How About a Nap - or Some Intervention - Before We're Dead?

There's an abundance of material meriting attention out there, but I'm going to settle for low-key here tonight. A full week in the traces has been wearing, especially with a bridal shower here the other night. Fun but not without some wear-and-tear on the system, you know?

I'm in the throes right now of Crystal Zevon's great memoir "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." Yes, it's that Zevon, of Roland, Werewolves, Lawyers, et al.

I've been a fan since Excitable Boy, but frankly not a very devoted fan. I didn't hear much of him after that disk and I guess in hindsight was not so enthralled as to seek his recordings out given my multitude of other musical interests. But, inevitably, I was a bit sucked into the whirlpool over Warren's early death and expanded his slots in my CD racks a bit as a result. In particular, EB was joined by the great tribute "Enjoy Every Sandwich" and the retrospective with that same great Warren-esque "Sleep/Dead" tag. That was somewhat of a revelation. There's a lot of great stuff there. I'm looking forward to enjoying recently-acquired "Wind."

But this frank book is an eye-opener. Somehow that carefully made-up sweet-boy visage on the EB cover far outweighed the gun-on-plate image. From my reading, while Warren certainly could be a friend, compadre, and even a lover, far too much of the time he was plain and simple a substance-abuser with a paranoiac streak who tended to resort to very nasty behavior to folks who had done him no wrong. The gun was a necessary caution - this dude was seriously unstable, putting it politely. He seems to have often been a total asshole to the folks who had his backside, possibly for that very reason (i.e., insecurity). Oh mercy.

So I guess it comes down to hate the behavior, try to understand the person. As I believe Jackson Browne, a seeming saint in terms of smoothing the road for Warren, says, he was not gifted with the best voice, but he was a terrific songwriter. And, indeed, his quirky choices of subject and language are remarkable. He doesn't fit neatly in categories - a characteristic I particularly love - and am frustrated by.

I.e., yet another creative genius with sociopathy.

The reading of course has me pursuing recordings by others in Warren's orbit - Ronstadt in particular.

I give the book a B+ on preliminary reading.

The Fossils of Our Time

535 more days my cheery little countdown clock tells me!

Mr. Blumenthal at Salon seems to be in high dudgeon and possibly consequent doldrums. And why not? He's writing exceptional stuff on a week-in and week-out basis in a medium that is mostly serving those of us who already are groping with the real world on its' terms. Most of the non-net media seem to be either continuing to boot-lick for their masters (e.g. absolutely pathetic and shameful pure and puerile propaganda by warmongers Pollack and O'Hanlon published without even a disclaimer or apparent shred of embarrassment by the NYT this week) or in their chronic doldrum-state. I have no expectation that the dog-days now upon us will suddenly trigger some unprecedented fit of actual journalism, activism, or effectiveness out there where sycophancy is the key social attribute (Russert and Mathews et al show no signs of suddenly growing a spine, and Moyers obviously scares the bejesus out of the establishment wimps) . So anyone interested in regaining the standing position, taking pressure off those classically inflated North-American glutes and getting the fight with depression going on a fair basis - as long as we've gone this far go ahead and open your eyes! - has little choice but to surf. The web, the Internets, the tubes, whatever. Get thee to an Internet!

But Sidney, you are a true gem, every Thursday like clockwork at Salon. You go:

Omertà (or a code of silence) has become the final bond holding the Bush administration together. Honesty is dishonorable; silence is manly; penitence is weakness. Loyalty trumps law. Protecting higher-ups is patriotism. Stonewalling is idealism. Telling the truth is informing. Cooperation with investigators is cowardice; breaking the code is betrayal. Once the code is shattered, however, no one can be trusted and the entire edifice crumbles.

If Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were miraculously to tell the truth, or if he were to resign or be removed, the secret government of the past six years would be unlocked. So long as a Republican Congress rigorously engaged in enforcing no oversight was smugly complicit through its passive ignorance and abdication of constitutional responsibility, the White House was secure in enacting its theories of the imperial presidency. An executive bound only by his self-proclaimed fiat in his capacity as commander in chief became his own law in authorizing torture and warrantless domestic wiretapping and data mining. Following the notion of the unitary executive, in which the departments and agencies have no independent existence under the president, the White House has relentlessly politicized them. Callow political appointees dictate to scientists, censoring or altering their conclusions. Career staff professionals are forced to attend indoctrination sessions on the political strategies of the Republican Party in campaigns and elections. And U.S. attorneys, supposedly impartial prosecutors representing the Department of Justice in the states, are purged if they deviate in any way from the White House's political line.

Last week, for example, the Washington Post reported that William R. Steiger, director of the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, suppressed the 2006 "Call to Action on Global Health" report of U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, which explained the connection of poverty to health and urged that attacking diseases become a major U.S. international commitment. Steiger, who has no credentials in the field, is the son of a former congressman who was Vice President Cheney's earliest patron, giving Cheney his first congressional job as a staff intern. At the White House's behest, Steiger acts as a micromanaging political commissar. His insistence on approving every single overseas appointee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has left many of its posts empty. "Only 166 of the CDC's 304 overseas positions in 53 countries are filled," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in April. "At least 85 positions likely will remain unfilled until 2008." Such is the theory of the unitary executive in action.

Just this week, Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the New Yorker about the suspicion that fell on the U.S. attorney in Washington state, John McKay, who was fired in the wholesale purge because of his interest in devoting full resources to an investigation of the murder of an assistant U.S. attorney, Tom Wales, who had been a prominent local advocate of gun control. On July 31, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, Va., John Brownlee, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the night before a guilty verdict was delivered in his case against the drug manufacturing company that produced OxyContin, he received a call from a Justice Department official asking him to slow down his prosecution.

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Gonzales is a unique figure of disrepute in the history of the Justice Department, a cipher, enabler and useful idiot who was nonetheless indispensable in the rise of his patron and whose survival is elemental to that of the administration. Warren G. Harding's attorney general, Harry Daugherty, trailing accusations of bribery for which he was never indicted, resigned after Harding's death. Daugherty had been one of Harding's creators as the Republican Party chairman of Ohio. Two of Richard Nixon's attorneys general resigned in disgrace during the Watergate scandal, both significant political men: John Mitchell, Nixon's former law partner and campaign chairman, and Richard Kleindienst, an important player in the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican Party of Arizona.

Gonzales earned the gratitude and indebtedness of Bush in 1996, when he enabled him to escape jury duty in Travis County, Texas, on the attenuated argument that as governor he might find himself in a conflict of interest in the future when considering a clemency or pardon. In fact, Bush's worry was filling out the juror's form that required listing arrests. By avoiding acknowledgement of his drunken-driving violation, Bush maintained his political viability. Grants of clemency and pardons never bothered Bush again. Of the 152 people condemned to execution in Texas during his tenure, the most under any governor in modern American history, he indulged in not a single act of clemency. His counsel, Alberto Gonzales, briefed him on 57 of these cases, and "repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence," according to a study published by the Atlantic.

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In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our minds
In loyalty to our kind we cannot tolerate their obstruction
(P. Kantner)

George Finds Evil

I stubbed a toe on this quote from Dan Froomkin in his White House Watch post today:

"Look, people who kill innocent men, women and children to achieve political objectives are evil, that's what I think," Bush said.

Let's see now, what does that evoke? Certainly not the idea that we cannot countenance any planning for even a phased drawdown of US forces in Iraq. How about an indefinite "surge" of more young women and men into a lost deadly cause largely to preserve face for this sorry little monkey-prez and continue to fill the coffers of the cheneygargoyle. What if we even for once heard our elected officials acknowledge and talk about the euphemistic "collateral damage"? How about some dialogue about the use of depleted uranium in that few hours when the Rumsfeld approach actually had folks with an IQ over 80 briefly enthusiastic? How's that leukemia treatment going now, guys?

Oh please.

I have my suspicions as to our toy-cowboy's familiarity with Freud and Greek tragedy. But I'll be damned - could he be finally beginning to own up? Of course he can't say the words (he's still competing for the Most-Spoiled-Brat-of-the-Universe Title, and has that bullroarer codpiece ready), but Allah be praised, his inner self seems to be vibrating through the wires with that confessional!

It has been so long in coming.

But much as it a relief to encounter something resembling an addict's preliminary fumbling attempts to at least abstractly describe his own behavior, this unpleasant reality reported by AlterNet documents the criminally dishonest communications of people supposedly answerable to us for directing and managing the military as We the People would have it done:

It was The Washington Post that first quantified General Petraeus's remarkable ascension. President Bush, who mentioned his new Iraq commander's name only six times as the surge rolled out in January, has cited him more than 150 times in public utterances since, including 53 in May alone.

As always with this White House's propaganda offensives, the message in Mr. Bush's relentless repetitions never varies. General Petraeus is the "main man." He is the man who gives "candid advice." Come September, he will be the man who will give the president and the country their orders about the war.

And so another constitutional principle can be added to the long list of those junked by this administration: the quaint notion that our uniformed officers are supposed to report to civilian leadership. In a de facto military coup, the commander in chief is now reporting to the commander in Iraq. We must "wait to see what David has to say," Mr. Bush says.

Actually, we don't have to wait. We already know what David will say. He gave it away to The Times of London last month, when he said that September "is a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy." In other words: Damn the report (and that irrelevant Congress that will read it) -- full speed ahead. There will be no change in policy. As Michael Gordon reported in The New York Times last week, General Petraeus has collaborated on a classified strategy document that will keep American troops in Iraq well into 2009 as we wait for the miracles that will somehow bring that country security and a functioning government.

Though General Petraeus wrote his 1987 Princeton doctoral dissertation on "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam," he has an unshakable penchant for seeing light at the end of tunnels. It has been three Julys since he posed for the cover of Newsweek under the headline "Can This Man Save Iraq?" The magazine noted that the general's pacification of Mosul was "a textbook case of doing counterinsurgency the right way." Four months later, the police chief installed by General Petraeus defected to the insurgents, along with most of the Sunni members of the police force. Mosul, population 1.7 million, is now an insurgent stronghold, according to the Pentagon's own June report.

By the time reality ambushed his textbook victory, the general had moved on to the mission of making Iraqi troops stand up so American troops could stand down. "Training is on track and increasing in capacity," he wrote in The Washington Post in late September 2004, during the endgame of the American presidential election. He extolled the increased prowess of the Iraqi fighting forces and the rebuilding of their infrastructure.

The rest is tragic history. Were the Iraqi forces on the trajectory that General Petraeus asserted in his election-year pep talk, no "surge" would have been needed more than two years later. We would not be learning at this late date, as we did only when Gen. Peter Pace was pressed in a Pentagon briefing this month, that the number of Iraqi battalions operating independently is in fact falling -- now standing at a mere six, down from 10 in March.

But even more revealing is what was happening at the time that General Petraeus disseminated his sunny 2004 prognosis. The best account is to be found in The Occupation of Iraq, the authoritative chronicle by Ali Allawi published this year by Yale University Press. Mr. Allawi is not some anti-American crank. He was the first civilian defense minister of postwar Iraq and has been an adviser to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki; his book was praised by none other than the Iraq war cheerleader Fouad Ajami as "magnificent."

Mr. Allawi writes that the embezzlement of the Iraqi Army's $1.2 billion arms procurement budget was happening "under the very noses" of the Security Transition Command run by General Petraeus: "The saga of the grand theft of the Ministry of Defense perfectly illustrated the huge gap between the harsh realities on the ground and the Panglossian spin that permeated official pronouncements." Mr. Allawi contrasts the "lyrical" Petraeus pronouncements in The Post with the harsh realities of the Iraqi forces' inoperable helicopters, flimsy bulletproof vests and toy helmets. The huge sums that might have helped the Iraqis stand up were instead "handed over to unscrupulous adventurers and former pizza parlor operators."

Well, anyone can make a mistake. And when General Petraeus cited soccer games as an example of "the astonishing signs of normalcy" in Baghdad last month, he could not have anticipated that car bombs would kill at least 50 Iraqis after the Iraqi team's poignant victory in the Asian Cup semifinals last week. This general may well be, as many say, the brightest and bravest we have. But that doesn't account for why he has been invested by the White House and its last-ditch apologists with such singular power over the war.

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