On Saturday, David Brooks trashed whatever credibility he may have had left as an 'independent' voice rather than a Bush Admin mouthpiece when he savaged the CIA's attempt to defend itself against the assault of blame marshalled by the BA to get itself off the hook for its refusal to respond to their warnings before 9/11 and its analysts' conclusions that Iraq posed no threat. The neocon cabal, in thrall to nutbag Laurie Mylroie and her whacko conspiracy theories of Saddam as the Professor Moriarty of terrorism, set up, out of Cheney's office and under Doug Feith's supervision, two agencies--the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (C-TEG) and the Office for Special Planning (OSP)--to do an end-run around the CIA's experienced analysts by 'stovepiping' raw, unconfirmed intelligence straight to them. Whatever they found that fit Mylroie's tinfoil-hat paranoia, they believed without question and made policy without bothering to confirm whether or not it was true, which explains how ace con-artist Ahmad Chalabi came to dominate the neocons' unreal version of Iraq's reality.

The Company rapidly became the scapegoat for the Admin's refusal to face facts after Dick and W's Excellent Adventure in Iraq turned into a quagmire of quicksand, and the Mighty Wurlitzer of the right-wing Noise Machine was only too happy to trumpet that political twist. I said months ago, after the notorious outing of CIA covert-op Valerie Plame by the Bush Admin for political reasons, that the CIA wasn't going to stand for watching itself be politicized out of existence and its operatives blown for a few quick political brownie points. The absurd, not to say insane, appointment of GOP hack Porter Goss to head the CIA was bound to intensify the hard feelings and petrify the polarization between old hands who believed the CIA's analysis role was to be as non-partisan and accurate as possible, and the neocon newbies from C-TEG and OSP who saw analysis as another word for 'rationalizing what the Admin wants to do'.

And they didn't stand for it. When Porter Goss began to do the job he was appointed to do--turn the CIA into an Imperial foreign-policy spin machine--they began to fight back. Brooks makes not the slightest attempt to so much as acknowledge that they might have had some legitimate reasons to protect themselves from this politicization. No, to Brooks, the CIA's only job is to 'serve the president', and they should be ashamed of themselves for serving the truth instead.

President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

Oh goodness me, the dastardly crime of 'undermining' the Emperor's Admin by defending oneself against its on-going assaults and scapegoating to cover its own mistakes and blindnesses is one we should never have to suffer in the Imperium. Why, the Imperial Viziers actually felt they had to hide their political agenda for fear the CIA would out them because they were all, you know, Kerry moles.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

... Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

'Insubordination'? What an odd word to use. And 'brazen' at that. Oh, and the truth 'violate[s] all standards of honorable public service'. Uh-huh. Right.

Ordinarily this would be a typically laughable piece of Brooksian idiocy and a good example of why I haven't bothered to read him but 3 or 4 times since the NYT caved under Grand Vizier Rove's insistence that they hire him, but his fawning over Imperial policy toward the Company and his automatic acceptance of its rank politicization are the above-the-water tips of icebergs looming off the Imperial bow.

Newsday reported yesterday (link thanks to The Agonist) that Goss has been ordered to 'purge the agency' of any officers considered 'disloyal to Bush'.

WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

Brooks' job on Saturday was to lead this story away from its Soviet-style 'off with their heads' quality into Imperial Spinland where it could be interpreted as punishment for 'brazen insubordination', and now we can begin to understand why he chose that word. The Bush Admin is going to use the blame-the-CIA-for-9/11-and-Iraq meme as an excuse to turn the whole agency into a larger version of C-TEG and the OSP: an NKVD-style political network whose job is to 'serve the Emperor' and his Presidium by endorsing--and enforcing--what they've already decided to do.

Given this, it would make sense if the first old CIA hand to go was the covert op director who kept telling them his Iraq network couldn't find any evidence that Hussein had WMD's or any capability to produce them, and that everything Chalabi was telling them was false. And guess what?

One of the first casualties appears to be Stephen R. Kappes, deputy director of clandestine services, the CIA's most powerful division. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Kappes had tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Goss' chief of staff, Patrick Murray, but at the behest of the White House had agreed to delay his decision till tomorrow.

But the former senior CIA official said that the White House "doesn't want Steve Kappes to reconsider his resignation. That might be the spin they put on it, but they want him out." He said the job had already been offered to the former chief of the European Division....

The Emperor is, in sum, wasting no time consolidating his power, and in a few short months, we'll all have forgotten that there was ever a difference between the CIA and the KGB.

No wonder the Emperor got along so well with Putin. Birds-of-a-feather.

CONGRATULATIONS!!


You Did It!

The phone bill will be paid next week. Thanks to you, the crisis is over and the Alley is back in business.


Click the picture for Thank You card

The PayPal button will remain at Reality Check, and any further donations will be applied to the same cause. Normal blogging will re-commence on Monday after I recover.

I was offline Thursday due to a computer glitch--something called 'MSDDHelpWndClass' wouldn't load and it's responsible, somehow, for making the dialing program that hooks me to the internet work. When I finally got it to boot, I opened my mail hoping for maybe enough in donations to wage a vicious negotiation with Verizon over a new payment plan to keep the line up and me connected.

What I found was enough to guarantee I could get this monkey off my back, at least for a month. But you weren't done. Thanks to Kathy and eRobin who put notices on their sites and some old friends riding to the rescue, by Friday morning when I got home from work there was enough to pay half the phone bill. HALF. I called Verizon and told them what I could pay by Tues or Wed next week, and they said, 'Fine. How are you going to take care of the balance?" and that was that. It was the easiest conversation I have had with a creditor in months.

I don't know how to thank you. I don't know how to tell you what it means to me that near-total strangers were willing to help out in a crisis. I can't tell you what it felt like to see a small community come together on my behalf. I can honestly say I've never been here before.

I've been an outsider all my life. Partly that's because I was always looking under the rocks nobody else wanted to look under, which makes you weird after a while (people would rather not get too close to you) and partly it was by choice. As a writer, I've always been more comfortable on the outside looking in; you see more clearly when your emotions aren't invested. I was always willing to pay the price--some loneliness, the lack of a support group--in order to maintain that clarity. I wanted to see everything as honestly as I could from my own perspective, whatever that was. I went to churches from time to time but was never a member. I worked in a lot of places and socialized with co-workers but I was never part of an identifiable group or clik--I was a floater. When you connect with everybody, you connect with nobody, that's how it goes. In the theater or on the films where membership is foisted on you whether you like it or not, I joined in but only because they're irreductibly ad hoc--temporary connections that only last as long as the show lasts. That I could deal with.

I came online mostly because I am one of the most long-winded, opininated curmudgeons (the description of a good and great friend who never pulled her punches) on the face of the planet, and a writer. Blogs were a natural fit. I expected to be what I had always been--an outsider pissing against the wind. Instead, I found a lot of people who didn't automatically assume I was looney-tunes, people who listened and responded, people who appreciated and whom I appreciated right back. Without quite realizing what was happening, I became, for the first time in a my life, an actual, more-or-less-functioning member of a genuine community, and I didn't even know it.

I know it now. In my old age, after sailing through the 60's avoiding the communalism that was so rampant and which I so much admired, if from a distance, I have discovered what it feels like to be on the inside instead of the outside, and I can understand the attraction.

But I am also aware now of a sense of responsibility to that community, a sense I had always previously reserved for individuals alone. When a community reaches out to you, you reach back. It means giving up a kind of freedom--the freedom to bail out. But as I have been trying to process this over the past 24+ hours (which wasn't easy; you people threw a major monkey-wrench into my whole world-view), I can see the outlines of a different kind of freedom opening up right as the other closed down.

This is probably old news to most of you--you'll likely be saying to yourself, 'Jeez, Mick, you're just figuring this out now? Little slow on the uptake there, ain'tcha, pal?', and you'll be right--but bear with me just a tad.

I have avoided being on the inside because over and over again what I saw seemed to prove that 'insidership' required the suppression of individuality to maintain the coherence of the group. That was unacceptable to me. Still is. But what has been dawning on me slowly over the past few months (and probably led to the Great Experiment of joining the PBA) is that there is a completely different membership paradigm in the blogosphere than anything I'm used to. It's a framework in which individuality is not only tolerated but actively encouraged and rewarded, yet--as you have shown me so convincingly--it is still a community, a place where people come together, help each other out, share ideas and chores without demanding obedience or conformity in return.

It's a paradigm that I used to think was impossible, against the laws of human nature. Yet I see it operating here every day. The internet, because it is based on the written word rather than irl interpersonal relationships, seems able to foster just enough distance for everybody to remain their own boss, yet breaks down the barriers between people by affording them a means of personal expression they often have to suppress in their daily lives.

This is both empowering and freeing. In a way, it's the best of both worlds, and if respect is part of the equation (I don't have to tell you it isn't always), it makes certain types of communication between people possible that have never been possible before: a protected intimacy, totally open and yet with strict boundaries controlled by each individual. The potential for building communities whose members can speak as frankly and as passionately as they wish--or not--without suffering the usual sets of consequences for disturbing the accepted social hierarchy, carries within it, it seems to me, the promise of a genuinely new social interaction modality that approaches--gingerly and on tiptoe, but nevertheless--the old utopian ideal of direct heart-to-heart conversation.

It is fear of reprisal that does most people in when they try to express themselves. Take that away, as we do in the blogosphere, and a whole different communications mechanism can open up.

See what you started? Ain't you sorry now?

I haven't worked this out yet; that's about as far as I've got up to now. You'll probably be hearing more about this now that I can sort of see the edges of it. The only immediate response I have to what I can see is the necessity to facilitate the connections between the members of the community, give them a place where the conversations that take place in isolation on each blog can bump up against each other, give the conversation some perspective.

To that end, I'm going to be starting a webzine (what the hell; thanks to you I'm here to stay, or so it appears) that will re-publish some of these isolated conversations in the same space. Hopefully, that will help both the connections and the dialogue to develop. That's what I see as part of fulfilling my new responsibilities to this community I seem to be inside of.

The zine is called Blog Tower at the moment, and I'm just stealing things I run across that I like. It will be published sometime in the next couple of weeks, and y'all will be the first to know. Some of you will be surprised to find out you're in it....

To sum up: You have just created a Frankenstein. How does it feel?

'The disclaimers stem from a petition drive begun in 2002 by Marjorie Rogers, a creationist. Rogers collected 2,300 signatures of supporters....'

The Plaintiff: Your Honor, I have 5612 verified signatures here, every one of them in favor of these disclaimers. We 're not saying astronomy shouldn't be taught, only that the composition of the surface of Pluto is at this point a theory, and we should make it plain that there are other theories.

The Judge: You mean your contention that the surface of Pluto is composed of orange beach balls and six kinds of lime Jello?

TP: There's no proof it isn't. And I have the signatures of over 5000 god-fearing people who will swear that that's what they believe.

TJ: But it's still only a belief.

TP: It's a competing theory, Your Honor. That's different.

TJ: Really? How?

TP: We have evidence.

TJ: Do you? What evidence?

TP: Legitimate scientific authorities who say that that business about the rocks and dust is just nonsense. This photograph shows conclusively that the surface of Pluto is made of a layer of orange beach balls. This second photo, taken from a privately-financed spacecraft--

TJ: Financed by whom, may one ask?

TP: The General Foods Corporation. This second photo--

TJ: Excuse me. And the General Foods Corporation makes...?

TP: (inaudible)

TJ: I'm sorry? Speak up, please.

TP: Jell-O, Your Honor. This second photo--

TJ: Uh-huh. Lime jello. I see it. This is your 'proof', is it?

TP: It's not proof, Your Honor, it's evidence. This is a theory.

TJ: And you want this taught in our schools alongside astronomy, is that it?

TP: Oh no, we're not asking that. Yet. No no, we just want the schools to put a disclaimer in the books saying that the composition of Pluto is just a theory and that there are...alternative theories. Out there. That's all.

TJ: That a planet is composed of orange beach balls and lime jello.

TP: That's what we're postulating, yes sir.

TJ: And you think this is equivalent to the scientific evidence astronomers have for the make-up of the Plutonian surface?

TP: We think it...will be.

TJ: When?

TP: When we find enough gullible--um, intelligent people to believe it. After all, a theory is just a theory until people believe it. It's the belief that's important when you don't have facts. When enough people believe a thing, then it's true.

TJ: Whether it's true or not.

TP: Exactly. I see Your Honor grasps the concept very quickly. You see, it's our position that science changes every day--something that was true on Tuesday could be completely discredited on Thursday. But dogmatic belief, now there's something you can count on. Steady as a rock. It never changes. There are no doubts or questions, and you never have to change your mind. That's what we want: consistency. We just want people to have an open mind about closing their minds.

TJ: You lost me, there. Say what again?

TP: You see, Your Honor, it's our belief that every American should be free to believe whatever they want to believe about anything, including science. To be American means having the Freedom to believe that what you believe should be what everyone else believes so things don't get too confusing. When we're confused, we're weak, sloppy. We're liable to take the trash out on the wrong day or forget to put the milk on our Cheerios. Science demands that we be confused, whereas if we open-mindedly consider closing our minds, we have clarity, and clarity is strength.

TJ: Couldn't we achieve clarity by all agreeing with the scientific evidence of rocks and dust?

TP: Oh, no, sir, and that's precisely my point. Whenever you're tied to facts, you have to change your mind whenever the facts change. But if you're tied to belief, why the facts can change as much as they like. They're irrelevant. Nothing ever changes. That's how you achieve clarity, strength, resolve, and a Rolls-Royce in your garage.

TJ: What's your name again, Counselor?

TP: Alberto Gonzales, Your Honor.

TJ: And you represent...?

TP: Well, usually I represent Enron and Torturers-R-Us, but today I'm representing the Amalgamated Rubberized Plastic Industry Council of...America!

TJ: They wouldn't make orange beach balls, by any chance?

TP: Only on Saturdays when no one's looking. Sir.

This was to have been today's post at Dispatch from the Trenches, but I've exceeded my bandwidth (all those damn pictures everybody likes) and they've closed me out, so you're getting it here instead.

The disagreement among unions about how to deal with the Bush policy of turning the US government into a corporate subsidiary has been simmering under the surface for months. It broke into the open briefly during the Democratic convention when Andy Stern, President of the largest and fastest-growing union in the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Bruce Raynor, President of Unite Here, criticized Kerry and the Democratic Party for their tepid response to the assault on workers from the Bush Administration.

"The Democrats have to decide where they stand on economic issues," Mr. Stern said in an interview on the convention's first day. "John Kerry's positions are fine, but they don't go far enough to deal with the issues that are facing people who go to work every day."

Raynor directly attacked the old-style unions' strategy of trying to hold on to what little thay've got left rather than devise aggressive plans for the future.

He said the structure of organized labor was outmoded, asserting that unions were too fractured, small and poorly structured to contend with global corporations.

"The labor movement needs to confront these issues, but not in a backroom," Mr. Raynor said. "We're not the Kremlin. It's not like people don't know that our ability to protect American workers has been weakened. We have to turn that around, and to some degree that debate has to be done publicly."

Well, it's public now. Andy Stern posted his demands on the SEIU website, then sent them in the form of a letter to the 54 members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council along with a threat: if the organization doesn't change to suit the times, he's ready to pull his 1.6 million members out of the AFL-CIO.

Unite To Win

American workers are at a crossroads.

For generations, America was a land of opportunity. When working people united our strength and spoke with one voice, we were able to create the broadest middle class in the world. Many people could support a family by working one job, not two or three, and together we won the security of affordable health care, paid time off, job training, a safe work place, and a pension on which you could retire with dignity.

Today, global corporations threaten American jobs, families, and the hopes of future generations. The middle class is shrinking, health care is becoming unaffordable, and guaranteed pensions are disappearing, yet corporate profits are booming and the rich are richer than at any time in history.

Yet now, when we need new strength and unity the most, working people find ourselves divided as never before. We are divided into union and nonunion as nearly 9 out of 10 workers are not part of the labor movement at all. We are divided within industries and employers as union members who do the same work often are divided into multiple unions that do not have a coordinated strategy. We are divided into a more unionized North where workers try to maintain hard-won gains, and an almost entirely nonunion South where employers can drive down standards virtually unchecked.

The need to adapt the labor movement for the 21st century has been discussed for years, but previous leaders failed to act, and workers paid the price. American workers cannot afford to wait any longer.

The reelection of President Bush creates new challenges for working people. We must be bold enough, strong enough, and courageous enough to give ourselves the best chance to win. To change workers' lives, union members must be involved in changing what is within our control, uniting our current strength, and then uniting millions more workers in each industry to grow stronger. That is essential to building a grassroots, democratic labor movement; taking on today's employers; and uniting a true pro-worker majority in this country.

American workers can win again, but only if we decide to act now. Our future is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice.

At the top of Stern's list is the immediate taming of Wal-Mart.

1. Build New Strength by Stopping the "Wal-Marting" of Jobs

Good jobs are the foundation of strong and healthy families and communities. But today the Wal-Mart business model of providing low wages and few benefits, shifting jobs overseas to exploit workers under poverty conditions, and viciously opposing workers' freedom to form unions is setting a pattern that undermines good jobs for all working people at home and abroad.

Principle: A key function of the AFL-CIO should be to support a strategy to win good jobs in America that is larger than the members of any one union could accomplish on their own. The AFL-CIO should establish a center to support such projects and should allocate to the center all of its $25 million annual royalties from Union Plus credit card purchases. Challenging Wal-Mart should be its first project.

Regular readers of this site don't have to guess how we feel about that: we think Stern's exactly right and that it should have been done years ago before WM had a chance to dig itself so deeply into American communities. The WM model is destructive of everything the American Dream used to stand for and the leader in forcing a Race to the Bottom in wages and benefits: as long as they can get away with it, every corporation in the country is going to try to find a way to increase its profits by stripping its workers of their hard-won gains.

But an all-out campaign against WM's predatory labor practices is only the beginning. Stern has clearly been listening to his membership because #2 on his list is the issue I've been harping on continually for months: health care. It's the biggest expense we face and everybody's pulling out of doing anything about it, from the Bush Administration--which wants to pretend it's all because of 'frivolous lawsuits' so it can cap damage awards arising from shoddy and dangerous products sold by the corporations it works for--to employers who are focused merely on shifting more of the burden to their employees--preferably all of it, and getting out of the business of providing health care altogether. Emergency rooms are once again becoming our 'primary care provider' because we can't afford anything else. Stern seems to realize this:

2. Build New Strength by Leading a National Campaign for Quality Health Care for All

Out-of-control health care costs and declining quality have become one of the leading threats to every family in America. At any given time, 45 million people have no coverage at all, and even those that do see needed improvements in wages and other benefits undermined by the rising cost of health care. Health care costs are now a leading issue in virtually every strike or lockout.

Principle: The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions and allies should unite behind an all-out national strategy to win access to quality health care for all. The AFL-CIO should lead a grassroots campaign for this purpose with dedicated funding, campaign staff, and other necessary resources.

Furious at both his criticism of their methods and his challenge to re-structure their way of doing things, leaders of the old-style unions have blasted Stern's letter, and one oif them has even threatened to pull out of the AFL-CIO if Stern wins.

Mr. Stern's call for broad restructuring has fueled fierce divisions, even causing one union, the International Association of Machinists, to warn that it might quit the A.F.L.-C.I.O. if Mr. Stern prevails in his push to remake the federation.

Adding to the tensions, some labor leaders say that a close ally of Mr. Stern, John W. Wilhelm, the longtime president of the hotel workers' union, might challenge Mr. Sweeney, who is up for re-election next year.

In an interview, Mr. Wilhelm declined to say whether he would run against Mr. Sweeney, who says he will seek a new four-year term at the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s convention in July.

"We have to do things much differently in the labor movement because of all the challenges that we face," Mr. Wilhelm said. "Organized labor right now is obviously in trouble because we continue to decline as a percent of the work force."

Mr. Sweeney, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s president, called today's meeting to discuss proposals to reshape the union movement and to assess labor's political efforts this fall.

He, too, sent a letter to labor leaders yesterday, saying that unions needed to reshape their movement "to better take on corporate America and win power for working families in today's economy." He added, "We should be big enough to discuss our different positions with respect for each other and without restoring to an 'us against them' stance."

Bush's election--and the inability of an all-out union effort to rule election day--has galvanized the labor movement in a way I've never seen in my lifetime. As Newt Gingrich's attempt to destroy PBS and NPR was the best thing to happen to them since their formation, energizing their audiences and involving them in saving public broadcasting, so may Junior's election prove to be a dynamic turning point in the history of the American Labor movement, forcing the changes that should have come 40 years ago and transforming Labor from a moribund movement in full retreat to an activist movement energizing and giving a much-needed structure to the Resistance.

After reading the letter and other material at SEIU's site, I must admit in the interests of full disclosure that I've just become an Andy Stern fan. I only wish I was going to be around to stick my 2 cents' worth in as the fight develops. But Jordan (Confined Space) and Nathan (Labor Blog) will no doubt be all over this like white-on-rice, so keep track with them.

If I don't see you again: Keep The Faith.

Eric suggested a PayPal button for donations. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered doing that. I have.

Like a lot of Americans--a lot of people, probably--I have 'issues' about money that I've never resolved. I'm profoundly schizophrenic about it. On the one hand, I like having it. It makes things a lot easier. I feel more human with some than I do when I don't have any. On the other hand, if you're not careful, it can take over awful quick. The burgeoning commercialism on the net is a prime example. I surf a lot of sites with so many ads the page takes 2 or 3 minutes to load. They're not horrendously intrusive in the blogosphere, as a rule, but they're a sign of what's coming. I've seen it before.

As a couple of you know, I've been on the verge of starting a couple of online magazines. One of them, devoted to humor, was going to be an experiment in pay-blogs. I was going to charge a small fee ($2) to view each month's issue and $6 for a year's subscription, and put ads on every page. I hoped to make only enough to pay for the site at first, but if it worked, to pay the writers who contributed just like a real litmag would.

That. to me, is how commercialism ought to work: up front, this is what you're getting and this is what it will cost. That ought to be separate from sites like the Alley and Dispatch. I never wanted those to be about money.

So when the shit hit the fan this summer, it occurred to me that just this once, maybe, I should ask for donations to pay the phone bill. I went round and round about it and basically stalled as long as I could believe that the work would come back before we got to the termination point. But it didn't and now I'm there and I have to stop ducking it and make a decision.

As of the time I wrote this, I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that as much as it hurt to stop doing this and give up this aspect of the battle, maybe it was time to move on. Bush won, and that means the next few years are going to be a long struggle dedicated pretty much to survival. I won't stop writing. I can't. I've tried and I hate myself when I'm not working. Everybody else hates me, too. I'm a bear--short-tempered, irritable, unhappy all the time and liable to snap at the slightest provocation. But I have projects sitting in my computer that I have stolen time from to do this. A hiatis, I thought, might be just what's needed here.

On the other hand (can you tell I'm bi-polar?), Bush won. That means that the next four years need as many of us plugging away as possible. Despite all the weaknesses of the internet in general and blogs in particular, this format holds the greatest promise of citizen-participation on a mass scale, and I'd hate for money to be the reason I'm not part of it. That somehow seems like handing them another victory: take away our money and you shut us up. See? Like Olsen said before the SCOTUS, 'Money is free speech.'

Last night the thought of being forced to stop this meant I was allowed to work on the book more regularly. After all, there are tons of good sites out there--I've even helped call attention to some of them--and the loss of this one is nothing in the Grand Scheme. You'll just move on to others that are (almost) as well-written (WARNING: ego-plug) and a lot more informative. Of opinion and analysis, there is so much that you could read 24/7 and still not scratch the surface. No single one of us is that critical to the effort. If one goes down, there are thousands more to take its place. And that's as it should be.

But today, it means Bush gets what he wants. Fuck 'im.

So--a compromise. I put a PayPal donation button at Reality Check. I put it there because it will go straight to my Verizon account (I think....). If enough comes in to keep the phone line from being shut down, then the Alley will stay in business and continue its snarky, sarcastic, standing-on-a-soapbox-and-screaming-at-the-top-of-its-lungs ways, and Dispatch will keep sniping at the corporations, reminding people that there is a class war and they're losing it, and standing up any way it can for the ones nobody cares about. If it doesn't, we move on and no hard feelings.

If you click the boot, it will take you to the page at Reality Check where the PayPal button is.

I'll keep my fingers crossed. And thank you.

The Awful Truth

Bush won this election not by pandering to the religious right, although that certainly helped, nor did he win by lying about his record, although that was critical. He won by playing Commander-in-Chief on tv.

The election, as the 'Sad American' letter tends to show, was about what everybody said it was going to be about for months: national security. Rove had Junior and His Snarling Veep Road Show play every conceivable variation on the Theme from Fear: The Movie in every key precinct in every swing state, sometimes so often that Bush could probably have called everybody in his limited, loyalty-oath-sanctioned crowds by their first names. Over and over: Kerry won't protect you, Kerry is indecisive, Kerry doesn't understand this is a war, Kerry wants to hand your security over to the UN, Kerry wants to ask Europe's permission to protect the nation, and on and on and on like a broken record, the same phrases, the same lines, the same lame gags.

Look at the convention. There was no talk about 'values' or the gay marriage amendment or prayer in schools. There wasn't even all that much talk of religion except in carefully couched, coded language. What did they talk about? What words were repeated endlessly by every speaker, particularly Giuliani? Terror. Terrorist. Terror. Fear. Attack. Terrorists. Destruction. Fear. Destroy. Weapons of mass destruction. Terror.

That's not an appeal to 'values', it's an appeal to fear. it's the commodity they were selling and they sold it like any other product: repetition, repetition, repetition. Every other word out of their mouths was Terror or Terrorist, every other sentence was about how unsafe we were. Thankfully, Rove had Bush dump the idea of wearing his uniform to accept the nomination but it was a close call.

Yes, I think the election was stolen in the key states of Florida--where the massive irregularities we should have expected are just now beginning to surface--New Mexico, and, of course, Ohio, but if Kerry could have won the election in the EC, he still would have lost the popular vote even with legitimate recounts, and that's the Awful Truth here. In order to understand what really happened, we have to look more closely at the exit polls. We have been blinded by the '80% of the people who voted on values voted for Bush'. 80% is a lot, or so it seems. But only 22% of the respondents voted on values. That's 4/5 of 1/5, or about 16% give or take. That's lower than in the last election. With 84+% of voters giving different reasons, I don't see how anyone can make a case that it was 'values' that swung it.

In writing we would call 'values' a sub-plot in this election: important but not the dominant theme. The dominant theme was clearly the one Bush ran on: We're at War. Support Your Commander-in-Chief in a Time of War. That's what his cheerleader stump speech centered on, that's what Cheney's dour warning stump speech centered on, and that was what the vast majority of the B/C ads centered on. It was a bald-faced play to the guilt over Viet Nam and the angry cries of conservatives that the nation had been cowardly in turning its back on Nixon, in withdrawing its support of the troops. They lost that battle because Viet Nam was a tv charnel house, a bloody, unforgiving war with no redeeming features and a purpose that was a fantasy: the Domino Theory was a crock, and by 1972 everybody knew it. It was an unsupportable war undertaken for specious reasons that no one could explain or understand, and conservatives have been fuming about it ever since.

To some degree, the First Gulf War was a scam, a show meant to finally relieve the nation's guilt over Nam by letting us cheer for our boys again. It would have worked, too, for most of us, but not the hard-line ultra-conservatives and the neocons. They were furious that Poppy had refused to finish the job. But Poppy understood what they didn't: it was a Show, and when the Show is over, you let the actors and the audience go home. On the other hand, Karl understood what Poppy didn't: you don't call the Show off too far in advance of your re-election; you keep the audience entertained right up to the time they vote, because then they'll vote for you. Give them a few months to think about it and they might not. Once the Show is over, the actors are just actors again.

Viet Nam cut deep. Up to then we had never lost a war, we had never had to face either our naivete or our arrogance, we had never had to admit we wrong. Viet Nam turned the whole of America--or the large part of it that never came to terms with the travesty that was Nam--into the South after the Civil War when the humiliation of a loss that couldn't be borne was borne by translating it into resentment and an itch for revenge. Some of us simply refused to believe that Viet Nam was the hellhole it was or that the Domino Theory was crap or that 50,000 men had basically died for nothing or that the America of WW II, the Savior of the World, could sometimes act like a tyrannical overlord, or that uncle you have who only visits for a few hours on Christmas and spends the whole time explaining in great detail how each member of the rest of the family should live.

It wasn't a pretty picture and we didn't like ourselves very much, so we decided not to believe it. Maybe that wouldn't have been so bad, but we also decided to get even for it, and that is. The Viet Nam War encapsulated for a lot of people the whole messy time: the rejection of the previous generation's dreams of material success; the attacks on cherished traditions, thousands of years old, from the place of Woman (in the home, needless to say) to civil rights to drugs and rock'n'roll; the blithe indifference of a generation of plenty for the skinflint fears of a generation that lived through the Great Depression. Viet Nam wrapped it all up in a neat bundle.

There are two great underlying traumas in American life that we have steadfastly refused to deal with no matter how many chances we had. One is race, and the other is Viet Nam. We have treated both of them like malformed cousins we let out of the closet once a year but if anybody sees us together, we say, like Peter, 'What? Him? No, no relation to me. Uh-uh, no. Never saw him before in my life. Ugly little bastard, isn't he?' Instead of taking our medicine like grown-ups and admitting we weren't perfect and maybe even had a flaw or two we needed to work on, we buried the kid back in the closet and then went about our business as if he didn't exist.

The result is the Bush Cult. At root it feeds and feeds on these insecurities and guilt in the most effective way: it tells us there's nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to think about it, we didn't do anything wrong, and anyway it's somebody else's fault. The USS Lincoln flight accomplished exactly what it was supposed to: it cemented Bush in our minds as our C-in-C. We didn't know it was a stunt because we didn't want to know it was a stunt; we wanted to believe it, to believe in him. All those sycophantic Republican women oohing and aahing about his 'package' and how sexy he was should have told us clued us in--whatever else George W Bush may be, a matinee idol he ain't. He looked near-ridiculous in the suit, like a little kid playing dress-up, but it served its purpose.

We voted for Bush--and Nixon and Reagan and even, to a certain extent, Clinton--because we desperately wanted somebody to tell us it was alright. The very intensity of the right-wing's 'For gawd's-sake, get over it already!' response when we mentioned the eerie similarities between Nam and Iraq told us how sick they were of feeling guilty about it. We voted for Bush, in short, because he was the one who had finally shown us the 'package' we'd been waiting for, a 30-year wait: Not only wasn't Viet Nam wrong, it was the right policy and we shouldn't have flinched and here's the guy who going to prove it in Iraq. We were right all along.

And so exactly the same mistake is made all over again in order to prove that the first mistake wasn't a mistake at all.

But it was, and so is this one.

Reality has hit. Hard.

I wanted to say good-bye to everyone who has been so kind to me here, and to all the visitors who, I hope, got their money's worth (how could you not? it's free) over the past year both here and at Omnium before I vanish into the ether from whence I came.

The fact is that I have been struggling along on part-time work since June, rarely more than two days a week, and it doesn't look like the work is coming back any time soon. Three or four times in the last year and a couple this summer I have been in the same spot, but something always happened to pull me out--a couple of extra days' work, somebody buying something I was selling, my vacation pay--and as long as I had hope I hung in there. But this time it's different.

Barring a minor miracle, the phone company is going to shut off my service sometime this week, maybe tomorrow. I have nothing left to sell and no one left to borrow money from. I was hoping for just two extra days of work in the last two weeks and I could have staved this off but it wasn't there. Rumors of lay-offs are flying around, and it would hardly be surprising at this point. We've lost two huge accounts since June to companies in the South with lower labor costs and apparently haven't been able to replace them. Maybe it will get better, maybe it won't. I've tried to find other work but there isn't much for a 50+-year-old man without a college degree. Businesses aren't coming into this area, they're leaving--for the South, Indonesia, Borneo for all I know. It's an old story now. I'm not the first one this has happened to and god knows, with W back in charge, I won't be the last.

I hope you learned something now and again--I learned tons from you--and that you usually enjoyed whatever time you spent here.

To the friends I made here--Peter and Seattle and briank and eagle2 and Kathy and eRobin and Nick and Eric and all the rest of you--I'm going to miss you like hell. Hopefully this will be temporary, a few months away while I re-group. I hope so, but you never know--there's a Bush in the White House and I always seem to be scratching to survive whenever that happens. In any case, I didn't want to just disappear without telling you what you've meant to me.

I felt for years as if I was a lonelier and lonelier voice shouting into the wind. I watched the union workers I grew up with go for Nixon and Reagan; I saw my country making a hard right that it seemed everybody I knew either ignored or dismissed as unimportant; I watched people who had been hippies and counter-culturists and peaceniks and fighters against corporate power over democracy turn into their exact opposites: suits and investors, going for the gold the first time it winked at them. I watched most of my generation turn its back on everything it said it believed, and heard it stop talking about peace and justice and start talking incessantly about stock portfolios and earnings indexes. We had changed the world--we thought--only to run back to the safety of the very world we said we wanted to leave behind.

It wasn't until I got online that I discovered that not everyone had abandoned their beliefs to beef up their bank accounts. That's not fair, I suppose, but I have met people here who manage to make a living without turning their backs on those who can't, without swallowing the corporate line like a happy-pill. People who still talk about peace and justice as if they're important, still fight for something beyond themselves and their immediate families, so I know that all the excuses I heard over the years for why it couldn't be done were bullshit.

I came online angry and cynical, and I'd be lying if I said I was leaving any other way. I'm still angry, still cynical, still snorting and pawing at the ground. But there is a difference: I came online with little hope that anything would change. I leave it, thanks especially to Kath and Rob, with some hope that the spirit I thought was dead is still alive, still breathing, still chipping away at that brick wall. Hope is a gift, and you have all given me some of that. I may remain a dour old fart, a black-hearted Scot with a perpetual cloud over his head and an evil eye, but I also have the gift of a small window opened where the sun never used to shine, and there's a little more light and a fresh breeze coming through it that wasn't there before. For that gift, I thank you. I'll try not to spend it all in one place.

As my parting gift--unfortunately, it's all I have--I've completely redesigned The Annex. Now called Reality Check, it looks better, it's easier to navigate, and only the stuff that's still relevant is included. It isn't done, of course, but I'll be adding new stuff right up to the time I can't any more. I hope you find it useful and/or informative. I only wish it could be more.

This is my last word about this. I'll post as usual until the line goes down. Good luck in the trying, testing days ahead, and remember: if a cynical, embittered old man thinks there's still reason to hope, then there must be. We're always the last to believe, and we always demand proof. Look around you. The proof is here.

Now here's an idea--Howard Dean replacing Terry McAuliffe as head of the DNC.

Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is considering a bid to become chairman of the national Democratic Party.

"He told me he was thinking about it," Steve Grossman, himself a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Monday. Grossman was a Dean backer during the former Vermont governor's failed presidential bid.

Dean was traveling Monday in New York and unavailable for comment. His spokeswoman, Laura Gross, said "it was far too early to be speculating on that."

The roughly 240 members of the DNC will elect a new chair early next year. Several names are being mentioned, including former Clinton aide Harold Ickes; Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's presidential campaign; and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.

Grossman said it is not too soon for Democrats to focus on their future leadership.

Grossman said that if Dean were to run for DNC chair, he would need to pledge that he would serve the full four-year term, thus ruling out a presidential bid in 2008.

High price to pay, but who better to break the stanglehold of the DLC? And that's going to be critical for '08, assuming there's an election.

Ooo, Ive got goosebumps.

Inspired by Supersize Me!, the LAT's Patrick Goldstein tried an experiment: he stopped reading left-wing newspapers and listening to traitorous liberal network NPR and watching the destructive secular-humanist programming on PBS and devoted himself entirely to Fox for one week--election week. He discovers in the process a number of things he didn't know, like about Kerry, like for instance that he had 'aligned' his positions with France and China; that he lives in a posh neighborhood inside another posh neighborhood; and some other things non-Kerry-related, like for instance that all the female reporters on Fox are blonde.

Monday, Nov. 1, election eve:

8: 15 a.m. My doctor says I'm in fantastic shape. My blood pressure is 111/64. My cholesterol is 108. My glucose level is 77. He checks my testosterone level. The normal range is 240 to 830. I'm a tad low, but pretty good for a liberal. My doctor chuckles darkly: "Let's see what happens to that number after a few straight days of 'Hannity and Colmes.' "

9:09 a.m. It's early, but today's Fox News theme is clear: pump up Bush, dump on Kerry. News anchor David Asman grills Democratic party strategist Tad Devine on why "we continue to hear from Kerry the stuff about Tora Bora and how we allowed Osama bin Laden to get away and yet he's on record when that took place saying he wouldn't do anything different from what George W. Bush did." When Devine disputes that, Asman jumps in: "He didn't say that in December 2001 ... "

Devine: "Yes he did."

Asman: "No he didn't. I can quote him."

Devine: "You can pull out part of what he said ... "

Asman: (waving papers in the air) "I'm looking at the whole transcript!"

10:04 a.m. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans appears, offering a tribute to guess who: "I've known the president for 39 years and I can tell you this is a man that has a big heart and a great mind who wakes up every morning thinking about you."

10:49 a.m. A Fox News update from Martha MacCallum. I make a note: Every female Fox News reporter I've seen so far is a blond. Coincidence or conspiracy?

6:07 p.m. Sean Hannity asks presidential brother Jeb Bush what might possibly be the easiest question he's gotten in 15 years: "We now have discovered the Democrats were out polling the position for John Kerry on Bin Laden," says Hannity. "What are your thoughts?"

6:59 p.m. Molly Henneberg reports from the battleground state of Ohio. (If you're keeping score — another blond.)

7:26 p.m. A catfight breaks out between political analysts Susan Estrich and the very conservative (and very blond) Laura Ingraham. Ingraham says that when people go to vote they'll realize "if they support Kerry, they're aligning themselves with the people of France ... and China ... and you heard Osama bin Laden try to interject himself...."

Estrich: "I think what Laura is doing now is really destructive. People are sick of this kind of garbage...." I think it is time to check my blood pressure.