http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/20/opinion/20dowd.html?th&emc=th
Make Poetry, Not War By MAUREEN DOWD NY Times Op-Ed: May 20, 2006 It was a rough crowd for agents of American imperialism. At the New School commencement at Madison Square Garden's theater yesterday afternoon, dozens of the red-and-black-gowned graduates and some faculty were heckling, cackling, hissing, booing, jeering, whooping, bolting, turning their backs and holding up orange signs that read, "Our commencement is not your platform." As for John McCain, he spoke about how the "passion for self-expression sometimes overwhelms our civility." "We're graduating, not voting," one young man yelled. "This is all about you," another called out. "We don't care." A little while after the senator quoted Yeats about the fleeting nature of beauty, a student sarcastically called out, "More poetry." First, Mr. McCain and the New School's president, Bob Kerrey, were slapped around by a student speaker, Jean Sara Rohe, a 21-year-old from Nutley, N.J., who sang a lyric from a peace song and then abandoned her original remarks to talk about the "outrage" over Mr. McCain's speaking gig. "The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," Ms. Rohe said, adding: "I am young, and although I don't profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong." She continued: "And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction." The New School, of course, makes New York University seem like Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., where Mr. McCain kowtowed last weekend to Jerry Falwell, the looney-toon he formerly deemed an agent of intolerance. (Just as Rudy buddy-buddied with Ralph Reed in Atlanta.) The ultraliberal kids at the New School, the pacifist Greenwich Village university, think of themselves as free-thinking rabble-rousers in a world where many college kids, complacently cocooned under iPods, don't even like to debate, much less protest. When a rigid-faced Mr. Kerrey chided the audience for being rude, a young woman yelled out, "You're a war criminal!" And a guy chimed in, "Yes, you are!" It was a remarkable tableau to see the two iconoclastic vets, their bodies beneath the black gowns still bearing broken pieces from Vietnam, being pilloried by kids angry about another endless war, faceless enemy and feckless defense secretary. Senator McCain came to Mr. Kerrey's defense in 2001. That's when graduate students called for the New School president to resign and for Congress to investigate him because a Times magazine piece had revealed that he had led a Seals unit that killed up to 20 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. (The Pentagon is now investigating a case in Haditha, Iraq, where marines are accused of killing 15 unarmed Iraqis from two families, including 7 women and 3 children.) Yesterday, Mr. Kerrey returned the favor, admonishing the students that when they are "heckling from an audience ... no bravery is required." The Arizona senator did not depart from his text and engage the students, as Bill Clinton might have done, with a passionate exegesis of his stance. And, still trying to show that his temper is under control, he did not push back, as Rudy Giuliani might have. He may have even found the screaming students useful, as a liberal hippie foil that will endear him to the evangelical base he's smooching up. Mr. McCain's adviser, John Weaver, talked dismissively of the West Village students, saying they should get out more and hear opposing viewpoints. Mr. McCain's panderthon grew even more absurd this week. He let the Wyly brothers - the Texas businessmen who financed a $2.5 million ad campaign in 2000 trashing his environmental record, a move that enraged Mr. McCain and spurred him to call the Wylys W.'s "sleazy Texas buddies" - hold a fund-raiser for him in Dallas. The senator may have wanted to give the same commencement speech at Liberty, the New School and Columbia as a way of showing those disillusioned by his snuggling with old enemies that he is still a straight talker, willing to say the same thing to Southern conservatives and Northern liberals. But Bob Kerrey better summed up the feeling of many of us about the New McCain in the new issue of Men's Vogue. He mocked the senator's coziness with W., telling Ned Martel: "He kissed him! McCain let Bush's lips touch him. Yuck!" *** From: Michael Munk Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 8:03 PM Subject: US combat casualties pass 20,000 The media don't report it this way, but today's US combat casualtes in Iraq have passed the 20,000 mark. That's still far less than the actual total of about 40,000 total casualties. The total of personnel wounded by what the Pentagon classifies as "hostile causes" reached 18,088 last week, while dead from those causes were 1,924. That's 20,012. The reporting of these numbers, of course, deliberately minimizes the actual human cost of the war. It does not include between 15,000 and 20,000 injured by what the Pentagon calls "non-hostile" causes, even though the victims' lives may be even more devastated. The 525 dead from such causes are, however, included in the total "deaths"( 2,449 today) and are the figure most Americans learn from their media. There's a big political difference beween 2,449 and 20,012 but so far the media are cooperating with the Penatgon by ignoring it. *** I edited the following for brevity, udate and inclusion in this email. Please read it as a succinct, valuable analysis, or for the original click on http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051506Y.shtml -Ed Humpty-Dumpty Republicans, by William Rivers Pitt, May 15, 2006 Before the immigration debate blew up, the GOP coalition was one big (mostly) happy family. The business conservatives - the ones with the money - happily deployed the movement conservatives - the ones with the causes - as their "useful idiots" on the ground. So long as the GOP remained stalwartly against Roe v. Wade, and so long as Bush continued to mouth platitudes about Jesus, the movement conservatives would keep voting Republican, and the business conservatives would get the tax cuts and deregulation they live for. It was a match literally made in heaven, if you believe what you read on GOP direct-mail flyers. The divide here is straightforward: The movement conservatives want massive border security, want to deport every illegal immigrant in the country and want to make citizenship harder to obtain. The business conservatives, on the other hand, enjoy having a massive pool of illegal laborers to tap because they can pay those laborers slave wages, avoid having to offer them insurance and thus pad their profits. This divide was ripped wide open when two competing bills appeared in Congress recently. The House bill, a truly draconian piece of work offered by Rep. Sensenbrenner, pandered to the movement conservatives. The Senate bill, which allowed for citizenship for illegal immigrants after a long series of hurdles, was more suitable to the business conservatives. The two bills were incompatible from the start and the entire debate collapsed into a blaze of acrimony. George W. Bush, as leader of the Republican party, was the inheritor of this mess. Though he owes his political success to the work of the movement conservatives, Bush's heart lies with the businessmen. He voiced support for the Senate immigration bill, and then watched as his favorability numbers among the GOP grassroots dropped like a ruptured duck. A recent New York Times/CBS poll placed his approval rating on the immigration issue at 26%, and for the first time, Republicans appear to be abandoning him. It was, strictly speaking, a terrible time for this kind of division to erupt within the GOP ranks. Iraq is a mess, Goss has quit the CIA under terribly suspicious circumstances, the #3 man at CIA just had his house searched, the scandal surrounding Duke Cunningham has reached into the heart of the House Intelligence, Appropriations and Armed Services Committees, Rep. Jerry Lewis of California is the newest name on the list of those being looked at, the Abramoff scandal continues to walk and talk, Karl Rove has reportedly been indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald in the Plame investigation, and it seems that the NSA has been harvesting millions upon millions of telephone calls from Americans to Americans, despite strident denials by Bush administration officials that anything of the sort has been going on. There isn't much Mr. Bush can do about this long laundry list of scandals and catastrophes. He can, however, try to pull together the separating spheres of his coalition. By announcing a significant military presence along the southern border, Bush is seeking to mollify the movement conservatives, without whom any attempt at national electoral victory would be a comprehensive waste of time. He will also, in all likelihood, voice support for the Senate version of the immigration bill, thus mollifying the business conservatives who write all the checks during campaign time. Somewhere in there, or afterwards, he and his spinners will have to explain how deploying National Guard forces, which are already massively overtaxed because of Iraq, won't weaken our military even further. There will also be the matter of how he plans to pay for this operation, given the ocean of red ink currently flowing through Washington. It will be, in the end, one heck of a straddle, and the stakes are tremendously high. If Bush is unable to bring the Republican coalition back together again in time for the midterms, a lot of conservative voters will stay home on election day. The Democrats could conceivably pick up enough seats to regain the majority, and if that happens, the subpoenas will start flying out of Conyers's office faster than one can say, "What did the president know and when did he know it?" Reading tea leaves is a dangerous hobby, and nobody knows for sure how all of this is going to shake out. But the malevolently divisive spirit of Pat Buchanan still stalks the highways and back roads of New Hampshire, the immigration issue he used to snap the campaigns of two consecutive Republican presidential candidates remains as dangerous now as it was in 1992. Can Bush stuff this genie back into the bottle? Watch and see. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. ------------------------ Yahoo! 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