Latimer on Law

Ouingnut Ouija

Wingnut Ouija  

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations,  or the dictates of  our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
            - John Adams, Trial Lawyer, defending British Soldiers after "Boston Massacre"             

Facts are stupid things.
            - Ronald Reagan, B-movie actor, Freudian slip mangling Adams quote.

 Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of  terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
            - Matthew Rycroft, MI6 Downing Street Memo, July 23, 2002

Several years ago my former law partner and I travelled to Wassau, Wisconsin, to take depositions on a product liability case where our client had lost an arm to a defectively designed industrial machine manufactured there.  We took a local flight from Detroit to Green Bay, a nice enough small city -like Worcester with an NFL franchise, and we rented a car for the drive through the boonies to Wassau.  

          We took depositions from everyone involved in the design and manufacture of the machine, including the president of the company who can best be described as a master of dumb looks and evasive answers -or more accurately non-answers.  And, being pathetically unimaginative as well, his evasions began to follow a predictable pattern. 

         When a difficult question was asked, i.e. one where he couldn't think up a suitable way to wander off topic and would have to acknowledge fault and inadequate design of the machine if he answered, this bold captain of industry would begin with a blank-stare pause, anywhere from fifteen seconds to several minutes, after which he would say things like, "I'll have to check with my people," or "I have to review the paperwork," or our very favorite "I gotta go lose some water," after which he would get up and go to the men's room for several minutes, apparently thinking we might ask a different question when he returned.

         Of course, we didn't ask a new question. Being the patient and determined fellows that we are, my partner and I didn't get angry or nasty with the witness or with counsel, either.  We just kept asking the same question until we got a responsive, substantive answer,  and we made it obvious that we were going to stay there and keep asking questions as long as it took for this cretin to give us a straight answer to each question.  This one deposition continued over two full days.

            To while away the time however, after a half-day of that obstructionist nonsense, I devised a little chart on a yellow legal pad listing every one of his evasive responses that we'd heard.  I then began using the chart like a Ouija board.  My partner would ask a question and while the deponent was giving us the blank stare, I would move my finger over the chart a few times and stop it on one of the evasions to see if I could predict which one he would use. 

            We had files stacked on the table, so nobody else could see my finger moving over the little yellow Ouija board.  Both defense counsel and the witness were therefore clueless as to why we snickered every time I guessed right, and our apparent jollity clearly conveyed to them that we weren't about to give up until we got everything we needed from the witness -which we eventually did. 

            Doing this blog post over the past several months, I am struck by the similarity between the predictable evasions of that dim bulb CEO in Wassau, and the equally predictable, unimaginative off-topic "talking points" we get from the purportedly "conservative" folks who reply to these postings, typically consisting of right-wing shibboleths like "tenth amendment," or "Barney Frank," or "Acorn,"  et cetera,  always only marginally pertinent to the subject under discussion if at all, and never uttered within the context of any cogent, critical analysis of the substantive topic at hand.

            I might, for example, be discussing the failure of "free market" idelology, culminating with the failure of the Bush administration's policy of deregulation in 2008.  I might use the example of Kenny Boy Lay's close personal ties with Bush to show how corporate influence corrupts our politics and damages our economy.  I will then, inevitably, hear from someone braying about Acorn, as if corrupt activity by people working for a non-profit corporation involving a few million dollars, a non-profit that has contributed to Democratic political campaigns including a President's, was even marginally comparable to for-profit corporate corruption involving billions, like Enron's, that bankrupts an entire state due to the criminal acts of a President's close friend. 

            It's a question of both perspective and relevance, two things that are totally alien to today's right-wing GOP base, and the media demagogues they fawn on and then parrot on this site.  These are people who speak and act solely on ideological preconceptions across the board, as opposed to critical analysis of specific factual situations, to determine public policy. 

           A clear example of this approach was the Bush administration's manipulation and its cynical misrepresentation of the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's alleged WMDs, outright lying or at best saying things were so that they did not in fact know to be so, in order to justify invading Iraq.  As stated by Matthew Rycroft in the MI6 "Downing Street" memo of July 2002, the Bush administration was "fixing the intelligence around the policy" instead of determining policy based on accurate and reliable intelligence, and that has cost 4,000 young American lives to date, plus a nearly trillion dollars increase in our national debt.  

           Another example is Reagan's Freudian slip, flubbing his lines while trying to quote John Adams and saying that "facts are stupid things."  That's what he really believed, though, not what Adams said about facts, because the facts and logical analysis always contradict the extremist, right-wing ideology which informs the basis of today's post-Reagan Republican agenda, consisting of a marriage between capitalist and conservative religious ideologies.  How else could an administration seriously try to classify ketchup as a vegetable in order to stiff America's children out of a nutritional school lunch just to shave a few dollars off federal support for local public schools?

          I have therefore designed a "Ouingnut Ouija" board, listing some of the most often heard "talking points" that self-described conservative  savants borrow from the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Beck, Sowell, Thomas, Krauthammer, et al.  Before reading the replies from the usual wingnut suspects to any future post on this site, I'll just set the Ouignut Ouija board on my desk and let my finger land where it will to see if I can predict which of the inevitable right wing obfuscations and irrelevancies the respondent will recite.

           Anyone else is free to use this Ouingnut board for his or her own amusement, even the wingnuts themselves.  If they can't think of a response based on what Rush said last night, they can just get one from the Ouingnut board and nobody will know the difference.  As for the rest of us, it won't reduce or otherwise mitigate the right-wing tripe that gets regurgitated in response to these "liberal" postings, but it might go a long way to alleviate the tedium of reading such evasive nonsense, the hackneyed rant radio "talking points" they mistake for critical analysis, the way it did for my partner and me in Wassau with the Cheesehead CEO.

           The only difference is that we two tort lawyers settled that product-liability case not long afterward for a very large sum of money, as we knew we would, but it's unlikely that the right wing media hacks and their ditto head wannabes who post on sites like this will ever just own up to their moral and intellectual bankruptcy and then stop bleating about things like  "tort reform," "free markets" and "family values." 

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A Columbus Day Reflection on Christianity and Corporatism in America

                         A Columbus Day Reflection on Christianity and Corporatism in America

               Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."  At this the man's face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth. Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!" . . . - Mark 10:21-23

               There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.  - Acts 4:34-35

                Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. . . . . -Jesus, Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:43-44

                                         Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.

                                                                       - Jesus, Beatitudes, Matt. 5:9

                   We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

                                             - Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America

                  For decades, ever since the so-called "Reagan Revolution" circa 1980, we've heard the hard core right wing bleating constantly about how America is a "Christian nation," which to them means we have to punish gay people for being who they are, teach Creationist nonsense in the public schools as if it were science, force public school students to pray -or at best sit silently through prayer led by a public employee who, during that school time, should be teaching things like math, reading and science. 

              Above all, we must never spend any tax moneys to help the poor and the infirm, but instead must devote vast sums of money to the defense industry to protect the American way of life by developing insanely destructive weapons capable of annihilating the human race and, most recently after the fall of the Soviet empire and "Godless Communism,"  making war against the "evil" Islamic world.  Real Christian American patriots must always have an enemy, an evil bogeyman, in order to prove to themselves, to the world and to God how pious they are.

             The scariest among them are those who believe that Bush's oil wars in the Middle East, in "Babylon,"  are  necessary precursors to the Second Coming of the Messiah.  Some of them have cast Saddam Hussein literally as the anti-Christ, and they eagerly await a full scale conflagration, i.e. Armageddon as predicted in the Book of Revelation.  At that time they, and only they, will be "raptured" up to Heaven, as predicted in the Bible.

             Others on the wingnut religious right define their patriotic American Christianity in terms of reviving the Crusades which, like today's invasions of countries possessing large oil reserves, were more about seizing other peoples' wealth than anything Jesus ever taught, despite all the pious rhetoric about democracy and Christian values.

             In recent times, Columbus has been vilified by some on the left for opening up the Americas for colonial exploitation under the aegis of the Spanish crown.  And he was indeed seeking to find a western route to India for the purpose of opening new avenues for trade in silks, spices and gold.   As every schoolboy knows, that's why Native Americans are still referred to as "Indians" by many whites, and the white man's treatment of the Native American peoples, beginning in Columbus' time, has been driven by anything but Christian values and principles -certainly not those uttered by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount.

            Columbus was a devout Catholic, however, and his avowed, larger purpose was not simply economic betterment for his patrons, but to also outflank the Islamic peoples that stood between Europe and East Asia, i.e. the followers of  "Mohamet," in order to spread Christianity in the far East.  Today's melding of professed Christian beliefs with rank economic ambition and exploitation of weaker peoples is therefore nothing new.  Nor is the demonization of Islam, the world's other great monotheistic religion that competes both theologically and geo-politically with the Judeo-Christian tradition.   

            In ages past, however, that melding of the state with the church was both direct and explicit in Catholic nations where royal authority was said to be based on a "divine right."  Catholic monarchs like Ferdinand and Isabella, believed themselves to be answerable to God, whose word was made known to them by the Pope in Rome. The Papal imprimatur was the cornerstone for political legitimacy of European monarchs for over a thousand years until the Reformation, and even then it remained so in strictly Catholic nations like Spain.

            It is therefore understandable how, as a man of his time, Columbus might honestly have believed he was doing God's work, first by seeking a western route to India, and then by subjugating the more primitive natives he found in America.  But, today, we are more than two-hundred years into the great social and political experiment we call the United States of America, and given both our revolutionary history and the democratic ideals  embodied in our determinedly secular Constitution, we should know better.

            After the Reformation, the close connection between Christianity and the exercise of colonial power continued in other European nations with Protestant majorities, like Holland and England.  In Holland, there was the Dutch Reformed Church which followed and provided the moral basis for the Dutch mercantile ambitions and exploitation of New World peoples, purchasing the Island of Manhattan for a chest full of shiny baubles, for example, from natives who had no concept of private property.

            In England, Henry VIII replaced the Catholic hierarchy with the hierarchical Church of England, and most of the British colonists who subsequently settled on America's Atlantic seaboard came here for religious reasons, to find freedom to preach and practice Christian doctrines that differed from the Church of England.  The Puritans, forbears of today's Congregationalists, settled in Massachusetts and northern New England. 

            The Baptists, led by Roger Williams, left Massachusetts to escape the rigid theocracy of the Puritan regime and established the area still officially known as Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations.  The Quakers found religious freedom in Pennsylvania, and English Catholics did the same in Maryland. In some colonies, like coastal Virginia, the Church of England followed the colonists as the official church among the landed gentry like Washington.

            Then, in the late Eighteenth Century, a rabble of revolutionaries in the British American colonies, banded together to overthrow the legitimate royal government.  The catalyst was taxation, not the collection of taxes per se, but the fact that the colonists were being taxed without having any representation in Parliament where such issues could be debated. 

              The Boston Tea Party was an act of domestic terrorism, with the armed invasion of ships moored in Boston Harbor and the destruction of valuable cargoes. It was meant to make a political statement, not that taxes were too high, or were being used erroneously, but simply to protest that the colonists were being taxed without having any say in the matter.  They were basically protesting Parliament's highhanded arrogance, an arrogance akin to the GOP's exclusion of Democrats from meaningful Congressional debate under DeLay's leadership during Bush's first six years in office when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

              The American revolutionaries were in many cases nominal Christians, although many of the more prominent ones like Franklin, Jefferson and Washington were Deists who accepted Christ's moral teaching but questioned his divinity,  precursors of today's Unitarian-Universalists.  They were also intellectuals attuned to the most current, and strange, "European ideas" about mankind and society which we refer to as the Enlightenment.  The Americans like Jefferson tended to be "warm Deists" who believed in a benign Creator, while European thinkers were cold Deists who believed in an indifferent Creator, but neither school can be thought of as being doctrinally Christian.

              Because of their belief in Enlightenment principles, such as the individual's right to life, liberty and freedom to choose the path to happiness, the founding fathers who framed the Constitution saw fit to devise a system of checks and balances among three branches of government.  A decade later, under Jefferson's leadership, they added the first ten amendments to the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights.  In the very first sentence of the First Amendment, they provided for both complete religious freedom and the separation of government and religion.  Thus, far from creating a "Christian" nation as the religious right claims today, the framers determinedly established a secular democratic republic based on the primacy of the individual.

            In America today, we don't have a Ferdinand and Isabella seeking to subjugate and exploit other peoples to enrich their coffers, perhaps in a sincere belief that was the way to spread the word of Jesus across the wide world.  Instead, we have corporations, insurance giants like AIG, oil oligopolies like Exxon-Mobil and the vast amorphous financial engine referred to as Wall Street who seek political dominance in America in order to advance their economic interests both in the United States and in worldwide markets through "globalization."   

            We have also witnessed an unprecedented ascendancy of the corporate elite over the past eight years of GOP control of government, an ascendancy that ended in 2008 due in large part to the ideological excesses of the corporate American right opposed to governmental regulation and taxation per se on principle.  But it wasn't that ideology that enabled the GOP to do this, it was the cynical appeal to the religious right on those so-called "values" issues like school prayer, creationism, abortion, gay rights, et cetera, that gave the Republicans the votes needed to win elections at the national level, thus creating an unholy alliance between the corporate elite and Christian fundamentalists, largely from the Southern Baptist Convention, who believe in biblical inerrancy.

           The Southern Baptists separated from the church founded by Roger Williams over the issue of slavery, and they justified slavery based on selective readings from both the Old Testament and the New Testament which referred to it as it was practiced in biblical times.  This schism continued during and after Reconstruction, as the Southern Baptists continued to justify racial segregation through Jim Crow laws. 

            The Southern Baptists have been joined in recent times by other Bible-based Christian sects in the South and Mid-West to create the political phenomenon known as the Bible Belt which today votes heavily Republican because the GOP cynically panders to them on the socially conservative and economically meaningless "values" issues, in order to maintain the corporate elite's political ascendancy as, basically, an oligarchy.

            This was the basis of Nixon's 1968 "Southern Strategy," and it was perfected in 1980 by Ronald Reagan who opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where a white mob got away with murdering three civil rights workers who were helping poor blacks register to vote.  There, Reagan expressly avowed his belief in "states rights," which everyone but the scarecrow in the cornfield understood to mean Jim Crow segregation, but he also blended this in with issues important to the American corporate elite such as taxation, welfare and "federal regulation."

           That odd-couple marriage of the corporate elite and the religious right, based on pandering to the most intolerant and ignorant religious and social impulses,  remains the basis of the GOP's popular support, which over the past eight years allowed corporate interests to control both the economy, through regulatory and tax policy, and foreign policy focused chiefly on controlling and exploiting global markets and economic resources worldwide.  The Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, focused on seizing Saddam's oil reserves while Bush himself espoused his messianic "Christian" beliefs, is a clear example of this, and it's enabled by the religious right's highly selective reading of Scripture.

              During slavery and Jim Crow, the Southern churches selected isolated biblical passages which mentioned slavery to support the South's economic dependence on slavery.  Today, they read passages from Matthew and the Book of Revelation to support a Christian "holy war" in the mid-East that serves American corporate interests in an attempt to seize petroleum resources there.  In their "values" driven support of the GOP's corporate base, and its agenda of greed and unrestrained capitalism, the  American religious right simply ignores Jesus' message, as reported by Mark, that a camel may more easily pass through a needle's eye than a rich man, i.e. a person who values money above all else, may pass into Heaven.

             Thus, today, we are saddled with armed conflicts on two fronts, costing thousands of human lives, devouring our tax dollars and increasing our massive trillion dollar debt, all benefiting only the defense contractors and petroleum industry, while the national economy itself is teetering due to the GOP's deregulation of the financial markets and reckless tax cuts for the rich.  Personal bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures have reached record highs, individual savings and retirement accounts have been wiped out and unemployment is verging on ten percent. 

              Of course, to the diehard GOP ideological media hacks, it's all Obama's fault, or it's all Barney Frank's fault or Nancy Pelosi's fault because, like the Bible, free market capitalist ideology is infallible.  Pay no attention to the man behind the crash of 2008, and its real causes, because like Reagan once said in a Freudian slip,  "facts are stupid things," meaning that they usually contradict the fundamentals of his conservative ideology.

             So, Columbus gets a pass from me, despite his mangling of Jesus' true message to the world, because he was honestly acting as a Christian and a European of his time, serving a monarchy which he sincerely believed was established by divine ordination and was acting as the agent of God here on Earth.  He didn't know any better, and he had no reason to based on the cultural and political norms of his time.  But today's corporatist Republicans have no such excuse for invading other peoples and trying to steal their resources, like the Iraqi oil reserves, while pandering to the religious right on conservative social values to maintain control of the national government.

            Today's Republican faithful thus  not only mangle Jesus' message as did Columbus, but they do so by violating and eroding our secular Constitutional principles, principles based on those strange  European ideas of the Enlightenment, ideas for which our founding fathers risked their lives and fortunes to pass along to us as their social and political posterity.

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The Ten Million Pound Gorilla At Town Meeting

The Ten Million Pound Gorilla At Town Meeting

  "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
     - Senator Jim DeMint, R. So. Carolina

"All politics is local."  -Rep. Tip O'Neill, D. Mass.

We just held a special town meeting in Falmouth this past week to deal with budgetary shortfalls due to the economic collapse of 2008.   You remember that, don't you?   There are lots of folks, the corporate elite and their errand boys in the GOP, who don't want you to remember how the financial idiocy of Wall Street combined with  the idiotic deregulatory and tax cutting policies of the Bush administration over the prior eight years to create a major collapse of the U.S. economy second only to the crash in 1929.  

            As I sat there listening to the budgetary debate at town meeting, I wondered whether I was the only one who noticed the ten million pound gorilla sitting right there with us in the Lawrence School auditorium.  I'm referring to  the $10,337,104 line item for employee group health insurance entered as a "fringe benefit."

           This is the second largest line item in the budget, second only to the School Department and weighing in at almost double either the police or fire department allocation. It's more than double any other departmental allocation, and takes up over ten percent of the entire $100 million plus annual budget, yet  there was no discussion or questioning of this item as we debated long and hard over really important issues like whether to apply some of the $5,600 taken out of the travel allowance for the administrator's office toward shellfish propagation, to replace $3,000 that had been taken out there. 

          Putting $3,000 back into the line item for shellfish propagation, by the way, would have been a wise investment of public money.  It would directly create an available resources for taxpayers worth about twenty times the layout. Lots of people in town rely on harvesting shellfish in our public waters to supplement their declining incomes or just to put food on the table for their kids.  But, no, we voted to put the whole piddling $5,600 into the stabilization fund instead.  Now, that really put us back in the black, didn't it?

          Meanwhile, in Washington, cadres of insurance industry lobbyists and their Republican stooges in Congress are fighting tooth and claw to prevent meaningful reforms that will make health care both more affordable and more widely available to all Americans, including us taxpayers here in Falmouth and our municipal employees.  As Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina has admitted, it's really all about politics because the GOP is desperate to defeat President Obama on something, to make health reform his "Waterloo," public health and welfare be damned.

          Those of us who have been paying attention over the past three decades or so know that while the insurance industry is concerned only with profits, the right wing GOP base is driven by the ideological nonsense that "free market" capitalism, deregulation, small government and states rights is a constitutional and divine mandate.   They still cling to their imbecilic, knee-jerk ideology despite seeing the economy go into the tank last year, with trillions of dollars in debt, bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures and ten percent unemployment, after eight years of GOP deregulation and tax cuts.

            As Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local, and our local budgetary problems are a good example given the presence of that obscenely obese gorilla, the one sitting in the auditorium with us Tuesday night, taking over ten million of our local tax dollars and handing them over to the private insurance corporations, enabling them to pursue excessive profits by making reckless investments while devising ever more ingenious, "perfectly legal" ways to deny the health care benefits we pay for.  Then, when they become "too big to fail" of course, we have to use federal tax dollars to pay for their recklessness in the form of bailouts.

           Here in Falmouth, that ten million dollars to provide group health coverage for town employees is paid in addition to the premium dollars we pay as individuals or through employer funded ERISA plans for ourselves.  It's the same in small towns all over America, where major portions of municipal budgets are devoted to providing the same kind of corporate welfare for the insurance industry CEOs and shareholders, where basic health care for municipal employees is considered only a "fringe" benefit.

          After we got through deciding we couldn't afford to put $3,000 back into shellfish propagation, we were presented with an opportunity to increase local revenues by adopting a local option increase in hotel and motel room taxes.  Then we were entertained by the bellowing of all the gored anti-tax oxen, business owners like former Selectman Kevin Murphy, telling scary stories about how a couple of extra tax dollars imposed on hotel or motel rooms was going to frighten tourists away en masse and deprive them of their anticipated profits.  Murphy and others also argued that the additional tax was "unfair" because it didn't apply to other temporary rentals like time-shares -as if they'd ever endorse any new tax on time share rentals.

             The rooms tax increase would have enhanced town revenues by "only" $150,000 or so for the remainder of this fiscal year, based on an anticipated $330,000 annual increase.  Earlier, Fire Chief Paul Brodeur gave us a breakdown of his budget saying he was able to hold the line for now, but by 2011 he would probably have to start cutting personnel in addition to the $200,000 or so in cuts he took this year, including over $169,000 for salary and wages. 

             Of course, we can't collect a few hundred thousand extra tax dollars to be paid by visitors instead of town property owners, because that'd cut into the profits of local businessmen like Murphy and it'd be "unfair."  So let's just take away the livelihoods of two or three firemen, a couple of policemen, a half-dozen teachers or several DPW workers instead.  Now, that's really fair, isn't it?

           About $120,000 in salaries and wages had to be cut from the Police budget, too, but nobody stopped to think that the extra $330,000 from the rooms tax increase just might go a long way to keep Falmouth a lot safer by maintaining existing levels of police and fire protection by offsetting those wage and salary cuts.  Alternatively, it would easily pay for several teachers whose jobs will be threatened if we don't begin to increase revenues in addition to looking for ways to limit expenditures.

          Naturally, when the Fire Department jobs disappear in a year or so, we'll be able to reduce some of that health care "fringe benefit" line item proportionally -make that gorilla slim down to about nine million pounds or so maybe.  You'll  have to learn to be patient then, however, because when you call for an ambulance you'll have to wait longer the way you have to wait, according to all the right-wing media blowhards, for medical treatment in all those "socialist" European countries with publicly financed health care.   But that's o.k. because, after all, what's a few extra minutes waiting for the ambulance when you have a stroke against a couple of dollars maybe taken off of Mr. Murphy's bottom line?

          Those European countries with "socialized" medicine recognize health care as a basic right rather than merely a "fringe benefit," and keep health care costs a lot lower than here in America, because they don't see how "fair" it is  to enhance business profitability by making basic health care unaffordable to millions of people.    In England they do this even though they don't even have a written constitution that specifies one of the basic purposes of government, and of the power of taxation, is to provide for the general welfare of the people, as expressly stated in Article I, Sect. 8, of our Constitution. 

          No, in England, France and other European democracies they have practical and effective political parties that are concerned for the well-being of all the people, with or without a constitutional mandate.  Here, however, we have the ideologically addled GOP marching in lockstep with the very rich to create a political paralysis serving only to maintain the economic ascendancy of the corporate elite,  and the constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare be damned. 

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On Birthers, Truthers and Political Paranoia

On Birthers, Truthers and Political Paranoia

"Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts."  -William S. Burroughs

"This is the Nineties, Bubba, and there is no such thing as Paranoia. It's all true."   - Hunter S. Thompson

" Cui bono?"   -Cicero

"He's been falling out of trees head first all year and landing on his feet"  -Pitcher Bill Lee on former Red Sox Manager Darryl Johnson

"At long last, sir, have you no decency?"  -Attorney  Joseph Welch to Sen.  Joe McCarthy, 1954

The recent public stoning of White House green energy advisor Van Jones for the political blasphemy of  having considered the possibility that the Bush administration had some foreknowledge that al Qaeda would attempt an attack on U.S. soil before 9/11 looks a lot like what they do in repressive Muslim theocracies to women who dare to wear pants or go barefaced in public. 

           The hypocrisy on the right, too, is palpable.  The most serious charge against Van Jones, according to no less a right-wing mouthpiece than Charles Krauthammer, was to indulge in conspiracy theory speculation by signing a petition circulated by the so-called "truthers," calling for further investigation into the Bush administration's actions before 9/11.  

           Meanwhile, however, the American right wing remains a large tent that welcomes in all who indulge in speculation that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and let it happen in order to push his program through Congress to build up the Pacific Fleet.  That conspiracy theory is almost an exact equivalent to the Bush 9/11 conspiracy theory.  The GOP's large tent also welcomes many on the right called "birthers," who claim that Obama was not born in the U.S. and therefore is not eligible to be President.

            As conspiracy theories go, both the 9/11 and Pearl Harbor scenarios stand on equal footing.  Both are well within the realm of possibility, and both are supported by some circumstantial evidence, but no smoking gun.  The "birther" scenario, however, is just plain nuts and is supported by nothing but hysterical speculation. 

             The birther whackos, including right-wing demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, persist in saying that Obama's birth certificate is a forgery, despite the fact that microfilm of the Honolulu Sunday Advertiser for July 13, 1961, proves publication of his birth notice in Honolulu at that time.  Forty-seven year old microfilm, unlike electronic data or ink on paper, cannot be forged, and to suggest that the editors of the Advertiser conspired 47-years ago to plant a fake birth announcement just so the newborn Barak Obama might someday be elected president goes far beyond mere paranoia and descends into the realm of group phantasm.

             Because there is no smoking gun for 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, however, critics can say that the proponents of those conspiracy theories are open to the charge of political paranoia.  Maybe so, but then what do we say about police officials and right wing politicians who defend acts of racial profiling in law enforcement?  What is profiling if not institutional paranoia about a presumed propensity of all black men to commit violent, criminal acts? Defenders of racial profiling, by the way, can rightly claim that it very often leads to the arrest and conviction of real criminals, which only goes to prove that even a paranoiac's suspicions can sometimes prove  to be correct, like the blind pig who finds a tasty nut by rubbing his nose on the ground.

           Let's not stop with profiling as an example of contemporary right-wing paranoia, either. Let's look, too, at the GOP's very own Sarah Palin taking a brief reference to end-of-life-counseling out of context from Obama's health care reform package and conflating it into "death panels" to scare the bejeezus out of all those sign wielding bluehairs that have been showing up at the insurance industry orchestrated "town meetings" recently.  

          The death panel canard is just the most prominent of several unfounded right-wing ruminations about the intent and content of Obama's health care reform initiative.  So many scary stories are being circulated by the right wing about Obama's evil designs with absolutely no cogent explanation given or required by the GOP true believers as to why Obama might want to kill grandma or cut off her Medicare.  Forget about mere paranoia for that one and think paranoid schizophrenia!   

          Another recent example of right wing political paranoia is the eight-year witch hunt the GOP conducted against Bill Clinton.  Yes he boffed Monica Lewinsky and then, stupidly, lied about it.  But there were all the other conspiracy theories floating around by the whacko right, and fervently exploited by the GOP, about Whitewater, Vince Foster, et cetera, all based on hysterical speculation with no solid circumstantial evidence.  As Hunter Thompson remarked, back then in the 1990s, there was no such thing as paranoia, especially for the GOP.  It was "all true" for their true believers.

          By contrast, when we look at conspiracy theories like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor from an unbiased perspective, i.e. one which makes no ideological prejudgment as to the probability of the theory based primarily on the character of those involved in relevant events,  it is helpful to realize that circumstantial evidence is often more probative than so-called "real" evidence such as eyewitness testimony or, indeed, a smoking gun.  It was circumstantial evidence, after all, that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for selling America's "atomic secrets" to the Soviets.  

         The Rosenberg's accusers were admitted communist spies who had made plea deals with the government in return for their testimony, so the trial jury  had to rely on circumstantial evidence to resolve the issues, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the convictions under the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.  I have read the trial court and appellate rulings on the Rosenberg case and, under the law as existed at that time, it appears that they were properly convicted based on the evidence presented at trial -even though a different outcome might obtain today under current procedural and evidentiary rules.

          That all occurred, by the way, in the 1950s, during a period of mass right-wing paranoid hysteria about a "communist conspiracy" among the American intelligentsia, with the spectacle of "Tail-gunner Joe" McCarthy waving his shopping list before Congressional Committees and newsreel cameras, saying that it contained the names of dozens of communist spies. The fact that some of the people identified by the red-baiters in Congress may actually have been communist spies only proves again the point that even a paranoiac's suspicions can actually turn out to be correct. 

            It's just too bad for all the innocent people who came within the ambit of McCarthy's paranoid speculation and had careers, marriages and lives ruined because of it.  That's o.k., though, isn't it, because it was only a few, unimportant liberal artists and writers who were smeared by McCarthy and his red-baiting cohorts on the HUAC, not presumptively honorable dignitaries like Bush and Cheney, or FDR for that matter, who must like Caesar's wife always be perceived by one segment of society or the other as being above reproach.  

          It was a Boston trial lawyer, Joseph Welch, who finally called McCarthy's bluff during the Army-McCarthy hearings, with the words "At long last, sir, have you no decency," after McCarthy publicly questioned the loyalty of a young American soldier based on allegations of homosexuality.   McCarthy of course did not have a shred of decency.  He was in fact a drunk addled by both liquor and ideology, yet there are many on the right today, all welcomed under the GOP's big circus tent, who consider him an American "hero."

           Personalities and ideologies side, however, there are strengths and weaknesses to the circumstantial cases supporting both the 9/11 conspiracy theory and the very similar  Pearl Harbor theory, with the 9/11 theory having stronger circumstantial support though still not decisively so.  We can start with the obvious fact that like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 gave a sitting president the catalyst from which he was able to implement a pre-determined geopolitical initiative. 

           Here's where Cicero's cui bono applies.  Something very bad happened in both cases, and questions are raised as to why it was allowed to happen while it also served the sitting president's political and ideological interests significantly, allowing him to proceed with policy initiatives that had otherwise been stymied politically.  FDR got his build up of the Pacific fleet, and W got his oil war in Iraq.

            We're looking at these cases objectively, remember, without any prejudice or bias toward either Bush or FDR.   Personally, I do believe in FDR's integrity while I question that of both Bush and Cheney, but this analysis just looks at the objective circumstantial facts surrounding these two very similar conspiracy theories.

           FDR wanted to build up the Pacific fleet and engage the Japanese, and Pearl Harbor gave him the political momentum he needed to do that.  By the same token, it's clear beyond any doubt that Bush and Cheney took office with the single-minded intention to take out Saddam Hussein and to seize Iraqi oil resources to benefit American petroleum interests and thereby maintain the dollar as the basis for oil prices worldwide.  That's why one of the first things Cheney did was to invite top oil and gas executives into his office for a top-secret, private meeting on national energy policy, without inviting anyone interested in "green" renewable energy technologies -like Van Jones, for example.

           It's also clear that despite some success on domestic issues like taxation in the first eight months of his presidency, Bush had absolutely no mandate for an invasion of Iraq or any other military engagement in the Mid-East, just as FDR had little hope of getting Congress to fund a buildup of the Pacific fleet before Pearl Harbor.  But then, for Bush and Cheney, 9/11 came along and gave them the pretext they needed for invading Iraq.  It was Osama bin Laden who gleefully took credit for 9/11, not Saddam, but that didn't deter Bush and Cheney from starting and maintaining the drumbeat for invading Iraq. 

          If it wasn't Saddam directly, they said, he was working with the "terrorists" and was therefore still to blame for 9/11, plus he had WMDs at his disposal that he would use against us if we didn't stop him.  We can't let the "smoking gun," Bush intoned, become the "mushroom cloud."  Only problem was, as has now been proven beyond a fare thee well despite Cheney's continued ruminations, there were no ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, and there were no WMDs. 

          The Bush people in fact knew or had good reason to know that Saddam had no connection with 9/11 and had no WMDs, just as U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix had said.  So they used lies, half-truths and innuendo to scare a majority of Senators into voting for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  As stated by British MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove in his Downing Street Memo after a briefing by the Bush administration, it was clear that "the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy."  Dearlove could see right through it, as did the French and Germans, but not Congress or the American public. So let's talk about paranoia some more, huh?

         One thing is undeniable.  If Bush and Cheney did not have any prior knowledge of 9/11, they certainly did exploit it to the hilt, cynically as well as dishonestly, to their political and ideological advantage.  As  for the fact that 9/11 happened on their watch, the kindest thing that can be said about them is that they were not merely inept, but grossly negligent.  Richard Clarke, a top intelligence analyst who had served in several prior administrations, warned them specifically in August 2001 that al Qaeda was going to attack  American soil, and the Bush people did virtually nothing about it.  Van Jones is guilty of nothing more than asking for a clearer answer to the obvious question -why?

          Now, the Spaceman's remark about Darryl Johnson notwithstanding, most people do not fall out of trees head first and land on their feet.  But, if Bush and Cheney were for any valid reason not in fact expecting an attack by al Qaeda, as Clarke had warned them was going to happen, if they had any bona fide reason to doubt that warning, it was indeed the equivalent of falling out of the tree head first and landing squarely on their feet.  They  certainly got exactly what they needed, and they  hit the ground running after 9/11, with calls for an invasion of Iraq in retaliation, which just happened to dovetail nicely with their pre-determined designs on the vast untapped Iraqi oil reserves.

           This is what differentiates the 9/11 theory from the Pearl Harbor theory, making it a much stronger circumstantial case.  There is no clear indication that FDR in fact had any advance knowledge of a pending Japanese strike on Hawaii, just some speculation and hearsay, but there is irrefutable proof that the Bush people knew in advance that al Qaeda, not Saddam, was going to attack American soil.  A proven and reliable intelligence analyst told them it was going to happen and that al Qaeda was going to do it, it did happen and then they persisted in claiming that Saddam was responsible and faked the intelligence to fit their preconceived policy of invading Iraq. 

           It's no mere coincidence here that both Bush and Cheney had and still have close ties to the petroleum industry, and that says volumes about why they chose to limit the military effort to take out bin Laden in Afghanistan, the admitted perpetrator of 9/11, and focused instead on Saddam in Iraq by manipulating and falsifying the intelligence.  You may recall that the very first thing the invading American troops did in Iraq was to secure the oil fields there.

          Thus, leaving any belief in the integrity of FDR or W aside, there is a much stronger circumstantial case to indicate that the Bush administration both knew that a terrorist attack was going to occur on American soil, and willingly let it happen without making any effort to prevent it, because they desperately needed something to happen in order to get support for a mid-East war and thereby create an opportunity for them to invade Iraq.  They needed that to happen somewhere on American soil,  no  less than FDR needed Pearl Harbor to happen in order to get funding to build up the Pacific fleet.  Here, we know that the Bush administration knew and had good reason to know that al Qaeda was planning an attack before 9/11, because it is well documented that Clarke told them so, but there  is no such clear evidence of prior knowledge by FDR about Pearl Harbor.

           Where the "truthers" conspiracy theory falls flat, however, and really enters the realm of paranoia, is in the suggestion that people in the Bush administration were involved in planning 9/11, or even knew specifically what was going to happen.  That would have been foolish because they wouldn't need to participate in such an attack, or even know the specifics, to get exactly what they needed, i.e. a pretext for invading Iraq.  Overt participation in such an attack, in planning an attack or even actually learning the specifics of an attack on any level, would have created a  needless risk of detection and thereby impaired the wall of plausible deniability.

            And it's just that wall of deniability that compels us to conclude, despite a healthy level of reasonable "paranoia" based on the circumstantial facts, that even willfully ignorant, passive complicity by the Bush people in 9/11 cannot and will not ever be proven.  Therefore, further investigation as sought by the petition Van Jones signed  would only prove to be fruitless as well as politically divisive.  We are thus compelled, at least as far as any official action goes, to render the Scotch verdict "not proven," and leave the issue for future historians who will look at the facts again, to be sure, from an academic perspective rather than a purely ideological or political position as people on either side of the question are doing today.

           That does not mean, however, that someone like Van Jones should be pilloried by the likes of Limbaugh, Beck and Krauthammer simply for not believing unquestioningly in the integrity of two characters like Bush and Cheney as they do, two people who unquestionably dissembled after 9/11 to start an oil war in Iraq.  Given the undeniable indulgence of political paranoia on the American right, from the "red menace" in the 1950s all the way through the present GOP obstructionism on health care reform, someone like Van Jones should not be removed from an important post for which he is eminently qualified, a post having nothing to do with war policy except and exactly to the extent that the invasion of Iraq was indeed an important element of Cheney's top secret energy policy,  simply for entertaining the possibility that Bush and Cheney may have been so cynical and corrupt as to let a terrorist attack occur on American soil for such political and ideological gain.

            It's not paranoia by Limbaugh and others on the right who have called for Van Jones' resignation, because he in fact said what he said and signed what he signed which is good circumstantial evidence that he believed what he said and believed in what he signed, despite any pro forma protestations to the contrary.  No, it's not right-wing paranoia to have called for Van Jones' resignation because he indulged a conspiracy theory about Bush and Cheney's possible foreknowledge of 9/11, but given the GOP's own historical and present indulgence of scandalous conspiracy theories it surely is a huge dollop of hypocrisy.

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Give ‘Em Hell, Barry!

                                                                      Give ‘Em Hell, Barry!

           What a great presentation by President Obama last night!  He managed to sustain his commitment to bipartisanship and working with the GOP, while at the same time giving them a good tongue-lashing for their ideological obstructionism to date.

            He clearly outlined the essentials of his three-point plan:  First, private insurers will remain in business, maintaining existing personal and ERISA health plans, but with tightened regulations to make sure the "product" is fairer and more predictable for the consumer;  second the law will recognize and encourage private, non-profit health insurance entities to allow those of us in the middle class and working class who cannot afford personal coverage and do not belong to an employee group under ERISA to purchase group coverage similar to ERISA and also compete with the private insurers to keep premiums down; and finally he is sticking with a needs based publicly financed plan for the relatively small number of citizens who cannot afford to buy into a non-profit group plan.

            It was significant, too,  that Obama expressly invoked Teddy Roosevelt, who was a true conservative champion of the middle class and working class against corporate excesses.  As TR said in his State of the Union Address on December 2, 1902:

            We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until  we  fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.

And that clearly expresses both the tone and the substance of Obama's health care reform as he delineated last night.  He's not out to eliminate private insurance companies, but he sure is going to do everything possible to make them more accountable and responsive to the needs of the public.

         In making this presentation, Obama went out of his way to emphasize that it is based on the 80 percent or so bi-partisan consensus that presently exists, incorporating ideas put forth by Republicans in last term's health care "debate" as well as Democrats, and he even acknowledged taking specific elements from individuals like John McCain.  Obama is The Man, precisely because he is smart and smooth as shown last night, as opposed to claiming to be the great "Decider" or the one-way "Communicator" like former GOP presidents have been.

            Still, Obama made many Republicans uncomfortable, as he should, by giving them Hell about the purely ideological nature of their opposition to health care reform so far.  When the camera panned the assembled GOP senators and congressmen at certain points in Obama's address, their discomfort was palpable and not because they had serious, bona fide issues with the substance of Obama's plan, but because they could tell that he was both energizing the Democratic majority and making his point loud and clear with the American public. 

           Yes, we know, the devil is in the details -how could we not know it?  We need only look at the private insurance industry today, with details in the fine print,  like exclusions for pre-existing illness, arbitrary limits for mental illness, arbitrary termination of coverage, et cetera, et cetera, to see how the devil really works in a profit-driven corporate system.  And Obama expressly held out the olive branch to the GOP, again, asking them to come forward and discuss with him any and all specific substantive issues they might have with the plan, saying his office was always open to them.

            So now it's time for the GOP to put up or shut up, to demonstrate that they can be a loyal opposition as opposed to being ideological obstructionists defending the status quo as they have been doing so far. Obama has called upon them to do so, and in so doing he has called them out in front of the whole country.  It was Harry Truman who who first brought up the issue of health care reform back in mid-20^th Century, and I'm sure that if he were still alive today he'd be saying: "Give ‘em Hell, Barry!"

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