Mr. Moderate

One of my major complaints against President George W. Bush is his egregious blurring of the line between “terrorists” and people, groups, and nations who are merely “enemies.” You see, the whole problem for President Bush is that it is very difficult to find some particular activity engaged in by “terrorists” which has not also been engaged in by the United States or its agents at some point in the past half-century. Thus, if we apply the Bush definitions to the United States of America (USA), then the USA is a “state sponsor of terrorism.”

I mention this because, after the recent Hamas takeover in Gaza, it appears that the USA, Israel and its allies are scheming to cut off water, electricity, food, fuel, and everything else supplied to Gaza on the grounds that Gaza is under control of “terrorists.” This of course misses the point: there are 1.4 million men, women, and children trapped in Gaza and the efforts just discussed seemed designed to terrorize them all, or to even kill them all for lack of food, water, health care, and any other “necessities of life.” I know that President Bush has no heart, but what about the rest of the world? Is there nobody out there who will dare to call Bush and Israel “terrorists” for preventing the Palestinian people from surviving this decades-long occupation and seige by Israel? Isn’t this really a Palestinian Holocaust in the making? WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE, WORLD!
Continue reading ‘Hi, Fellow Terrorist!’ »

President Bush and his military leaders (presumably acting under Bush’s orders as Commander-in-Chief) are streaming out hopeful words about the prospects for the US troop surge making things better inside Iraq. However, the BBC reporters on the scene in Baghdad offer this gloomy assessment:

One measure of how bad things have become is that Western diplomats will no longer visit the Iraqi Defence ministry, even though it is inside the Green Zone.

In fact, militia infiltration is believed to be such that no-one walks anywhere in the Green Zone for fear of being snatched off the street.

So, if the coalition cannot even guarantee its own safety in the heart of its power base, what hope for the rest of Baghdad?

The so-called “Green Zone” is the heart of the US occupation, and is heavily walled, fortified, and guarded by American troops. So, if things are getting to be that bad in the “Green Zone,” then it really is legitimate to ask not only what hope there is for Baghdad as a whole, but what hope is there for the whole of Iraq?
Continue reading ‘Where The Surge Is’ »

The one thing which is most broken here in the United States is the health care system. I believe that the reason it is broken is rooted in the economics of health care. When it comes to individual doctors treating individual patients, I believe that the free market economy, as ruled by the law of supply and demand, ought to produce a good outcome for everybody. However, for almost a century now, there has not been a free market in health care.

If we look back a century and a half or more in America, all it took to become a doctor was enough learning from books to absorb the concepts of how the human body worked and what could be done (based upon what was known at the time) to repair whatever was deemed to be wrong. Many of my ancestral cousins in the old south were deemed to be “doctors” because they had enough learning from books to be able to treat slaves and assist mothers to give birth to babies. Of course, so little was known about “proper health care” in that day and age, that the concept of medical malpractice rarely entered the picture. Even today, it is difficult to find one “expert witness” doctor who will tell a jury that what another doctor did was absolutely wrong and caused injury to the plaintiff. In the distant past, juries were supposed to use common sense in deciding cases, and “expert witness” testimony was rarely used.

But my real point here is that the law of supply and demand is broken now when it comes to health care. All of the changes in how medicine is practiced have led to a situation where there isn’t any real free market in health care, and thus it is easy to understand why costs are out of control.
Continue reading ‘Economical Health’ »

The intense political debate in our nation over whether we are “winning” or “losing” the war in Iraq actually misses the point. The real fact is that we never intended to win in any real sense. President Bush went into Iraq with one goal in mind: to capture Saddam and see him executed by his enemies. Even that extremely limited goal proved very difficult to achieve, as Saddam avoided capture for many months, and the total destruction of the Iraqi governmental structure took years to rebuild to the point where Saddam’s political show trial could take place with at least some semblance of decorum. But the replacement of the chief judge in the middle of the show trial simply proved to the world at large it was no real trial, but a kangaroo court of the worst kind. The appeal process proved that when the appeal court insisted that one more defendant be sentenced to death when he had been spared after his original trial. It isn’t recorded in the public news media what punishment the judges received for failing to follow the script set down by the Bush administration.

But to get back to the war, it was never stated as an objective that the United States would somehow annex Iraq as a political dependency, such as it had done in the past with Cuba and the Philippine Islands. It is true that, in the earliest days, there was talk of using Iraq’s oil money to pay back the United States for giving Iraq its freedom from Saddam. But that idea foundered when it was pointed out that the Iraqi government was not likely to keep up payments to the United States after the US military leaves Iraq, and the US military was spending $100 billion per year in Iraq to protect an oil output worth only $30 billion per year. Besides, the main idea of repayment was to pay back construction loans, but again, the US is still destroying more each year than it builds overall. So, even in that limited case no legitimate argument exists for expecting the Iraqi government to make any payments to the United States.

The real issue, which nobody points out, is that even if Bush’s war plan is the greatest success any general could conceive of from here on out, the United States still loses the war by any rational measurement. No matter what happens, the US military will eventually leave Iraq. And no matter what happens, Iraq will still be next door to Iran. And no matter what happens, Shiites with a natural friendship towards Iran will be in the majority within the body politic inside of Iraq. So, no matter what happens, eventually Iran will have far more influence within Iraq than the United States will. With a victory like that, who needs a loss?
Continue reading ‘Iraq: Winning Is Losing’ »

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist by his own petard
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4

The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 25, 1979. The final troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989. Due to the high cost and ultimate futility of this conflict for this Cold War superpower, the Soviet war in Afghanistan has often been referred to as the equivalent of the United States’ Vietnam War.
Wikipedia article on the Soviet War In Afghanistan.

As hundreds of Muslim “enemy combatants” remain held in the Gulag at Guantanamo, lost in all of the moral outrage mounted by the Republicans is the fact that during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States funded and provided arms to those very same Muslim “enemy combatants” (really, “terrorists”) for the purpose of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Continue reading ‘USA Terrorism’ »

Unable to find a decent “permanent” job, I took a one-year contract position with a major contract labor company. This at least allowed me to have access to a decent health care plan, even if I was required to pay the entire group rate premium out of my gross earnings. However, I’m approaching the end of my one-year contract term, and that means I’m approaching the end of my ability to (barely) afford health care. Now, its true that I will have the option of continuing my coverage under the COBRA law. But it is also true that my maximum monthly unemployment benefit will just about equal my health insurance premium under COBRA, so how am I supposed to afford food, shelter, and other basic needs?

Unfortunately, my family and I have chronic health care problems. As long as we are covered by health care insurance, our chronic problems are manageable. But if we ever become uncovered, we descend into medical Hell, and getting covered again becomes increasingly problematic as our chronic conditions are all “pre-existing conditions” for any new plan. This means that I do not dare allow my plan to lapse, as exclusions for “pre-existing conditions” are waived if you are simply moved from one plan to another. That being the case, though, how do I afford food, shelter, etc. while paying for health care?
Continue reading ‘Health Care Horrors’ »

There seems little doubt that the American public is being subjected to a great deal propaganda coming out of Iraq. But how do we sort fact from fiction? Take, for instance, these paragraphs out of THIS STORY:

After the arrest, the military said, nine vehicles moved into the area and positioned themselves to “block and ambush Iraqi and coalition forces.”

Iraqi and coalition forces called in an airstrike. All nine vehicles fought, and five terrorist suspects were killed, the military said.

According to an official in Iraq’s Ministry of Information, the attack planes hit a line of cars queuing next to a gas station near Sadr City. Six cars were destroyed, three civilians were killed and eight others were wounded, the official said.

Continue reading ‘Paranoia Strikes Deep’ »

The State of Israel was born on or about May 14, 1948 when the Jews declared themselves free from the British Mandate established by the League of Nations after World War I. Since that time, the State of Israel has been in a continuous war with the Palestinian people and various Arab states who have at times taken up their cause. Presently, there are definitive peace treaties only with Jordan and Egypt.

I have been watching this conflict over the past several decades, and it seems to me that Israel does not really want peace. Instead, it appears to me that Israel is attempting to gradually push as many Arabs as possible out of “Greater Israel” (which includes at least the West Bank area if not the Gaza Strip). Every time it appears that things might be settling down so that peace talks could begin, Israel seems to find an excuse to do something to set off the fighting once again.
Continue reading ‘Israel: No Peace In Sight’ »

With the passage of the Iraq War funding bill yesterday, giving President Bush another blank check through at least the end of September, there has been much time wasted on talk radio and in print media with analysis of minute shifts of opinion among the political elites. All of this misses the main point: we are fighting the wrong war.

The right wing focuses on the terrorist acts in Iraq and claims “we have to fight them there or else we will end up fighting them here,” in the United States. This ignores the one undisputed fact of the 9/11 terrorist attack: it was an operation run by Osama bin Laden, and Osama bin Laden continues to hide out in safe houses, most likely in a region of Pakistan where neither the US nor Pakistani armies dare to go after him. My rejoinder to the right wing is this: we need to find and fight Osama where he is hiding or else he will continue to lead and inspire terrorists to come after Americans.
Continue reading ‘Fighting The Wrong War’ »

Suppose you read a story about a criminal gang that broke into a state lottery office and stole a batch of winning tickets. They get caught and punished, but the state gives them their lottery winnings anyway. Would you be outraged at such a set of circumstances?

Well, that is more-or-less what the current “compromise” immigration bill calls for. People who are in this country illegally get a mild punishment, but they still win the lottery and gain legal status within the US labor force. Normal immigrants have to win a real lottery to gain entry visas into the United States. Why should illegal immigrants get to move ahead of all of the folks who have played by the rules?

In my view, the only possible fair treatment of illegal immigrants is to require them to go to the back of the line and start over. That is what we would tell anybody who tried to cut into line, right? So, illegal immigrants, “go to the back of the line!”
Continue reading ‘No To Immigration Bill’ »