By The River

One of the few disappointments for Democrats in the recent election was the re-election of Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont because of his strong support for the Iraq War and his embrace of George W. Bush. He stayed in the race as an Independent, and with strong support from the White House and many Republican votes, won re-election.

Today, Lieberman returned the favor to Bush and his political advisor, Karl Rove, by writing an op-ed piece in the Washington Post urging America to stay the course in Iraq. How should they do that? By supporting a "surge," of American troops there, the word chosen by Bush and Rove in preference to the more accurate "escalation." In other words, throw good money after bad and waste even more American lives (not to mention countless thousands more Iraqis) so Bush doesn't have to admit defeat in this personal adventure.

It astounds me sometimes that there are people who still support Bush because he is supposedly more "moral" than Bill Clinton. What is less moral--a consensual affair with a woman well above the legal age of consent, or taking the nation into war on false pretenses and sacrificing untold numbers of lives? Think about it.

What worries me the most about Lieberman's op-ed piece is that it could be the opening gambit in a plan by him to caucus with the Republicans instead of the Democrats. That would return the Senate to Republican control for two more years and possibly give Bush another Alito-like appointment to the Supreme Court. I can envision Lieberman making a "sorrowful " announcement that because "his" party has "irresponsibly blocked" an escalation of forces in Iraq, he will shift his allegiance to the party of Bush. With Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota clearly recovering from his brain surgery, a Lieberman betrayal is Bush's last option for retaining control of the Senate.

Here's an interesting dissection of Lieberman's op-ed by a writer at the Daily Kos.

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I was in the Watergate Class of journalists, the young men and women who entered the profession in the mid-1970s, immediately after the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. During my years at Hope College, I avidly followed the reporting on the scandal by the national press, especially the stories of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. It was hard to see the actual Washington Post in Michigan in those pre-Internet days, but many of their more important stories went out on the wire and were reprinted in the Detroit Free Press and Grand Rapids Press, if my memory serves me. Their two books on Watergate, "All The President's Men" and "The Final Days," became holy writ for young reporters like me. We could quote chapter and verse.

Many of us wanted to be like Woodward and Bernstein, investigative reporters who pounded the street and worked their sources to get big stories with a momentous impact on America. A few of us actually succeeded--the 1980s and 1990s were the golden age of American investigative reporting. I did it on a much smaller scale with my reporting on the Centralia mine fire and my own book, Unseen Danger, published in 1986. Woodward and Bernstein weren't perfect journalists, but they came mighty close to the ideal.

Woodward, long a solo act, proved it again this week with stories from an interview he did with former President Gerald Ford before his death. First came the story that Ford was highly critical of George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq, and tonight comes an admission from beyond the grave that his personal friendship with Nixon influenced Ford's decision to pardon him a month after taking office in August 1974. He had always said he did it to spare the country the torment of seeing a former President put on trial, as Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski wanted to do.

I can tell you as a journalist that you don't get stories like this by walking in cold and asking Ford why he really pardoned Nixon. Woodward did extensive pre-research, including combing the Nixon Tapes for hitherto unknown conversations between Nixon and Ford that suggested their friendship was far closer than either man ever let on publicly. The journalist is part detective, part psychiatrist, part musical conductor. He must win the trust of his subject, but also induce him to believe that he is just confirming what the reporter already knows.

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Former President Gerald Ford, who became Vice President after the resignation of Spiro Agnew, and then President with the resignation of Richard M. Nixon in 1974, died Tuesday at the age of 93. He was a good and decent man, and probably the last of the old-style Republican presidents. With him, perhaps, dies the type of "Rotary" Republican who stood for lower taxes when it didn't mean pulling the plug on government revenues, for internationalism when it didn't mean wars of choice in Iraq, smaller government when it didn't mean hatred for the poor and working man, and religion when it meant the Presbyterian church on the corner, not Bible-thumping, in-your-face fundamentalism. Hard to imagine, isn't it?

Ford served in the Congress from Grand Rapids, Mich., for nearly a quarter century before he ascended to the White House because of the Watergate and associated Republican scandals. His district included my hometown of Holland, Mich., until the redistricting of the early 1960s. It is and was a firmly Republican region, except for the post-Watergate election in 1974 when a Democrat, Richard VanderVeen, briefly held Ford's seat.

Ford seemed a bland, Rotary Republican from Grand Rapids, so much so that one couldn't imagine him as President. The jokes were many. "Played football without a helmet" was one, a backhanded tribute to his glory days on the gridiron for the University of Michigan. That segued easily into comedian Chevy Chase's pratfalls on Saturday Night Live, which debuted a year after Ford became President.

Yet he was exactly the right man for the moment. For one thing, he was confirmable by the firmly Democratic Congress (trivia question: who succeeded him as vice president? Answer: Nelson Rockefeller, who was replaced by Bob Dole on the 1976 Republican ticket). The exit of Nixon and the arrival of Ford was greeted by a profound sense of national relief. You couldn't imagine Ford and his press secretary, Jerry TerHorst, foisting the same nonsense on the nation as had Nixon and his press secretary, Ron Ziegler. He even had kids that seemed normal. The honeymoon ended when he pardoned Nixon to spare the nation the spectacle of a former President going to prison. That all but ensured his loss in 1976 to Jimmy Carter.

Ford left a toxic legacy, however, in Dick Cheney, who was Ford's White House Chief of Staff, and Donald Rumsfeld, who preceded Cheney as Chief of Staff and then moved to Defense Secretary after Ford was forced against his better judgment to turn to the right after the Nixon pardon. Historian Barry Werth's op-ed piece in Thursday's New York Times is quite illuminating on this score (I can't link to it, sorry). Cheney, in particular, has proven to be the anti-Ford, much more like Nixon than his old boss. It will be interesting to see who shows up for the funeral.

Postscript: There is an interview that Bob Woodward did with Ford in 2004 on the Washington Post website. Woodward did it for a future book project, but with the proviso that it could be published anytime after Ford's death. In it, Ford criticizes George W. Bush for going to war in Iraq. He says that running off to free people around the world--Bush's latest rationale for the war--is "not in the national interest." That is straight out of Henry Kissinger, yet Ford talks about the trials and tribulations of having Kissinger as his Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He says Kissinger had the "thinnest skin" of any public figure he had ever known. Read it--it's great political history.

Postscript #2: Associated Press has released a round-up of interesting items from other embargoed interviews Ford gave prior to his death. You can read the story here.

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Media Matters for America, the liberal website that tracks the various misstatements, lies, and foibles of the rightwing media, has released its Top 10 Most Outrageous Statements of the year. From Ann Coulter calling Al Gore "a total fag," to Fox News commentator John Gibson urging white people to make more babies, it's all here and more. Happy holidays to all!

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As you prepare for Christmas or whatever winter holiday you celebrate, give a thought to the five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor imprisoned in Libya on spurious charges and sentenced to death by firing squad. They were arrested in 1999 and charged with infecting more than 400 Libyan children with the AIDs virus. Some of them were tortured into confessing.

As Kafkaesque nightmares go, this one is right up there. Apparently it is quite easy to prove scientifically that they had nothing to do with the infections, but the exculpatory evidence was disallowed at their trial. Most Western doctors blame unsanitary conditions in Libyan hospitals for the infections. A number of observers suspect the whole thing is an extortion plot by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, possibly to extract perverted vengeance for the blood money he had to pay in the Lockerbie bombing case.

With the U.S. facing loss of the war in Iraq because of George W. Bush's demented bungling, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the world is full of bad people. Gaddafi is one of them; these medical caregivers are not.

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One of the more disturbing articles I've read in a long time is a lengthy piece by New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman in Rolling Stone. It will take you some time to read, but when you are done, expect to be in a state of rage.

Krugman, who I interviewed when he was in Harrisburg last June, has analyzed how the rich got richer, and richer, and richer, over the last 25 years, but especially during the hand-it-over Texas oil and Bible regime of George W. Bush. Most of us have gotten screwed, and screwed really badly. Only the super rich have done well under Bush.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is Krugman's discovery that one of America's most cherished beliefs--that someone from the lower classes can move into the upper middle class--is slipping away. Today's Horatio Algers, he writes, are much more likely to be found in Canada, Finland, or even Great Britain than in America. Those are, by the way, countries where social democracy is still strong .

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From Kearny, N.J., of all places comes a story about a public high school teacher who actively and offensively proselytized his students, arguing his fundamentalist Christian faith to them and telling them they will burn in Hell for all eternity if they do not accept his beliefs. After a complaint by a student who recorded his remarks (the above New York Times story has links to excerpts), the school board took confidential action against him.

We expect a story like this out of rural Pennsylvania or anywhere in the Bible Belt South, but not in a state like New Jersey, in a small town just 12 miles from New York City. The boldness of this teacher in taking actions he knew were an unconstitutional violation of the separation of church and state tell me things are going to get worse before they get better when it comes to relations between fundamentalist Christians and the rest of Christian and non-Christian America. When you factor in the increasing number of fundamentalist Christian officers in the Armed Forces, things get really scary.

At some point in the last five years, fundamentalist Christians decided to no longer honor the invisible line of privacy that had long been drawn between their own flock and the majority of Americans who are moderate or liberal Christians, hold other beliefs, or no beliefs at all. Years of preaching the canard that the "separation of church and state" is a myth because those exact words are not found in the U.S. Constitution have led to the situation where a former student of this teacher proclaims that freedom of religion gives him the right to proselytize his students.

Where once the fundamentalist churches confined themselves to preaching to their own flock and not bothering those who weren't members or seeking to be members, now some do this with abandon. They claim that proselytizing is part of their faith and cannot be proscribed by schools or employers, whether public or private. I found particularly interesting the contempt expressed by the teacher for public schools, saying they were originally supposed to be for "people who cannot afford to pay for their own education." That is dead wrong, yet another piece of ignorance fostered in fundamentalist churches and schools.

On the other side of the line, atheists are becoming more aggressive about publicly challenging Christian belief, something else that didn't happen much in the old days and which I believe is a direct result of fundamentalist boldness on things like evolution and church and state issues. A newspaper reporter, trained to be skeptical of everything, is never skeptical about someone's belief in God. You never ask, "So you believe in a deity that lives in the sky? Where is your proof?" It simply never happens. But if this keeps up, I could see that changing, at least around the edges.

Driving to New York City on Friday, I saw a large sign posted along Interstate 78 in Pennsylvania proclaiming that "Santa Claus is a lie" and that parents who lie to their children endanger their souls, or words to that effect. It was an ugly thrust by a fundamentalist Christian into the privacy of passing families on a public highway, denying them the right to maintain a friendly, harmless myth about where those Christmas presents come from. Some might find this amusing. I don't, because I understand the hatred and ugliness behind it.

My own Episcopal denomination is in danger of being torn apart by conservative Episcopal priests and believers who have never accepted female clergy and hate gays and lesbians. That is the main reason for the dispute, and it crystalized after the ordination of Gene Robinson, a non-celibate gay, as a bishop in the church. These dissidents look to the leadership of Anglican bishops in Africa who hold some of the most retrograde opinions about gays imaginable.

There was a reason the Founding Fathers provided for the separation of church and state. They had seen the horror of religious wars in Europe, and wanted to spare America from having to endure any of that. We now risk a descent into a maelstrom of unknown ferocity by letting the fundamentalists, the American Taliban, take this most precious protection away from us. Let each of us believe what we want without shouting our belief through a bullhorn.

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We just got back from our annual pre-Christmas weekend in New York City. I'm tired, but happy, and ready to blog again.

The highlight of the weekend was taking our daughters to see the very enjoyable Broadway stage version of "Mary Poppins," the 1964 film that starred Julie Andrews and Dick VanDyke. Ashley Brown did well in the eponymous role, but Gavin Lee excelled in the role of Bert, the chimney sweep. The original songs by Robert and Richard Sherman are supplemented by several new compositions by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The special effects are amazing, notably when Lee tap dances upside down across the proscenium arch of the stage. There wasn't an empty seat in the house, and I see from the ad in today's New York Times that weekends are sold out, or nearly so, through March. Try StubHub.com. That's where I got my tickets.

Now if you thought you'd escape politics in this post, you're wrong. Both the 1964 film and the 2006 Broadway production were/are creatures of their time. The film, no matter how you remember it, was actually quite subversive, suffused with a mid-1960s ethos of rebellion against conformity and rules. Consider Mr. and Mrs. Banks, the couple whose efforts to find and keep a suitable nanny for their unruly children, Jane and Michael, lead to the magical arrival of supernanny Mary Poppins.

In the 1964 film, George Banks is a stuffy banker who proclaims himself the lord and master of his house, wife and children. He sings that, "a British bank, is run with precision. A British home, requires nothing less. Tradition, discipline and rules, must be the tools..." (That song is mostly gone from the new production, save for a few bars near the end.) In addition to trying to tame his unruly children, he is vexed by a wife who is an active suffragette, trying to win women the right to vote. Mary Poppins and Bert introduce the children to a different world, one where rules and conformity are far less important than being a creative free spirit. They visit their father at the bank, where Michael inadvertently triggers a run on the bank by complaining that they won't let him see his money.

In the 2006 Broadway production, George Banks seems more like an over-stressed Yuppie trying to find a nanny with a Green Card than a striver seeking to maintain the rigid social standards and rules of Edwardian England. Mrs. Banks is a former actress, not a suffragette. The conflict with her husband is over his refusal to allow her to continue to work on the stage. When the Banks children visit George at the bank, it seems more like Take Your Children To Work Day than an opportunity for rebellious non-conformity. Michael doesn't cause a ruckus. The bank threatens to fire George for turning down an Enron-like financing deal that another bank snaps up. His career is saved not, as in the film, because George repeats a dumb joke he heard from Jane and Michael that causes the stuffy bank chairman to die laughing, but because the deal implodes for the other bank. The non-conformity is there, but it's not the subversive be-all and end-all it is in the film. It becomes just another lifestyle, like the Apple guy versus the Windows guy.

I suppose one can argue that because the hippies and other rebels of the 1960s essentially won, and non-conformity is the new norm, some other approach had to be taken. Despite its muddled message, "Mary Poppins" on Broadway is well worth your time and money. The wonderful songs, especially "Feed the Birds" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," and the great dance routines make for an evening that will entrance even the most stuffy non-conformist.

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Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the brutal former dictator of Chile who took power with U.S. support in 1973, died today in Santiago at age 91. That he lived so long is a rebuke to justice and to the memories of the thousands of Chileans he had tortured and murdered.

To understand Pinochet, think of the absolutely worst aspects of George W. Bush and multiply them by 10 or more times. He had contempt for democracy, contempt for unions, contempt for leftist professors at the universities, contempt for any effort to improve the lot of the poor that did not grow out of his devotion to conservative economist Milton Friedman and "free markets." He was strongly supported by the economic elites of Chile and its military. American conservatives were slavishly devoted to Pinochet for the supposed "economic miracle" he brought to Chile, especially the privatization of Social Security that was a model for Bush's failed effort at the same. Yet much of it was an illusion that left the poor in Chile as bad off as ever.

Here is the Washington Post's obit of Pinochet, and here is the version in the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times, linked above, has the most comprehensive account, while the Post is better on the role of the Nixon Administration in Pinochet's seizure of power and the Los Angeles Times on the latter period of the dictator's life.

Pinochet ousted and may have murdered President Salvador Allende of Chile, although some believe Allende committed suicide during Pinochet's aerial attack on the Presidential palace in Santiago in 1973. There is no longer any doubt that President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger strongly supported the coup. Nixon had instructed the CIA to destabilize Allende's government. I recall Kissinger saying something about not letting a nation go communist "because of the stupidity of their own people." It was a shameful thing they did in our name. And we probably barely know the half of it.

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I spotted this bedraggled lot of state employees walking in traffic on Commonwealth Avenue in Harrisburg today and snapped a photo with my cameraphone. It illustrates yet another of my perennial complaints about being a pedestrian in Harrisburg, how contractors casually block off sidewalks for their own convenience and tell you to walk somewhere else. There's a perfectly good sidewalk on the other side of that barrier, but now that construction has started on the Commonwealth Judicial Center in that big hole on the far side, pedestrians got the boot.

Much the same happened when Verizon did construction work on its central office tower at Second and Pine a few months back. Signs near both the Verizon building and the Judicial Center warned pedestrians to cross to the other side of the street. Inconvenient? Too bad.

This wouldn't happen in New York City, where contractors erect elaborate covered walkways for the convenience and protection of pedestrians when they have to infringe on the sidewalk. I suspect city law requires that, as it should here. Such a law recognizes an immutable fact about humans: they tend to travel the shortest distance between two points, not some wacky zigzag pattern for the convenience of contractors.

A couple of months ago, when the roofing contractor at Salem Church on Chestnut Street helpfully taped off the entire sidewalk while he stripped shingles off the back of the church, I just lifted it and went under. An employee of the roofer came huffing up and ordered me back outside the tape. In this instance, I would have needed to go back an entire block to safely cross the street. I ignored him and his yelps and kept on walking. Sic semper tyrannis!

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As long as we're on the subject of hazards to life and limb, how about those intersecting on and off ramps along Interstate 83 in Harrisburg? To readers who don't have a clue what I'm talking about, imagine that your exit ramp crosses the entrance ramp for somebody else. You're trying to get off, he's trying to get on, and you hopefully don't meet in the middle. Let's call them on-x-off ramps, the 'x' symbolizing the point where they cross.

My pick for the worst on-x-off ramp, which of course is the one I use the most, is where the on ramp from 13th Street crosses the off ramp for Second Street. If a tractor-trailer, or even just a lowly Kia, is coming off 13th he can potentially block you from the Second Street exit, forcing you onto the South Bridge and over the West Shore before you can turn around. In practice, most drivers will attempt death-defying maneuvers to get onto the Second Street ramp rather than be forced over to New Cumberland. Others have their own favorites. Patriot-News City Editor Mike Feeley nominates the Progress on-x-off ramp further up I-83.

Who was the engineer at PennDOT in the 1960s who thought on-x-off ramps were a good idea? Who was his supervisor who said "attaboy!"? What was going through their heads? They can't fall back on the argument that this was the industry standard of the time. I haven't seen them in many other states, if any. And now we're stuck with on-x-off ramps until the freeways are replaced or until Doomsday, whichever comes first.

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A few days ago, I had my latest near-death experience with a car.

I was leaving the Patriot-News building at 812 Market Street around 4:30 p.m. to walk home. Typically I cross Market Street in front of the building at the pedestrian crosswalk. The newspaper, at its own expense, details one of its security guards be a crossing guard here for about an hour in the morning and at quitting time for the day shift. He will walk out into the street and stop traffic so pedestrians can cross the busy street. I'm convinced this service has saved somebody's life. Many Harrisburg drivers have little regard for pedestrians and seem to have no understanding that they are required by law to stop for people in crosswalks. Those traffic cones that proclaim that rule might as well be invisible.

Either I was early or the guard was late, but there was no crossing guard and traffic was whizzing by. The westbound lane was clear, but several vehicles were approaching on the eastbound side. The problem is that at this hour, you can wait forever and it willl never completely clear in both directions. So I walked out into the crosswalk, waving my umbrella to make sure they saw me. Two of the drivers stopped as I approached the middle of the street. I was hopeful. Then as I was about to continue across a third car, driven by a dark-haired woman behind heavily tinted windows, came speeding toward me and whizzed in front of me without even a pause. I yelled at her, but that's like, well, shouting in the wind.

I cross there to avoid the intersection on the north side of Fifth and Market, a notoriously difficult one to cross during rush hour because drivers are turning both left and right onto Fifth, and even if you have the light they will make a right turn on red. You have to look in two directions at once to make sure you're not about to be run over.

The intersection at Fifth and Walnut Streets a block away used to be horrible, but a couple of years ago a traffic light was installed, which raised its status to "risky." The mian problem here is drivers heading north in the right lane of Fifth and making a right on Walnut. Some will stop to let pedestrians cross. I've had drivers refuse to stop, heading right at me in the crosswalk. Some think it's perfectly okay to whiz in front of pedestrians, apparently reasoning that as long as they don't hit someone, they're within the law.

Police are never there when you need them, and I doubt any driver is ever pulled over and ticketed for risky behavior toward pedestrians. I actually had a Capitol police officer yell at me and order me OUT OF THE CROSSWALK so a driver could pass. A legislator, no doubt.

My anger toward drivers has to be tempered by the fact that physics are not on my side. In a head-on confrontation, I lose. Are drivers-ed instructors doing anything to educate their students about being safe around pedestrians?

Posted by David at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With Frank Rich of the New York Times arguing quite convincingly that George W. Bush is divorced from reality in ways that resemble the last days of Richard Nixon in 1974, and Paul Krugman of the Times calling him a bully that few have the nerve to stand up to, it's hard to imagine wnat other excoriation can be heaped upon the President.

My favorite story, though, and one which Krugman mentions in his column tomorrow (I can't link to either the Rich or Krugman columns, which are part of the Times Select premium service), is how Sen-elect James Webb of Virginia and Bush got into a testy exchange in a White House receiving line. Bush asked Webb how his son was doing in Iraq, and Webb, ala Eartha Kitt with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, told the President he wanted his son and the other troops brought home. "That's not what I asked you," Bush snapped, at which point Webb apparently felt his fist clenching if one account is to be believed. "How's your boy?" Bush demanded. To which Webb answered, "That's between me and my boy."

We fight around the edges of the Iraq War, making nonsensical arguments about whether it is or isn't a civil war instead of organizing massive marches on Washington demanding an end to the insanity. And Paul Krugman is right when he says too many are willing to let themselves be bullied by Bush and his wingnut bitter enders rather than speak the truth. The war is lost. Let us leave now before we have our Stalingrad.

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Associated Press is firmly defending its story about the six Sunnis dragged from their mosque and set afire by Shiite militia men. It has not retreated one iota in the face of denunciations by the Iraqi "government," US military, and rightwing U.S. bloggers. And why should they? They confirmed the story six ways to Sunday, and if it upsets the Iraqi "government" for showing that security is non-existent in that hellhole of a nation, too bad. Now the "democratic government" of Iraq is making threats about taking legal action against journalists who write things it doesn't like.

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