Friday, February 14, 2003
Before turning in
I’ll be in Portland this weekend, so no more entries until Monday. Who knows what the world situation will look like by then?
In the meantime, I recommend a close reading of Devra’s Fear & Anxiety entry. She articulates a lot of what I’ve been trying to formulate as an entry for some time ... the virulent brand of Christian fundamentalism underlying everything Bush and undermining everything America.
More needs to be said, I think, about the Attorney General. From the obvious glee with which he overrules federal prosecutors by forcing them to seek the death penalty, it’s crystal-clear that the scriptures of John Ashcroft’s brand of Pentecostal Christianity must omit Matthew 5:38-41. There are numerous other examples of the odious (and patently unChristian) nature of Ashcroft’s actions, actions which he regularly insists are derived in their entirety from his faith.
Additional reports on Mr. Ashcroft will have to wait for another day. My alarm clock is set for 5:30am (on Satuday!?!), so it’s way past bedtime.
Thursday, February 13, 2003
The next piece of spin
What are the odds that news stories like this will be cited by Ari Fleischer as proof that the Senate Dems are anti-American meddlers, filibustering poor l’il ole Miguel Estrada instead of making progress on helping out our guardians against terror?
Never mind that the severe underfunding was Dubya’s idea of “homeland security” or that Dubya’s big-Republican-donor-targeted tax cuts and related economic policies have contributed mightily to the nationwide collapse of state and local government revenue sources.
Just watch it get spun…
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Shout it from the rooftops
Robert C. Byrd, senior Senator from West Virginia, is no liberal. Yet his voice has been one of the very few in the nation’s most esteemed legislative chamber to speak out forthrightly about the dangerously reckless course on which George W. Bush has sent this nation careening.
Thanks to someone called CTDem2 (I presume this person is a Democrat from Connecticut), posting a comment on the consistently-interesting Daily Kos site, I just read Byrd’s February 12 Senate floor speech, a movingly powerful indictment of two years of Bush administration depredations wreaked upon the world and the country.
So how is the New York Times covering Byrd’s challenge? In the early morning of February 13 (just after midnight Pacific Time), there’s nothing whatsoever on their website. Same with CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, FoxNews, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times. Boy, those “liberal” media sure do jump to cover stories slanted “their” way, don’t they?
Well, at least the Charleston Gazette back home in West Virginia picked up the story…
Today...
...is February 12, 2003.
Exactly 194 years ago today may have been the single most momentous date of birth ever. On this date in 1809, both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born.
Born into a frontier farming family in Hardin County, Kentucky, Lincoln had little or no formal schooling. In his childhood, his family moved to Indiana and Illinois; it was a difficult existence, filled with hard manual labor and family crises. Yet this self-taught, ungainly giant rapidly rose to pre-eminence as an attorney in the state capital of Illinois, briefly held a seat in the US House of Representatives, then ran for President as the American political system was falling apart at the seams. In a four-way race in 1860, he became President as southern states were seceding from the Union over the issues of state versus federal power and our national legacy of human slavery.
For all their brilliance and logic in constructing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers had glossed over these essential inconsistencies in American governance and society. Lincoln guided the national response to secession, bearing up through early military disasters while also presiding over the re-formation of the nation. Under his leadership, the nation finally began the process of working through and overcoming its contradictory flaws, a process that continues to this very day. His eloquence—the power, depth, and clarity of his words—thrills and challenges us to this day. That his life was violently cut short, mere days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, simultaneously cements his status as our great national martyr and opens endless speculation about how our post-Civil War reconstruction into one nation might have turned out had Lincoln’s presidency continued.
The consummate observational scientist, Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. A product of upper-class gentility, he studied for the ministry at Christ’s College, Cambridge after an abortive earlier study of medicine in Edinburgh. Signing on as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, he collected, examined, and studied during the ship’s lengthy explorations. Returning to England in 1836, he spent the next two decades organizing his notes, developing his logical arguments, and writing his masterpiece, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (1859).
Though he could not possibly have known the cellular and genetic mechanisms upon which his observations and inferences rest, and was therefore incorrect in most of the small details, the general principles of his theories—natural selection, random mutation, competition for resources and reproductive advantage—remain powerful and important in contemporary science and in contemporary intellectual investigation of all kinds. The magnitude of his intellect, apparent on every page of The Origin of Species, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and other works by Darwin, was coupled with a voluminous knowledge of biological and physical phenomena of the world that he used to demonstrate and exemplify the conclusions to which the evidence led.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Depression, and maybe a small revelation
Everywhere I look, I see little but gloom and doom.
Bush and the monsters who operate him are poisoning our nation’s standing in the world, poisoning our nation’s financial well-being, poisoning our nation’s political equilibrium, poisoning our nation’s water and earth and sky. George Walker Bush is just as much the rigid and dangerous fundamentalist that Osama Bin-Laden is. With the vast power of the United States military behind him, with the self-righteous surety that he is God’s instrument of all things good and pure, with his astonishingly simplistic black-and-white, all-or-nothing belief system, Dubya is far more dangerous to every human being on this planet than Saddam Hussein taken to the Kim Jong Il power.
With every passing day, with every incremental outrage perpetrated by these people who purport to be leading my country, I am convinced that George Walker Bush would use weapons of mass destruction to achieve his ends. He would happily drop a nuke on Baghdad, some time between gleefully permitting states to drop millions of poor people from Medicaid and fixing up a few more six-figure tax breaks for his high-roller friends, then head off to a prayer meeting.
