Various Writings from Molly Ivins - a journalist who isn't afraid to tell it like it is...
Stand Up Against the "Surge"
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on January 12, 2007, Printed on January 13, 2007

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that we simply cannot let it continue.

It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he said.

His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Bush's call for a "surge" or "escalation" also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: "The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own -- impose its rule throughout the country. ... By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed." But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country -- we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls. We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.

Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy's proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration's idiotic "plans" and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone." It's like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

As The Washington Post's review notes, Chandrasekaran's book "methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq's fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis."

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/46657/
Flawed Justice
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on April 20, 2006, Printed on April 22, 2006
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/35247/

"Compare and contrast," read the directions for essay exams in the old college blue books. Compare and contrast the trials of Zacarias Moussaoui and Jeffrey Skilling.

Moussaoui appears to be headed for the death penalty, despite having an alibi of the lead-pipe-cinch variety. He was in jail on Sept. 11, 2001, so we know he wasn't out hijacking jets and killing people. He also appears to be seriously crazy, or at the very least a chronic liar, but that's a separate argument.

Although Moussaoui is a member of al-Qaida, there is evidence that they thought he was a crazy screw-up, too. Peter Bergen, author of two books about Osama bin Laden, told The Washington Post, "Even al-Qaida tried to cut this guy loose."

In Texas, we are quite accustomed to seeing people who haven't actually hurt anyone sentenced to death. One classic case featured a kid whose entire contribution to the annals of crime consisted of holding open a screen window. Another kid crawled through said window to burgle a house, surprised the householder, and shot and killed her. The perp then rolled on the screen-holder, who bought the death penalty for abetting in the commission of a felony with firearm.

Nor would Moussaoui's mental state draw much note here. Where's Dr. Death when you need him? Dr. James Grigson testified in hundreds of capital murder cases in Texas and was always certain that the defendants were going to commit more violent crimes and should be executed -- even though he never met with some of them before testifying.

If I were to make an argument against the death penalty for Moussaoui, it would be on grounds of practical public relations. Why let this guy have martyrdom and world fame when we could just put him away?

Meanwhile, back in Houston, we have our laughs, too. Jeff Skilling was testifying along about the great rip-off that almost pushed California into bankruptcy when he observed that the state formerly called "Golden" had a regulatory environment like that of Brazil. Prosecutor Sean Berkowitz stared at him. "Do you think it was funny what happened in California? You're smiling."

Skilling backtracked and said he regretted joking about it. But isn't it almost funny, what happened in California? Remember the Enron energy traders who thought it was so funny they joked about ripping off "Grandma Millie," the citizens of California, and how unfair it was that they wanted their money back? All that madness when California was caught in this hopeless bind, having to buy energy at grossly inflated prices?

If the California legislators had been stupid enough to deregulate electricity in such a disastrous way on their own, they would deserve being laughed at. But they had help -- from Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Enron spent more than $345,000 lobbying in California.

Skilling himself testified to utility commissioners that deregulation could save the state $8.9 billion: "You can triple the number of police officers in Los Angles, San Francisco, Oakland and San Diego. The stakes are huge, and every minute that we delay bringing competitive markets to California allows the meter to keep ticking."

Enron was very busy creating the regulatory climate of Brazil nationwide in those years. From 1997 to 2000, 24 states adopted energy deregulation, and Enron repeatedly sent Lay and Skilling to testify. The company spent more than $1.9 million in campaign contributions to more than 700 candidates in 28 states since 1997, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Enron had a huge fleet of lobbyists and even enlisted George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas, to call Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania to lobby for deregulation. According to the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, "In early 1998, Enron Corp. secured a $750,000 contract for political operatives tied to (then) House Majority Whip Tom DeLay to secretly conduct an aggressive grass-roots campaign pushing energy deregulation. … The contract was awarded after DeLay personally recommended to Enron officials that they hire the team of strategists who make up the inner circle of his political and fund-raising machine."

I doubt it will startle any citizen to read that the quality of justice in this country is deeply affected by how much you can afford to pay for it. If Zacarias Moussaoui could afford the jury coach Jeff Skilling has sitting in the courtroom, he'd doubtlessly be less at risk.

But in both cases there is the same feeling that maybe we've missed the point -- the real culprits in Moussaoui case were the FBI higher-ups who stifled the investigation and have never paid any price. In the Enron case, our political system should be a co-defendant -- campaign contributions, lobbyists, sell-outs and all.

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

The Cost of Incompetence
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on March 3, 2006, Printed on March 7, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/33019/

The administration's competence problem is already at the yadda, yadda, yadda stage. They were supposed to protect us from terrorist attacks, they said Iraq would be a cakewalk, that we only needed 50,000 troops. They failed to plan for the occupation or Hurricane Katrina or the prescription drug plan. Yadda.

But when you look at the details of what incompetence means, it becomes both chilling and really, really expensive. The Army announced this week it has decided to reimburse Halliburton for nearly all of the disputed costs in the more than $250 million in charges the Pentagon's own auditors had identified as excessive or unjustified.

According to the Pentagon's figures, it normally withholds an average of 66 percent of what the auditors recommend. In this case, the Pentagon wound up paying all but 3.8 percent of the disputed costs, a figure so far outside the norm, it was noticed immediately. Rick Barton of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times, "To think that it's that near zero is ridiculous when you're talking these kinds of numbers."

You may recall Bunnatine Greenhouse, a senior civilian contracting official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who said the Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) contract was "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career." (Greenhouse was later demoted for her honesty.)

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus." In addition to costs, the Army, which blamed the excess to "haste and the perils of war," also awarded the company additional profits and bonuses provided in the no-bid contract.

And now comes a curious new contract for KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Custom enforcement. It's a contingency contract -- the contingency they have in mind apparently being "in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States." Canadians drowning from global warming? Mexicans feeling the return of PRI? Ah, but the contract also specifies the detention centers are to "support the rapid development of new programs." New programs? Far be it from me to speculate.

The alarmmeisters in the blogosphere, whose imaginations know no bounds, are already positing any number of horrors. (I cannot imagine where they get some of these far-out ideas. From reading the right-wing blogosphere?)

What surprises me is that the administration has planned for whatever it is it's planning for. How forethoughtful of them to have something in place in case a lot of citizens need to be rounded up or something. What else are these people planning for? How to get body armor to the troops after all this time? Improved port security?

One of the problems we have here is that in order to fix a mistake, it is first necessary to recognize that you've made one. But we're dealing with George W. Bush. We should be getting ready for three Katrinas next year, but first the administration would have to recognize that global warming is taking place.

One of the most discouraging morsels of news in recent days is that President Bush was so enchanted by Michael Crichton's novel purportedly debunking global warming that he asked Crichton to the White House to chat with him. Help! Why can't we ever get a break? Think what would happen if the president read The Da Vinci Code.

And so we are back to the ultimate mistake. I'm all in favor of saving face in Iraq; they can call it Iraqification or whatever they want to. Declare victory and go home, fine by me. But somewhere, somehow, some grownups are going to have to admit that this whole endeavor was a terrible idea. I'm for democracy. I'm against Saddam Hussein. I'm sorry it didn't work out the way they wanted it to. Now let's go. Because anybody who tells you it couldn't possibly get worse is a fool.

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/33019/

Bush's Corporate Contortionist Act
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on March 1, 2006, Printed on March 7, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/32914/

With the Bush administration, it's important to have in mind the old carnival con game: Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it.

Among the many curious aspects of the administration's approval of the Dubai Ports World takeover of operations at six major ports (and as many as 21) is this exemption from normally routine restrictions: The agreement does not require DP World to keep copies of its business records on U.S. soil, which would place them within the jurisdiction of American courts. Nor does it require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government. So what's that about?

It makes DP World harder to sue and less subject to American regulation. The lovely thing about the ports deal causing such a commotion is that it allows us to bring attention to this fairly obscure provision, which is, in fact, part of a wave of similar special exemptions that's starting to turn into a flood.

Here's a lovely example of how it works: Just before Christmas last year, in a spectacular example of a straight power play, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled off a backroom legislative deal to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits. The language was slipped into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of the House-Senate conference committee meeting on the bill.

Lots of players were outraged at the short-circuiting of the legislative process. "It is a travesty," said Thomas Mann of The Brookings Institution. Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who had specifically checked to make sure the language was not included, was enraged, calling Frist and Hastert "a couple of musclemen in Congress who think they have the right to tell everybody else that they have to do their bidding." Rep. Dan Burton said succinctly, "It sucks."

The way this was done was outrageous, but so is what it did. Frist has received over $270,000 in contributions from the drug industry and has long advocated liability protection for vaccine makers. As the Gannett News Service reports, the provision allows the secretary of health and human services to issue a declaration of a public health emergency, or threat of an emergency, or declaration of "credible risk" of an emergency in the future, thereby protecting the industry against lawsuits involving the manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration or use of vaccines or other drugs.

In order to prove injury from a drug, a person would have to prove "willful misconduct," not just actual harm.

But this putrid performance is part of a much larger pattern to protect corporations from the consequences of the damage they cause. The Los Angeles Times reports:

• "The highway safety agency … is backing auto industry efforts to stop California and other states from regulating tailpipe emissions."

• "The Justice Department helped industry groups overturn a pollution-control rule in Southern California that would have required cleaner-running buses, garbage trucks and other fleet vehicles."

• "The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has repeatedly sided with national banks to fend off enforcement of consumer protection laws passed by California, New York and other states."

• "The Food and Drug Administration (claims) FDA-approved labels should give pharmaceutical firms broad immunity from most types of lawsuits."

Because of repeated problems with roof-crush incidents that have crippled drivers in rollover accidents, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at last proposed a beefed-up safety standard for car roofs -- but the proposal also provides legal protection for the manufacturers from future roof-crush lawsuits. So your car roof may be less liable to crush during a rollover, but if it does and leaves you paraplegic, but you won't be able to sue.

Sometimes I'm not sure what planet these people live on -- they must think the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal represents reality.

Gee, would a fine, upstanding American corporation actually make a product that would hurt someone? Knowingly? Would they ever lie to cover it up after they find out about the problem and continue manufacturing whatever it is until finally forced to stop? Well, would they do that if it was really, really profitable? Could that happen in our great nation?

The trouble with the people who write the Wall Street Journal's editorial page is that they never read their own newspaper, which still does the best job of business reporting anywhere. Business interests have done a splendid job of vilifying trial lawyers and pretending the only people hurt by limiting the right to sue are trial lawyers.

Look, the trial lawyer is not the one in a wheelchair after a roof-crush rollover leaves someone paraplegic. Do you drive a car?

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/32914/

Big Brother Bush
- Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on December 29, 2005, Printed on December 30, 2005
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/30175/

The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Thirty-five years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was crazy as a bullbat, and J. Edgar Hoover, who wore women's underwear, decided some Americans had unacceptable political opinions. So they set our government to spying on its own citizens, basically those who were deemed insufficiently like Crazy Richard Milhous.

For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be killed. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon's collapse because he was also a man of notable talents. There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching this president, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of our country.

The Testy Kid wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because he is the president, and he considers that sufficient justification for whatever he wants. He even finds lawyers like John Yoo, who tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal.

The creepy part is the overlap. Damned if they aren't still here, after all these years, the old Nixon hands -- Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the whole gang whose yearning for authoritarian government rose like a stink over the Nixon years. Imperial executive. Bring back those special White House guard uniforms. Cheney, like some malignancy that cannot be killed off, back at the same old stand, pushing the same old crap. Of course, they tell us we have to be spied on for our own safety, so they can catch the terrorists who threaten us all. Thirty-five years ago, they nabbed a film star named Jean Seberg and a bunch of people running a free breakfast program for poor kids in Chicago. This time, they're onto the Quakers. We are not safer.

We would be safer, as the 9-11 commission has so recently reminded us, if some obvious and necessary precautions were taken at both nuclear and chemical plants -- but that is not happening because those industries contribute to Republican candidates. Republicans do not ask their contributors to spend a lot of money on obvious and necessary steps to protect public safety. They wiretap, instead. You will be unsurprised to learn that, first, they lied. They didn't do it. Well, OK, they did it, but not very much at all. Well, OK, more than that. A lot more than that. OK, millions of private e-mail and telephone calls every hour, and all medical and financial records.

You may recall in 2002 it was revealed that the Pentagon had started a giant data-mining program called Total Information Awareness (TIA), intended to search through vast databases "to increase information coverage by an order of magnitude."

From credit cards to vet reports, Big Brother would be watching us. This dandy program was under the control of Adm. John Poindexter, convicted of five felonies during Iran-Contra, all overturned on a technicality. This administration really knows where to go for good help -- it ought to bring back Brownie.

Everybody decided that TIA was a terrible idea, and the program was theoretically shut down. As often happens with this administration, it turned out they just changed the name and made the program less visible. Data-mining was a popular buzzword at the time, and the administration was obviously hot to have it. Bush established a secret program under which the National Security Agency could bypass the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court and begin eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

As many have patiently pointed out, the entire program was unnecessary, since the FISA court is both prompt and accommodating. There is virtually no possible scenario that would make it difficult or impossible to get a FISA warrant -- it has granted 19,000 warrants and rejected only a handful.

I don't like to play scary games where we all stay awake late at night, telling each other scary stories -- but there's a reason we have never given our government this kind of power. As the late Sen. Frank Church said, "That capability could at any time be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capacity to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

And if a dictator took over, the NSA "could enable it to impose total tyranny." Then we always get that dreadful goody-two-shoes response, "Well, if you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about, do you?"

Folks, we KNOW this program is being and will be misused. We know it from the past record and current reporting. The program has already targeted vegans and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- and, boy, if those aren't outposts of al-Qaida, what is? Could this be more pathetic?

This could scarcely be clearer. Either the president of the United States is going to have to understand and admit he has done something very wrong, or he will have to be impeached. The first time this happened, the institutional response was magnificent. The courts, the press, the Congress all functioned superbly. Anyone think we're up to that again? Then whom do we blame when we lose the republic?

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Some Kind of 'Manly'
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on November 11, 2005, Printed on November 13, 2005
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/28154/

I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people.

I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning.

Maybe I should try to get a grip -- after all, it's just this one administration that I had more cause than most to realize was full of inadequate people going in. And even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Cheney. And after all, we were badly frightened by 9-11, which was a horrible event. "Only" nine senators voted against the prohibition of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control the United States."

Nine out of 100. Should we be proud? Should we cry?

"We do not torture," said our pitifully inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

I am baffled by these "arguments:" But we're talking about really awful people, cries the harassed press secretary. People like X and Y and Z (after a time, one forgets all the names of the No. 2's after bin Laden we have captured). The SS and the Gestapo and the KVD weren't all that nice, either.

Then I hear the familiar tinniness of the fake machismo I know so well from George W. Bush and all the other frat boys who never went to Vietnam and never got over the guilt.

"Sometimes you gotta play rough," said Dick Cheney. No shit, Dick? Now why don't you tell that to John McCain?

I have known George W. Bush since we were both in high school -- we have dozens of mutual friends. I have written two books about him and so have interviewed many dozens more who know him well in one way or another. Spare me the tough talk. He didn't play football -- he was a cheerleader.

"He is really competitive," said one friend. "You wouldn't believe how tough he is on a tennis court!" Just cut the macho crap -- I don't want to hear it.

If you are dead to all sense of morality (please let me not go off on the stinking sanctimony of this crowd), let us still reason together on the famous American common ground of practicality. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

Torture does not work. Ask the United States military. Ask the Israelis.

There seems to be some fantastic scenario floating around -- if Osama bin Laden had an atomic bomb hidden in a locker at Grand Central Station, and it was due to go off in 12 hours, and we had him in prison … I seem to have missed some important television program on this theme. I am told it was fiction, but it must have been really scary -- it certainly seems to have unbalanced the minds of some of our fellow citizens.

Torture does not work. It is not productive. It does not yield important, timely information. That is in the movies. This is reality. I grew up with all this pathetic Texas tough: Everybody here knows you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs; and this ain't beanbag; and I'll knock your jaw so far back, you'll scratch your throat with your front teeth; and I'm gonna cloud up and rain all over you; and I'm gonna open me a can of whup-ass …

And that'll show 'em, won't it? Take some miserable human being alone and helpless in a cell, completely under your control, and torture him. Boy, that is some kind of manly, ain't it?

"The CIA is holding an unknown number of prisoners in secret detention centers abroad. In violation of the Geneva Conventions, it has refused to register those detainees with the International Red Cross or to allow visits by its inspectors. Its prisoners have 'disappeared,' like the victims of some dictatorships." -- The Washington Post.

Why did we bother to beat the Soviet Union if we were just going to become it? Shame. Shame. Shame.

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/28154/

Big-Time Trouble, but Why Worry?
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
 Posted on July 22, 2005, Printed on July 25, 2005
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/23670/


If you had done a poll in November 2000, or in November 2004, I don't think you would have gotten out of single digits with this proposition: "George W. Bush wants to radically revise American law, including complete repeal of the New Deal, and take us back to the economic legal system that prevailed at the turn of the 19th century -- Robber Barons Redux."

During the past five years, both media and political circles have devoted an enormous amount of attention to social issues and culture wars -- rise of the Christian Right, anti-abortion groups, our debates over moral decline and moral relativism, prayer in the schools, school vouchers, displaying the Ten Commandments, sex and violence in entertainment, bias in the news media, gay marriage and all the rest of it. I sometimes think all of it amounts to a bunch of people saying, "The world would be a much better place if everybody else thought exactly the same way I do." Reminds me of Dr. Henry Higgins in his famous philosophical disquisition, "Why Can't A Woman Be More Like A Man?" Higgins finally discovers the ultimate problem: "Why can't a woman be more like ME?"

Then, of necessity, we have spent huge amounts of time on Sept. 11, terrorism, Iraq, and related and ancillary problems. It is not necessary to review the bidding here, but Iraq is becoming as divisive and unpopular as the Vietnam War.

While we have been absorbed in the silly circus of cultural issues and the riveting questions of the war, we've also been getting our pockets picked. Big time. I am impressed that cartoonist Lloyd Dangle in the strip "Troubletown" managed to get the whole problem into 12 panels, each announcing some piece of economic news accompanied by an American saying, essentially, "What, me worry?" The U.S. is over $7 trillion in debt (no problem); China buys $1 billion worth of U.S. treasury bills a day (thanks for floating us); Americans love the prices at Wal-Mart (made in China, cute!); the Chinese save 50 percent of their domestic product; the average American has $9,000 on his credit cards; our economy is fueled by a fragile housing bubble; the minimum wage is $5.15 per hour ... ; taxpayers who earn over $1 million saved $30K under Bush tax cuts; the war in Iraq costs $9 billion a month; by 2040, our kids will be unable to do more than pay the interest on the national debt ... ; bankruptcy reform makes it impossible to escape your debts; in Darfur [Sudan], people earn $1.25 a day.

For those who prefer to get their economic news from a more respectable source than a cartoon, I recommend Bill Greider's op-ed article in the July 18 New York Times, "America's Truth Deficit." He begins with the startling thesis that we face structural economic problems as serious as those that destroyed the late Soviet Union and that, like the USSR before its breakup, our leaders cannot talk about these problems honestly. "[Our] weakening position in the global trading system is obvious and ominous, yet leaders in politics, business, finance and the news media are not willing to discuss candidly what is happening and why. Instead they recycle the usual bromides about the benefits of free trade and assurances that everything will work out for the best."

It is a curious thing that as the disadvantages and, indeed, perils of globalization become clearer and the subject of ever-more worried books by respected economists, the mainstream media keep treating the whole problem as though it were about a bunch of protesters in turtle costumes at the G8 summit. If it were not for Lou Dobbs on CNN, one would never even hear it mentioned on television.

Forget what the Supreme Court thinks about teaching creationism in the schools: Think about what it will contribute to the spiraling disasters of globalization by dismantling the entire economic regulatory system built up over the past 100 years. As Greider notes, "Washington defines 'national interest' primarily in terms of advancing the global reach of our multinational enterprises." Problem is, our multinational corporations increasingly work against the interests of Americans themselves. In addition to outsourcing jobs, the companies locate sham headquarters in off-shore tax havens to avoid paying taxes. The only restraints we have ever had on multinational corporations are government regulation and the right to sue the bastards for the various kinds of harm they cause. It is precisely those two forms of control that are being not just undermined but tossed out entirely by an increasingly activist right-wing judiciary.

Recommended reading: Greider's "One World, Ready Or Not"; David Korten's "When Corporations Rule the World"; and Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling."

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Pattern of Deception, Revealed
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on July 20, 2005, Printed on July 20, 2005
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/23622/

Now it's getting funnier and funnier. There is an elephant in the living room and we're sitting around having a conversation about whether there's an elephant in the living room.

"I think there's an elephant in the living room."

"Well, there's a lot of elephant poop around, but that doesn't prove there's an elephant in the living room."

The entire Republican Party is shocked (!) anyone would think that Karl Rove (!!) would leak a story to damage a political opponent. Oh, the horror. And Karl has always been such a sweet guy. Just to give you an idea, one time Rove was displeased with the job done by a political advance man and said, "We will f--- him. Do you hear me? We will f--- him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f---ed him!" (From an article by Ron Suskind). And that was a guy who was on his side.

Attacking an opponent's wife is standard operating procedure for Rove. Have Republicans actually convinced themselves that he wouldn't do such a thing? People, sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

Actually, we are missing the point here. The point being that Joseph Wilson is merely one of the many people who provided one of the by now innumerable pieces of evidence that this administration lied about why we went to war in Iraq. When former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill wrote that Bush planned to invade Iraq from the day he took office, the administration went after O'Neill. When Richard Clarke disclosed that the Bushies wanted to use Sept. 11 to go after Saddam Hussein from Sept. 12 on, they went after Clarke. They went after Gen. Zinni, they went after Gen. Shinseki and everyone else who opposed the folly or told the truth about it. After they got done lying about weapons of mass destruction and about connections to Al Qaeda, they switched to the stomach-churning pretense that we had done it all for democracy. Urp.

We suffer the worst attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, and the Bush administration sends the FBI after the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU exists to protect every citizen's rights as defined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. The ACLU works solely through the legal system: It does not advocate violence, terrorism or any other damn thing except the Bill of Rights. Since when is that extremist? Why in the name of heaven are we wasting the FBI's time on this idiocy? I don't pretend to be an expert on counter-terrorism, but if it were up to me, I wouldn't start looking for the violence-prone in pacifist groups either. Your pacifists, you see -- oh, just look it up.

I know that sludge-for-brains like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being "un-American," but when Bill O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for him just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years. The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one person's rights, it can take away everyone's.

We are living in a time when our government is investigating an organization that stands for the highest and best American ideals. And claiming the mantle of patriotism while they are about it. This is cuckoo -- and such an idiotic waste of the FBI's time and the taxpayers' money that whoever thought up this idiocy should be fired yesterday.

But even that is superseded by what lies at the heart of Plamegate, and that is lying in order to get this country into war. If the Washington press corps had a memory bank longer than 10 minutes, they could have exposed this years ago: the lies so often directly contradict one another. Before the war, the CIA was such a wussy organization it kept trying to downplay weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: After the war, it was all the CIA's fault, they had exaggerated the weapons of mass destruction. And so on and so on.

The trouble with piling lies on top of lies is that we can't even agree on facts anymore. I read the right-wing commentators, and it's not that we're not on the same page -- we're not even in the same library. They read the Downing Street memos and convince themselves they don't mean what they say. I really don't understand: Is it that hard to admit you're wrong when you're wrong? Is it that hard to admit that the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster? Isn't it self-evident?

If you support someone politically, you are not required to believe they are perfect. Did I think Bill Clinton had a sleazy affair while he was president? Yes. I just didn't care. I didn't think it had anything to do with the way he was running the country. You can't dismiss this. You can't not care about lies and war. Not if you care about American soldiers.

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Don't Dismiss Downing Street
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on June 22, 2005, Printed on June 23, 2005
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/22282/

I hope this is not too insider baseball, but I am genuinely astonished by what the bloggers call "mainstream media." (In my youth, it was quaintly called "the Establishment press.")

The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have all gone way out of their way to deny that the Downing Street Memos (it's now plural) are news. Like many of you, during the entire lead-up to the war with Iraq, I thought the whole thing was a set-up.

I raise this point not to prove how smart we are, but to emphasize that I followed the debate closely and probably unconsciously searched for evidence that reinforced what I already thought. Most people do that. I read some of the European press and most of the liberal publications in this country. I read the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and several Texas papers every day. It's my job.

But when I read the first Downing Street Memo, my eyes bugged out and my jaw fell open. I could not believe what I was reading. It was news to me, and as I have tried to indicate, I'm no slouch at keeping up. Yes, it has long seemed to me the administration had been planning the war for months before it began its pubic relations campaign to scare a skeptical public.

That was no easy task. Public opinion was still evenly divided at the time we invaded. The administration actually said it could invade another country without even consulting Congress or the United Nations. Pretty much everything that followed was a charade.

It was always weird that the White House kept saying it knew Saddam Hussein had WMD, but it would never tell the U.N. inspectors where. Yes, I suspected all that, but I was not the head of British intelligence in the summer of 2002, for pity's sake.

Here are some aggravating factors. Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote that "liberals" no longer want to talk about the war because we were against it to start with and probably hope it ends in disaster. Good Lord, who does he think we are? Does this man actually think we are out here cheering every time another American is killed?

Mr. Friedman, real, actual, honest-to-God American liberals are out here in the heartland, and we know the kids who are dying in Iraq. They are from our hometowns. We know their parents. That's why we hate this war. That's why we tried to tell everybody else it was a ghastly idea.

We are not sitting here gloating because it is the horrible mess we said it would be. We're in agony. There is nothing pleasurable about being a Cassandra. I have said from the beginning that if this thing worked out the way Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney all said it would, I would be perfectly happy to get down on my knees and kiss George Bush's feet.

The second aggravation is that the very prestigious papers that are now dismissing the Downing Street Memos have already themselves admitted that their pre-war coverage was -- I don't know, you pick the adjective. Slack? Inadequate? Less than rigorous? Wrong? And now they're saying, oh hell, this isn't news, we knew it all along.

Michael Kinsley out at the Los Angeles Times, which has certainly done some commendable reporting on this war and taken the heat for it, too, also dismisses the memos. I don't get it. You suddenly get evidence -- I don't know if it proves or just strongly suggests -- that this administration lied to all of us about war, and your reaction is not to go after the administration, but to dismiss the evidence? And to put down the people who are calling you screaming about why you haven't bothered to mention it? What is wrong with this picture?

Also aggravating, the Republicans in Congress refuse to allow hearings. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan held "Democratic hearings," without the R's, in a room described as a large closet, because they were not allowed to use an actual hearing room. Under these difficult circumstances, 30 Democratic representatives persisted in asking the important question, "Were Americans deliberately misled in the lead-up to this war?" When did we come to the point where the minority has no place?

I don't know if these memos represent an impeachable offense -- although I must say, I don't want to bring up the Clinton comparison again. But they strike me as a hell of lot worse than anything Richard Nixon ever contemplated. He used the government for petty political vindictiveness. Heck, I'd settle for that again, over what we're looking at now.

The irony of Deep Throat surfacing after all these years in the midst of this memo mess is almost too precious. Does the Washington Post have any hungry young reporters on Metro anymore? I'd say, start with: Who did Dearlove meet with besides George Tenet?

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Destroying PBS
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on June 20, 2005, Printed on June 20, 2005
online at http://www.alternet.org/story/22262/

I was watching the PBS science program "Nova" the other night and spotted the liberal bias right away. I knew it would be there because Ken Tomlinson, the Bush-appointed chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), says the network is riddled with leftist leanings. Sure enough, in a program on tsunamis and what causes them, the show blamed it on shifting tectonic plates in the earth's surface. Then the graphic shows these two tectonic plates grinding against each other -- suddenly, the one on the left sort of falls down, and the big, aggressive plate on the right jumps on top of it, causing a killer tsunami. See? Wouldn't have happened on Fox.

I have listened patiently to years of right-wing bull about liberal bias in the media, but let us be perfectly clear about what is happening at PBS. Big Bird is not in favor of affirmative action. Bert and Ernie are not gay. Miss Piggy is not a feminist. "The Three Tenors," "Antiques Roadshow," "Masterpiece Theater," "Wall Street Week" and nature programs do not have a political agenda. "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" is biased in favor of boring, old, white guys who appear on painfully well-balanced panels. "Washington Week in Review" is a showcase for "Inside the Beltway," conventional wisdom, power-parroting, political-geekhead, Establishment journalism -- there is nothing liberal about it.

But there is a plot to politicize public broadcasting. It is plain as a pikestaff, and it is coming from the Right. It is obvious, undeniable and happening right now. The Bush administration is introducing a political agenda to public broadcasting. They are using the lame pretext that PBS is somehow liberal to justify it into a propaganda organ for the government. That is precisely what the board of CPB was set up to prevent 40 years ago; it is there to be a firewall between public broadcasting and political pressure. Ken Tomlinson is a disgrace to the purpose of that board, he has a political agenda and is engaging in a raw display of ideological bullying. The right-wingers in the House of Representatives are backing his power play with a threat to cut off funding for PBS entirely.

Tomlinson's claim of liberal bias at PBS is based on the program "NOW with Bill Moyers," even though Moyers' program frequently featured guests on the Right. Moyers is now retired, and the show has been cut to half an hour. Tomlinson "balanced" it with a weekly program by the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, who don't even bother to pretend to be objective: They are right-wing beyond argument. Tomlinson actually spent $10,000 of the taxpayers' money to pay some consultant to find bias in Moyers' program but has never released the results of that "study."

Tomlinson, himself a former head of Voice of America in the Reagan administration and a retired editor Reader's Digest, has been an active right-winger since I first met him in 1974. He is also the Bush-appointed chair of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other official arms of the government's propaganda machine. He is a Bush information apparatchik. It is quite clear he believes PBS and NPR should also function as cheerleaders for the government.

His choice for president of the CPB is Patricia Harrison, who is such a Republican activist she was elected co-chair of the Republican National Committee, where she was particularly noted for attacking Hillary Clinton. This is beyond open partisanship. Harrison is currently at State, where she oversees that department's propaganda arm, including the production "news segments" openly intended to support Bush administration policy. She has testified before Congress about the value of such "news segments" in swaying public opinion.

When Richard Nixon attacked PBS 35 years ago, the Republican chairman of CPB resigned in protest over the political interference. The impeccably Republican Ralph Rogers of Dallas led a nationwide effort to stop the malicious meddling. Where's a decent Republican when you need one?

I've read all those studies that show people on the Right lack the gift of empathy. I can see they have a real hard time imagining themselves as people on welfare or as blacks in East Texas -- that's quite a stretch even for white bleeding hearts like me. What I don't get is their inability to do the simplest exercise in elementary fairness -- how would you feel if the shoe were on the other foot?

Let's pretend Hillary Clinton wins the 2008 election. Who do you want her to appoint chairman of CPB? James Carville? Noam Chomsky? Or should she show how much she understands the importance of the independence of public broadcasting by naming an esteemed Republican, say John Danforth or Alan Simpson or Richard Lugar? How about anyone who understands that the function of journalism is not to toady to those in power but to challenge them? Is that too much to ask?

The ideological Republicans are destroying a fine public institution.

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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Molly Ivins writes for Creators Syndicate. Her latest book is Bushwhacked: Life in Geoge W. Bush's America - click on book cover to order online.

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The Return of the Swift Boat Veterans
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet
Posted on March 1, 2005, Printed on March 2, 2005

I'm sorry, but every now and again a girl just finds it necessary to lay her head down on the table and howl with laughter. I wrote a column warning that USA Next, a Republican Astroturf (meaning "fake grassroots") group was going to attack the AARP. The senior citizens' lobby does not support the privatization of Social Security, and so clearly incurs the wrath of all God-fearing, true-believing, highly-paid Republican public relations firms. But I have to confess, even I did not see this one coming.

You may not believe it, but I swear it is true: USA Next's first salvo was to accuse the geezer lobby of being against our troops in Iraq and in favor of homosexual marriage.

No joke, what journalist-blogger Josh Marshall calls "the fogey-bund" stands accused of being anti-soldier and pro-gay-knot-tying. A charming internet ad shows a muscular hero of the desert in combat fatigues with a big X across his picture, and on the other side are two guys in tuxedos getting hitched with a big check across their picture. Under these two pictures, it says, "The REAL AARP Agenda."

I haven't laughed so hard since President Bush informed us that we have had a close and enduring friendship with Japan for the past 150 years.

Being old enough myself to join the AARP – not a member, but well into Wrinkly City – I find this the most deliciously zany, mortifyingly awful moment since the time a speaker of the Texas House called on a bunch of people in wheelchairs to stand and be recognized.

I'm really curious as to how far this "anti-military, pro-gay" attack stuff can be extended. Take the Pope, for example. The Pope differs from the president on the matter of capital punishment. In fact, I can remember at least two occasions when the Pope wrote then-Gov. Bush agonized pleas on behalf of some of our more spectacularly pardonable prisoners. Karl, does this mean the Pope is anti-military and pro-gay?

Yes, our old friends from the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" are back again. The very people who told you that John Kerry was anti-military and pro-gay – the people who told you he didn't deserve his medals from Vietnam, who said he testified before Congress that American soldiers were all war criminals – these same friendly folk are back again, attacking the AARP, a group largely known for advocating afternoon naps for the elderly. (Disclosure: I once wrote an article for the AARP magazine Modern Maturity," and not only did they pay well, but they got the jokes, too.)

Despite this happy onetime experience, I am not an AARP fan. I consider its support of the abomination that is the Medicare prescription drug coverage bill the most ill-advised sellout since the memorably awful 1996 telecommunications deregulation bill. (Enjoying that one, everyone? Your bills gone down lately?)

USA Next has the same address as O'Neill Marketing Co., although Charlie Jarvis, head of Next, says he's three floors down. O'Neill is a list company – it sells lists of names, and its clients are various branches of the Republican Party. O'Neill was once partnered with the United Seniors Association, which then morphed into USA Next. So subtle. Hi, Karl.

Speaking of healing laughter, the president is providing all Europe with chuckles. After he denounced the idea that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran as "ridiculous," he then promptly added, "All options are on the table." So they laughed, apparently on the polite assumption that the man must be joking.

Not being veteran Bush-listeners, they are unaccustomed to the fact that he often contradicts himself, sometimes from one sentence to the next. They have also failed to master the key element of Bush-listening – you must understand that George W. Bush is never, ever wrong. He does not make mistakes. And if he is against something one day and for it the next (that would be everything from opposing the 9-11 commission to the corporate law brought on by the Enron scandals), he is still never wrong.

He is right to oppose things, and he is right to support those same things. He's not a flip-flopper, like you-know-who. And if something he says turns out to be completely untrue (hard to think of such a case, but the letters WMD somehow float to mind), it is never his fault and best to ignore it.

If you do not pretend to believe everything Bush says, then you are unpatriotic, against Our Troops and probably in support of gay marriage. Those Europeans understand nothing.

Speaking of unsatisfactory allies, Canada has had the nerve (!) to announce it does not want to be under our nuclear shield, if we ever get it built. Gee, how could it not want to buy into (and help pay for) our Star Wars defense system? Just because it doesn't work and costs the earth? Well, they're partly French, you know.

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/21384/
'From the day of our founding'
Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate  

01.25.05 - AUSTIN, Texas -- A substantial nit to pick with President Bush's second Inaugural Address and some questions about his theme.

 "From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."

 Oh dear. It took us almost 100 years to get rid of slavery right here in the Land of the Free, it took us another 100 years to get rid of legal discrimination based on race and gender, and how long it will take us to achieve equal opportunity for all in this country no one can say. At least we're working at it. Or we were.

 The Bush theme of what someone else christened "evangelical democracy" is rather like the "From the day of our founding ..." passage -- actually, it's more complicated than that. I, too, am happy to proselytize for freedom and democracy, but I don't think we can export it by force and I don't think we can expect the world to accept our noble intentions.

 Nor is democracy necessarily the cure for terrorism. As a British journalist pointed out, if Britain had been following the Bush plan, it would have nuked us years ago for being the largest single source of money for the Irish Republican Army. Reality is so often much more complicated than George W. Bush thinks it is.

 Saddam Hussein was about as nasty a dictator as you can find. So why didn't the Iraqis welcome us with flowers? Because we invaded their country and are now occupying it. It is extremely difficult to convince people that you are killing them (and torturing them) for their own good. How would you feel? The British medical magazine Lancet estimates Americans have now killed over 100,000 Iraqis. We don't know for sure, because America has several policies that prevent anyone from keeping an accurate count.

 Unfortunately, because of the violence in Iraq, we have achieved very little in the way of reconstruction there, so many Iraqis are actually worse off today, in terms of basic services like water and electricity, than they were under Saddam Hussein. We can still hope that the elections work out well in most of the country, but it's silly to say things are going well in Iraq, as some of my more delusional colleagues claim.

 Actually, we have already tried foreign policy based on idealism: In one case, it didn't work worth a damn, and in the second, it produced pretty handsome results based on a pragmatic application of principle.

 The first great foreign policy idealist in the presidency was Woodrow Wilson, everyone else having pretty much stuck to the Monroe Doctrine (pace our unfortunate venture into the Philippines, a sort of early Vietnam). Wilson got us into the insanely named "War to End War." (As A.J. Muste, the great pacifist, observed, "The way to peace is through peace.")

 After that hideous slaughter, Wilson signed a treaty that set up the same war to happen all over again 20 years later. He was famously unable to get his own Senate to join the doomed League of Nations.

 A rather better effort was made by Jimmy Carter, who based much of his foreign policy on human rights, the equivalent of Bush's "freedom." This consistent emphasis, applied over time, resulted in every country in Latin America (though not Central America) becoming a democracy.

 Unfortunately, the rest of the world is skeptical of Bush's benign intent, mostly because he invaded a country that not only hadn't done anything to us, but also was no threat to us. (There is a new line on the right that goes, "But everybody in the whole world was saying Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." Actually, everybody wasn't. Hans Blix and the U.N. inspectors had been unable to find any, even though we claimed we knew exactly where they were and had pictures of them. Quite a few people were beginning to doubt the existence of WMD, and what "everybody in the world" was saying at the time we went to war was, "Give the inspectors more time." In retrospect, it was quite good advice, wasn't it?)

 At other points in the speech, one was left wondering, as one so often is, about Bush's grip on reality. Talking about his "ownership society," he said, "By making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny, we will give our fellow Americans greater freedom from want and fear, and make our society more prosperous and just and equal."

 He's delusional: He cannot possibly believe his tax cuts are making this country more just and equal -- they are making it more unjust and unequal every day, not to mention getting us ever deeper into debt. One does not provide "freedom from want and fear" by privatizing Social Security. We've been there, we've done this -- we tried unregulated capitalism at the end of the 19th century, and it was awful.

This article was borrowed from: http://www.workingforchange.com
(c) 2004 Creators Syndicate  

Molly Ivins writes for Creators Syndicate. Her latest book is Bushwhacked: Life in Geoge W. Bush's America - click on book cover to order online.

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Look at who's on the payroll
- Molly Ivins, Creators Syndicate

Tommy Corcoran -- Tommy the Cork, so dubbed by FDR -- was a Washington wise man. His various biographers called him the ultimate insider, the super lawyer and the master fixer. He came to Washington in 1926 to clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and became a fixture, an almost institutional source of wisdom about American politics, before his death in 1981.

The Cork had a theory about how to choose a president. He always said it didn't matter who was running, that it was unnecessary to pay any attention to them.

What matters, he said, is the approximately 1,500 people the president brings to Washington with him, his appointments to the positions where people actually run things. The question to consider is which 1,500 people we get.

So here are a few suggestions:

• At the EPA, you do not want people who think it's a good idea to allow more arsenic in the water. When someone, anyone, proposes allowing more arsenic in the water, what you want is people at the EPA who promptly say: "No. Not a good idea."

• There are some lawyers, and then there are other lawyers. You do not want lawyers at the Justice Department (or the White House or the Defense Department) who, when asked to prepare a legal brief defending torture, do so.

You want lawyers at Justice (and the White House and the Defense Department) who say: "No. Torture is not a good idea. Trying to wiggle out from under our laws, international treaties and civilized norms is not a good idea."

You especially don't want lawyers who defend torture promoted to the federal bench. It is not a good idea to have the CIA using the same "interrogation technique" so favored by the Gestapo.

This is counterproductive as well as wrong.

• You don't want folks in charge of the IRS who think it is more important to audit poor people than rich people. That is dumb.

• You do not want people in charge of foreign policy who are fools enough to believe in Ahmad Chalabi, a convicted con man and, it turns out, probably a spy for Iran. Those people should be fired. Especially when some of them are now also being investigated for giving classified information to Israel.

• Having your Department of Homeland Security turn out to be a public disgrace indicates that you have either not put the right people in charge or they are not getting enough support.

• When "Hurricane Hits Florida Yet Again" becomes a standing headline right up there with "Canadian Trade Talks Continue," you may want to put people in charge of policy who recognize that global warming not only exists but threatens us all.

• If the people a president puts in charge of foreign policy are all from the same small circle of rigid ideologues, what happens is that they end up listening only to themselves, and that way lies disaster.

• When the people who are running the Food and Drug Administration do so to benefit the big processors and the big drug companies, people get hurt, and some of them die.

• When the people in charge of prosecuting terrorists in this country screw up case after case, those people should be replaced.

• When the country endures a hideous terrorist attack, is it actually useful for the White House to oppose the commission assigned to find out how it happened?

To first deny it adequate funding, then refuse to provide it with critical documents, then oppose an extension of its deadline, then refuse to allow the commission access to prisoners who played key roles in the attack, then try to stop Condoleezza Rice from testifying, then refuse to have the president testify under oath?

• When the people in charge make a decision to start an unprovoked war because of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent ties to the terrorists who have attacked us, you may conclude that these people are lying, or dumb, or just not helpful.

• When a new administration comes into office with a huge budget surplus and then blows it all on tax cuts that benefit the very rich, should it be retained? If an economic team leads the country to a record $422 billion deficit this year and $2.3 trillion in the next decade, do you really want a team in charge that announces it wants more tax cuts that will double the total deficit to $4.6 trillion by the end of the decade? Do these people have a sense of responsibility? If the economic team produces a net loss of 1.1 million jobs after four years, should its contract be renewed?

Forget Bush -- the people around him are a complete disaster.

John Kerry will basically re-hire the Clinton team and presumably remain faithful to his wife.

Of course, Clinton didn't get Osama bin Laden, either. But his people worked harder at it.

Molly Ivins writes for Creators Syndicate. Her latest book is Bushwhacked: Life in Geoge W. Bush's America - click on book cover to order online.

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Lies and Lying Liers
by Molly Ivins, published September 2, 2003

AUSTIN, Texas -- At the beginning of the summer, several of us who are not exactly upbeat about our prospects in Iraq urged the administration to Do Something before it was too late -- like, by the end of the summer.

Now what? Our people are over there liked staked goats in the desert, the administration won't ask other countries or the United Nations for help, they won't send more troops, and the NGOs are pulling out. There was no apparent connection between Iraq and al Qaeda before this war, but there sure as hell is now. We have already lost more soldiers in the "peace" than we did during the war.

And still no weapons of mass destruction. I realize all the good little boys and girls are supposed to "get over" the missing weapons of mass destruction, but I cannot brush this aside with the careless elan of the neo-con hawks ("doesn't matter," "makes no difference," "who cares?"). Public officials need to be held to some standard of accountability for what they say.

In a separate column, I will try to Be Constructive about our current plight, but I think it is important to remember how we got here. May I remind you of what we were repeatedly told?

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." -- Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons." -- George W. Bush, Sept. 12, 2002

"The Iraqi regime possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons." -- Bush Oct. 7, 2002.

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that would be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using the UAVs for missions targeting the United States." -- Bush, Oct. 7, 2002

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his ‘nuclear mujahideen' -- his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past."-- Bush, Oct. 7, 2002

"We know for a fact there are weapons there." -- Ari Fleischer, Jan. 9, 2003

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of Sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." -- Bush, Jan. 28, 2003

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more." -- Colin Powell, Feb. 5, 2003

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." -- Bush, Feb. 8, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." -- Bush, March 17, 2003

"Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly." -- Fleischer, March 21, 2003.

"There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them." -- Gen. Tommy Franks, March 22, 2003.

"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction." -- Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board, March 23, 2003

"We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad." -- Donald Rumsfeld, March 30, 2003

"We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so." -- Bush, May 3, 2003.

"I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country." -- Rumsfeld, May 4, 2003.

"U.S. officials never expected that we were going to open garages and find weapons of mass destruction." -- Condoleezza Rice, May 12, 2003

"They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer." -- Rumsfeld, May 27, 2003

"We based our decisions on good, sound intelligence, and the -- our people are going to find out the truth. And the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence. There's no doubt in my mind." -- Bush, July 17, 2003

To quote Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, "And I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he had nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush administration again." -- March 18, 2003

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

Cost of the War in Iraq
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