Abortion, through a Glass Darkly

Many South American countries have long had fairly liberal policies on abortion. Bolivia is a good example. Abortion has been available there for what is, by Western standards, a small fee, since the early seventies. This is true even though Bolivia has had, during this time, fairly conservative governmental leadership and an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population.

With the collapse of the Monroe Doctrine, many of the poorer countries of South America are experiencing burgeoning populist movements, with the indigenous majorities, mired in a cycle of ignorance and poverty for centuries, seizing power through the ballot box, as US supported, right wing oligarchies, founder.

An interesting thing is happening as the poor, native population gains power. In Bolivia, for example, abortion rates have always been high, at least as high as in the US. The populist sentiment though, is to outlaw abortion. It has not been done yet but it looks like it's coming.

Why is this the case? The new, young, Indio President of Bolivia, has been condemned as a communist, in everything but name, by Condolezza's impotent stammerers. The Catholic Church is in virtual schism in Bolivia, over the fact that so many of the parish priests in the hinterlands are ordained locally and married. Rome exercises little real power over the people. While there is no feminist movement in Bolivia, women's traditional roles in society are strong.

It turns out that the sanitary, efficient abortion clinics in Bolivia were for the elite, Mestizo population. Indian women, in their homespun rebozos and bowler hats were not welcome. In any case, the $150 to $300 fee required by these clinics, is likely more than most of these women will ever see at one time. Indigenous women see these clinics as just another entitlement, lavished for generations, on the mestizo class and resent their presence. While their actual rates of abortion are as high or higher than those of mestizo women, Indians were and are, forced to pay what little they can afford, to back alley practitioners and suffer high rates of infection and hemorrhaging, often resulting in sterility or death. Whether abortion remains legal or not in Bolivia, this will not change for them.

This is the kind of moral victory that the pro life movement, who glory in the death and suffering of innocent women at the hands of back alley abortionists in filthy, third world privies, can expect. They enjoy this kind of situation, when women who have engaged in fornication get their fitting punishment. These hippocrites are truly an abomination against God and will burn in Hell.

Where is that Third Stooge?

Bush wants another 50 Billion for the War in Iraq. He and Dick Cheney both say they want to invade Iran and start World War III. They say it's OK, they don't want your tax money for this. They say they will just have the Treasury print up the money and that the economy needs more liquidity anyway.

Sounds good to me.

Support the Troops!

BABY KILLER

The Spring of 1970 was a busy time in America. Even though Japanese cars were only starting to be seen on the highways, the writing was on the wall. American mills, mines and factories were already shutting down. Jobs were already going overseas. OPEC was tightening the screws and the oil embargo was just around the corner. Nixon had been elected 2 years earlier and his secret plan to end the war turned out to be a secret war in Cambodia. College campuses around the country erupted in protest.

I attended a large suburban State College in Southern California. It was a pretty ironic situation. A lot of the guys attending were there for the student deferrment from the draft. A lot of the guys attending were Vietnam vets using the GI Bill to take a breather before going on with their lives. You'd think there might be some tension between the two groups. There was not much. Some of the vets grew their hair long, some were establishment guys. The president of the student body was a vet, so was the president of the campus chapter of the SDS. It was ironic that in this time of the Kent State massacre, Vietnam vets were just as likely to be fired upon as to be doing the firing. A year or so later, while living at a commune in the Pacific Northwest, I found that many of the leading members of this "hippie" community were Vietnam vets.

It was during this time, the early '70s, that I first started hearing stories about soldiers returning from Vietnam, through San Francisco and being spit upon and called baby killers by "hippies". It seemed unlikely to me at the time but it was a time when a lot of unlikely things were happening. I always heard these stories in the third person, never from someone it actually happened to and the stories were remarkably similar. Who knows, it might have really happened.

The Right has used this story over the decades to conjure up images of an un-patriotic anti-war movement that doesn't "support the troops". I feel the same about the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan today as I did about the guys coming home from Vietnam 40 years ago. I want to hear what's going on over there and what's going on in their heads. I don't see them as in any way responsible for the war or it's consequences. They are welcome in my home. I'll get them on at work with me if I can. I may think there are war criminals but I think they are in the Whitehouse and the Pentagon, not patrolling the streets of Baghdad.

I suppose I'll keep hearing the story of the "dirty hippies" and the returning Vietnam Vets for the rest of my life. I don't care. It wasn't me that did it. It wasn't anybody I knew. If it happened at all, I suspect the person that did it was pretty impaired and pathetic. The returning serviceman it happened to probably felt pity for the perpetrator. Certainly he had gone through much worse during the course of his military service and the restraint he showed does him credit.

President Bush Awarded Prestigious Multi-Million Dollar Peace Prize

The White House announced today that President George W. Bush has been awarded the Atlantic Foundation International Peace Prize for his efforts to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East. The President is said to be excited and pleased with the award.

More details of the $2,000,000 award and the upcoming, gala, presentation ceremony will be announced after further communication with the Chairman of the Atlantic Foundation Awards Committee , Godwin Okuli, whose offices are in Lagos, Nigeria.

Wag the Dog

Al Gore is fat. He has a big head. He has a huge house, with a lot of bathrooms and real high utility bills. His garage is full of gas guzzling SUVs. He married his childhood sweetheart, who got fat along with him. She's kind of prissy and would like to take the sex and drugs out of rock and roll. They have a couple of nice girls that seem to do all right but their youngest child is a son who's surly and has a drug and alcohol problem. And he's a lard ass. And he has a big head.

Al Gore is awkward in public. He spins parables and makes analogies that seem simplistic. People perceive him as talking down to them. When he shows affection for his family, it seems contrived. He never really seems comfortable in front of a crowd and he knows it, after a while he starts to sweat and stutter. He always suffered when he was on the same stage as Bill Clinton. He didn't even come off that well against George Bush and George Bush is a genuine retard.

We decided to give George Bush the job as President, instead of Al Gore. He's got better hair. He's not fat. His head's not so big. He might be a retard but he cleans up nice. He looks real good in a dark suit. It was a mistake. He wasn't just a retard. He was a thug and a bully. He fancies himself a modern day Theodore Roosevelt, Great White Fleet, speak softly carry a big stick sort of thing. He's not. He's not even close. He's just a nasty little poser who struts around the neighborhood with his stick, exacting tribute and enjoying the cringing and fawning of the oppressed.

Gore might not have been a great President. He might not even have been a very good one. He would have reacted to 9/11 in a very different way, though. Bush used 9/11 to begin a plan of aggression in the Middle East that was already on the drawing board and had nothing to do with defeating terrorists. It wasn't a very good plan and look where it got us. We lost three thousand citizens in 9/11. Bush has killed hundreds of thousands and none of them had anything to do with 9/11, not one.

BIRTHDAY GREETINGS

CONGRATULATIONS AMERICAN WAR OF AGGRESSION IN IRAQ!!!

You are five years old today.

You are already the third longest and most expensive war in American history.

Your ratio of innocent civilian to combatant casualties is right up there with the Rape of Nan king.

Your refugee status as a percentage of the total population has not been seen since the establishment of the modern Israeli State after the UN partition of Palestine.

You have managed to accomplish so much, so young, with the promise of a long life still ahead.

You have made all of this happen with no plausible justification whatsoever.

WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH! YOU'RE THE BEST WAR EVER!

The Four Horsemen

Pimpin' the Print

Everybody is always saying how slanted and selective the news media is in their presentation of what is covered and how it is covered.

My favorite beef with them is how they cover literature. In the first place, they never cover the release of fiction, unless your name is JK Rowling. Even Danielle Steel, the "Novelist of Light", who sells more books than Jesus, can't get 2 minutes on Nightwatch at 3 AM. The most commonly covered authors on talk shows are, surprise, talk show hosts. Every six months or so Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, or one of the other vanilla flavored talking heads makes the rounds of all their buddies shows, pimping their new little $29.95 volume of wisdom. Do we really need another installment on how "Big Russ" managed to win World War II, hold down two jobs and still find time to spend several hours a day swilling down suds in the family garage. At least, since they are no longer gainfully employed, we won't have to hear about Don Imus' latest coffee table tome or any more of Tom Brokaws heartwarming tales of growing up retarded in Montana.

Then there are the vanity books, collections of anecdotal wisdom, completely fabricated, written by ghost writers, for people who while they may possess rudimentary literacy skills, are no more capable of writing coherent prose than a hydrophoby raccoon. In recent weeks we have been enthralled by the Mother Teresa-like work that Jena Bush has been doing in the slums of South America, pu-leeese. Then there is the little volume of homespun, hometown wit and wisdom by Lynn Cheney. In reality, she kicked the dust of Wyoming off her heels 40 years ago, splits a carton of Kents with Laura Bush every day, downs a half liter of Stoly, dresses designer and never looks back, in fondness or anything else.

Doris Lessing is 87 years old. She won the Nobel prize for Literature this morning. She has been pumping out controversial, cutting edge, contemporary fiction of the highest literary standard for half a century. I've never seen her wares displayed on the cathode alter once. I've never seen a review of her work in print. I doubt I ever will.

Just a little life affirming thought for the day.

Jimmy Carter was the last American President to consistently tell the truth to the American People. He was the last American President to actually be a Christian and live a Christian life. He is the only American President I remember ever admitting he was a sinner, or even to have made a mistake, about anything. He does not play golf or belong to a country club. He lives simply, in a small house, in his home town, in the middle of nowhere. He has devoted the almost 30 years since he was president, exclusively, to charitable and humanitarian efforts. As far as I know, he is the only President to serve as a career officer in the regular navy. I have never heard him to be connected to any scandal. He seems to have genuinely admitted and overcome the deep, bred to the bone racism implicit in a childhood spent growing up in rural Georgia of the 1930s. His mother was a gadfly. His brother drank a little beer. His cousin was a faith healer. He never denied or disassociated himself from them. He is pretty close to ninety years of age.

He says President Bush and Vice President Cheney have done great damage to America and the American people. He calls them liars. He calls them warmongers, without the personal conviction or courage to have served themselves. He calls them torturers. He thinks that they have conspired to usurp the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

He didn't always speak highly of Bill Clinton, either.

Unlike me, I don't believe he speaks this way because of a deep gut-wrenching hatred for these men. Unlike me, I don't believe he'd like to see them tarred and feathered, run around the National Mall on a splintery rail, pelted with stinking, rotten vegetables, dumped into the most polluted basin of the Potomac at low tide and then made to live out the rest of their miserable lives in a windowless, plumbingless, electricityless lean-to on Diego Garcia, under strict guard.

But it is nice to know that he agrees with me, basically, about the character of these men.

Hiding in his Foul Lair, with his Scurvy Minions, the Blood of Innocents dripping from his Rotting Fangs and Diseased Mouth, HE SPEAKS!

George W. Bush, the cringing Curr that calls himself our President, proves himself to be a Holocaust denier. Today, he warned Congress against passing a resolution recognizing the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians at the dawn of the modern Turkish Republic. He cautions that to do so would damage our relationship with Turkey, a valued ally in his unspeakably immoral war against Iraq.

Arnold Toynbee, historian and dean of British intelligence during World War I, stated he believed that 650,000 Turkish Armenians died in 1915-1916 alone. The genocide, in fact, took place over the years between 1896 and 1923. At its high point, the Armenian population in Turkey was upwards of 3 million. At the end of the genocide, the population was effectively zero. The ethnic Armenians in Turkey were dragged from their homes, men, women and children. They were beaten, burned, mutilated, raped, murdered and buried in mass graves. When this proved to be inefficient, they were herded, barefoot and in their nightclothes into the burning wastes of the Syrian Desert, where the bones of those who did not perish along the way, bleach to this day. Pitifully few escaped in a diaspora that sent the survivors to the far corners of the World. The numbers are even more staggering when the deaths of at least 650,000 Turkish Assyrians and 250,000 Turkish Greeks, slaughtered during the same period, are added in. The populations of these ethnic minorities, in Turkey, after the genocide, was also zero. You also must add to this the murder of virtually every prominent religious, social and business leader of the Kurdish community in Turkey and their families, in an attempt to suppress all vestiges of Kurdish culture and autonomy among the large Kurdish minority, approximately 20% of the population of Turkey, during this same time period. This adds at least another few hundred thousand deaths to the total and probably substantially more.

Most of the countries of the free world and 40 of the 50 United States, as well as hundreds of municipalities around the world, have long since passed resolutions in support of calling this heinous act of ethnic cleansing exactly what it was and is, a cold, calculated, remorseless, governmental policy of genocide carried out over the period of an entire generation by a State intent on establishing a racially pure society.

The President would like us to believe that it didn't really happen or if it did, not for the reasons that are apparent. He would like us to believe that it is in the nature of an unfortunate accident. Perhaps, like Global climate change, it is an unexplainable Act of God. There is nothing to be done about it now. Nobody really is to blame or should be held to account.

Bullshit!

Who supports the President in this spineless act cowardice? The Neocons, of course, once again asserting that the Jewish Holocaust is the only official, patented genocide deserving of recognition in the World community. All other genocides are cheap imitations, not the genuine article, possibly even deserved.

This man and the community of soulless golems that follow him are a plague upon the shining countenance of a once great nation. This diseased appendage must be cut away and cleansed by fire, lest we all perish from it's foul virulence.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Larry Craig is breaking new ground in closeted gay liberation. Like most gay Republican politicians, his sexual preference has been more or less common knowledge since puberty. Usually, as long as no major public exposure occurs, nothing threatens a boring, conservative, political career. As society has become more liberal, over the last several decades, standards of allowed sexual deviancy among closeted, gay politicians have relaxed. Presently, it is to the point, where a Republican politician can pretty much live openly as a gay American as long as he/she does not present as gay while engaged in official activities, in public. It has always been the rule, however, that if caught in homosexual behavior that comes to light as a result of an investigation into immorality, or arrest by a law enforcement agency, the closeted, gay, Republican politician will immediately resign his/her position and leave Washington for at least a token period of shame and disgrace.

Larry Craig is changing the rules. He has decided not to resign. He has also decided, even though everyone in the country knows who he is and harbors no doubt as to his sexual preference, to stay in the closet. What he is saying to the Republican establishment and the Idaho voters is, it's OK, you can trust me. Even though I'm gay I will continue to vote in keeping with the covenant we have always had. Kind of like those little powdered wigs that Officers of the Court wear in England, Larry is offering to wear a surrogate authoritarian, heterosexual guise while acting in his official capacity a a Senator. He is getting some resistance but not much and certainly none that will force him to leave his Senate seat before his term is up. This is important, because it signals a major achievement in conservative political goals, relative to the separation of reality from relevancy. The requirement for Republican politicians to give personal lip service to the restrictive and often conflicting codes of behavior and prejudice that make the Republican coalition possible, is making it increasingly difficult to find people willing to accept political office. This is one of the reasons that closeted gays are often the only ones willing to accept it, other than complete idiots. In the end, if conditions don't change, the Republicans will be left with only candidates like George W. Bush and my Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, to offer up to the voters, who are both closeted gays and complete idiots.

This is a painful transition for the Republican infrastructure to make but the highly diverse nature of their coalition demands it. If they are to have any hope of bringing new groups into their coalition or even maintaining the present one, they must make it.

A Shepardess, With Crook and Sling, Guards the Flock

Hilliary Clinton was raised and active in the Methodist Church, until she married, when she began to attend the Southern Baptist Church of her husband.

Her husband has been a serial philanderer, a condition so common among Southern Baptists that it is almost universal, even among the clergy. She has not engaged in adultery, nor has she sought separation or divorce from her husband. She does not smoke, drink or use drugs and never has. She does not personally believe in or advocate abortion or euthanasia. The daughter that she raised, also does not smoke, drink or use drugs, nor is she sexually promiscuous. Her demeanor is modest and she strives to stay out of the public eye and lens.

Hilliary supported Bush's war until the fourth set of progressively weaker rationale for it proved to be fallacious. She admits, now that we are so deeply enmeshed in the Middle East, militarily, it might be years before we can extricate ourselves.

She does not support gay marriage.

Her position on illegal immigration is virtually the same as the current Republican Presidents.

She believes everybody ought to have access to health care.

She is committed to a balanced budget and fiscal responsibility.

A coalition of leaders of the fundamentalist Christian movement met this week and announced that if no candidate emerged who was acceptable to them, they would have to support a third party candidate.

One can only intuit that their bulbs shine very dimly.