Pat Political

More on Memorial Day

I listened Sunday night to the radio broadcast of the Concert on the White House lawn, and for a brief moment I had hope that this was going to be an evenhanded celebration of the sacrifices of both the soldiers and their families.

Yes, the suffering of families in the current conflicts were told. And the best part of the evening was the statement of a recent Iraq war widow about her pain, her difficulty in finding other widows with whom to share their difficulties, and her determination that these women shall not be forgotten. I hope she stays with this. We need an organization called Widows and Widowers of Foreign Wars alongside the long standing Veterans of Foreign Wars.

But for previous wars there was little or no mention of the sacrifices by mothers and widows. What we were given was dramatic presentations of war history accompanied by truly soul stirring music. Speeches by Colin Powell and our present chief general were the usual cant. Essentially in order to highlight the sacrifice of our soldiers we glorify war itself.

When Memorial Day becomes a day of national mourning for the ugly horror that war is, I shall indeed celebrate it.

Memorial Day 2005

The news this morning began with what is now its usual start-- an account of the latest deaths and injuries in Iraq.

I knew at once that I could not bear to listen to any of the words of praise President Bush was going to heap on our “fallen heroes”-- those men and women he has sent so callously to their deaths in his carefully marketed war on Iraq..

For years now I have resented our celebrations of Memorial Day. Always the politicians have spoken of “the last full measure of devotion “ given by our young men who died in battle.

And always I have at once remembered the faces of mothers of my schoolmates who died in the war.

Have not the women who gave their sons, the flesh of their flesh, also given the last full measure of devotion.

And have not the widows who have lost their lovers and friends, and the children who have lost their fathers also given a full measure?

Why have we been so insistent on treating war as heroic instead of as the ugly horror which it is for us all.

Now that women can also exercise their Second Amendment right and duty to defend and die for our country, I may in time come to feel differently about Memorial Day.

But not this year.

How they plan to stay in power

Why are the Bush Republicans so sure that they will retain their control of our government and how do they plan to do this....

I offer two quotations which go to the heart of these questions.

...we provincials...are not beguiled by the notion that the fate of mankind and of human culture lies wholly in our hands...The Americans certainly do (enjoy some such delusion) for they are natural-born crusaders, forever in the right, even when they are least aware of what they are crusading about. (Quotation from Canadian author Robertson Davies’ book Murther and Walking Spirits, pp 277-278.)

Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things.  Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid. (These are words spoken by President Dwight D. Eisenhower-- a good Republican President-- in 1952, and are quoted by Anne Abrams in her Letter to the Editor published in the Times Argus on May 21st, 2005.)

This tiny splinter group of Texas oil millionaires is now close to taking control of all three branches of our government.

The division of our governmental structure into three branches was meant to prevent this from happening. The founders of our country were determined to create a government which could never tyrannize over an individual or a state. They knew that a majority in power could be as much a tyrant as any dictator.

How have the Bush Republicans done this?

They have allied themselves with Southern Fundamentalist religious sects. These groups now believe that the South has finally won the Civil War and they are now ramming their version of Reconstruction down all of us just as thoroughly as we in the north rammed ours down them one hundred and forty years ago.

But first and foremost our President and Vice President are business men. And business today believes absolutely in the power of marketing. Anything can be sold to the American public provided it is properly presented. And they have the incredible success of TV advertising in the latter half of the 20th Century to prove this.

The Afghanistan war seemed the obvious and proper outcome of 9/11.

But the invasion of Iraq required marketing. They tried fear marketing at first-- weapons of mass destruction, Iraq’s connection with terrorists. This didn’t work. Too many people understood that both assertions were untrue.

And so they are now relying on the idealism of Americans, our belief that we have something of worth to offer the world.

They are marketing everything they are doing as being part of our helping spread democracy to the rest of the world. And we are nearly all of us happy to follow along and say how wonderful this is whether we color ourselves Red or Blue.

And this is why I like Davies’ description of us so much-- We will still go right along with the crusade even if we may find ourselves a bit confused about why democracy for the rest of the world seems to include the rights of all humans while democracy as it is practiced here at home means the will of the present Republican majority.

Filibuster debate

The most frightening part of the debate over the filibuster is the conviction of the Bush Republicans that they will never again be in the minority.

Our State Senators and Healthcare

(I sent the following email yesterday to VT Senators Welch and Leddy. Our State Senators begin to sound just like their Republican fellows, don’t they.)

I had the following conversation with Mark MacDonald Friday evening,
and he thought it would be all right to share it with you....

You Democrats are presently helping to re-elect Douglas because you
are allowing the health care debate to be framed in his terms, that
is, as a business issue, to be solved by a business solution.

If Clavelle had done his homework on the healthcare issue, we might
very well have a Democratic governor today. I don't believe that you
also have done yours.

The Vermont public has been well educated and is well aware that there
is a basic division between what they want as a community
infrastructure universal health care system and the
Bush-Douglas-Republican approach that health care is an insurance
concern to be solved by a business model.

Unless you really want to see Douglas re-elected, I suggest that your
approach should be to make your bill essentially the same as the
House, and perhaps you will be lucky enough to push Douglas to a veto.

In case you are looking for ways to pay for universal health care,
Vermonters are increasingly aware that they are paying with their
property taxes for the infrastructure that out-of-state corporations
benefit from but do not contribute to.

A tiered health care tax should be levied on all income which is
generated within the State of Vermont. This would include income like
mine, which is primarily Social Security and income from such
businesses as Wal-Mart, Hannaford, Chittenden Bank, and could quite
easily finance a state-wide health care system..

Our Second Amendment

Here is the Second Amendment, which provides, yes, the clear and unequivocal support of both the NRA and Gun Lovers of America but, far more important, our right to a civilian based army.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

Note that our right, my many gun loving friends, is based on our duty to be ready to defend our country.

The British use of professional paid troops, the Hessians, may well have been the impetus for our Second Amendment. Our founders saw clearly that any government which claimed to be based on the consent of the governed should be defended only by the citizens of that government.

And indeed our army has been firmly under the civilian control of Congress for all of its existence until the present Bush Republicans. Donald Rumsfeld has succeeded in privatizing several functions of our civilian army using some of the favorite buzz words of business-- “efficiency” and “modern”. For us as citizens what this privatization really means is that our taxes to support defense must now include a little extra for the profit margins of these privatized entities and that we have through our Congress a lot less control of our defense.

I hope that you are as alarmed as I by this change.

And again-- Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib is once again in the news. Colonel Pappas who was one of the officers in charge there has been given a fairly harsh reprimand which essentially will halt any further advancement in the army by the colonel. His case has been given full treatment by the media. Barely a mention has been made of the start of Spc. Sabrina Harmon’s criminal trial for among other items dereliction of duty. As I understand this charge she should have protested the illegality of what she was asked to do. Of course, if she had protested, she would then have been court-martialed for insubordination. Army has her coming and going, doesn’t it.

So we have here the woman general in charge who was punished, a colonel under her command who was given a “naughty-naughty” rebuke, and one of the very small fry who is facing real prison time. This does not show our present army command looking too pretty, does it. It would seem to be the same sexist “old boy network” approach that has also kept the army from properly pursuing the many rapes of woman soldiers that are reported.

But we the public are still left not knowing who actually was in control of the interrogation of Abu Ghraib prisoners, since the army is clearly unwilling or unable to establish a clear line of command.

Tomorrow I want to talk about the Second Amendment and all of its implications.

Lynndie England trial

Lynndie England’s trial was ended last week by the surprising testimony of Pvt. Graner. I am going to accuse Pvt. Graner of something I am not sure he would want said about him in public and something of which I would not have thought him capable.

I feel certain he knew that his testimony would cause the judge to declare a mistrial and that this was an act of male protective gallantry toward the mother of his son. If he is hoping that the army will now conclude that pursuing this very small fish, who is guilty of nothing more than the usual female blind following of her man, is no longer worth the expense, I am with him. Give her her dishonorable discharge and let her go home and raise their son.

I am disgusted by this administration’s cover-up of the fact that there was no regular army control over Abu Ghraib, that the directions Graner and others were given were through the CIA and their various private forces. Then General now Colonel Karpinsky has been made the official army upper echelon scapegoat in what is obviously a sexist “old boy” protective move. Other than Karpinsky no other senior army officer has been accused. Only the small people are being tried and sentenced. It is neither believable nor possible in a properly run army that no senior officer was involved.

Unless, of course, the chain of command was broken by another command unit interposed between General Karpinsky and the army personnel actively dealing with the prisoners.

Those of us who are aware know only too well that the man who is responsible and who should be held accountable is Donald Rumsfeld..

Home again!

Here I am home again and feeling pretty good!

I was moved by my indignation at the headline in today’s Times Argus-- State prepares to end home-health monopoly-- to write the following indignation letter to the editor. I’ll be interested to see when it gets published....

We have two universal health care agencies working in the State of Vermont and both are functioning very well.

The first is Medicare, which is, of course, national in its coverage. Medicare could not only, as Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts has suggested., be expanded for national universal coverage, but is also an excellent model for a Vermont program.

Medicare provides me as a senior with my choice of provider, no rationing of services, and timely delivery of services. All these things the Douglas administration assures us are impossible in a universal health care system.

The other agency is our Vermont home health care network. I deeply appreciate the assistance I was provided in my husband’s last years. And now, because of recent surgery I am also grateful for myself.

I can understand the Bush Republicans trying to label this network as a monopoly but Governor Douglas!

Health care is a community expense, an infra-structure expense, and does not belong to business.. I hope that the Senators shaping a health care measure remember this.