the '50's.
Initially, people were in awe of the Russian scientists when ... we came to our senses and realized
this tarnished our God given chest beating rights as the greatest;
and more interestingly
the event morphed into a tool for politicians hellbent on unseating Eisenhower. (in this scenario the Democrats were screaming that we were about to be bombarded with bombs from space and Ike was too slow on the trigger. All coming from the mouths of the likes of LBJ, Humphrey et al. All scaring America shitless.
Today, Frank Rich wrote an Op-Ed in the NYTimes stating the obvious fact that the American public is failing to clean up our government's dirty work: "It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day."
Years ago, Seymour Hersh wondered about the stability of our system of government: "That 8 or 9 people can change so much...Where was the military, the Congress, the press? What has happened raises the question about the thinness of the fabric of democracy."
In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave an historic speech in which he declared, "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
And way back in the early 1800s, Thomas Jefferson warned us, "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
When Eisenhower advised us to beware the military-industrial complex upon leaving office 47 years ago, not even the members of his own party seemed to take note. And so we end up where we are today, with military contractors as major employers (making it very hard to pass legislation limiting them... after all, it will effect employed voters), with outrageous amounts of money being thrown away on scams and misuse (see the Top Twenty Iraq Oversight Outrages as summarized by the Democratic Policy Committee) and with the need to enter even more wars in order to maintain a military economy.
