Ellen DeGeneres was pictured palling around with former President George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game and a lot of people were outraged. Ellen was unmoved and in fact she was indignant about their outrage. Ellen quoted a tweet that said her friendship with the former President gave the tweeter “faith in America again” and argued that we should be friends with people who disagree with us. On its surface, it’s a valid point so let’s take a look at when it’s fine to be friends with those people whose politics we find “disagreeable”.

It’s fine if they voted for George W. Bush.

It’s definitely not fine if they are now or have ever been George W. Bush.

It’s fine if they supported the war in Iraq, although if they supported it even after the surge you probably don’t want to let them pick the restaurant you eat at because clearly, they lack sound judgment.

It’s not fine if they started the war in Iraq and are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the continued destabilization of the Middle East.

It’s fine if they have conservative opinions on LGBTQ+ rights. Well not fine per se but those decisions are up to every individual who they choose to associate with.

It’s not fine if they went on prime-time television to demand that America amend our constitution to make sure that gay people couldn’t get married or enjoy the same rights as other citizens. It’s also not fine if they were in a position of power to protect LGBTQ+ persons from hate crimes, perhaps through a law named in honor of Matthew Shepard, and then killed the legislation.

It’s fine if they like Brett Kavanaugh or don’t believe the credible accusations from Dr. Blasey-Ford.

It’s not fine if they hired Brett Kavanaugh (giving him credibility among conservative jurists) and successfully lobbied congress for his appointment to the Supreme Court.

It’s fine if they have a different view of enhanced interrogation and whether Guantanamo Bay should remain open.

It’s not fine if they made the United States into a torture nation while routinely abusing international human rights and our constitution. It’s not fine if they sanctioned the rollback of our civil liberties and empowered an unaccountable super intelligence state.

This isn’t about policing George Bush for thought crime or a difference of political opinion. It’s about his acting out his politics as the leader of the free world and most powerful person on earth and very much materially harming millions of people. Ellen and other liberals defending Bush are revealing more about themselves than they think they are about their detractors. They are indifferent to human suffering and they view their lives as existing outside of politics, for them this is an issue of class solidarity. How quickly we forget the villains of yesterday because of our current temporary discomfort with the incumbent. Liberals have forgiven Kissinger in spite of Cambodia, they’ve attempted to claim Reagan as their own because of his anti-Russia bent despite his 8 years of global carnage, and they’ve even invited the late John McCain into their hearts because he was polite while loudly promoting every potential war no matter the civilian cost. We shouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years we witness the rehabilitation of Trump because liberals are disgusted by President Josh Hawley. They’ll say “oh what a man Trump was. He served with distinction and openness though we disagreed. Where have all the Trumps gone?” The collective amnesia of the liberal establishment and the American public is disheartening. We need to learn to love one another again, but let’s not start with Bush.

The post Politically Divergent Friendships, When They’re Fine vs. When They’re Not appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Former President George W. Bush gave a speech last week that could be summed up as “racism is bad” and “democracy is good”. The New York Times called it a “pointed rebuke” and the Huffington Post described it as “[speaking] truth to power”. Just how low has the bar fallen when condemning racism and defending democracy can be called acts of bravery? Simply because we’ve grown accustomed to our current President’s dismissiveness towards white supremacists does not mean that it’s abnormal or commendatory for any public figure to…I don’t know…not be a racist with authoritarian tendencies?

Have we been so starved of decency that even the most mundane platitudes like “people of every race, religion, and ethnicity can be fully and equally American” make us forget who George W. Bush is? Because I guarantee the people of Iraq have not forgotten, or at least the ones who weren’t one of the 600,000 casualties of the fruitless war that Bush started haven’t forgotten. Or have we forgotten Iraq because George Bush repeated some mean words about Donald Trump from a speech somebody else wrote?

Maybe you have been caught up in Bush-mania, with all of his painting, getting trapped in ponchos, and talk show appearances. Perhaps that southern drawl and his rather “limited” command of the English language has made you nostalgic for the Bush Presidency. On occasion, you might even turn on the television and say to yourself “Oh what a man he was”, pinning for a time when “things just made sense” Stop doing that.

Liberals so often want to hold the Democratic establishment, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and others to account for their actions (which is what we should be doing). But if we can’t even resolve to hold to account the man who lied us into the most reckless foreign policy disaster ever (President Trump, there’s still time), who deregulated the agencies responsible for federal oversight which would contribute to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression (again President Trump, there’s still time), and stoked the flames of white resentment that would eventually lead to the ascendancy of Trump…then how can we expect to be taken seriously?

George Bush wants to imply that Donald Trump, members of his cabinet, and the supporters of Trumpism are bigots. I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment. However, George Bush surely isn’t going to pretend that he’s above playing the bigot for political gain? Because when he was a candidate for President in 2000, Bush didn’t seem to have any reservations about giving a speech at Bob Jones University (which at the time banned interracial dating). Bush’s allies also didn’t seem to have a problem spreading the slander that John McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was actually a love child from an affair with a black prostitute. Then there was the debacle over “family values” which lead to Bush campaigning for reelection in 2004 on the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would’ve prevented gay couples from receiving any legal recognition.

George Bush also just casually drops that democracies across the world are becoming unstable and for reasons beyond our understanding, America has lost it’s moral authority internationally. He says “Our security and prosperity are only found in wise, sustained, global engagement:…In the confrontation of security challenges before they fully materialize and arrive on our shores…In serving as a shining hope for refugees and a voice for dissidents, human rights defenders, and the oppressed.” First of all, if confronting security challenges before they “fully materialize” sounds familiar it’s because that’s basically the justification Bush used for a preemptive invasion of Iraq in 2003. Back then he said “Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety. Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed.” Which leads me to my second point, many of the “refugees” Bush says America should embrace exist because of his policy decisions. ISIS would not exist if it were not for the power vacuum created by the Iraq War. As we now know, many of the leaders of ISIS got their start as bureaucrats and insurgency fighters in Iraq. The Civil War in Syria, which has many combatants including ISIS, has created by some estimates at least 6,000,000 refugees.

But perhaps all of that could’ve been forgiven, obviously it shouldn’t be but it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where this praise might’ve been more appropriate. There was a time to give this speech, and it was literally at any point before November 8th, 2016. It literally only adds insult to injury that Bush had his come to Jesus moment a full 11 months after it would’ve been the most useful. We know George Bush didn’t vote for Trump, and he didn’t have kind words for him at the inauguration. So with all this pontificating about his concern for the future of democracy and the threat posed by unbridled nationalism, one has to wonder…what the hell took so long?

Forget the Obama-Trump voters and Bernie-Trump voters, because George Bush was unlikely to sway those people when it really mattered. Instead, remember the Romney-Trump, McCain-Trump, but more importantly, Bush-Trump voters who constituted the overwhelming majority of Trump’s support. Those people might’ve cared what George W. Bush had to say about the dangers of nativist and isolationist politics. It’s almost like this entire speech was political theater because in the grand scheme of things it did nothing but reinforce ideas held by everyone whose name is not Donald Trump.

So, let’s not be so quick to heap praise on Republicans with destructive pasts simply because they did the not at all courageous thing of criticizing the most unpopular President in history. Will there come a day 10 years from now when we’re applauding former President Donald Trump for delivering a speech on the dangers of President Ted Cruz’s fundamentalist ideas? Will we forget again and initiate Donald Trump as a member of the resistance for doing the bare minimum as some have attempted to with George Bush? Let’s hope not.

The post Liberals, Stop Fawning over George W. Bush appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Recent references to Donald Trump’s bizarre ramblings in interview transcripts (Trump’s NYT transcript: Read it, and weep for our country) make one yearn for a kinder, gentler time.

In 2001, Richard Thompson, a cartoonist for the Washington Post, published “Make the Pie Higher.” It is a wonderful mashup of actual quotes from George W. Bush.

Read and let your mind drift away from Mr. Trump.

Make the Pie Higher

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It’s a world of madmen
And uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the internet
Become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish
Can coexist.

Families is where our nation finds hope
Where our wings take dream.
Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

      — George W. Bush (true quotes, as organized by Richard Thompson)

The post Make the pie higher: nostalgia for W in a Trump era appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The Republican Party has strayed so far from “societal norms” or “polite company” in recent years that it has caused some to ask, “Where have the grown-ups in the party gone?” It’s a fair question, particularly when looking at those members of the Grand Old Party who are currently running for president.

But it wasn’t too long ago that there were indeed grown-ups who very visible in the Republican Party. Some would say that when Ronald Reagan was elected president thirty-five years ago that he was a grown-up, even if his politics ranged further to the right than the two Republicans who had proceeded him, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Importantly, Reagan’s choice for Vice-President, George Herbert Walker Bush, was cut from the cloth of proper establishment Republicans.

As we are learning now, with the imminent release of Jon Meacham’s book, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, the elder Bush has been a measured and often cautious man; someone who does not act impulsively and who is not afraid of dissenting opinions in his company. When he became president in 1988, he commanded one of the very few successes that the United States has had in armed conflict since the end of World War II. He put together a coalition of forty-three nations to oppose Iraq’s Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iraq, and the forces were strong enough to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait in four days.

But when Pappy Bush ran for president on his own right in 1988, he made a startling and strange choice for his vice-presidential running mate, one that opened the door for the “kiddy corps.” His selection was Indiana Senator Dan Quayle, someone who was known to most as a mental lightweight before he was anointed, and who pretty much convinced the rest of the world of that after he was nominated. We are now familiar with the term “kiddy table” when talking about Republicans running for office, but to get there, one has to perform poorly in the polls. If you were looking for child-like naiveté as a ticket to the table, Quayle might have been seated at the head of the table. Who can forget him saying, “What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.”

We all have blind spots, and unfortunately for George H.W. Bush, he was also deaf to the advice of many other Republicans when considering Quayle for Number Two. Quayle may have been the first of the recent cadre of young, energetic, not-too-bright, and generally non-empathetic “rising stars” in the Republican Party. He came to us courtesy of a true grown-up, a war hero, and a very credible president, George H.W. Bush.

As tidbits come out about the Meacham book, we learn that Bush 41 had significant issues with the way his son, George W. Bush, ran his two-term presidency. Pappy saw Vice-President Dick Cheney as many others have, as a controlling force who had a war agenda which was central to his vision of foreign policy. 41 also saw 43’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, as somewhat oblivious to facts.

Criticizing the administration of George W. Bush is both rather easy and also sad. He never should have been president of the United States. However, there were enough American voters who preferred him as their choice over Al Gore in 2000 that Bush nearly won the vote and actually won the appointment of the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court.

So George H.W. Bush wittingly brought Dan Quayle to the national scene and then unwittingly brought us his son, George W. We do not really know if Pappy Bush wanted George W. to be president, but from what we can currently tell, Pappy did not tell his son that the job was over his head and it would not be wise to call upon his political chips to try to get there. The bottom line is that one way or another George H.W. Bush brought us George W. The American people confirmed ‘W’s’ so-called readiness to be commander-in-chief.

After ‘W’ was two-termed out, the Republican Party went back to a grown-up in John McCain as their nominee in 2000. McCain was regarded as a serious opponent to Barack Obama, until he made that fateful decision to ask someone he had not previously met to be his vice-presidential nominee. He called upon Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, who was regarded, again, as a young and energetic Republican firebrand. Unlike Quayle, Palin could rally a conservative crowd, but her knowledge of the news was laid bare when she was asked by CBS’s Katie Couric if she could provide the name of one newspaper or magazine that she reads, and she couldn’t think of any so she blurted, “All of them.”

McCain lost to Obama. Palin soon thereafter quit her governorship in mid-term and has since been somewhat of a darling of the right. Even though she has not sought political office over the past seven years, she has had a huge impact on the Republican party, both its insiders and its voters. She has taken the main stage and said truly outrageous things reflecting huge gaps in knowledge, in critical thinking and in empathy. These characteristics are now common in most Congressional Republicans. The extremism of Congressional Republicans is why the very conservative John Boehner gave up on managing the Kiddie Table in the Lower Chamber of Congress.

Would we have had this brand of Republican had George H.W. Bush not given us Dan Quayle and later his son, and if John McCain had not given us Sarah Palin? The strength of the current extremists is such that they surely would have risen to prominence somehow some way. But the apparent legitimacy that they have in the GOP was greatly strengthened by the nod and a wink from the likes of Pappy Bush and John McCain. They both may well be regretting that now.

The post Pappy Bush and McCain gave green light to GOP extremists appeared first on Occasional Planet.

More than 10 years, six-thousand+ body bags, and hundreds of thousands of physically and psychologically wounded veterans too late, George W. Bush may finally be feeling a twinge of something resembling regret over the deaths and injuries caused by the Iraq War–the war he created based on a lie—and the war in Afghanistan. Last week [February 2014], Bush emerged from his self-portrait-in-bathtub-painting, post-Presidential hibernation to announce that his foundation plans to help veterans who are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD].

About 2.5 million U.S. service members served in the Bush-initiated Iraq and Afghanistan wars since 2001, according to the Department of Defense.  Nearly 7,000 U.S. military personnel were killed. More than 50,000 U.S. and coalition service members were wounded in more than a decade of war. More than 270,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are thought to suffer from PTSD. To date, the Veterans Affairs Department has awarded disability benefits to more than 150,000 PTSD patients.

In a speech delivered last week, Bush outlined his plans. According to the Dallas News, he noted that “the Bush Institute hopes to create a set of best practices that can be applied to business, non-profits and other groups that are working with veterans and their families…Bush is expected to focus on three areas: the civilian-military divide; the employment prospects for post-9/11 veterans; and the stigma surrounding post-traumatic stress.”

I think it needs to be said that among the “best practices” that ought to be deployed is the practice of not sending people into unnecessary wars, and that such a “best practice” would preclude the need to deal with hundreds of thousands of people experiencing the “stigma” of post-traumatic stress.

Later, in an interview on ABC News, Bush talked more about the new initiative. He didn’t actually apologize for the physical and emotional destruction his fake war created. I doubt that he’ll ever be big enough to do that. As a person born to privilege, propped up as a puppet of a politically cynical entourage, and never really held accountable for his behavior (including ducking out on his own, cushy military tour of duty), W is not prone to introspection or regret. But he did say that helping veterans was his “duty,” and he did seem to be pursuing a positive impulse—unlike much of what he did as President.  So, perhaps in the years since he left office, the boy president has finally matured enough to put some of his presidential swagger behind him, and get some perspective on the long-term effects of sending millions of soldiers into a cooked-up, bloody battle with no justification and no acceptable outcome—just years of extended suffering for its physically and emotionally scarred veterans and their families.

At least, I hope that’s what has happened. Unless this is all just convenient, empty, legacy-building baloney from a former President who never really understood–and wasn’t curious about–the world around him or the consequences of blindly following the dictates of Dick Cheney. Or maybe as he ages, Bush’s testosterone level is falling a bit…Or maybe what he really regrets is that his legacy is going to be that of an empty-headed dolt who did a shitload of harm. Or perhaps, as has been suggested to me, the Republican party is hoping to elevate Bush’s brother to presidential status and needs George to do something–anything–to clean up the family image he totaled.

As Bush talked about his plans, he choked up a bit, and a single tear coursed down his cheek in what he called a “slightly emotional” reaction. It didn’t make me like him, or respect him, or forgive him for all the damage he mindlessly and callously inflicted. It’s far too little, far too late. But it was a heckuva lot better than “Mission Accomplished.”

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Of all the U.S. Presidents, in all of the White Houses, in all of our lifetimes [so far], the one I’d judge least qualified to have a library—you know, one of them booky thingies with “facts”and “documents” reflecting “thinking” -–is  George W. Bush. And I’m not alone in saying that. Recently [April 2013], when the George W. Bush Presidential Library opened at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, political cartoonists expressed in pictures what a lot of us were thinking. Here’s a gallery of some of their observations:

The post George W. Bush’s Library: Political cartoon fodder appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Two recent pieces in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch helped me make some connections about why Republicans can’t stand to talk about how the unnecessary Iraq war bankrupted our country. They like to blame President Obama for spending too much money despite the fact that spending has decreased and the deficit is shrinking. In a letter to the editor, Robert Specker of Wildwood asked, “Why is our government spending funds it has to borrow in the first place if the expenditures are not necessary?”

Say what? “Unnecessary” is the adjective that will be used to describe the Iraq War by future historians, and they won’t pass up a chance to mention that we cut taxes while ramping up military spending.

An excellent article by Grady Smith about the “moral wounds” of combat shines some light on why Republicans are going to such great lengths to avoid taking responsibility for driving the nation into debt. Smith quotes a 30-year-old article by Peter Marin to explain how terribly difficult it is for humans to come to terms with the damage they do to others when “the dead remain dead, the maimed are forever maimed, and there is no way to deny one’s responsibility or culpability.”

Over 4,000 Americans were killed in Iraq and tens of thousands have physical and emotional scars that our society will have to take care of for decades to come. Estimates are that over 100,000 Iraqis, including women and children, died in the war of choice by the George W. Bush administration. As more details emerge about how the intelligence was massaged to give the desired result about Iraq’s threat to its neighbors and to us, those who supported the war must be facing some pretty difficult self-analysis.

Psychologists use the term “projection” to describe how humans blame others for something they can’t face about themselves. I think we’re on to something here. I hope Republicans who supported President Bush’s ill-conceived war accept partial responsibility for the physical, emotional and fiscal damage done to everyone involved. Maybe then they can start making amends rather than looking for others to blame.

The post It’s time to take responsibility for the Iraq War and its moral/financial consequences appeared first on Occasional Planet.

On his HBO show, Bill Maher usually arranges for one of his three guests to be a conservative. In one sense, he wants to be fair to the conservative point of view; in another he wants to provide a foil for the two liberal guests (as well as himself) who also sit on the panel.

One of the conservative guests who has been a regular on the program is David Frum, a one-time aide and speech writer in the George W. Bush White House. He did not always take the company line in the White House. While he supported John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he was a force in opposition to Harriet Miers as an associate justice. He was a strong advocate for many conservative ideas in the White House, but also a gadfly who would oppose the “Rovian” conventional wisdom when he felt that empathy was being overlooked. He eventually left the Bush White House to work for presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City.

The Canadian-born Frum is the author of seven books. Most advocate conservative ideas, suggesting that the liberal philosophy leads to financial waste and unaccountable social policy. However, through it all, he has maintained a certain skepticism of the wisdom of his fellow conservatives.

Over time, David Frum did what very few political advocates do. He basically changed his political philosophy. He came to accept the Democratic principles of primary concern for the poor and disenfranchised. He saw hypocrisy within both parties, but particularly with the Republicans. He became comfortable with uninhibited criticism of the Republican Party, particularly its leaders.

In the July 30, 2012 issue of The Nation, David Oppenheimer wrote a definitive article,  describing Frum’s metamorphosis. The same day that the article in The Nation came out, Frum, as a CNN contributor, wrote an article entitled “Mitt Romney’s painfully bad week.” Frum spared no punches on the Republican presidential candidate-to-be. He talked about Romney’s blatant criticism of the Affordable Health Care Act  at a meeting of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Romney was predictably booed, but Frum raises the question of whether Romney was  naïve and had no idea what the reaction would be, or if he intentionally stirred the embers and sought sympathy from America’s whites, who seem to hate President Obama.

Frum points out that Romney also floated the idea of Condoleezza Rice as a vice-presidential nominee.. Perhaps this was intended to be a lame effort to win a few African-American votes, but Romney seemed to forget that (a) Rice is strongly pro-choice,  anathema to Republicans, and (b) she has repeatedly said that she has no interest in the vice-presidency.

And then who can talk about Mitt Romney without mentioning his inexplicable finances with Bain Capital, the financial services company that he once headed. As Gloria Bilchik has written in the Occasional Planet, this is like Retroactive Romney. He takes what he did in 2002 and pretends that it ended in 1999. The bending of the truth is a big enough concern in itself, but the real problem is that he tries to distance himself from a period of time when Bain was shipping thousands of jobs overseas. Frum, as a one-time loyal Republican, cannot take Romney’s slippery and sloppy rhetoric, and reams him, as many Democrats are currently doing.

Frum is a thinker; he enjoys analyzing data and putting disparate perspectives together into a coherent set of ideas. That took him on the path from aligning his views with those of Republicans to Democrats. We need more David Frums, even if they move on the other direction. We will not progress without critical thinking, and David Frum is a true model for such an approach.

The post How refreshing: David Frum goes from conservative to semi-liberal appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of America’s finest progressives was South Dakota Senator George McGovern. In 1972, he won the Democratic nomination for president. Unfortunately,  he was trounced by Richard Nixon in the general election.

In many ways, George McGovern is best known as an anti-war candidate; someone who had the courage and fortitude to stand up against the folly of the Vietnam War. He was an early opponent of the war. In a speech on the Senate floor in September 1963, McGovern became the first member to challenge the growing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. This was two months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As time went on, opponents called him “McGivern” because they thought that was a pacifist and he wanted to give victory to Vietnamese communists.

McGovern was far from being a pacifist. He opposed the war in Vietnam because, to quote a future president, he thought it was a “dumb war.” Twenty years prior to his warning about Vietnam delivered on the floor of the Senate,  he was in the U.S. Army,  training to fly the B-24 bomber. Like most of his generation, “the greatest generation,” he was eager to fight for his country and its allies against the totalitarian regimes in Germany and Japan.

The B-24 was the biggest American bomber at the time and a difficult plane to handle, because its initial versions did not have any hydraulic controls. It required an enormous amount of physical strength and mental alertness to get the plane off the ground, to keep it on target while in the air, and to land upon return. McGovern became an outstanding B-24 flyer. He was a co-pilot of the B-24 for his first five missions; for the final thirty, he piloted  one that he named the “Dakota Queen.”

In contrast to McGovern,  the biggest initiators and instigators of the discretionary wars following World War II had passive or no military records. Lyndon Johnson and Nixon escalated the Vietnam War to a point where the U.S. had over 550,000 troops involved at its peak. Both Johnson and Nixon had been in the Navy in World War II, but neither of them saw significant combat, as McGovern had.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush, who had a distinguished military record, committed the United States to forming a coalition of nations to force Iraq under Saddam Hussein back within its borders, after it had invaded Kuwait, to provide greater access to the Persian Gulf. But a dozen years later and after the 9-11 attack, George W. Bush (the son) took America into a specious war against Iraq, presumably because of the presence of weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda in Iraq. Neither were there.

Bush’s military record was questionable at best. He was in the Texas Air National Guard for two years during the peak of the Vietnam War. He never left stateside, and there are indications, reported most actively by Dan Rather of CBS News, that he was AWOL during much of the time that he was supposed to be on duty. What is clear is that, prior leading America into several senseless wars as president, he had never personally been close to combat.

Bush had a cadre of associates who encouraged him to invade Iraq. Among them were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol, Richard Pearle, and Condoleeza Rice. Cheney may have been the most hawkish of all of them, but he avoided Vietnam by receiving five deferments that prevented him from being drafted.

The neo-cons had a way of making it like Alice in Wonderland. In 2004, when Bush was running for reelection against John Kerry, who had fought heroically while piloting swift boats on dangerous rivers in the Vietnamese jungles. He saw considerable combat and received two Purple Hearts for his bravery. Yet the neo-cons fabricated a story that Kerry had embellished his military record. Numerous credible witnesses vouched for the veracity of Kerry’s account. The neo-cons were essentially accusing Kerry of cowardice, while most of them either did not serve in the military or had non-combat roles.

With the benefit of hindsight and history, we can see that George McGovern had an accurate view of the Vietnam War, even if his positions were unpopular. While there is no way to prove it, it is possible that his combat experience in World War II gave him a clear view of what lay ahead in Vietnam.

Bush and the other neo-cons did not know the reality of war. It seems that they almost saw Iraq and Afghanistan as video games, and with modern technology, they almost look that way.

If there is any saving grace from American military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is that there are literally millions who have served in the war zones. Perhaps in the future, one or several of them will run for President of the United States. It might serve voters well to remember that since World War II, it has generally been those who served in the military who kept us out of major wars, while it was those who did not serve who launched the fruitless adventures.

The post If you didn’t fight in a war, don’t start a new one appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Watching the coverage of President Obama’s speech about the killing of Osama bin Laden, I find myself in agreement with various friends (on Facebook and elsewhere) who have expressed uneasiness with the crowing over this development.  I’m uneasy with the celebration of an assassination, leery of reprisals, and put off by the tackiness of citizens singing “We Are the Champions” in response to a bloody shootout.

I thought Obama’s speech framed the killing with great care and sobriety. I think what we saw in Obama’s speech was the President taking personal responsibility—and, yes, credit—for bin Laden’s death. It was the statement of a President who understood what he had done and why.

Some have pointed out that yesterday was the anniversary of George W. Bush’s infamous speech on the aircraft carrier in front of the unfortunately premature “Mission Accomplished” banner.

I think an even more interesting contrast, however, is with this clip of Bush talking about bin Laden just six months after 9/11:

Bush’s casual swagger and smirking seem so painfully inadequate, so utterly different from Obama’s gravitas and moral understanding.

Bush mocks the idea of “focusing on one person” and proudly notes that he doesn’t spend that much time thinking about bin Laden. He asserts that those who worry about bin Laden don’t understand the “scope of the mission”—and that terror is so much bigger than one person.

From this vantage point, this clip seems to crystallize the tragedy of the Bush years: the President’s blithe expansion of “the mission” beyond al-Qaeda and bin Laden; the loss of focus that led us into two wars in which we are still enmeshed.

And though I’m uncomfortable with the triumphalist “flash mobs” chanting U-S-A and waving flags in celebration of America’s killing someone, I’m made hopeful by the intelligence and subtlety of Obama’s announcement and by the fact that he not only understood from the beginning of his Presidency how important it really was (to the American public, if nothing else) to bring down Osama bin Laden, but also was focused enough to make it happen.

The post Obama’s moral understanding vs. Bush’s swagger appeared first on Occasional Planet.