The Unimaginable Life

Editor’s Note: This commentary of mine was broadcast on public radio, WBFO, in Buffalo, New York on May 12, 2009. You can listen to the audio here, on the WBFO website.

I was driving home one day in May 2007 when my cell phone rang. It was the Communications Director of the Iowa Democratic Party returning my call about the upcoming Democratic political dinner in Cedar Rapids. She said that my blog, Brilliant Politics, had not been published long enough to qualify for press credentials, but . that I sounded like a nice guy, so she would grant credentials for me and my photographer, Martin Saunders.

When we arrived at the hotel in Cedar Rapids, the lobby was buzzing with journalists, film crews, and political bigwigs. We stepped onto an elevator with Senator Tom Harkin. I said to him that we were from Brilliant Politics and he replied, “Brilliant Politics …that’s an oxymoron. I’ve never seen that animal.” The hallways were jammed with hordes of volunteers chanting slogans that echoed off walls plastered from floor to ceiling with campaign posters. Press scrums mobbed Bill Richardson, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton. I asked Edwards a question about global warming and captured his answer on my new digital voice recorder. Later we chatted amiably with our fellow reporters at the press table. We were now members of the press because…well…we had asked to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Jesse Ventura, a former Navy SEAL who was waterboarded as part of his training, says unequivocally that waterboarding is torture. He also makes an offer to Dick Cheney:

This photo essay is a retrospective look at my time on the campaign trail as a blogger during Barack Obama’s campaign for president. I am suspending operation of my blog, Brilliant Politics, with an eye toward reviving it during the 2012 presidential campaign. I was happy to have my great friend, collaborator, and photographer, Martin Saunders, with me on some of those trips. His political photography of our two trips to Iowa can be seen here and here.

Brilliant Politics was always a part-time and intermittent blog, given my time limitations. But I have to say that our timing was perfect. I was one of the first persons to publicly suggest that Barack Obama should run for president, on October 10, 2006, in this commentary on public radio, “My Daughter the First Black President,” although I did so with a heavy dose of irony. About seven months later, I wrote this justification for starting Brilliant Politics:

It might seem oxymoronic to some to seek brilliance in contemporary politics. We will, nevertheless, undertake this daunting task because the United States, now suffering through a bipartisan endarkenment in the early years of the 21st century, so badly needs the light of brilliant ideas and the radiance of brilliant leaders.

Well, I think that I hit the bullseye, and I believe that we all are very fortunate because we elected a brilliant president. Some of us worked harder than others to ensure that outcome. Now let’s make sure that he follows through on those brilliant ideas.

-CDP

The Telegraph reports:

The images from the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that an estimated 700 square kilometres of the Wilkins Ice Shelf have been lost, with satellite data last week showing the first icebergs had started to calve off its northern front.

The indications that the ice shelf has become unstable follow the collapse three weeks ago of the ice bridge between the Antarctic mainland and Charcot Island, with the loss of around 330 square kilometres of ice.

The following video has nothing to do with ice loss, but it does give a sense of the astounding beauty of the place:

Antarctica from Darek Sepiolo on Vimeo.

It seems to me that many Republicans, at least those in Washington and in the media, are becoming hysterical. In other words, they have been overcome with emotion, irrationality, and, in the worst cases, paranoia. At a time when Barack Obama has the highest presidential approval ratings in 20 years, Republicans accuse him of socialism, fascism, and one-party rule. Is it any wonder then that people are leaving the Republican Party?

Robert Gates , our current Secretary of Defense, held the same job under George W. Bush.  Why did Obama keep him on? Read Gates’ article, “A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age” in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs and you will understand the reason.  Here is the key passage:

What is dubbed the war on terror is, in grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign — a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and those of moderation. Direct military force will continue to play a role in the long-term effort against terrorists and other extremists. But over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory. Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit. It will take the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies.

It was unimaginable a few years ago that we would have a black president and a black first lady.  If I had told you 18 months ago that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States and that Hillary Clinton would be the next Secretary of State, you would have said that I was a fool.

The photos below were taken by my friend, and sometime Brilliant Politics photographer, Martin Saunders.

Frank Rich makes the case that the Bush Administration used torture in the summer of 2002 to try to establish a link between the 9/11 attacks and Iraq. There was no link and torture could not establish something that did not exist.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

The use of torture by Americans, which is illegal and a war crime, has had a horribly corrosive effect on our bedrock democratic principles and on our reputation around the world. In addition to Frank Rich’s column today in the New York Times, essential reading on the subject of torture by Andrew Sullivan, such as “Cheney Lies Again” and “The Right Vs. the Geneva Conventions,” can be found regularly at his blog, The Daily Dish.  The following interview of a Republican congressman by Chris Matthews on Hardball on April 23 also gets to the heart of issue:

Al Gore, testifying before Congress yesterday, points to the massive fraud corporate polluters have perpetrated on the American public by covering up information about global warming. He refers to an April 23, 2009 article in the New York Times that shows that the oil, coal, and automotive industries financed the anti-global warming propaganda campaign.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is an environmental attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, noted in a speech in Buffalo last week that the oil and coal companies are gearing up for another massive propaganda campaign against the renewable energy industry. Don’t get fooled again.