A Purple Finger is NO Guarantee of Freedom

"When we came back from exile, we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened -- we have lost all the gains we made over the last 30 years. It's a big disappointment."

Who's the speaker? None other than Safia Souhail, now Iraq's ambassador to Egypt -- who back on Feb. 2 served as a poignant, living prop for Bush's State of the Union speech. After thrusting her purple-stained finger in the air, Souhail embraced the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq.

It's Time to Leave

Remember when the New York Times editorial page used to shake the very foundation of American politics with its pronouncements? Remember when presidents awaited the Times thumbs up or thumbs down on their policies with tribidation?

It's not that way today. But the editorial writers continue to get it right even if the American public is too stupid to read newspapers anymore for their news. Today was a call to arms. It is time to leave to Iraq. Every death there is a wasted American life, and the murderer of our young men and women is George Bush.

Editorial
President Bush's Loss of Faith
Published: August 24, 2005
It took President Bush a long time to break his summer vacation and acknowledge the pain that the families of fallen soldiers are feeling as the death toll in Iraq continues to climb. When he did, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Utah this week, he said exactly the wrong thing. In an address that repeatedly invoked Sept. 11 - the day that terrorists who had no discernable connection whatsoever to Iraq attacked targets on American soil - Mr. Bush offered a new reason for staying the course: to keep faith with the men and women who have already died in the war.

"We owe them something," Mr. Bush said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for." It was, as the mother of one fallen National Guardsman said, an argument that "makes no sense." No one wants young men and women to die just because others have already made the ultimate sacrifice. The families of the dead do not want that, any more than they want to see more soldiers die because politicians cannot bear to admit that they sent American forces to war by mistake.

Most Americans believed that their country had invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by a popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and his advisers may have had.

It is also very clear, although the president has done his level best to muddy the picture, that Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. Mr. Bush's insistence on making that link, over and over, is irresponsible. In fact, it was the American-led invasion that turned Iraq into a haven for Islamist extremists.

When Mr. Bush articulated his "comprehensive strategy" for responding to the threat of terrorism, he listed three aims: "protecting this homeland, taking the fight to the enemy and advancing freedom." The invasion of Iraq flunks the first two tests. But it did free the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and may still provide an opportunity to inspire the rest of the Arab world with an example of democracy and religious toleration.

Right now, however, the Iraqi Assembly is dickering over a constitution draft that would not accomplish any of the American goals. It would fail to protect the rights of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority and the rights of women, and it would enshrine Islam as a main source of law. It could well lead to a fracturing of Iraq into an all but independent, and oil-rich, Kurdish homeland in the north and an oil-rich Shiite theocracy in the south, while the oil-poor center was left to the disaffected Sunnis, the terrorists and the American troops. It's an outcome that would make the violent religious extremists very happy.

Preventing that kind of tragic last chapter is the only rational argument for continuing the American presence in Iraq. The president's strange declaration yesterday that the draft constitution would protect the rights of women and minorities, and his continuing attempts to clog the debate with misleading explanations, suggest his own lack of commitment to the only rationale for keeping American troops in Iraq - or, perhaps, his lack of faith in the likely outcome.

Who Would Jesus Assassinate?

Our own American Imam, Pat Robertson, wants us to assassinate the president of Venezuela.

Let's see: democracies are only good if they are highly supportive of the U.S. Shoot, I hope the Iraqis get it right or they may have us repounding their cities with 2,000-pound bombs within a few more years. They better hope Chaney doesn't win the presidency.

But let's talk about Robertson, and that is difficult to do with any kind of straight face. The man is the classic village idiot but without a village. He is no longer the head of the 700 Club and commands a viewership of about one million, roughly what a the food channel gets on a very very good day. But he still instills fear - not on the Venezuelan president - but rather on our own.

Robertson, a high-profile religious righter and big supporter of George Bush, calls for the murder of a sitting president of a Western Hemisphere country (and not Cuba!) and the best the Bush administration can do is parade out a low ranking State Department bureaucrat to state that Robertson is a "private citizen" and that his remarks do not reflect U.S. policy.

Thank you, George. I'm glad we have that cleared up and the rest of the world can relax.

Meanwhile, Senor Presidente, don't accept any cigars from U.S. citizens!

I always ask: where is the outrage? Internationally, it is everywhere. Here in the United States, minimal although some right-wing Christian organizations appear to be distancing themselves from Robertson's statements.

I do not recall anything in the Bible where Jesus says, "hey, let's off this guy." I mean, even Judas got a free ride. He didn't end up in an old battered trunk at the bottom of the Red Sea, which I'm sure Peter would have taken care of had Jesus given Judas the kiss rather than vice versa.

I mean, you could point to David, who did do a fair amount of offing rivals, including Uriah, the husband of Bathesheba. But we learned he paid for it. God did not take it kindly and David felt extreme retribution.

Perhaps, we can assume that Robertson has not been reading the whole Bible, but rather the Reader's Digest abridged version. Maybe they did not have the "David, you sinned" portion. Or, perhaps Robertson is like his buddy George Bush, who seemingly believes that only "portions" of the Bible is relevant, particularly since George has not coveted his neightbor's ass since he was 40 or so.

But maybe we have it all wrong. Robertson is a major religious leader, and given that, perhaps he is more in the know of what makes us all good little Christian boys and girls. Perhaps those medieval pontiffs had it right: if you are not one of us, then you deserve to die (in horrendous ways!).

In Robertson's world, Jesus may very well has made an enemies list. He sure got pissed off once with a shrub and cursed it to hell. He took a whip to those alleged money lenders and realtors outside the temple. He did hang out with prostitutes and undesirables and did not have much love for rich men (didn't he say they would go more likely to hell than heaven, and since he probably has a major say about that now, isn't that, well, kind of mean?) Maybe that's what Robertson has been focusing on. No more namby pamby turn-the-other-cheek kind of Christianity - let's turn those plowshears into swords and cut off some ears!

Jesus' enemies list? That liberal Pontius Pilot was probably on it. That pompus Calaphus? Possibly. Judas? You would think. Herod Antipas? Oh, definitely, and there is good indication he did take him out. Remember the bit about Herod dying in agony from being eaten from inside by worms! I am not making this up. Read Acts.

But I am begging the point. Anyway you look at it, Robertson is an idiot. That explains more than any of us really need to understand.

To Good to Let Pass

All over the internet:

How many members of the Bush administration does it take to change a light bulb?
Ten.

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed;

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed;

3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb;

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for eternal darkness;

5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb;

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner 'Bulb Accomplished';

7. One administration insider to resign and in detail reveal how Bush was literally 'in the dark' the whole time;

8. One to viciously smear No. 7;

9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along;

10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

Why Intelligent Design is in fact Unintelligent

The New York Times is currently running a very interesting, very timely series of articles on "Darwin Under Attack." In fact, it is about science under attack from the religious right. Go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html?hp&ex=1124856000&en=18c409315b60bf1e&ei=5094&partner=homepage


Today's piece was about scientists who have no problem dealing with the seemingly contradictory dual beliefs in God AND science. Admittedly, it probably is a minority of the scientific community (one poll said 40 percent; another indicated 10 percent, but still, it shows that science isn't totally godless secularists as the religious right would like everyone to believe.

Fundamentalists and very conservative Christians naturally find science a threat to their belief systems because science by its very nature tries to deal only with provable facts and acceptable theories. Belief isn’t a quality in science. You don’t “believe” in evolution. Evolution is a fact.
How evolution occurs – the processes that stimulate evolvement - is a theory.

“Intelligent design” is a craftily created “theory” to explain evolution in a less obvious religious way. Make no “ifs” and “buts” about it. It is solely about injecting fundamental religion into the teaching of science and acting like you are not.

Intelligent Design in fact does not explain squat. It just says evolution is “too complicated” to occur naturally (but without providing any evidence to back up that assertion), so therefore the only explanation “must be” that it was directed by a supreme being. And this is where the major problem with Intelligent Design lies. They want you to believe that great quantum leaps in evolution (development of the eye, the arrival of humans on the earth, etc.) was specifically the hand of God, i.e., this long journey of evolving from bacteria to primates to man is totally wrong. We are back to God created Adam and Eve from the dust of the earth. That is not Intelligent Design – that is Creation Theory with a new coat of thin paint.

Don’t be misled by the seemingly innocuous title “Intelligent Design”. This is not some well-thought out theory by C.S.
Lewis-inspired scientific-theologians. It was dreamed up solely by the religious right Think Tanks as a way to get around the legal problems Creation Theory posed. The courts tossed out (including the Supreme Court) Creation Theory as an obvious misuse of one religion’s creation myth.

That is why I find it incredibly offensive to hear the President of the United States and members of his administration endorsing it as a perfectly acceptable education track. The man who stole the presidency is now trying to lead us back to the Dark Ages. To bad I do not believe that the Book of Revelations has any particular insight. I could propose the perfect Anti-Christ!!!

William Jennings BUSH: Taking the Mystery Out of Science

What a continual embarrassment to have a President who thinks the Earth was created in 4004 BC during a coffee break joke that got out of hand among God and his angels.

Intelligent design is not so intelligent
By Donald Kaul
MinutemanMedia.org
People keep telling me that George Bush isn't dumb. Intelligent people. Honest. They say that, close up, he's quick and sharp. Which, if true, means that he is the most willfully ignorant man who has ever occupied the White House.
His statement the other day -- that the theory of "intelligent design" should be taught in high school science classes, right beside evolution -- was nothing short of appalling.
" ... people ought to be exposed to different ideas," he said.
Really? Crackpot ideas as well as sound ones Mr. President? Taken to its logical conclusion it would mean that kids should be exposed to the flat earth theory and astrology as well as astronomy, numerology along with statistics. On the other hand, taking something to its logical conclusion is the last thing I'd accuse the president of. I suspect he's simply pandering to the Know-Nothing wing of his party, that is to say, its majority.
There are many explanations of how life came to be. Most of them rely heavily on magic, a god-figure creating the heavens, earth and man out of nothingness simply through an act of will. Shazam!
Evolution, the theory that man has evolved through the millennia from less complex forms of life, does not rely on magic; rather it is an informed speculation that has been shaped over the past 150 years by relentless scientific investigation. It has proven itself to virtually the entire scientific community (a few cranks excepted) and is integral to a whole range of scientific disciplines, biology especially.
Intelligent design -- the notion that human life is too complex to be explained by evolution and so must be the work of an intelligent -- something -- is just another magic act and not a persuasive one at that. (They never tell you whom they suspect of being that intelligent, for one thing.) Its proponents have seldom published in reputable scientific journals nor put their research, such as it is, to the test of peer review. It is junk science.
In short, intelligent design isn't very.
Mr. Bush's science adviser (and doesn't that sound like a zany job. I wonder if they make him sleep in the basement and eat scraps from the table) tried his best to make his boss sound less of a dolt.
"Intelligent design is not a scientific concept," the adviser, John Marburger III, said. The president's remarks should be interpreted to mean that intelligent design could profitably be discussed as part of the "social context" in science classes.
And if you think that's what the president really meant, I have some Enron stock I'd be willing to let you have at cost.
If it were just a case of the president being a science ignoramus one could shrug it off as part of his good ol' boy act (like his dropping of g's) but this ignorance, in case after case, has been reflected in disastrous public policy, particularly in the areas of the environment (global warming) and scientific inquiry (stem cell research).
We have become the most science-illiterate people in the industrial world and our president is giving aid and comfort to the enemy, at times because it is politically advantageous to do so, at times because he is a man of belief rather than reason.
The "Scopes-Monkey trial," which dealt with the right of Tennessee teachers to teach evolution in the schools there, is now 80 years old. Since then we have entered the ages of jet propulsion, atomic energy, television, space exploration and the Internet. Yet we find ourselves still fighting that same battle -- with the president on the side of the tin-foil collectors.
Creationists and others have been putting stickers on high school textbooks pointing out that evolution is "only" a theory and has not been proved. Fair enough, but to be accurate and thorough we should add another sticker saying "And the Bible is a series of well-crafted myths of a kind common to all cultures and should not be confused with journalism."
It's an idea people should be exposed to.


Donald Kaul recently retired as Washington columnist for the "Des Moines Register." He has covered the foolishness in our nation's capital for 29 years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards along the way.

Why King George Bush II Is Really King Richard II, But Without the Hump

"What if" is the worst kind of speculation. It can drive you to tears, depending on what level of importance the "what if" is applied.

What if King George III listened to his advisors and not agreed to Parliament's excessive demands on the American colonies?

What if George Washington had listened to Jefferson rather than Hamilton and not embraced the concept of federalism during his first term?

What if the Democratic Party had not split so decisively during the 1860 presidential election, allowing for an upstart GOP to win its first presidency?

What if the 2000 Presidential election had been run honestly and we would have ended up with a President Albert rather than a King George.

Speculation about what you cannot change in history can drive you to tears. If I was a family member of the nearly 1,900 young men and women who have died in Iraq because of this current president's hubris, I definitely would be in tears.

Please read from the Krugman column today in the New York Times:

What They Did Last Fall


By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 19, 2005By running for the U.S. Senate, Katherine Harris, Florida's former secretary of state, has stirred up some ugly memories. And that's a good thing, because those memories remain relevant. There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy. If so, their tender concern for the nation's feelings has gone for naught: Cindy Sheehan's supporters are camped in Crawford, and America is more bitterly divided than ever.

Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.

And what about 2004?

Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan history of dirty elections.

He told me that he wasn't brushing off the serious problems in Ohio, but that "this is what American democracy typically looks like, especially in a presidential election in a battleground state that is controlled substantially by one party."

So what does U.S. democracy look like? There have been two Democratic reports on Ohio in 2004, one commissioned by Representative John Conyers Jr., the other by the Democratic National Committee.

The D.N.C. report is very cautious: "The purpose of this investigation," it declares, "was not to challenge or question the results of the election in any way." It says there is no evidence that votes were transferred away from John Kerry - but it does suggest that many potential Kerry votes were suppressed. Although the Conyers report is less cautious, it stops far short of claiming that the wrong candidate got Ohio's electoral votes.

But both reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic. Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.

The Conyers report goes further, highlighting the blatant partisanship of election officials. In particular, the behavior of Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell - who supervised the election while serving as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio - makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.

We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

Would you rather be a Kansan, or a Darwinian Monkey?

Tough question.

This from the London Telegraph today (8-15). You gotta love the headline alone! The story, for the most part, misses the point . . . but it is worth repeating.

Lesbian Japanese monkeys challenge Darwin's assumptions

By David Derbyshire, Science Correspondent, in Denver

The promiscuous sex life of lesbian Japanese monkeys is challenging one of the central tenets of Charles Darwin. He argued that females are coy, mate rarely and choose mates to ensure the best genetic inheritance for their offspring, while males are promiscuous and fight among themselves for female partners.



But after studying Japanese macaques in the wild, Dr Paul Vasey, of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, begs to differ. He found that bisexuality is common in females and that they often compete with males for sexual partners.

"In some populations, female Japanese macaques sometimes prefer same-sex partners," he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver. "That occurs even when they are presented with sexually motivated, opposite-sex alternatives."

Males are often prompted into sexual intercourse only if they are first mounted by females. Dr Vasey said: "Female-male mounting in Japanese macaques is an adaptation that sexually motivated females employ to prompt sluggish or uninterested males to copulate with them."

He observed that the females gain pleasure from mounting males, often rubbing themselves against a male's back or stimulating themselves with their tails.

Dr Vasey said that once they evolved the capacity to mount males, they could gain the same sexual gratification from mounting females. "I see females competing for males all the time," he said. "I see males ignoring females that are desperate to copulate with them."

Dr Joan Roughgarden, a biologist at Stanford University, said the macaque was just one of many species that did not fit Darwin's theory of sex selection.

Female langur monkeys promiscuously mated with many males, for instance. Homosexuality in animals - at least 300 invertebrates practise it - was also unexplained by Darwin.

Dr Roughgarden said that a more comprehensive theory of sex selection should take into account social as well as sexual selection. Mating could function to build and manage relationships as well as to reproduce. "Female choice, I am pretty sure, has much more to do with managing male power than it does with trying to obtain good genes."

Yes, but he still is on the job

A Newsweek poll last weekend concluded that "61 percent of Americans polled say they disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling the war in Iraq. . . .

"And when asked about the reports that White House adviser Karl Rove may have leaked classified information about Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, 45 percent say, from what they've heard or read about Rove's involvement in the case, that they believe he is guilty of a serious crime; 18 percent say he is not guilty of a serious offense and 37 percent say they don't know, the poll shows."

And Will Lester writes for the Associated Press that not since Richard Nixon has a president's standing with public been this low at this point in their second term.

Deja vu all over again

Finally, a major league columnist with the courage to finally call a spade a spade . . . so close, so close to the closing days of LBJ, may his soul find peace in hell.

August 14, 2005

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over
By FRANK RICH

LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.

But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.

The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)

As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.

That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."

It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."

But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.

The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.

Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.

Across the road and far away

"The president says he feels compassion for me, but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here," Sheehan said. "Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we're asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq."

Cindy Sheehan
Outside a certain Crawford, Texas, ranch

Democrats Don't Get It . . . that's the problem.

This nails it.

Now we have to find the right Democrat to handle the job.

August 4, 2005
The Message Thing
By JIM WALLIS
SINCE the 2004 election, there has been much soul-searching and hand-wringing, especially among Democrats, about how to "frame" political messages. The loss to George W. Bush was painful enough, but the Republicans' post-election claims of mandate, and their triumphal promises to relegate the Democrats to permanent minority status, left political liberals in a state of panic.

So the minority party has been searching, some would say desperately, for the right "narrative": the best story line, metaphors, even magic words to bring back electoral success. The operative term among Democratic politicians and strategists has become "framing." How to tell the story has become more important than the story itself. And that could be a bigger mistake for the Democrats than the ones they made during the election.

Language is clearly important in politics, but the message remains more important than the messaging. In the interests of full disclosure, let me note that I have been talking to the Democrats about both. But I believe that first, you must get your message straight. What are your best ideas, and what are you for-as opposed to what you're against in the other party's message? Only when you answer those questions can you figure out how to present your message to the American people.

Because the Republicans, with the help of the religious right, have captured the language of values and religion (narrowly conceived as only abortion and gay marriage), the Democrats have also been asking how to "take back the faith." But that means far more than throwing a few Bible verses into policy discussions, offering candidates some good lines from famous hymns, or teaching them how to clap at the right times in black churches. Democrats need to focus on the content of religious convictions and the values that underlie them.

The discussion that shapes our political future should be one about moral values, but the questions to ask are these: Whose values? Which values? And how broadly and deeply will our political values be defined? Democrats must offer new ideas and a fresh agenda, rather than linguistic strategies to sell an old set of ideologies and interest group demands.

To be specific, I offer five areas in which the Democrats should change their message and then their messaging.

First, somebody must lead on the issue of poverty, and right now neither party is doing so. The Democrats assume the poverty issue belongs to them, but with the exception of John Edwards in his 2004 campaign, they haven't mustered the gumption to oppose a government that habitually favors the wealthy over everyone else. Democrats need new policies to offer the 36 million Americans, including 13 million children, who live below the poverty line, as well as the 9.8 million families one recent study identified as "working hard but falling short."

In fact, the Democrats should draw a line in the sand when it comes to wartime tax cuts for the wealthy, rising deficits, and the slashing of programs for low-income families and children. They need proposals that combine to create a "living family income" for wage-earners, as well as a platform of "fair trade," as opposed to just free trade, in the global economy. Such proposals would cause a break with many of the Democrats' powerful corporate sponsors, but they would open the way for a truly progressive economic agenda. Many Americans, including religious voters who see poverty as a compelling issue of conscience, desire such a platform.

Similarly, a growing number of American Christians speak of the environment as a religious concern - one of stewardship of God's creation. The National Association of Evangelicals recently called global warming a faith issue. But Republicans consistently choose oil and gas interests over a cleaner world. The Democrats need to call for the reversal of these priorities. They must insist that private interests should never obstruct our country's path to a cleaner and more efficient energy future, let alone hold our foreign policy hostage to the dictates of repressive regimes in the Middle East.

On the issues that Republicans have turned into election-winning "wedges," Democrats will win back "values voters" only with fresh ideas. Abortion is one such case. Democrats need to think past catchphrases, like "a woman's right to choose," or the alternative, "safe, legal and rare." More than 1 million abortions are performed every year in this country. The Democrats should set forth proposals that aim to reduce that number by at least half. Such a campaign could emphasize adoption reform, health care, and child care; combating teenage pregnancy and sexual abuse; improving poor and working women's incomes; and supporting reasonable restrictions on abortion, like parental notification for minors (with necessary legal protections against parental abuse). Such a program could help create some much-needed common ground.

As for "family values," the Democrats can become the truly pro-family party by supporting parents in doing the most important and difficult job in America: raising children. They need to adopt serious pro-family policies, including some that defend children against Hollywood sleaze and Internet pornography. That's an issue that has come to be identified with the religious right. But when I say in public lectures that being a parent is now a countercultural activity, I've found that liberal and conservative parents agree. Rather than fighting over gay marriage, the Democrats must show that it is indeed possible to be "pro-family" and in favor of gay civil rights at the same time.

Finally, on national security, Democrats should argue that the safety of the United States depends on the credibility of its international leadership. We can secure that credibility in Iraq only when we renounce any claim to oil or future military bases - something Democrats should advocate as the first step toward bringing other countries to our side. While Republicans have argued that international institutions are too weak to be relied upon in the age of terrorism, Democrats should suggest reforming them, creating a real International Criminal Court with an enforcement body, for example, as well as an international force capable of intervening in places like Darfur. Stronger American leadership in reducing global poverty would also go a long way toward improving the country's image around the world.

Until Democrats are willing to be honest about the need for new social policy and compelling political vision, they will never get the message right. Find the vision first, and the language will follow.

Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, is the author of "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It."