WATCH WHO YOU DANCE WITH
"According to the geographical isolation theory, speciation begins with the accidental geographical division of a single ancestral species into separate populations. No longer able to interbreed, the two populations drift apart, or are pushed by natural selection in different evolutionary directions. Then, if they subsequently meet after this divergence, they either can't interbreed or don't want to. They often recognize their own species by some particular feature, and studiously avoid similar species who lack it. Natural selection penalizes mating with the wrong species, especially where the species are close enough for it to be a temptation, and close enough for hybrid offspring to survive, to consume costly parental resources, and then turn out to be sterile, like mules. Many zoologists have interpreted courtship displays as aimed mainly against miscegenation. This may be an exaggeration, and there are other important selection pressures bearing upon courtship. But it is still probably correct to interpret some courtship displays, and some bright colours and other conspicuous advertisements, as 'reproductive isolation mechanisms' evolved through selection against hybridization." —Richard Dawkins, THE ANCESTOR'S TALE, p. 339
Speaking of courtship rituals. For a good part of my life I was attracted to women who had been victims of various sorts of abuse in their lives, from sexual through psychological to physical abuse. I was sexually attracted to women I feared. Part of every sexual urge I'd feel would be hyped up or under girded with fear. I feared those I was attracted to because women who have been badly mistreated by men aren't likely to like men very much. My own mother was beaten with coat hangers and locked in closets as a young girl is southern Ohio. And this is the woman who "raised" me the first four years of my life. What feelings about myself and women in general did I pick up in my relationship with her? Theory has it that we learn who and how to love from our relationships with our mothers or whatever woman might be closest to us when we're pretty tiny things. Makes sense to me. My mother could be pretty dangerous and my stepmother was another horse of the same color, physically and psychologically abusive and a damn fine body too. Ah—talk about sex and fear!
Took me a long time to feel the fear which underlay all my attractions, but I got there eventually. I confronted my fears and worked through them in counseling. (Aside: Now I'll never be able to run for public office because conservatives have contempt for those who go in for counseling. That's because they also have fears and emotional twists in their own pasts which they're afraid to confront. See Rove and Delay and so many others. There are some psychological theories which predict that many politicians seek political power because they have felt so powerless in their pasts that they want to control their environment for safety's sake. O, well!)
In short, watch who you dance with. Now, let me also explain, this does no in any way imply that women who have been abused are not fit subjects to marry. Just like me, if they have worked on their problems, they can become the "great a wonderful partner" I have become in my current marriage. Only took me four tries to get it close to right, and better to work with a damaged partner who realizes he's damaged than to hook up with a damaged person who won't or can't face his/her fears, those who'd rather seek salvation in somebody outside themselves like Jesus or become president rather than deal with his/her deepest fears. How do you think we got Stalin and Hitler?
Friday, January 27, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Dear Reader,
I'll be shut down for a week or so, probably until Jan. 25th because my son has just given me a brand new computer and I'm shifting over, plus updating from dialup service to dsl. My cuspidor runneth over.
"Some are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust within them." —Matt Groening (Think about it!)
Geo
I'll be shut down for a week or so, probably until Jan. 25th because my son has just given me a brand new computer and I'm shifting over, plus updating from dialup service to dsl. My cuspidor runneth over.
"Some are born to greatness, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust within them." —Matt Groening (Think about it!)
Geo
Monday, January 16, 2006
MATH IS SO GRAND. AND POETRY TOO.
As you may know, this fall I started taking a basic algebra course at Spokane Community College. I last had algebra over fifty years ago in high school. Working math problems for me is something like doing crossword puzzles for others. My grandmother who lived to be 100 and whose formal education ended in the eighth grade worked crossword puzzles most of her life to improve her word skills.
I put the expression above into words because I don’t think my blog site will allow the superscripted twos to come through. It’s not their fault; it’s just that my Mac with Internet Explorer 5 no longer interfaces correctly with Blogspot. Blogspot wants me to download “Firefox” as my browser. Which is one of the things I hate about being on the internet, about being part of the whole computer world. They can lead us around by the noses and force us to do as they say while slipping a hand into our pockets and robbing us of our hard-earned cash. They are probably creating a whole generation of people ripe for a dictatorship. Americans will learn to quit fighting and surrender. But, then, I’m willing to believe we don’t have much freedom anyhow. Haven’t I said so a thousand times in this blog? Doesn’t Bush and company prove it everyday, that huge parts of America can be lied to and led around by their beliefs like so many bleeding sheep?
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got an MFA in Creative Writing under my belt too. After many years, I learned to think like a poet though it didn’t come quite as naturally to me as it may have come to some others. I should say that I learned to think like the poets of my generation. Ways of thinking poetically come and go. Who writes or reads poetic sagas like the “Iliad” anymore or Dante’s “Divine Comedy”? I can’t say that I ever learned to think like Ezra Pound, and James Joyce was hard, but I definitely understood Frost and huge chunks of the poetry of the western Frost, William Stafford. Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables taught me how a symbol can be said to “come alive”, and on and on.
Now let me show you two things beautiful which follow from math and poetry.
Here’s the proof that a negative number times a negative number results in a positive number.
4 x (-4) = -16
3 x (-4) = -12
2 x (-4) = -8
1 x (-4) = -4
0 x (-4) = 0
-1 x (-4) = 4
-2 x (-4) = 8
-3 x (-4) = 12 and etcetera
Do you see how irrefutable the pattern is? It’s the logic of numbers, the power of logic. That’s the interesting thing about the patterns of math. Trouble is, I can understand the beauty of the progression which I’ve copied down above, but I’ll be damned if I can understand what makes mathematicians think up the proof in just that manner. That’s what I told my math teacher a week or so back. I want to learn to think like a mathematician. I want to understand how one comes up with simple and beautiful proofs like the one above, not just how to resolve an equation. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can quite master the talent or that I have the time. I can resonate to the beauty of the proof but not exactly understand how to think it up myself. And, perhaps after a long winter of it, I’ll grow bored of working over equations and want my time back.
Now here’s the second beauty I promised above:
DETAIL FROM A COMBAT FLIGHT
frontally, from the left and above, he dove
in, out of the sun. i saw his tracers first,
orange, looking for me in slow curves
that seared in and sailed past; i rolled up
and right and over and into a curve
of my own that brought the horizon
into my canopy upside down.
i dove for it through shredded clouds,
looking for safety in low altitudes; the tracers
still curved past, now from behind,
burning out and vanishing toward earth.
when they hit, there was a jolt, the stick
went loose, flame, and a slow loss
of control, tightening into a dead spin.
i gave it up, drifted through the black
smoke trail of my own burning, the hazed earth
dangling below, details sharpening
as i came in: first the vineyard, then the vines,
finally, the grapes crushed in my landing.
jolted, i lay still in the hot sun
out of which he'd come, looking at the dusty grapes
and the green, dark vines; there was only
a light tug of shrouds to remind me where i'd been,
and the soft dirt warm against my back.
i took a hot grape in my hand and ate,
felt the seed grits against my teeth,
its warm juice in my throat.
when i stood, the earth was right side up.
That is one of my best poems. I understand it to reveal a process, it’s a metaphor about life, my own life specially, of recovery, of giving up struggling, of surrendering to a new way of life. I wrote several pretty good poems at a certain time in my life, and I understood how emotional life can be revealed in the lines of poetry. One’s personal and emotional life will never be revealed in a formula, but one can be emotionally satisfied by evaluating formulas, and I imagine that one can get the deepest sort of intellectual grasp of the universe with mathematics.
I’m proudest that a fighter pilot who happened to be in a poetry workshop with me told me that my description of rolling and diving in a combat flight was accurate to the feelings he’d had up there in the wild blue yonder.
PS: I put this post together on Oct. 22 last year. I've got a lot of posts ahead I guess. . . .
____________________________________________________________________
"The top TV shows in Russia are "Bowling For Food" and "Wheel of Torture". Yakov Smirnoff [Do you remember this comedian? He was big time in Reagan's America. I had completely forgotten him.]
As you may know, this fall I started taking a basic algebra course at Spokane Community College. I last had algebra over fifty years ago in high school. Working math problems for me is something like doing crossword puzzles for others. My grandmother who lived to be 100 and whose formal education ended in the eighth grade worked crossword puzzles most of her life to improve her word skills.
Anyhow, I get small jolts of satisfaction to see my
problems simplify correctly and agree with the answers at the back of the book,
and I love the way the “rules for exponents” have a consistent logic or that
I’ve got an equation which is an identity or to find out that the value of “x”
which I’ve arrived at actually works in my proof. I love that n-2 = 1/ n2. I
love how that looks on the page when you flip the numbers, how n to the negative
two squared equals one over n squared. Though I don’t quite understand why this
is so, still it satisfies my mind to invert the numbers and solve or simplify
the expressions correctly. So on and so forth.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got an MFA in Creative Writing under my belt too. After many years, I learned to think like a poet though it didn’t come quite as naturally to me as it may have come to some others. I should say that I learned to think like the poets of my generation. Ways of thinking poetically come and go. Who writes or reads poetic sagas like the “Iliad” anymore or Dante’s “Divine Comedy”? I can’t say that I ever learned to think like Ezra Pound, and James Joyce was hard, but I definitely understood Frost and huge chunks of the poetry of the western Frost, William Stafford. Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables taught me how a symbol can be said to “come alive”, and on and on.
Now let me show you two things beautiful which follow from math and poetry.
Here’s the proof that a negative number times a negative number results in a positive number.
4 x (-4) = -16
3 x (-4) = -12
2 x (-4) = -8
1 x (-4) = -4
0 x (-4) = 0
-1 x (-4) = 4
-2 x (-4) = 8
-3 x (-4) = 12 and etcetera
Do you see how irrefutable the pattern is? It’s the logic of numbers, the power of logic. That’s the interesting thing about the patterns of math. Trouble is, I can understand the beauty of the progression which I’ve copied down above, but I’ll be damned if I can understand what makes mathematicians think up the proof in just that manner. That’s what I told my math teacher a week or so back. I want to learn to think like a mathematician. I want to understand how one comes up with simple and beautiful proofs like the one above, not just how to resolve an equation. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can quite master the talent or that I have the time. I can resonate to the beauty of the proof but not exactly understand how to think it up myself. And, perhaps after a long winter of it, I’ll grow bored of working over equations and want my time back.
Now here’s the second beauty I promised above:
DETAIL FROM A COMBAT FLIGHT
frontally, from the left and above, he dove
in, out of the sun. i saw his tracers first,
orange, looking for me in slow curves
that seared in and sailed past; i rolled up
and right and over and into a curve
of my own that brought the horizon
into my canopy upside down.
i dove for it through shredded clouds,
looking for safety in low altitudes; the tracers
still curved past, now from behind,
burning out and vanishing toward earth.
when they hit, there was a jolt, the stick
went loose, flame, and a slow loss
of control, tightening into a dead spin.
i gave it up, drifted through the black
smoke trail of my own burning, the hazed earth
dangling below, details sharpening
as i came in: first the vineyard, then the vines,
finally, the grapes crushed in my landing.
jolted, i lay still in the hot sun
out of which he'd come, looking at the dusty grapes
and the green, dark vines; there was only
a light tug of shrouds to remind me where i'd been,
and the soft dirt warm against my back.
i took a hot grape in my hand and ate,
felt the seed grits against my teeth,
its warm juice in my throat.
when i stood, the earth was right side up.
That is one of my best poems. I understand it to reveal a process, it’s a metaphor about life, my own life specially, of recovery, of giving up struggling, of surrendering to a new way of life. I wrote several pretty good poems at a certain time in my life, and I understood how emotional life can be revealed in the lines of poetry. One’s personal and emotional life will never be revealed in a formula, but one can be emotionally satisfied by evaluating formulas, and I imagine that one can get the deepest sort of intellectual grasp of the universe with mathematics.
I’m proudest that a fighter pilot who happened to be in a poetry workshop with me told me that my description of rolling and diving in a combat flight was accurate to the feelings he’d had up there in the wild blue yonder.
PS: I put this post together on Oct. 22 last year. I've got a lot of posts ahead I guess. . . .
____________________________________________________________________
"The top TV shows in Russia are "Bowling For Food" and "Wheel of Torture". Yakov Smirnoff [Do you remember this comedian? He was big time in Reagan's America. I had completely forgotten him.]
Friday, January 13, 2006
ANCIENT FOSSILS DISCOVERED ALL OVER THE WORLD
I can't think of anything more fossilized than the brain of a living fundamentalist Christian or, in fact, the brain of any fundamentalistic religious sort whose holy book (which they still worship) originated more than two-thousand years ago. Their own fossilized brains, awash in synapses which can't recognize natural selection and which believe the earth is flat and that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west ought to be proof positive that evolution occurs. They just have to study their own idea systems to see physiological change (i.e. evolutionary change) in the nature of altered and adaptive synaptical patterns. I do not discredit certain society-regulating systems of mores (morals) which they wrote down at the time those ideas (i.e. synapses, memes) were arising in the cultures of the world, only the ancient science through which they still try to understand the world. Whether their brains' inability to adapt to new realities will have a positive or negative impact on their survival only time will tell, but a close look at history shows many many discarded or vastly altered religions (which they fear) and many discarded scientific ideas (which scientists do not fear). Science marches ever toward a greater understanding of the world, though not complete, while religion just dawdles along from thought to thought, unenlightened and backward.
Hey, I just got a thought. . . !
Some people don't like to think of changing ideas (cultural change) as being the same as changing morphology (evolution), but changing patterns of synapses by which the brain interfaces with and alters the world outside its cranium is physiological change, a chemical and connection-oriented alteration in the brain. This brain of ours actually does link (through memes?) physiological change and cultural change. I don't know whether we could develop a hard science out of meme theory, but I guess some psychologists are trying to do just that. It's been awhile since I've read anything about meme theory, but someone must be working in the field and making the connections I just made between cultural change and evolution.
So—I guess I began this entry as a sort of serendipitous metaphorical adventure, but now I see that I can really say that fundamentalists' brains are living fossils.
ATHEISTS JUST GOTTA KEEP SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
The following is a letter to the editor of NEWSWEEK about a quote that their writer, Dickey, drew from a Catholic magazine.
Subject: I know you didn't say, but. . .
Date: Thursday, August 11, 2005 9:27 PM
From: George Thomas
To: NEWSWEEK
Dear Editors,
Dickey’s article on the new Pope troubled me in one area. He quoted Concilium, journal of theology: “Even though full-blown Nazism was an atheistic and anti-Christian ideology. . . .”
Hitler was a Christian. So was Mussolini.
Look, I know that Dickey was only quoting a propaganda tool of the Vatican, but as an atheist I must protest that Fascism, born in nations jamb-packed with Catholics and Lutherans, was fully an outgrowth of the tyrannous spirit which resides in that Christian book, the Bible, in which not one democracy raises it’s lovely head. Fascism was and is the product of deeply religious people who still pray daily to live in a tyrannous kingdom for all of eternity after they die. They worship a tyrannous king who killed their hypothetical forebearer for the sin of exercising free will and thus show their contempt for free will by worshiping that very being who supposedly makes amends for his unjust killing by killing his own son. Now what sense does such a fairy tale make in a democracy?
Show me in the world at this time any war or trouble which is not caused by people who believe in god. The increasingly atheistic, peaceful European peoples ought to be praised to high mountains for their strong atheistic and democratic spirit which does honor free will by the very act of supporting democracies over books about hypothetical spiritual kings and princes.
Sincerely,
Geo
____________________________________________________________
"Jimmy Stewart was one of the very best pilots and leaders in the Air Force and the kind of American that Americans like to think of as typical even though he was better than that." —Andy Rooney from MY WAR, p. 75 [I love the sly dig at American self delusion Andy gets in here.]
I can't think of anything more fossilized than the brain of a living fundamentalist Christian or, in fact, the brain of any fundamentalistic religious sort whose holy book (which they still worship) originated more than two-thousand years ago. Their own fossilized brains, awash in synapses which can't recognize natural selection and which believe the earth is flat and that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west ought to be proof positive that evolution occurs. They just have to study their own idea systems to see physiological change (i.e. evolutionary change) in the nature of altered and adaptive synaptical patterns. I do not discredit certain society-regulating systems of mores (morals) which they wrote down at the time those ideas (i.e. synapses, memes) were arising in the cultures of the world, only the ancient science through which they still try to understand the world. Whether their brains' inability to adapt to new realities will have a positive or negative impact on their survival only time will tell, but a close look at history shows many many discarded or vastly altered religions (which they fear) and many discarded scientific ideas (which scientists do not fear). Science marches ever toward a greater understanding of the world, though not complete, while religion just dawdles along from thought to thought, unenlightened and backward.
Hey, I just got a thought. . . !
Some people don't like to think of changing ideas (cultural change) as being the same as changing morphology (evolution), but changing patterns of synapses by which the brain interfaces with and alters the world outside its cranium is physiological change, a chemical and connection-oriented alteration in the brain. This brain of ours actually does link (through memes?) physiological change and cultural change. I don't know whether we could develop a hard science out of meme theory, but I guess some psychologists are trying to do just that. It's been awhile since I've read anything about meme theory, but someone must be working in the field and making the connections I just made between cultural change and evolution.
So—I guess I began this entry as a sort of serendipitous metaphorical adventure, but now I see that I can really say that fundamentalists' brains are living fossils.
ATHEISTS JUST GOTTA KEEP SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
The following is a letter to the editor of NEWSWEEK about a quote that their writer, Dickey, drew from a Catholic magazine.
Subject: I know you didn't say, but. . .
Date: Thursday, August 11, 2005 9:27 PM
From: George Thomas
To: NEWSWEEK
Dear Editors,
Dickey’s article on the new Pope troubled me in one area. He quoted Concilium, journal of theology: “Even though full-blown Nazism was an atheistic and anti-Christian ideology. . . .”
Hitler was a Christian. So was Mussolini.
Look, I know that Dickey was only quoting a propaganda tool of the Vatican, but as an atheist I must protest that Fascism, born in nations jamb-packed with Catholics and Lutherans, was fully an outgrowth of the tyrannous spirit which resides in that Christian book, the Bible, in which not one democracy raises it’s lovely head. Fascism was and is the product of deeply religious people who still pray daily to live in a tyrannous kingdom for all of eternity after they die. They worship a tyrannous king who killed their hypothetical forebearer for the sin of exercising free will and thus show their contempt for free will by worshiping that very being who supposedly makes amends for his unjust killing by killing his own son. Now what sense does such a fairy tale make in a democracy?
Show me in the world at this time any war or trouble which is not caused by people who believe in god. The increasingly atheistic, peaceful European peoples ought to be praised to high mountains for their strong atheistic and democratic spirit which does honor free will by the very act of supporting democracies over books about hypothetical spiritual kings and princes.
Sincerely,
Geo
____________________________________________________________
"Jimmy Stewart was one of the very best pilots and leaders in the Air Force and the kind of American that Americans like to think of as typical even though he was better than that." —Andy Rooney from MY WAR, p. 75 [I love the sly dig at American self delusion Andy gets in here.]
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
FROM THE MIGHTY INTERNET VIA JAY
[Open quote] Subject: FW: Bush Administration: change a light bulb
Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:49 AM
From: jay
Q. How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to change a light bulb?
Answer. 11
One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.
One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs
to be changed.
One to decide that, yeah, it IS dark in here.
One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.
One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for
changing the light bulb or for darkness.
One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Haliburton for the
new light bulb.
One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing
on a step ladder under the banner: "Light Bulb Change Accomplished."
One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in
detail how Bush was literally in the dark.
One to viciously smear the book writer.
One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush
has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along.
And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between
screwing a light bulb and screwing the country. [Close quote]
NO WONDER BUSH WOULDN'T SIGN IT
It's a common historical principle that winners write the history. In their writing of history, the truth gets often distorted and the loser becomes the bad guy while Mr. Winner gets to call himself the good guy. The South's distortion of the Civil War in their high schools is one case where the exception slipped in. However, a recent near-occurence in Britain serves notice on those who would rewrite history to their own purposes.
Seems that an Israeli general Almog was almost arrested by British authorities to be tried as a war criminal. British police were waiting when his plane arrived and only the intervention by Israeli diplomats stopped the proceedings. General Almog's pilots were warned and so he didn't leave his plane, turned around and headed back to Israel. According to NEWSWEEK (Oct. 17, 2005, p. 8): ". . . officials there [in Israel] worry hundreds of officers will be liable for arrest in European states that embrace 'international jurisdiction,' which allows nations to prosecute other nations' alleged war criminals."
Man, how good it would be to see Mr. Bush not be able to leave the country because his illegal invasion of Iraq makes him a war criminal. Frankly, I don't like harboring a war criminal in the Oval Office, do you?
_____________________________________________
"It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children." —Kingsley Amis
[Open quote] Subject: FW: Bush Administration: change a light bulb
Date: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:49 AM
From: jay
Q. How many members of the Bush Administration are needed to change a light bulb?
Answer. 11
One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed.
One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs
to be changed.
One to decide that, yeah, it IS dark in here.
One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb.
One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for
changing the light bulb or for darkness.
One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Haliburton for the
new light bulb.
One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing
on a step ladder under the banner: "Light Bulb Change Accomplished."
One administration insider to resign and write a book documenting in
detail how Bush was literally in the dark.
One to viciously smear the book writer.
One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush
has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along.
And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between
screwing a light bulb and screwing the country. [Close quote]
NO WONDER BUSH WOULDN'T SIGN IT
It's a common historical principle that winners write the history. In their writing of history, the truth gets often distorted and the loser becomes the bad guy while Mr. Winner gets to call himself the good guy. The South's distortion of the Civil War in their high schools is one case where the exception slipped in. However, a recent near-occurence in Britain serves notice on those who would rewrite history to their own purposes.
Seems that an Israeli general Almog was almost arrested by British authorities to be tried as a war criminal. British police were waiting when his plane arrived and only the intervention by Israeli diplomats stopped the proceedings. General Almog's pilots were warned and so he didn't leave his plane, turned around and headed back to Israel. According to NEWSWEEK (Oct. 17, 2005, p. 8): ". . . officials there [in Israel] worry hundreds of officers will be liable for arrest in European states that embrace 'international jurisdiction,' which allows nations to prosecute other nations' alleged war criminals."
Man, how good it would be to see Mr. Bush not be able to leave the country because his illegal invasion of Iraq makes him a war criminal. Frankly, I don't like harboring a war criminal in the Oval Office, do you?
_____________________________________________
"It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start life as children." —Kingsley Amis
Monday, January 09, 2006
FUNDAMENTALISM. . . AS IT COMES OUT THE POLITICAL SPIGOT
The description in NEWSWEEK (Oct. 17, 2005) by writer George Packer of the attitudes of the politicians who got us into the mess in Iraq are exactly the characteristics we can expect to find in our local fundamentalist, evangelical churches. Face it—fundamentalists may be okay in church but please keep them out of our government. There was a reason that our founding fathers wanted to keep state and religion separate. All history testifies to the founders' wisdom. Why didn't America learn?
[Open quote] ONLY A YEAR AND A HALF AGO, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq war, told the Senate armed services committee it was "hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.... Hard to imagine." As New Yorker staff writer George Packer shows in his indispensable chronicle "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq," Wolfowitz wasn't alone in his faith-based confidence that, somehow, once Saddam Hussein was removed, Iraq would readily become a beachhead of democracy in the Mideast. Yet, Packer writes, "I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness.... that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one." [Close quote]
ROBERTSON'S GOT HIS HAND IN THE FEDERAL HONEY JAR
Jenny Hearne, I believe, forwarded this to me.
[Open quote] The Federal Emergency Management Agency has done it again.
Already under fire for its woeful response to Hurricane Katrina, the federal disaster agency appears to have turned hurricane relief donations into a political payoff - until it was challenged.
All last week, FEMA bureaucrats gave prominent placement on the agency's Web site to Operation Blessing, the Virginia-based charity run by controversial right-wing evangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.
For anyone wishing to donate only cash, the agency's site listed the names and phone numbers of three groups: the Red Cross, Operation Blessing and America's Second Harvest, a national coalition of food banks.
That first list was followed by a second, longer list of several dozen religious and nonsectarian charities. This second list was for anyone who wanted to give either cash or non cash gifts.
Just as in an ordinary election, however, top ballot position makes it far more likely you'll get noticed and chosen.
The same FEMA list was then disseminated by state and local governments throughout the country. Both Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, for example, placed the same top three FEMA charities on their Hurricane Katrina press releases and Web sites last week.
Those familiar with Robertson and his charity were flabbergasted.
Operation Blessing, with a budget of $190 million, is an integral part of the Robertson empire. Not only is he the chairman of the board, his wife is listed on its latest financial report as its vice president, and one of his sons is on the board of directors.
Back in 1994, during the infamous Rwandan genocide, Robertson used his 700 Club's daily cable operation to appeal to the American public for donations to fly humanitarian supplies into Zaire to save the Rwandan refugees.
The planes purchased by Operation Blessing did a lot more than ferry relief supplies.
An investigation conducted by the Virginia attorney general's office concluded in 1999 that the planes were mostly used to transport mining equipment for a diamond operation run by a for-profit company called African Development Corp.
And who do you think was the principal executive and sole shareholder of the mining company?
You guessed it, Pat Robertson himself.
Robertson had landed the mining concession from his longtime friend Mobutu Sese Seko, then the dictator of Zaire.
Investigators concluded that Operation Blessing "willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements ..."
After the investigation began, Robertson placated state regulators by personally reimbursing his own charity $400,000 and by agreeing to tighten its bookkeeping methods.
Separating Operation Blessing from Robertson's many politically oriented endeavors is not that easy, however.
The biggest single U.S. recipient of the charity's largess, according to its latest financial report, was Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. It received $885,000 in the fiscal year ended March 2004.
Robertson uses that Christian network for some markedly unchristian purposes.
A few years back, he repeatedly defended Charles Taylor, the former brutal dictator of Liberia who is under indictment by a UN tribunal for war crimes.
As with Mobutu in the Congo, Robertson had a personal stake in the matter: He had millions invested in a Liberian gold mine, thanks to Taylor, according to press reports.
Recently, Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Those who know Robertson's record raised such an uproar that on Sunday FEMA suddenly rearranged its entire Web site for hurricane donations.
Gone was Operation Blessing's name and choice location. Replacing it was an alphabetical list of nearly 50 national relief organizations. [Close quote]
________________________________________________________
"The British tourist is always happy abroad so long as the natives are waiters." —Robert Morley
The description in NEWSWEEK (Oct. 17, 2005) by writer George Packer of the attitudes of the politicians who got us into the mess in Iraq are exactly the characteristics we can expect to find in our local fundamentalist, evangelical churches. Face it—fundamentalists may be okay in church but please keep them out of our government. There was a reason that our founding fathers wanted to keep state and religion separate. All history testifies to the founders' wisdom. Why didn't America learn?
[Open quote] ONLY A YEAR AND A HALF AGO, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq war, told the Senate armed services committee it was "hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself.... Hard to imagine." As New Yorker staff writer George Packer shows in his indispensable chronicle "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq," Wolfowitz wasn't alone in his faith-based confidence that, somehow, once Saddam Hussein was removed, Iraq would readily become a beachhead of democracy in the Mideast. Yet, Packer writes, "I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness.... that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one." [Close quote]
ROBERTSON'S GOT HIS HAND IN THE FEDERAL HONEY JAR
Jenny Hearne, I believe, forwarded this to me.
[Open quote] The Federal Emergency Management Agency has done it again.
Already under fire for its woeful response to Hurricane Katrina, the federal disaster agency appears to have turned hurricane relief donations into a political payoff - until it was challenged.
All last week, FEMA bureaucrats gave prominent placement on the agency's Web site to Operation Blessing, the Virginia-based charity run by controversial right-wing evangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.
For anyone wishing to donate only cash, the agency's site listed the names and phone numbers of three groups: the Red Cross, Operation Blessing and America's Second Harvest, a national coalition of food banks.
That first list was followed by a second, longer list of several dozen religious and nonsectarian charities. This second list was for anyone who wanted to give either cash or non cash gifts.
Just as in an ordinary election, however, top ballot position makes it far more likely you'll get noticed and chosen.
The same FEMA list was then disseminated by state and local governments throughout the country. Both Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg, for example, placed the same top three FEMA charities on their Hurricane Katrina press releases and Web sites last week.
Those familiar with Robertson and his charity were flabbergasted.
Operation Blessing, with a budget of $190 million, is an integral part of the Robertson empire. Not only is he the chairman of the board, his wife is listed on its latest financial report as its vice president, and one of his sons is on the board of directors.
Back in 1994, during the infamous Rwandan genocide, Robertson used his 700 Club's daily cable operation to appeal to the American public for donations to fly humanitarian supplies into Zaire to save the Rwandan refugees.
The planes purchased by Operation Blessing did a lot more than ferry relief supplies.
An investigation conducted by the Virginia attorney general's office concluded in 1999 that the planes were mostly used to transport mining equipment for a diamond operation run by a for-profit company called African Development Corp.
And who do you think was the principal executive and sole shareholder of the mining company?
You guessed it, Pat Robertson himself.
Robertson had landed the mining concession from his longtime friend Mobutu Sese Seko, then the dictator of Zaire.
Investigators concluded that Operation Blessing "willfully induced contributions from the public through the use of misleading statements ..."
After the investigation began, Robertson placated state regulators by personally reimbursing his own charity $400,000 and by agreeing to tighten its bookkeeping methods.
Separating Operation Blessing from Robertson's many politically oriented endeavors is not that easy, however.
The biggest single U.S. recipient of the charity's largess, according to its latest financial report, was Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. It received $885,000 in the fiscal year ended March 2004.
Robertson uses that Christian network for some markedly unchristian purposes.
A few years back, he repeatedly defended Charles Taylor, the former brutal dictator of Liberia who is under indictment by a UN tribunal for war crimes.
As with Mobutu in the Congo, Robertson had a personal stake in the matter: He had millions invested in a Liberian gold mine, thanks to Taylor, according to press reports.
Recently, Robertson called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Those who know Robertson's record raised such an uproar that on Sunday FEMA suddenly rearranged its entire Web site for hurricane donations.
Gone was Operation Blessing's name and choice location. Replacing it was an alphabetical list of nearly 50 national relief organizations. [Close quote]
________________________________________________________
"The British tourist is always happy abroad so long as the natives are waiters." —Robert Morley
Friday, January 06, 2006
BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS. . . .
My copy of HANDBOOK OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY just came in the mail, but I don’t have time to look into it yet. I’m deep into a philosophy course at Spokane Community College, started this week, and I’ve got lots of reading there. Was reading Dostoevsky for the class and had forgotten how powerful his writing is. The philosophy course, of course, is based in Continental Philosophy and will feature existentialism which I am, an existentialist, but never formally.
CHENEY CLINKING BIG CHANGE IN HIS POCKETS
The following came to me via the internet. Just passing it along. We all know how dishonest these guys are. Do you think Bush can be compared to Ulysses S. Grant and his time as president, though history has it that Grant just wasn’t aware how dishonest the people around him were? Something tells me that Bush is perfectly aware that he’s surrounded by untrustworthy scoundrels. If that’s so, then Bush is a scoundrel too whereas Grant was only a patsy. Being a Texan, Bush probably believes it’s better to be a scoundrel than a patsy. Bush is perfectly happy to let his fundamentalist base be the patsies.
[Open quote] Cheney's Haliburton Stock Options Soar to $9.2 Million
WASHINGTON -- Senator Frank R. Lautenberg reiterated his call for Vice President Dick Cheney to forfeit his continuing financial interest in the Haliburton Co (HAL), in light of the surging value of Vice President Cheney's Haliburton holdings. Vice President Cheney continues to hold 433,333 Haliburton stock options, now worth $9,214,154.93 (at close yesterday.)
"As Halliburton's fortunes rise, so does the Vice President's, and that is wrong," said Senator Lautenberg. "Haliburton has already raked in more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney Administration for work in Iraq, and now they are being awarded some of the first Katrina contracts. It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it."
All of Vice President's Cheney's stock options are "in the money" for the first time in years. According to the Vice President's Federal Financial Disclosure forms, he holds the following Haliburton stock options:
100,000 shares at $54.5000 (vested), expire 12-03-07 33,333 shares at $28.1250 (vested), expire 12-02-08 300,000 shares at $39.5000 (vested), expire 12-02-09
The Vice President has attempted to fend off criticism by signing an agreement to donate the after-tax profits from these stock options to charities of his choice, and his lawyer has said he will not take any tax deduction for the donations. Valued at over $9 million, the Vice President could exercise his stock options for a substantial windfall, benefiting not only his designated charities, but also providing Haliburton with a tax deduction.
The Vice President also continues to receive "deferred salary" from Haliburton. While in office, he has received the following salary payments from Haliburton:
Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2001: $205,298 Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2002: $162,392 Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2003: $178,437 Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2004: $194,852
In September 2003, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a memorandum to Senator Lautenberg concluding that holding stock options while in elective office does constitute a "financial interest" regardless of whether the holder of the options will donate proceeds to charities. CRS also found that receiving deferred compensation is a financial interest.
The CRS report can be downloaded here.
The CRS findings contradict Vice President Cheney's puzzling view that he does not have a financial interest in Haliburton. On the September 14, 2003 edition of Meet the Press in response to questions regarding his relationship with Haliburton where he was employed as CEO for five years, from 1995 to 2000, Vice President Cheney said:
"And since I left Haliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Haliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years." [Close quote]
America will not be safe until the average American takes back his country from the greedy rich. Note, I’m not saying all rich persons are bad for our country, just the greedy ones, the ones for whom no amount is enough and for whom the means of getting don't matter.
My copy of HANDBOOK OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY just came in the mail, but I don’t have time to look into it yet. I’m deep into a philosophy course at Spokane Community College, started this week, and I’ve got lots of reading there. Was reading Dostoevsky for the class and had forgotten how powerful his writing is. The philosophy course, of course, is based in Continental Philosophy and will feature existentialism which I am, an existentialist, but never formally.
CHENEY CLINKING BIG CHANGE IN HIS POCKETS
The following came to me via the internet. Just passing it along. We all know how dishonest these guys are. Do you think Bush can be compared to Ulysses S. Grant and his time as president, though history has it that Grant just wasn’t aware how dishonest the people around him were? Something tells me that Bush is perfectly aware that he’s surrounded by untrustworthy scoundrels. If that’s so, then Bush is a scoundrel too whereas Grant was only a patsy. Being a Texan, Bush probably believes it’s better to be a scoundrel than a patsy. Bush is perfectly happy to let his fundamentalist base be the patsies.
[Open quote] Cheney's Haliburton Stock Options Soar to $9.2 Million
WASHINGTON -- Senator Frank R. Lautenberg reiterated his call for Vice President Dick Cheney to forfeit his continuing financial interest in the Haliburton Co (HAL), in light of the surging value of Vice President Cheney's Haliburton holdings. Vice President Cheney continues to hold 433,333 Haliburton stock options, now worth $9,214,154.93 (at close yesterday.)
"As Halliburton's fortunes rise, so does the Vice President's, and that is wrong," said Senator Lautenberg. "Haliburton has already raked in more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney Administration for work in Iraq, and now they are being awarded some of the first Katrina contracts. It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it."
All of Vice President's Cheney's stock options are "in the money" for the first time in years. According to the Vice President's Federal Financial Disclosure forms, he holds the following Haliburton stock options:
100,000 shares at $54.5000 (vested), expire 12-03-07 33,333 shares at $28.1250 (vested), expire 12-02-08 300,000 shares at $39.5000 (vested), expire 12-02-09
The Vice President has attempted to fend off criticism by signing an agreement to donate the after-tax profits from these stock options to charities of his choice, and his lawyer has said he will not take any tax deduction for the donations. Valued at over $9 million, the Vice President could exercise his stock options for a substantial windfall, benefiting not only his designated charities, but also providing Haliburton with a tax deduction.
The Vice President also continues to receive "deferred salary" from Haliburton. While in office, he has received the following salary payments from Haliburton:
Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2001: $205,298 Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2002: $162,392 Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2003: $178,437 Deferred salary paid by Haliburton to Vice President Cheney in 2004: $194,852
In September 2003, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a memorandum to Senator Lautenberg concluding that holding stock options while in elective office does constitute a "financial interest" regardless of whether the holder of the options will donate proceeds to charities. CRS also found that receiving deferred compensation is a financial interest.
The CRS report can be downloaded here.
The CRS findings contradict Vice President Cheney's puzzling view that he does not have a financial interest in Haliburton. On the September 14, 2003 edition of Meet the Press in response to questions regarding his relationship with Haliburton where he was employed as CEO for five years, from 1995 to 2000, Vice President Cheney said:
"And since I left Haliburton to become George Bush's vice president, I've severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Haliburton of any kind and haven't had, now, for over three years." [Close quote]
America will not be safe until the average American takes back his country from the greedy rich. Note, I’m not saying all rich persons are bad for our country, just the greedy ones, the ones for whom no amount is enough and for whom the means of getting don't matter.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
Briefly, friends, the following passages and passages which will appear in some of my future blogs are from a book written by a conservative, David Brock, who was corrupted by his associations with the conservative movement. This is his confession and expose of what the enemies of American freedom are really like deep in the heart of modern conservatism. Modern conservatives are everything lovers of liberty fear they are. They are the shills for the rich and powerful, and they care not a whit for workers or the poor. Truthfulness, they are strangers to. As I read this book, I'm moved to pass on to you almost every passage I read, so all I can say is that you should read it for yourself. Read and enjoy, if you can enjoy the story of corruption it reveals. The book is BLINDED BY THE RIGHT by David Brock.
From the Prologue:
[OPEN QUOTE] This is a terrible book. It is about lies told and reputations ruined. It is about what the conservative movement did, and what I did, as we plotted in the shadows, disregarded the law, and abused power to win even greater power.
My story is about those familiar corrupting influences of ambition, greed, and ego. It is about how human weakness, lack of confidence, and emotional discomposure can lead to a susceptibility to manipulation for bad ends. It is also about the dangers of zeal and extremism in a political cause, and about how one can be blinded to the ethics of one's own actions.
I came to Washington in 1986 as a conservative rebel from Berkeley, California, and from that moment through the latter part of the l990s, as the leading right-wing scandal reporter, I was a witness to, and a participant in, all of the scandals that gripped the capital city—Iran-Contra, the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, the Thomas-Hill hearings, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Whitewater, and the secret scheming that led to the impeachment of President Clinton. The conservative culture I thrived in was characterized by corrosive partisanship, visceral hatreds, and unfathomable hypocrisy. I worked for leading institutions of the conservative movement—the Washington Times, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Spectator—where I fought on the wrong side of an ideological and cultural war that divided our country and poisoned our politics.
The process of breaking ranks from a tight-knit political movement has been slow and torturous. The break came not in one decisive moment, but in a series of revelations great and small, about the character and actions of those who were my friends, about my own character and actions, and ultimately about the fanatical cause behind it all. There were times when I was not sure I would live through it to tell this story.
In the 1940s and 1950s, ex-Communist intellectuals created a literary genre documenting their break with Communism. In the 1970s and 1980s, so many liberals became conservatives that a new movement—neoconservatism—was born. Few have traveled in my direction, from conservatism to liberalism, at least publicly. It is the nature of an ideological defection such as mine to be a lone voice, met by denials or silence from my ex-comrades. Only they and I really know what we did and why we did it.
Though I do not know if these wrongs can ever be righted, in this or any other way, I wrote this book as an act of conscience, to correct the public record on events in which I played a central role and to illuminate for others the dangers that I see in an empowered conservative movement. How a man won a Supreme Court seat that I later learned he should never have won, how a lavishly funded campaign of political terrorism and propaganda disabled a presidency—these are events that may seem to perhaps everyone but me as if they happened a lifetime ago. But the wounds on the body politic from this era are still open. In the course of events that I describe in this book, the bad guys often won and justice was not always done. Many of the same forces, and many of the same players, still exert influence—a payback scheme in which old misdeeds are now being rewarded.
Twice as I tried to put this book to press, I was interrupted with official inquiries into the activities of my former associates. Several months ago, Theodore Olson, perhaps the top Republican lawyer in the country and the man who successfully argued the Bush v. Gore case for the Bush forces that won Bush the election, was nominated to be solicitor general of the United States. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Olson denied involvement in the American Spectator's Arkansas Project, a $2.4-million dirt-digging operation against the Clintons funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. As a four-year veteran of the Spectator, I was contacted by the Judiciary committee, and I described what I knew firsthand about Olson's integral role in the project, contradicting his sworn testimony.
While working on Blinded By The Right for the past three years, I stayed out of the news and used the time to attempt to find a sense of peace, emotional balance, and personal integrity that had eluded me during my dozen years in the right wing. I had no plan or desire to speak against Olson's nomination; I was simply answering questions. But when I did, failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr fanned out in the press to vouch for Olson's character, and the virulent right-wing scandal machine, which my own reporting for the Spectator had done much to create back in the early 1990s, went into overdrive to besmirch me. Internet gossip Matt Drudge put up his flashing red sirens and claimed breathlessly that he had obtained a bootlegged copy of this book: "Brock Plans Scorched Earth; Book Outlines Reporter's Rise and Fall in Washington; Threatens Lawsuit Against Drudge." The trouble with Drudge's item was that he didn't have the book.
My last book, a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton published in 1996, had been widely expected to be as vicious as my first book, my 1993 expose on Anita Hill, The Real Anita Hill. When the Hillary book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, turned out not to be vicious, the right wing was enraged. Now, prompted by my statements about Olson, Norah Vincent, who had been an editor at the publishing house that brought out Seduction, wrote on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, "If the world ended tomorrow and good and evil fought it out for keeps, I imagine that David Brock would be one of the devil's chief recruits." Lucianne Goldberg, the sometime literary agent and chief provocateur of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, called me a "turncoat twinkie" and suggested that the right wing had blackmail photographs of me.
If the senators believed my account, then Olson was seen to have given false and misleading testimony under oath. Despite my own checkered past, forty-seven Democratic senators voted against Olson based primarily on my eyewitness report. He was narrowly confirmed.
Such is the world I live in.
In August 2001, the Los Angeles Times called, looking for information on another Bush nominee, Terry Wooten, who had been tapped as a federal district judge. While writing The Real Anita Hill in the early 1 990s, I searched for the confidential FBI file of Angela Wright, a damaging witness who said she was harassed by Clarence Thomas but never testified, in an effort to smear and discredit her. Wooten, the Republican chief counsel, gave me the file. I gave an interview to the Times about Wooten's illegal leaking, and I filed an affidavit with the Judiciary committee swearing to what had happened. When Wooten appeared before the Judiciary committee for his Senate confirmation in August 2001, he flatly denied giving me the FBI file. One of us had committed perjury.
A few weeks later, in late September, I sat across my dining room table from two FBI agents who interviewed me about Wooten and the Wright FBI file. I told them everything I knew about that tawdry episode. The FBI investigation concluded that while I had obtained confidential FBI material, the evidence against Wooten was not definitive, and Wooten was eventually confirmed. Yet regardless of the outcome, I was a witness to these events, and, as in the case of Olson, I believe there is something salutary to be gained simply by speaking and writing about them honestly. [CLOSE QUOTE]
Briefly, friends, the following passages and passages which will appear in some of my future blogs are from a book written by a conservative, David Brock, who was corrupted by his associations with the conservative movement. This is his confession and expose of what the enemies of American freedom are really like deep in the heart of modern conservatism. Modern conservatives are everything lovers of liberty fear they are. They are the shills for the rich and powerful, and they care not a whit for workers or the poor. Truthfulness, they are strangers to. As I read this book, I'm moved to pass on to you almost every passage I read, so all I can say is that you should read it for yourself. Read and enjoy, if you can enjoy the story of corruption it reveals. The book is BLINDED BY THE RIGHT by David Brock.
From the Prologue:
[OPEN QUOTE] This is a terrible book. It is about lies told and reputations ruined. It is about what the conservative movement did, and what I did, as we plotted in the shadows, disregarded the law, and abused power to win even greater power.
My story is about those familiar corrupting influences of ambition, greed, and ego. It is about how human weakness, lack of confidence, and emotional discomposure can lead to a susceptibility to manipulation for bad ends. It is also about the dangers of zeal and extremism in a political cause, and about how one can be blinded to the ethics of one's own actions.
I came to Washington in 1986 as a conservative rebel from Berkeley, California, and from that moment through the latter part of the l990s, as the leading right-wing scandal reporter, I was a witness to, and a participant in, all of the scandals that gripped the capital city—Iran-Contra, the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, the Thomas-Hill hearings, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Whitewater, and the secret scheming that led to the impeachment of President Clinton. The conservative culture I thrived in was characterized by corrosive partisanship, visceral hatreds, and unfathomable hypocrisy. I worked for leading institutions of the conservative movement—the Washington Times, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Spectator—where I fought on the wrong side of an ideological and cultural war that divided our country and poisoned our politics.
The process of breaking ranks from a tight-knit political movement has been slow and torturous. The break came not in one decisive moment, but in a series of revelations great and small, about the character and actions of those who were my friends, about my own character and actions, and ultimately about the fanatical cause behind it all. There were times when I was not sure I would live through it to tell this story.
In the 1940s and 1950s, ex-Communist intellectuals created a literary genre documenting their break with Communism. In the 1970s and 1980s, so many liberals became conservatives that a new movement—neoconservatism—was born. Few have traveled in my direction, from conservatism to liberalism, at least publicly. It is the nature of an ideological defection such as mine to be a lone voice, met by denials or silence from my ex-comrades. Only they and I really know what we did and why we did it.
Though I do not know if these wrongs can ever be righted, in this or any other way, I wrote this book as an act of conscience, to correct the public record on events in which I played a central role and to illuminate for others the dangers that I see in an empowered conservative movement. How a man won a Supreme Court seat that I later learned he should never have won, how a lavishly funded campaign of political terrorism and propaganda disabled a presidency—these are events that may seem to perhaps everyone but me as if they happened a lifetime ago. But the wounds on the body politic from this era are still open. In the course of events that I describe in this book, the bad guys often won and justice was not always done. Many of the same forces, and many of the same players, still exert influence—a payback scheme in which old misdeeds are now being rewarded.
Twice as I tried to put this book to press, I was interrupted with official inquiries into the activities of my former associates. Several months ago, Theodore Olson, perhaps the top Republican lawyer in the country and the man who successfully argued the Bush v. Gore case for the Bush forces that won Bush the election, was nominated to be solicitor general of the United States. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Olson denied involvement in the American Spectator's Arkansas Project, a $2.4-million dirt-digging operation against the Clintons funded by right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. As a four-year veteran of the Spectator, I was contacted by the Judiciary committee, and I described what I knew firsthand about Olson's integral role in the project, contradicting his sworn testimony.
While working on Blinded By The Right for the past three years, I stayed out of the news and used the time to attempt to find a sense of peace, emotional balance, and personal integrity that had eluded me during my dozen years in the right wing. I had no plan or desire to speak against Olson's nomination; I was simply answering questions. But when I did, failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and former independent counsel Kenneth Starr fanned out in the press to vouch for Olson's character, and the virulent right-wing scandal machine, which my own reporting for the Spectator had done much to create back in the early 1990s, went into overdrive to besmirch me. Internet gossip Matt Drudge put up his flashing red sirens and claimed breathlessly that he had obtained a bootlegged copy of this book: "Brock Plans Scorched Earth; Book Outlines Reporter's Rise and Fall in Washington; Threatens Lawsuit Against Drudge." The trouble with Drudge's item was that he didn't have the book.
My last book, a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton published in 1996, had been widely expected to be as vicious as my first book, my 1993 expose on Anita Hill, The Real Anita Hill. When the Hillary book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, turned out not to be vicious, the right wing was enraged. Now, prompted by my statements about Olson, Norah Vincent, who had been an editor at the publishing house that brought out Seduction, wrote on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, "If the world ended tomorrow and good and evil fought it out for keeps, I imagine that David Brock would be one of the devil's chief recruits." Lucianne Goldberg, the sometime literary agent and chief provocateur of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, called me a "turncoat twinkie" and suggested that the right wing had blackmail photographs of me.
If the senators believed my account, then Olson was seen to have given false and misleading testimony under oath. Despite my own checkered past, forty-seven Democratic senators voted against Olson based primarily on my eyewitness report. He was narrowly confirmed.
Such is the world I live in.
In August 2001, the Los Angeles Times called, looking for information on another Bush nominee, Terry Wooten, who had been tapped as a federal district judge. While writing The Real Anita Hill in the early 1 990s, I searched for the confidential FBI file of Angela Wright, a damaging witness who said she was harassed by Clarence Thomas but never testified, in an effort to smear and discredit her. Wooten, the Republican chief counsel, gave me the file. I gave an interview to the Times about Wooten's illegal leaking, and I filed an affidavit with the Judiciary committee swearing to what had happened. When Wooten appeared before the Judiciary committee for his Senate confirmation in August 2001, he flatly denied giving me the FBI file. One of us had committed perjury.
A few weeks later, in late September, I sat across my dining room table from two FBI agents who interviewed me about Wooten and the Wright FBI file. I told them everything I knew about that tawdry episode. The FBI investigation concluded that while I had obtained confidential FBI material, the evidence against Wooten was not definitive, and Wooten was eventually confirmed. Yet regardless of the outcome, I was a witness to these events, and, as in the case of Olson, I believe there is something salutary to be gained simply by speaking and writing about them honestly. [CLOSE QUOTE]
Monday, January 02, 2006
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