Dumb and Dumber

(NOTE: Blogstream has a new blogger named kimbathewhitelioness who has a well-written blog titled "A Day in the Life." Today's post with the title of "Rubber Bands and Comic Books" allows her to reveal her "youthful thoughts and memories.")

Out of a population of 300 million people, can’t the voters of the United States do better than they have done in some of their recent choices for political leaders? Dan Quayle, who served as the Vice-President under George H.W. Bush was only a heartbeat from the presidency; and we all have experienced the almost seven years of George W. Bush’s leadership.

The backgrounds of Dan Quayle and George W. Bush are similar in so many respects. They were both preppie rich-kid frat-boys who got by all their lives on daddy's money and daddy's connections, even going through university (Bush at Yale and Quayle at DePauw) on a string of a gentleman's C's. Both suffer from a lack of intellectual curiosity. Both have a short attention span and hate “written things.” Both come across as naïve and befuddled. Both avoided going to Vietnam by serving in national guard units. Both were placed in power by moneyed, powerful Republicans as a tool, a front, to be put up and manipulated as needed to protect and extend the far-flung vested interests of the American money-class. One difference is that Dubya is Alfred E. Neuman with a Texas accent.

Let’s compare the cognitive abilities of Dan Quayle and George W. Bush as they articulate their thoughts.

Quaylisms

“You’re close, but you left a little something off. The ‘e’ on the end.” --Quayle, at a spelling bee where a sixth grader spelled potato as P-O-T-A-T-O. (1992)

“Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is IN the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.” -Quayle, in Hawaii, 4/25/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

“What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.” – Quayle, winning friends while speaking to the United Negro College Fund, 5/9/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92, and the NY Times, 12/9/92). This gem has been added to Bartlett’s `Familiar Quotations’.

Quayle stumbled in response to a question about his opinion of the Holocaust. He said it was “an obscene period in our nation’s history.” Then, trying to clarify his remark, Quayle said he meant “this century’s history” and added a confusing comment. “We all lived in this century, I didn’t live in this century,” he said. – (reported in Esquire, 8/92, The New Yorker, 10/10/88, p.102)

“Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because the real question for 1988 is whether we’re going to go forward to tomorrow or past to the — to the back!” – Quayle, 8/17/88 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

“Mars is essentially in the same orbit… somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.” – Quayle, 8/11/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

“Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It’s the other way around. They never vote for us.” – Quayle,1988

“Bank failures are caused by depositors who don’t deposit enough money to cover losses due to mismanagement.” – Quayle, 1988

“The best thing about rain forests is they never suffer from drought.”– Quayle

“A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.” — Quayle, 1988

“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.” – Quayle, 1988

“Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.” – Quayle, US News and World Report (10/10/88)

“Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.” – Quayle addressing the 20th anniversary celebration of the moon landing, 7/20/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

“Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win.” — Senator Dan Quayle, during the ‘88 campaign

“We expect them [Salvadoran officials] to work toward the elimination of human rights.” — Quayle

“I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.”– Quayle, 5/22/89 (reported in Esquire, 8/92)

“If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure.” –Quayle, to the Phoenix Republican Forum, 3/23/90 (reported in Esquire, 8/92) Also reported by Reuters, 5/2/90

“[It’s] time for the human race to enter the solar system.” — Quayle, on the concept of a manned mission to Mars

“We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe.” –Quayle

Bushisms

“For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled." --explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

1) "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." --to a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test."
Source: United Press International, "Bush Proposes Increase in Education Funds," Mark Kukis, Feb. 21, 2001

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
—Bush addressing a group of witnesses at the signing of the Defense Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005 in Washington, DC on Aug. 4.

"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

"We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur."

"Then you wake up at the high school level and find out that the illiteracy level of our children are appalling."

"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur."

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
- US President George W. Bush (January 11, 2000)

I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family
- US President George W. Bush (January 27, 2000 in New Hampshire)

Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.
- US President George W. Bush (October 2000)

I think we agree, the past is over.
- US President George W. Bush (May 10, 2000)

"I feel strongly that there ought to be fair justice." --George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Sept. 20, 2007

"My job is a decision-making job, and as a result, I make a lot of decisions." --George W. Bush, The Decider, Lancaster, Pa., Oct. 3, 2007

"Those who enter the country illegally violate the law." --George W. Bush, Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005

The Loss of Moral Authority

Among the morsels of wisdom contained in the Holy Bible is one located in Matthew 7:3 “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” There are several parallel translations of this passage as in “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye”; “The man who finds fault with another for sin, while he is more guilty, is a hypocrite”; “A great many are very zealous to convert the world, who are themselves unconverted”; and finally, “"Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” In Romans 2:1 we read “Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.” When the Pharisees brought a woman accused of adultery before Jesus and asked him to judge her according to Mosaic law, Jesus replied, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone….”

In our own culture, we have a couple of idioms related to judging others: “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones” and “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.” We should be careful in judging others when we have some of the same faults ourselves; and accusing others of hypocrisy in a matter that could be applied equally to ourselves is not very wise. In former times cast iron pots and kettles were quickly blackened from the soot of the fire. If personified into animate objects, the pot would then be hypocritical to insult the kettle's color.

Almost since its establishment well over 200 years ago, the United States has enjoyed a position of moral authority in the world. With some egregious exceptions in our nation’s history, the United States has been envied for its government and those principles contained in the Declaration of Independence and incorporated into our Constitution with its Bill of Rights.

With the advent of 9/11 and our nation’s “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq, based on deceit, followed by the assault on our liberties by the Bush administration, including the establishment of Guantanamo, the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, the rendition of prisoners taken in Iraq to countries where they are subjected to torture, the attacks on the protections afforded our own citizens by habeas corpus, the surveillance of our own free and innocent people, and other governmental incursions into the area of our freedoms - all of these events have caused the United States to lose its moral authority in the eyes of the world.

With this recent history in the background, can you imagine Nancy Pelosi continuing her crusade to get a resolution passed labeling as genocide the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks. Turkey is an important ally in the Middle East and could cause much pain for the United States, so why does she want to go back almost a hundred years to rake over the coals?

My question to Pelosi is why stop there. Why not have the United States look into its own history of genocide. The story of the encounter between European settlers and America’s native population does not make for pleasant reading. Among early accounts, perhaps the most famous is Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), a doleful recitation of forced removals, killings, and callous disregard for human rights.

The reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents the most severe and sustained genocide on record. By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the "worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people." In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., "there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a 'race' of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history."

Another case of the pot calling the kettle black occurred recently when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meeting with civic and human rights advocates in Moscow, chided Putin for “overseeing steady erosion of the independent media, the courts and the legislative branch in Russia.” What does she think has been going on in the United States under the almost seven years of the Bush administration? Our media has almost ceased performing its function as a watchdog of liberty in our nation, the Bush administration is packing the U.S. Supreme Court with right-wing zealots (who selected Bush as the President to begin with), and until recently we had an Attorney General who was a rubber stamp for whatever the President wanted to do. The legislative branch? What has it done for you recently?

Then Rice continued her lecture to Putin: “In any country, if you don’t have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development.” Lord, spare me! This is what so many of our own citizens have complained about for the past several years, as we have watched this president dismantle the system of checks and balances built into our own government by the Constitution.

When important figures in our government speak the words of Pelosi and Rice, the leaders of other nations now counter such indictments with statements of their own such as “Why don’t you practice at home what you preach to us?” The moral authority of the United States is now considered to be a laughable joke to the rest of the world.

Who was the real Christopher Columbus?



Native Americans were victims of innumerable lies by our government:



There is such a thing as cultural genocide, too:

Langston Hughes Revisited

Note: Blogstream has a new blogger named the Dreamer who writes "The Annie Adventures." You might like to read her latest post titled "The Front Porch Swing."

Prior to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, most poetry was written by Caucasians about the experiences of white people. But during the 1920s, Americans suddenly heard strong black voices, writing with African-American rhythms and cadences breaking upon the scene. Probably the most creative of all those voices at that time was the voice of Langston Hughes, who wrote this poem during the Great Depression.

Here we see how Hughes is reaching for hope that he has not yet seen but believes is possible. This passage reveals how America can be the dream that his people long for without tyranny and the notion that one man can crush another. Here, we see how the poet longs for every man to get along and believes that it can happen at some point in history. This is also evident when the poet writes, "...opportunity is real, and life is free,/Equality is in the air we breathe". He writes, "I am the young man, full of strength and hope,/Tangled in that ancient endless chain/Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!". This is an interesting passage because it unites the hope the poet believes in and the underlying reason for protest of why it does not exist. Again, we see that the poet clings to hope because he realizes how important it is to the human psyche.

In reading this poem today, I found in it a new meaning within a new context that relates to our nation almost 70 years later. What does this poem mean to you today?

Let America be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!


Langston Hughes reported that his "Weary Blues," which won him his first poetry prize, included the first blues he had ever heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas, when he was a kid. He wrote this poem in 1923, when he was only 21 years old.

Here is one of the blues verses in "The Weary Blues:"

I got de weary blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got de weary blues
And can't be satisfied.
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died.

From Fats to Chubby

They call him the Fat Man. With his easy-rolling boogie-woogie piano and smooth rhythm & blues vocals, Antoine “Fats” Domino put a New Orleans-style spin on what came to be known as rock and roll. A pianist, singer, and songwriter who was born in the Crescent City in 1928, Domino sold more records (65 million) than any Fifties-era rocker except Elvis Presley. Between 1950 and 1963, he cracked the pop Top Forty thirty-seven times and the R&B singles chart fifty-nine times. Domino’s biggest songs are as winning as his broad smile. They include “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill,” “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday” and “Walking to New Orleans.” In 1956 Blueberry Hill was Domino's highest charting record ever. Another Fats Domino hit, I'm Walkin', was covered by Ricky Nelson in 1957 and helped to launch the teenage singing sensation's career.







Every generation has its music icons. To most Americans, the name “Chubby Checker” is synonymous with the dance known as the Twist. When Chubby Checker burst onto the music scene in 1960, Americans changed their ideas about what it meant to dance. To previous generations, dancing meant close dancing, but lack of physical contact was key for the Twist. Other dances replaced the Twist and were in turn replaced by yet newer ones. But the style of dancing that was popularized with the Twist, one that could be described as “two people standing apart, dancing 'at' each other instead of with each other."
It seemed for a time that people all over the planet were dancing the Twist, including even First Lady Jackie Kennedy. “The Twist” was re-released in 1962 and was even more successful the second time around, hitting number one on the charts again. It remained in first place for thirteen weeks.

War Whore or the Man from Blackwater

With Blackwater once again in the news for shootings in Iraq, the world has begun to throw the spotlight on its founder Erik Prince. Seventeen Iraqi fatalities occurred while a Blackwater Private Security Detail (PSD) was escorting a convoy of US State Department vehicles en route to a meeting in western Baghdad with United States Agency for International Development officials on September 16, 2007. The next day, Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq was revoked. On September 22, 2007, Federal prosecutors announced an investigation into whether Blackwater employees illegally smuggled weapons into Iraq that were later possibly transferred to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a Kurdish nationalist group designated a terrorist organization by the US, NATO and the European Union.

Blackwater is currently the largest of the U.S. State Department's three private security contractors. At least 90 percent of its revenue comes from government contracts, two-thirds of which are no-bid contracts. Missions conducted by Blackwater Security Consulting have raised significant controversy both through casualties suffered and inflicted by their employees. Blackwater USA is currently contracted by the United States government to provide security services in the Iraq War. The cost for each Blackwater guard in Iraq, $445,000 per year, has come under fire.

I have written previous blog posts about Blackwater but never one about its founder. Prince has been accused of putting profit over patriotism, receiving over $500 million in federal contracts, as he cuts corners at Blackwater in his relentless pursuit of money. After receiving federal contracts from the Bush administration, Blackwater graduated from $200,000 contracts to $200 million contracts. The company is loathed by military professionals, who say that it is spreading, by its actions, hatred for America wherever it deploys. Blackwater, the troops say, is turning friends into enemies by its needless, over-the-top brutality and racism and is therefore endangering the lives of American troops. Some of the Blackwater contractors have been known to use the "N" word in referring to the Iraqis.

Just who is Erik Prince and what is his relationship, if any, to the Bush administration?

First, let’s start with a biographical sketch of Erik Prince, a multi-millionaire right-wing fundamentalist Christian from a powerful Michigan Republican family. His wealth came from his father, Edgar Prince, who headed Prince Automotive, an auto parts and machinery manufacturer. He attended the United States Naval Academy after high school but left the Academy after a short time, and ultimately graduated from Hillsdale College. He was an intern in the White House under President George H. W. Bush.

After college, he earned a commission in the United States Navy after joining in 1992 via Officer Candidate School. He served as a Navy SEAL officer on deployments to Haiti, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, including Bosnia. When his father, Edgar, unexpectedly died in 1995, Prince ended his Navy service prematurely. Prince's mother, Elsa, sold the family's automobile parts company for $1.3 billion to Johnson Controls, Inc. Now a billionaire, Prince moved to Virginia Beach and personally financed the formation of Blackwater USA in 1997.

Prince's father founded the Family Research Council with Gary Bauer. Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party and wife of former Alticor (Amway) president and Gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos, son of Richard DeVos, Sr. (listed by Forbes in 2007 as one of the world's richest men, with a net worth of $2.4 billion). Under DeVos' tutelage, Amway has donated roughly $7.5 million to Republican candidates since 1990. Prince's father helped to bankroll the religious-conservative movement. Prince himself has given $236,000 to GOP candidates and conservative causes -- typical of a defense contracting industry that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, gave nearly $1 million to members of the oversight committee since 2003 -- 83 percent of it to Republicans.

At present, Prince serves as Vice President of the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation which gives money to organizations of the Christian right. Salon reports that "between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the Family Research Council and $531,000 to Focus on the Family" headed by James Dobson. He also serves as a board member of Christian Freedom International, a non-profit group with a mission of helping "Christians who are persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ."

Erik and his politically-active extended family are enablers of the Republican political elite and are reaping the benefits in return. Specifically, Erik is a war profiteer, a war whore, through his private security company's paid warriors. Beholden to nobody but the almighty dollar, these mercenaries are increasingly tasked with operations that were formerly conducted by uniformed U.S. military personnel.

Should I be surprised that if one follows the money trail of the war profiteers, it seems to lead invariably to the White House?



Just a few miles from where we live, Blackwater wants to establish a military training camp on some 800 acres in a rural setting. Their proposal has split the community into two groups - with one group wanting to preserve the rural setting and the other group wishing to take advantage of the jobs Blackwater would bring to the area.