So the big story this week seems to be that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has come out with a tell-all memoir that says stuff that anyone who's been paying attention already knows: Bush decieved about Iraq, Cheney and Rove were in on outing Plame, and that generally the Administration is a bunch of thieving hoodwinkers who don't give enough of a damn to tell the truth to their own electorate about anything.

I think the reaction on all sides of the political aisle is pretty hilarious. On the Republican side, you have Karl Rove comparing McClellan a left wing blogger and Bob Dole calling the former Press Secretary "a miserable creature." Democrats have siezed on McClellan's break with the President, with the Huffington Post even proudly putting forth his comments that he finds Presidential nominee Barack Obama "intriguing" -- and Nancy Pelosi took the opportunity to do her favorite thing in the whole world, bash Bush then do little to nothing to hold the Administration accountable or stop its policies (of course, this is the woman who was briefed on waterboarding, a war crime, in 2002 and had no problem with it). 

 So, let's get this all straight. McClellan for years knows all this, stands there and acts as Bush's straight man -- constantly attacking the war's critics with smears, claiming that Senate Democrats were being held hostage by the all-powerful interest group the ACLU when they offered mild lip service protest to the President's illegal wiretapping, and all around acting like a prick -- and then when it's too damn late to actually doing anything significant about Bush (well, we could impeach him for that whole illegal war, wiretapping, and torture thing, but asking Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to care about accountability or rule of law is like inviting a PETA Meetup group to Steak Night) he comes out with a book to cover his own ass and say, "Yeah, all the people I demeaned and belittled for questioning the President's policies were actually right. Sorry about that. I'm invited to the Moveon Christmas Party, right?"

The most intelligent comment I have found for McClellan's cashing in with a too-late mea culpa comes from the poster Ricardo on the left webboard Democratic Underground. In a reply titled Bull Fucking Shit to a post comparing McClellan to Nixon-era whistleblower John Dean, he writes:

 "John Dean revealed the Nixon/Watergate cancer WHILE HE WAS STILL IN THE WHITE HOUSE. He TESTIFIED under OATH against the most powerful people in the free world. He followed his conscience when it made a difference and at great personal sacrifice.

Scott McClellan is a political hack weasel who tattled like a school kid from the safety of the principal's office, after the vandals got away. He's not fit to lick the bottom of John Dean's shoes.

For Christ's sake."

The shrewd little former White House Press Secretary, in seeing that Bush's approval ratings were approaching that of other historical losers, like President Herbert Hoover or Indiana Jones 4, decided that he'd jump ship, say a bunch of stuff that most people already believe about Bush, and get welcomed as some kind of martyr by the country's left.

Well, Scotty, I don't buy it. You behaved as a lying scumbag propogandanik for the administration for years, smearing all of the President's critics with that dumb grin on your face (including a particularly asinine attack against one of the last true journalists left in DC, Helen Thomas), and coming out when it's too late to do anything about it is not at all helpful. You're at best a spineless coward who didn't speak out when the time was right, and at worst a shrill political opportunist, epitomizing the vicious spirit of cynicism that pervades American politics from top to bottom (directly resulting in the worst voter turnout of any industrialized democracy). 

Some have said that 'ol Scotty couldn't have possibly come out earlier with his information (Daniel Ellsberg, who risked life imprisonment to help stop the Vietnam War with his whistleblowing, doesn't agree), that this would've led to his firing and political retribution.

Cry me a river. There are people across the planet fighting against dictatorships, risking their lives for freedom in their country, and this guy can't even face the leader of a democratic country because he's afraid of not getting invited to nice dinner parties anymore?

Mr. McClellan epitomizes and symbolizes the culture of political cowardice -- of not taking any chances at all, of playing it safe, of adhering to a narrow, cynical incentive structure in your politics -- in this country. He is a pathetic little man, and I'm not going to forgive him for not speaking our earlier, for not acting against the tide of monstrous policies when he could've. 

Maybe if he drags himself to some public square somewhere and lets every widow of every American soldier lost in Iraq throw a punch at him, lets every mother of every Iraqi child killed by a cluster munition or rendered braindead by depleted uranium kick him in the groin, then maybe he'll deserve something less than a public flogging.

Otherwise, the way I see it, we still have an out-of-control executive raping the rule of law and a supine Congress laying there taking it. Nothing much has changed with this pathetic book by this cowardly little man.

Apparently having been wrong about free trade deals (admitting that he doesn't even read them), invading Iraq, and every other relevant policy issue in the past two decades, Friedman still doesn't find himself to be less relevant. And I'm sure that the adoring Washington Press corps, the reverse-meritocracy that it is, will continue to adore him and fawn over everything he writes, no matter how ridiculously wrong it continues to be.

His newest declaration is that we are approaching a "New Cold War" -- with Iran:

"That is the real umbrella story in the Middle East today — the struggle for influence across the region, with America and its Sunni Arab allies (and Israel) versus Iran, Syria and their non-state allies, Hamas and Hezbollah. As the May 11 editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan put it, “In the power struggle in the Middle East, there are only two sides: Iran and the U.S.”

For now, Team America is losing on just about every front. How come? The short answer is that Iran is smart and ruthless, America is dumb and weak, and the Sunni Arab world is feckless and divided. Any other questions?

The outrage of the week is the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah attempt to take over Lebanon. Hezbollah thugs pushed into Sunni neighborhoods in West Beirut, focusing particular attention on crushing progressive news outlets like Future TV, so Hezbollah’s propaganda machine could dominate the airwaves. The Shiite militia Hezbollah emerged supposedly to protect Lebanon from Israel. Having done that, it has now turned around and sold Lebanon to Syria and Iran."

"Team America" is facing off with the evil Persians (who apparently have a crescent that stretches across the region in evil conspiracy)? Really, Friedman? 

Iran is "smart and ruthless"; America is "dumb and weak"; and the Sunni world is "feckless and divided." Of course, the US is the country with hundreds of thousands of troops occupying the Middle East in several countries with the most advanced army that ever existed, and Iran provides support to small guerilla forces in Lebanon. And yet Friedman finds it appropriate to cast Iran as a great evil, decontextualizing why Hezbollah may actually be doing what it is doing (because in Lebanon the Shi'a are stripped of power by an electoral system that discriminates against them). And then he assures us that Hezbollah is both:

1) Religious fundamentalist and cracking down on "progressive news sources" 2)Doing Syria's dirty work

A rational person might ask why a secular national socialist Syrian Ba'ath Party might find it advantageous to spread Islamism in Lebanon, but why stop and ask questions? Friedman's on a roll of pointless analogies and catch-phrases designed around turning the entire situation into one of good vs evil (and now the Sunni Arabs are on our side? Before the Iraq war Friedman was telling us that Saddam and his Sunni cohorts in Al Qaeda were threatening our very existence). 

Of course, Friedman finds some harsh words for the Sunnis:

"The only weaker party is the Sunni Arab world, which is either so drunk on oil it thinks it can buy its way out of any Iranian challenge or is so divided it can’t make a fist to protect its own interests — or both."

So the stupid Arabs can't see the threat right in front of their nose, and for trying to make peace instead of militarily confronting Iran, they just don't understand their own interests. That should be dictated by American pundits like Friedman who have been so right in the past.

Friedman, I have a solution to your repeated "Earth is Flatism"  problem of repeatedly destroying any chance of substantive discussion on global issues. You have nothing to add but decontextualized simplistic summations of the situation which repeatedly cast Muslims as evil and nefarious or simplistic and stupid (with American and Israelis at worst being too weak despite the overwhelming firepower they've used in the region) and avoid the kind of nuance, respect, and understanding that is required for such a complex situation. You could try using that noggin at the top of your head, or you could stop writing. 

Please just don't continue as you have, because for some reason, the elite class of pundits and intellectuals in America find you insightful. You inspire their policies. And if it's one thing we don't need anymore serving as the intellectual base for our policies, it's the idea that the world is black and white, that we can only be tough or tougher, that our enemies are absolute evil and our worst sin would be to not be standoffish and hawkish enough against them. That might not seem like a problem to you sitting in an air-conditioned Manhattan skyrise office, but to the people who will die on the ground if we continue these hawkish policies -- especially talk of a new "Cold War" with a country that has less than 10% our military spending -- your idiocy has real consequences.

This morning Ralph Nader entered the 2008 Presidential Election contest in the United States.

What are the implications for this? It's difficult to say. A lot of it depends on public reaction.

There's a significant part of the public that blames Ralph for Al Gore's loss in 2000. This part of the population usually ignores that 250,000 registered Democrats voted for George Bush in Florida that same year, or that tens of thousands of African Americans were illegally thrown off voting rolls that year, or that Gore failed to pick up his own state or Clinton's state, or that Supreme Court decision thing. No, Ralph becomes the culprit.

I think one reason why Nader is blamed so much for 2000 when actual illegal acts committed by Katherine Harris and her cohort Jeb Bush don't get nearly as much condemnation is because Ralph and the Greens are easy to blame. They aren't corporate-backed boardroom executives floating Presidential runs (which is essentialy what Gore, Kerry, Bush, Obama, McCain, and Clinton are). They're just some folks who thought they'd hold the mainstream to account by running themselves -- you know, anyone's allowed to run for President. That's called democracy.

So if the American people can actually open their minds enough to have an actual democratic race, with multiple competitive candidates -- not just the candidates who bend to the will of corporate power or who can amass half a billion dollar campaigns -- then maybe Nader will have a signficant impact.

He'll be able to be a majoritarian voice on single-payer healthcare, on ending Taft-Hartley, on securing full gay rights, on a balanced solution to Israel-Palestine, on pushing full public funding of all elections, to real solutions about corporate control of our democracy.

It's true there's a difference between McCain and Obama. But if you look at, say, Political Compass, they're still quite close in ideology. And there's certain things - like the War on Drugs - that they won't even touch. If this is a decent democracy, if all the people who have fought and died for this country mean anything at all, then those things should be allowed to be on the table in this election (and debated). Ralph has always been a powerful voice for justice and citizen-led democracy. Let's see to it at progressives that he is allowed to speak in this election, even if his primary purpose is to push the major candidates towards issues that all of us care about but which never seem to appear in our corporate contes- I mean, elections.

There's nothing like the rage of a pissed off American media.

 Western media is out to Get Chavez. They're casting him as some kind of egomaniacal dictator out to make himself into some kind of cult-of-personality hero and give a giant middle finger to the United States, which is of course completely an innocent figure in Latin American history.

 Here's an example: "Chavez Threatens to Seize Banks, Media as Vote Nears".

 By portraying Venezuela's economic independence and his so- called socialist revolution as being under siege, Chavez is seeking to motivate undecided supporters to approve the referendum, said David Scott Palmer, a professor of political science and international relations at Boston University.

``Chavez sees a tightening electoral situation for Sunday and this explains the invective and the increase in conspiracy theories involving various foreign actors,'' Palmer said in a telephone interview.

Oh my God. Seizing banks and media? More like Hugo "Bolshevik" Chavez, right? 

He's using conspiracy theories about evil Amerikkka to get what he wants, right? After all, Bloomberg's saying it. Bloomberg  wouldn't happen to have any financial interests in suppressing left-wing governments in Latin America, would it? No -- that can't be right. It's an innocent bystander, a defender of our moral interests, the nice blue-eyed blonde that waits until marriage. 

 Yet some part of me wants to investigate this. After all, I've some stuff about some kind of 2002 coup lead by leaders of the private media and banks in Venezuela against the democratically elected government, that the CIA was involved, that the US immediately recognized the new dictatorship. 

 But that just can't be right. After all, the Wall Street Journal reminds us that the referendum Venezuela is about to vote on would be an electoral "coup" -- coup, as in bad things like dictators. Some would mention that the referendum's simply on abolishing term limits, and that our Congress doesn't have term limits and that FDR didn't have term limits, and that term limits don't actually deter democracy at all, in fact without them the people can actually choose someone they like AGAIN -- but why listen to such Communist Fifth Legion propoganda at a time like this?

 We have to get Chavez. He's a madman. After all, he's threatening to cut off oil to the United States if it attempts to undermine the election, possibly through another coup attempt.

 We just can't have that. That's our oil -- Jesus just put it under Venezuela's soil for some strange reason. And if Chavez is trying to turn his country's economy to the left to bring millions of desperately poor people out of poverty, then screw him. Allowing us to sit in gridlock on I-75 in SUV's is much more important. You'd better watch out, Chavez. The game has a name, and it's Get Chavez.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/8/16/62545/5027

Not a bad idea, Mr. Gore. So why don't you go on national TV and call for it? After all, young people were doing this against you and Mr. Clinton's destruction of the environment and trade pacts like NAFTA -- so why don't you come to our side?

Let's just say it wouldn't be very pretty for any candidate except for Kucinich, according to this new poll:

"Survey of Public Attitudes Makes Kucinich the Runaway Leader on the Issues"

CLEVELAND, Aug. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/-- In the political equivalent of a "blind taste test" taken by more than 67,000 participants, an independent website surveying public attitudes on various issues is reporting that Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich is the first choice of a phenomenal 53% of respondents.

No other candidate, Democrat or Republican, even reaches double digits.

The website (http://www.dehp.net/candidate/) has been asking respondents to express and rank their opinions on 25 different issues -- the war in Iraq, health care, the environment, Patriot Act, etc. -- that have been raised and debated among the Presidential candidates in both parties. Those surveyed vote only on the issues, not for or against any individual candidate. The 67,000-plus responses were then correlated with the positions of all of the candidates as reported on www.2decide.com/table.htm.

The results are here: www.dehp.net/candidate/stats.php.

As of this morning (the survey is recalculated every five minutes), more than 35,600 respondents were "in sync" with Kucinich on the issues. Democratic front-runner Senator Hillary Clinton was the first-place choice of only about 2,400 respondents (3.6%). Other leading candidates fared even worse: Senator Barack Obama (3%), and former Senator John Edwards (1.3%).

"When people vote exclusively on the issues that are important to them, without being influenced by name recognition, celebrity, or millions of mdollars in advertising, Congressman Kucinich wins in a landslide," his campaign said today."

This is from my school's newspaper the Red and Black (Link an article written by me about SiCKO.

Single-payer care faces obstaclesMichael Moore's health care documentary SiCKO debuted to critical acclaim last week, opening to the second-best opening weekend in documentary history.

It's no surprise that "SiCKO" is such a hit; the U.S. health care system is ranked 37th in the world by the World Health Organization, and we pay twice as much on health care as any other nation and receive worse results. People want change.

What is the problem? HMO's/insurance companies act as middlemen. A third of the costs of providing health care in this country go into the insurance company bureaucracy, PR, stock options and profits. Those things have nothing to do with providing health care and create enormous inefficiencies.

What is the solution? In France (ranked first by WHO) the profit is removed from the system. The government acts as a "single payer" that subsidizes all the costs of health care. Because the middleman is removed, health care is much cheaper to provide, and although citizens may pay for the service in taxes, they are paying much less overall. Hospitals and practices remain privately owned and operated, so they can compete with each other and stay efficient and drive down costs (you can choose any doctor you'd like). Single-payer care also means poor citizens don't forego preventive care and pack the emergency rooms, further driving down the cost of health care.

So if the single-payer solution is so good, why is it that out of eighteen Presidential candidates, only two support it (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel)? After all, polls generally show that somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the American people - including 50 percent of Republicans - support a "Medicare for All," government-run program to provide health care.

The HMO and pharmaceutical lobbying operation is the best in Washington. In the past ten years they've spent more than half a billion dollars lobbying to curtail efforts pushing for universal care.

Already, they've started to flood money into the presidential campaigns, with Sen. Hillary Clinton coming out on top, with more than $800,000 in campaign contributions from the health care industry (Obama, hypocritically campaigning on "changing Washington," comes in third).

Sens. Edwards, Clinton and Obama's health care plans do nothing more than subsidize the HMO's. Their version of "universal health care" keeps the biggest culprits in the disaster fat, healthy and lobbying.

Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers' bill in Congress - HR 676 - creates a single-payer system.

But these two congressional champions can't save the health care system alone. It's going to take a surge of citizen activism - Big People to fight Big Money - to finally throw the HMOs out.

Former British MP Tony Benn says it best in SiCKO in reference to war-torn Britain's decision to create the National Health Service in 1948: "If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people."


- Zaid Jilani is a sophomore from Kennesaw majoring in international affairs.-----------------------------------

Also check out the editorial cartoonist Bill Richards' toon about SiCKO from the same week: Link