Jill LePore: The American Way of Torture

Jill Lepore

Mad Dog celebrated St. Patrick's Day by hiking up Mount Major with his sons and a good friend, Tugboat, a yellow lab who is the most open minded member of a rather opinionated family.

The Yellow Trail to the summit was socked in with hard packed snow, but there was little ice and most of the trail is sheltered from the wind by pine forests. The hike is a family event, executed whenever the sons are home in New Hampshire and the conditions on the mountain allow for the assault. This was the first time we reached to summit  when Lake Winnipesaukee could be seen from the summit as a series of white fingers, frozen.

Many topics are explored along the flat approach to the Yellow Trail, but by the time the more vertical ascent begins, there is usually one upon which the group fastens. This time it was the question of whether or not the executive branch of the United States government, particularly the President, should have the right to send drones out on execution missions, a practice Rand Paul sought to grab some headlines by condemning  in a theatrical filibuster. 

The younger son, no fan of the grandstanding Paul, nevertheless agreed this is a very undesirable and completely unjustifiable corruption of fundamental principles of the rule of law and American freedom. Older son agreed:  the idea of the President acting as prosecutor, judge, jury and hangman seemed to violate the idea of due process. But, he averred,  as long as the President was acting against people who were not American citizens, who were not in fact even in America and likely unlikely to make themselves available for trial, it may be permissible. The key for the older son was whether or not American citizens were targets, because our Constitution protects only citizens of our country and its benefits should not extend beyond its borders.

Mad Dog found himself defending "Terror Tuesdays," the sessions during which Mr. Obama decides on which targets will be droned bombed/ assassinated without  trial or notice. 

This stance appalled the younger son, and was thought inconsistent by both sons, with Mad Dog's virulent attacks on Dick Cheney, who Mad Dog had attacked when Cheney advocated for Guantanamo and torture of prisoners.

"So you do not mind killing people who have been singled out as terrorists, without trial, but you cannot abide imprisoning them or torturing them."

At this point Mad Dog had to reach back into history and forward into the present.  He pointed out that Abraham Lincoln had suspended Habeus Corpus during the Civil War, and Lincoln justified this with the logic that you cannot have a nation ruled by law if you do not have a nation, if you allow infiltrators, spies and terrorists to destroy the nation before it has a chance to hold a trial with due process.

Extending this precarious risk justification: What if you knew, or had good reason to believe, you had tracked a terrorist with a nuclear bomb in his back pack, headed to New York City?  What if events were moving so quickly you had no way of intervening to arrest him, but you could zero in on him just before he got on the airplane or boat to the United States and you could blow him to smithereens? 

Is there no circumstance you can justify summary action to save the good citizens of the United States? During war, officers can shoot soldiers who refuse an order or who endanger their comrades by willful disobedience. Why can we not act in a summary fashion in these new circumstances in our struggle with foes who live and plan and organize abroad and then slip past our defenses into our homeland?

This was all dismissed as reducto ad absurdum by the younger son, who called it a "24"  dodge, alluding to the TV show in which the American hero shoots the terrorist, without due process, who will blow up New York City.

The more we thought about the problem, it became apparent the justification for the Terrorist Tuesday meeting boils down to: 1/ Time  2/ Distance 3/Practicality.  The objections boil down to 1/ Protection of rights guaranteed American citizens under the Constitution 2/ Ethical reservations about an American government forsaking the process in which the idea of law is contained because it is cumbersome, difficult or impractical in an age where criminals can move with speed to outpace the deliberative process we call "due process."

The younger son pointed to the drone killing of that terrorist in Yemen, who had been an American citizen, and then went to Yemen to preach hate against America and who may have been tied to the underwear bomber who tried to blow up a plane over Chicago. In that case, the accused was accused of doing more than preaching hate, but moving from incitement to action, that is, to arming a terrorist or at least becoming part of the process by which that terrorist was armed and sent packing on his mission.

 Plans by our government for that terrorist killing had been emailed about for months prior to the decision to kill him and his targeting and execution. So it could hardly be argued, there was a time factor--kill him now or lose your chance, possibly forever.  In cases like this, where there is time to think, you can argue for a trial, in absentia if necessary, with an appointed defense counsel, and with  notification of the verdict,. If that verdict is guilty, then the government can attempt notification of the accused of  the sentence. Now the terrorists knows he has been targeted, but he likely knew that before the trial.

There were sham show trials in absentia in Stalinist Russia but that does not mean our trials would be a sham.  It may be argued the defendant is not benefited by this exercise.  But we do not do funerals for the benefit of the dead; we do them for the living. We can do trials for the benefit of the citizens who value the argument prior to the execution. 

In her wonderful New Yorker article, "The Dark Ages," (March 18) Jill Lepore traces the idea of trials, of justice as they evolved from trials by fire to trials by jury with the institution of Habeus Corpus, (in which the simple principle requiring the man who imprisons another human being to offer some justification for this,) to the travesty at Guantanamo. 

Professor Lepore points to Mr. Cheney, whose posture has been consistent: He smirks at suggestions government is acting in a pernicious way. He attacks his critics as people who are hopelessly effete, who never had to make hard decisions in a hard world, who have no concept of the magnitude and risk of the forces which seek to harm this country, who are too weak to pull the trigger as the terrorist runs toward a vulnerable city, arm cocked, ready to hurl a dirty bomb.  If we are at war, then we have to have the courage to take swift and effective action to protect ourselves.

The problem is the word, "War."  What we have now is "asymmetric war" or something we really do not have a word for. We have no definable nation, no territory with flags and a capital to capture and a government and an army to defeat. Our enemy is largely invisible, diffuse, often unconnected to other enemies operating independently. It is more like the "war on crime" with drug organizations operating independently, for their own purposes.  We can use due process against drug organizations because the purpose of the drug organization is not to destroy our government or population, but what about the case of an enemy who is trying to destroy you?

Even in a democracy, we outlaw organizations whose expressed purpose is to destroy our government--except in the case of the Tea Party, but they say they are trying to save our nation by destroying our federal government. 

Every despot, from tinpot South American dictators to Joe McCarthy( the senator from Wisconsin) has claimed it is necessary to suspend our nice system of due process because the enemy is hidden, cunning, capable of subverting the due process and using due process to protect himself, as he sinks the dagger into our heart.

But how do we know the enemy is as dangerous as our leaders say he is? How do we know when we are in such danger we have to pull the trigger and ask questions later?

You cannot do ethical, much less legal analysis until you establish the facts, i.e., the circumstances. The critical piece of evidence, the fact that the Yemen/American "terrorist" who was droned in the desert, had been in our sites for weeks to months. If we could wait that long to get him, then he could not have posed an immediate threat. He was not racing toward New York City with a bomb in his backpack. He may have been planning that, but he was not launching an attack in proximity to the date he was killed. That fact, if true as construed, would suggest he could have been tried in absentia, invited to defend himself in a court of law and then, once warned, droned to death, and we could feel satisfied about that process.

The other "fact" about that case is the government accidentally droned the innocent son. This would imply the accuracy of the government's information can be poor enough to raise the question, the information about the target terrorist was accurate?  If we cannot even distinguish the son from the target, his father, how good is any of our information?

What Jill Lepore is saying, of course, is Mr. Obama's Terror Tuesdays have returned us to those days before Habeus Corpus, when the king did not have to justify imprisonment or death penalties.

All this makes Mad Dog even more anxious about Mr. Obama's upcoming trip to the Middle East, where he has no business going, less business than Kennedy had in Dallas. They have grudges out there in Palestine. Why fly into that hornet's nest?

Mr. Obama has not been a perfect President. But he is intelligent enough to be corrected and educable and he can be dissuaded from Terror Tuesdays. 

But not if he's dead.

The Origins of Gridlock: Louis Menand and the Past is Prologue

Writing in the March 4 New Yorker, Louis Menand writes a history of the American democracy, in reviewing a book by Ira Katznelson about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in which Menand places our current stagnation in Congress in historical context.

One of the benefits of  looking at history is the soothing effect it can have, when we look at our current state of turmoil and stagnation in Congress--we can see how it happened and we can understand the inevitability of the tide which washed us up on this particular shore.

Among the many astonishing factoids Menand casually drops upon the head of the reader are:
1/ Apart from the Congresses of 1947-1949 and 1953-1955, the Republicans did not have a majority in either Chamber of Congress until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
2/ When Eisenhower took office in 1953, nearly $53 of the national government's $76 billion budget was spent on defense.

The South, which has always been the least well educated, most rural and most desperate part of America, strongly supported the defense spending and the reorganization and re purposing of the federal government into an eternal war machine, because so many of those military bases and so much of the  war munitions were placed in the South.

Southerners, desperate and sinking beneath the waves of the Great Depression, were all for big government spending to rescue them. They were economic liberals, while at the same time embracing their Southern apartheid.  Claude Pepper, U.S. Senator from Florida, said, "The colored race will not vote, because in doing so..they endanger the supremacy of a race to which God has committed the destiny of a continent, perhaps the world."  But he was a liberal in voting for all the big New Deal programs which had the effect of starting to redistribute the wealth from the industrialized North to the underdeveloped South. He was beaten by George Smathers, in 1950, who called him "Red Pepper,"  for his embrace of big federal government. (In those days "Red" referred to communist red, not red states.)

Smathers, it must be remembered was a favorite whoring buddy of John Kennedy of Massachusetts. The two cut a wide swath in Washington, DC, back in the day when Senators got drunk together, partied and cavorted together around Washington. They were not hoping airplanes back to their districts on Thursday and returning Monday. They had personal relationships which oiled the wheels of government, as they oiled their own personal wheels.

When John Maynard Keynes published his General Theory of economics in 1936, he argued the federal government could stimulate the economy, if it chose, by burying bottles of money in abandoned coal mines and encouraging private entrepreneurs to figure out ways to dig them up.  This idea pointed the way to federal government spending on defense and other projects. Just spread around federal dollars and the capitalistic system will distribute them and the economy will become productive.

In 1933 there were 572,000 federal employees and government spending was $4.6 billion dollars; by 1945 there were 3,800,000 federal employees and the federal budget was $92 billion. The South had traded its poverty for feeding at the federal teat, but it remained determined not to allow the federal government to forbid racism. Labor unions, which were embraced by the New Deal, were an agent of mixing of the races and the South recoiled from that. 

During the Second World War, the Nazis, looking across the ocean and seeing a racist society it could admire, in the South, tried to encourage the American South to embrace their ideas of fascism, which the fascists saw were completely aligned with the ubermensch mentality of the South. But the South remained solidly anti-fascist, if not philosophically, politically. 

When David Kenyon Webster, a white GI,  describes casting his first vote in Germany, in the midst of the Allied advance in 1944, walking two miles to vote as a soldier deployed in a combat zone, the Southern Democrats had voted against his right to do that. They opposed soldier voting categorically, even though it meant denying white soldiers the right to vote, because they knew there were 200,000 Black soldiers in arms and if all those soldiers were allowed to vote while in the Army (something they could not do if they were back home in the South) they might gain political power, and Smathers's nightmare might be realized.  Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, voting against soldier voting explained enabling Black soldiers to vote along with White soldiers violated the principles Southern soldiers were at war to defend. "Those boys are fighting to maintain white supremacy."

The undoing of the Democratic Party was a slow train wreck. When Adali Stevenson ran for President in 1952 he put an ardent segregationist, John Sparkman of Alabama on his ticket, and again in 1956 he put a Southerner on the ticket. He won very few states outside the South. Can you imagine a map of the U.S. Presidential election showing the entire South in blue and most of the North, the Mid Atlantic and West Coast in Red?

To this day, the legacy of that paradox--reactionary, racist Southerners who were "liberal" in economic terms (i.e., they wanted the federal dollars flowing from wide open spigots, bringing military installations and weapons systems plants to Sweet Home Alabama) but at the same time they hate the federal government in Washington, DC telling them what to do. They fear black helicopters and central power which could look from afar and say, "You cannot have separate black and white water fountains, swimming pools, restaurants and hotels."

And Democrats, thinking it was political necessity, were in bed with all that.

Ironically, it was Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner who wrecked the Democratic Party by pushing through the Voting Rights Act. The entire Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party turned on a dime and became Republicans, joined the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, the man who had sent Sherman and Grant to ravage the South. History meant nothing to them when their racist way of life was threatened.

So here we are, all these years later, stuck with a reactionary South which lives on a federal government of eternal war, which sends enough representatives to Congress to tie the federal government up in knots, except where military spending is concerned.

What to do?  Well, for starters, kill all that sweet government crude flowing to the military.  Hit those super patriot free loading Southerners where it hurts. Close every military base, kill every defense plant in the South. 

To use Sherman's phrase:  Make Georgia howl.

Ted Cruz: Texas Comes Through for the USA

Following in the now well established tradition of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, the newest U.S. Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, has stepped up to upbraid two decorated veterans as being unfit for government service because they are insufficiently patriotic or brave or supportive of the national defense: He said this of both John Kerry, who served on a swift boat in Vietnam, one of the more exposed and harrowing assignments of that war, and Chuck Hagel, also a veteran who actually saw bullets and other hostile projectiles fired at him during combat.

Like all other members of his Republican Tea Party cohort, Mr. Cruz has never had a bullet fired at him in anger, and he has never worn the uniform of his country. He is one of those tough guys who never actually did the tough things in life.  Calling Professor Sigmund...Are we seeing something here you may have named?  Actually, the Phantom is even more impressed by the Republicans who pretended to serve by hiding out in the National Guard or the Reserves, when those two places were the preserve of the rich and well connected, during Vietnam, so they could get photos of themselves in uniform, while actually hiding behind the skirts of their mothers and well connected fathers, far from the bombs and bullets flying in Vietnam--guys like Jeff Sessions and Lindsey Graham, the twin draft dodgers who are now the U.S. Senators from South Carolina.  Ah, the old Confederacy.  What happened to that region, which once supported itself on slaves and tobacco, but at least it produced some pretty amazing soldiers? 

But back to Ted Cruz: He did go to Princeton, where he won awards as the best debater on campus. 
And then he went to Harvard Law, where, he claims, there were more Communists on faculty than Republicans.
But he never fired a gun for his country. 

When asked to name names, like his soul mate and ancestor in Republican calumny, Joesph McCarty, Mr. Cruz could not name a single Harvard faculty Communist. The names escaped him.  But Mr. Cruz knew those pinko Commies were there. 

Every few weeks, The Phantom reorders his list of states which ought to be expelled from  the United States. The Phantom believes states should have to re-apply for statehood every 10 years, and if  a particular state is deemed by a vote of the majority of free men and women and 2/3 of the others, to be just really nasty, we can then expel that state. If, after a sufficient period of reflection and/or internal purging and political enemas, the state feels it is all better now, it can reapply.

For some weeks the top spot was in contention between South Carolina and Arizona, but Texas, always a player, has now re-emerged for the top spot.

On the other hand, some have argued, these states provide us with such entertaining characters, it might be a shame to simply vomit them up.

Really, South Carolina has an ex governor who ran off with his Argentine mistress while claiming to be hiking the Appalachian trial and he is now running again, on that old South Carolina platform, "I am more humble than my opponent."

And Arizona has Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County who drives around in a tank painted with flames and who marches people he's arrested (not convicted mind you) in pink underpants down the street and he is a champion of the Constitution.
(All these Tea Party-ers are.)

As a side bar--have you ever known a graduate of Princeton you really liked? I mean, what is that place like, to have produced as its favorite debater the Ivy League version of Rush Limbaugh? 

And while we are thinking about the health of democracy in the land of the free and the home of brave, how many American citizens have been stripped searched in American jails this week?

TSA, Knives, Not My Job, The Bureaucratic Mind

Yesterday, on the radio, Mad Dog heard the testimony of the head of the TSA, who said the mission of his agency is to prevent catastrophic events on board airplanes, to wit, the storming of a pilots' cabin and the slashing of throats of pilots and commandeering of the airplane. None of this is likely  to occur with passengers armed with the pocket knives confiscated by the TSA, he insisted, and, he added,  looking through X ray machines for those knives, removing them from carry on luggage, arguing with the dim wit passengers who tucked these knives into their carry on luggage is a lot of work for the TSA. Why should his budget have to bear the burden of all that extra work? It's not his job to keep drunks on the airplane from disrupting the domestic tranquility.

(Of course, nobody asked him why these knives should be thought to be any less dangerous than the box cutters used by the 9/11 hijackers, but that is another story.)

The head of the flight attendants' union told lurid stories of inebriated passengers,  and she asked the Congressional committee to consider the havoc one of these drunks could wreak upon a flight crew, passengers, if he were wielding a pocket knife.

The head of the TSA replied, calmly, patiently, that it is not his job or the job of the TSA to ensure orderly flights; his job is to ensure no catastrophes. A little mayhem in the cabin is not his concern.

There you have it. Order in the cabin is not in my budget. We have our own problems and our budget is for those problems. If we focus on finding knives, we might miss that 16 oz bottle of water which could be nitroglycerin. 

(Of course, as any radiologist will tell you, when you look at an X Ray, you do it in a very systematic way, and you see everything, and that's part of the training. You may be looking for a lung cancer , but if you see a pneumonia, you do not say, "Well, I wasn't budgeted to look for the pneumonia.")

The fact that some collateral benefit accrued from what the TSA screeners do with their machines at the gateway, forget that. We don't want that burden on our budget.

When the Shah of Iran got admitted to The New York Hospital, the Shah paid for television monitors and guards at every entrance to the hospital. Photo ID's were, for the first time, issued to every intern, resident, nurse, escort service person, all the scrub techs, attending physicians, everyone who walked in and out of the doors to the hospital, which had previously been as wide open to the public as a church.

There was plenty of grousing about all the inconvenience by bleary eyed interns who had left their ID badges back on the ward, and now could not get in the next morning to do rounds. 

But, after the Shah died, and all that security was no longer being paid for by the Shah, the hospital decided to keep paying for those guards and monitors. Why? Because they noticed an unanticipated, collateral benefit, namely that the theft of equipment from the hospital went to close to zero, and the loss of all that hospital equipment more than paid for the added security.  The security was there to prevent bad guys from walking into the hospital, but the real benefit turned out to prevent bad guys from waltzing out of the hospital with all sorts of goodies.

But in the world of bureaucracy, each manager has his own budget and does not care a whit for the overall welfare; he just sees his own expenditures. This is a structural flaw in the way Americans do management, all the MBA's and schools of management and business notwithstanding.

After World War II and after Vietnam, journalists and military men occasionally interviewed our former adversaries to learn what they could about what we had done which was effective in thwarting our adversaries, and where we had been ineffective.

The German minister, Albert Spear, noted the Germans greatly feared the Allied officers who decided on the bombing targets--Robert MacNamara was one of these--would bomb the dam upstream from the major ball bearing factory. Without that factory the German war machine would have ground to a halt within weeks. If that dam were destroyed the factory would have been washed away in a sea of mud. But the dam was never targeted. The American target men were too narrowly focused on getting airplanes, tanks and bridges. They could not think more broadly.

The paratroopers who attacked behind the German lines were provided with bags in which to put their guns and other critical equipment, and this bag, with it's leg rope was thrust upon them the evening of the jump, after months of preparation, a critical change was made without testing, and many paratroopers arrived in Normandy without their weapons because the bags were ripped off their legs by the blast of the props when they jumped.

The Vietnamese simply observed that American soldiers were too slow, weighed down with too much equipment, and no match for the Viet Cong, who wore only black pajamas and carried a single AK-47 or a rocket, fired, and melted back into the jungle.
But the Americans carried all sorts of stuff, each provided by a different department or financial interest, and it made them stiff men. Nobody took the broad view: All this stuff makes our soldiers sitting, or more accurately, waddling, ducks.

This is the American genius. Put the common man at the top of an organization, which is to say, Congress, the Executive and even the judiciary, and you get a dumbed down management. 

Now, for the first time in years, we have a bright man in the White House, but it's not clear a single man can undo all the mischief created by the mediocrities, the tunnel vision men and women, below him.

Denying North Korea and Iran Nuclear Weapons

Mad Dog understands and accepts there are some nasty, threatening, unstable people and governments in the world, and that among them are likely Iran and North Korea.

But what confuses Mad Dog mightily is the moral outrage coming from successive Presidents of the United States, who have said  Iran is committing a crime against humanity if it develops a nuclear bomb, or that North Korea is a rogue state and a moral reprobate, if it develops a bomb and a rocket delivery system for that rocket.

Mad Dog understands the practical reasons the United States fears Iran with a nuclear bomb and why we fear a North Korea with a bomb. Not only have high officials of the Iranian state said they want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth,  powerful Iranian ayatollah's have called the United States the Great Satan. So, it is clear Iran bears the US of A and Israel ill will. For all those practical reasons, we have an interest in preventing our potential enemies of acquiring the means of injuring us. 

But to say they have NO RIGHT to try to acquire the power contained in nuclear weapons sounds very odd. 

We do not object to France, Britain, India, Pakistan and Israel possessing nuclear weapons. 

We, quite understandably,  fear the spread of this capacity to every little potentate who wish to aggrandize himself by possessing a bomb, and who may just sell one to Al Qaeda, who might ship it directly to New York City. 

We are entirely justified in attempting to cut off trade to Iran and North Korea, in attempting to isolate them, in tactics which include attempts to  strangle their economies,  because they represent a threat and we are attempting to weaken them, punish them and make them squirm.

But we can hardly accuse them of immoral or reprehensible behavior. 

Mad Dog would cheer a successful mission to destroy Iran's nuclear program and another to destroy Korea's.

But Mad Dog cannot understand the posture of, "We are doing this because Iran and North Korea have violated a norm of moral behavior."

Iran and North Korea ask: If you can have the bomb, why can we not have the bomb?
Why do we need your permission? Are we not grown ups? Do we not have free will as you do? You and Russia have thousands of nuclear weapons, with which you try to intimidate us. Well, we will have nuclear weapons, so we can stand up to you. That's our right of self defense. Who are you to decide who has a right to nuclear weapons?

If power grows out of the mouths of guns, then we want the bomb. If you want to stop us from becoming powerful, have at us. But don't tell us we are bad people for wanting the same potency you have. 

It may be a small point, but Mad Dog simply doesn't get the moral outrage on the part of the United States. 

Why not just say: We fear you and your intentions, should you arm yourself with nuclear weapons. We will attack you to prevent you from becoming more of a threat. If you do not want to be targeted, stop making yourself so threatening. 

This isn't personal; it's just business. 

End of discussion. Why inject all this phony outrage into the discussion?

David Kenyon Webster Speaks to Us From The Deep

Private (Proud to Be) Webster

David Kenyon Webster

He Didn't Have to Be There. But he was there.

Men Who Never Served, Never Ducked a Bullet

David Kenyon Webster was a child of privilege, whose family connections could have easily shielded him from combat during World War II, or, at the very least, got him a commission as an officer.  But he decided to serve as a private, and he chose the most challenging service, the newly formed Army parachute infantry, soldiers who fought surrounded by enemy. 
 He wrote the book from which "Band of Brothers" was drawn in larger measure than the producers of that show credited. Stephen Ambrose, whose book by the same name drew attention to the story of Easy company, endorses Webster's book, but when you read it, page by page, you see how many of the details of time, place, action, feeling the script writers used.  Ambrose's book gave them the skeleton on which to structure a narrative, but Webster's book provided the muscle, heart, arteries and central nervous systems to bring the stories to life.
It was not Ambrose's fault, I suspect, Webster did not get more credit, but it is somehow fitting Private Webster did not get invited to the party. That's the way privates were treated in the Army. It was guts and glory Patton; the general got the glory, but the privates spilled the guts.
Reading through Webster's  Parachute Infantry now, the details of the experience of war, in particular the harrowing Operation Market Garden, the failed attack dreamed up by Field Marshall Montgomery, makes you feel intensely grateful for things like clean sheets, heated homes, hot showers and peaceful New Hampshire fields. 

But one passage astonished me. In the midst of the Allied operation, beset by diarrhea, having slept in a foxhole which he thought comfortable because he had found straw for its flooring, having returned from being made to sweep out the officer's quarters in a near by townhouse, Webster mentions he had been allowed to walk two miles to cast his first ballot, a vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt "the only one who ever gave the working man a break."  Webster had been too young to vote when he joined the Army, but had turned 21 while in Europe and was 22 during the 1944 election. 
What he says then, as an aside, should make us look at the 3 stooges pictured above, and at Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, with unmerciful clarity.

Explaining why he walked the 2 miles in a war zone, Webster says,

"Roosevelt...was a politician, as crafty and conniving as any, for politics is a cesspool of lying lawyers, but his work was greater than the man, and the country was better for it. The rich Republicans hated Roosevelt for helping the working man, for encouraging the labor unions to wring a fair day's wage for a fair day's work out of employers who had never heard of such a thing before and for putting into effect fair-employment practices that they considered outrageously Socialistic. Roosevelt helped the unemployed, when Herbert Hoover, the last Republican, an engineer who never quite understood humanity, had said, "Let every man help his brother," when he knew perfectly well that the rich weren't about to help the poor, never had and never would. I had grown up with Republicans and gone to school and college with them and sickened by their selfishness, their cold avarice and lofty contempt for the common people, had early sworn to vote for Democrats, who, for all their rotten political faults, were more concerned with the welfare of the country has a whole."

Mad Dog, too, went to school with the children of the rich, and saw that same cold avarice, still operating thirty years after Webster. Cold contempt and disregard for the suffering of their fellow man, still alive and well among the upper classes, and it sickened Mad Dog just a surely.  Mad Dog can understand the Joe Sixpack Republicans, those desperate men at the bar, who worry about meeting the mortgage on their mobile homes, who are just one check away from having their F150 pick up trucks repossessed. You don't expect mercy from desperate, disadvantaged, resentful men. But from the rich, you might expect some magnanimity. 

Which is why Mad Dog's bumper stick says, "Not a Republican." 

Webster wrote his magnificent book, but not a publisher would touch it.  Once the "Band of Brothers" got hot, the book was published and gained some attention.

But Webster never lived to see it. He never had his moment at the award ceremony. He went out sailing on the ocean  in 1961, looking for sharks, and never came back. 

The Unbearable Smugness of Being A Tough Guy Republican

Driving into work this morning I heard Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions saying that he owned an AR-15 automatic rifle, the same gun which the teenage shooter used at Newtown, and Sessions said he  liked the gun because it looks so intimidating, and he can imagine, what with all the bad weather and floods and hurricanes (not caused by global warming,) that the lights in his town might just go out some night and he will need an intimidating weapon to protect himself and his home, and a two barrel shot gun does not have enough fire power for him to feel safe.

Mr. Sessions, whose middle name evokes a fearsome Confederate general, has a  website which shows him standing in front of a  battleship. He is a man who likes big guns. He is from Selma, Alabama, where the guns are big and the brains run small. 

But, funny thing, when you look at the background of the loudmouth Right Wingers, like Rush Limbaugh, Jon Kyl, John Cornyn, John Ensign, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, not a one of these tough guys ever served. None of them ever jumped out of an airplane with a parachute and a gun, into hostile fire. None ever had a shot fired at them in anger. None of them had to dig into a foxhole while artillery rained down upon their positions. None had to wade through a swamp carrying his gun above his head while leeches fed on their legs. 

You will quickly object: Senator sessions "served" in the Army Reserves during Vietnam. But as anyone who lived through that era will know immediately, the Army Reserves did not send soldiers to Vietnam. That and the National Guard were the safe hiding places for men trying to avoid the airplane ride to Vietnam. Only the well connected could get into those safe havens. So Sessions did not serve; in a sense, he did worse, like George W. Bush, he only pretended to serve.

It does not take Sigmund Freud to analyze the personality of the man who wants to boast of his own dangerousness  and potency, who has a history of avoiding danger.

Not that Vietnam was simply a test of bravery. The bravest men during that war were the men who stood up and refused to serve, who went to prison, or to Canada. But plenty of brave men were pressured into going to Vietnam. That was a bad war, and as Thoreau famously said, the only place for a really just man under those circumstances was in jail.  Ultimately, resistance to the war played a role in forcing Lyndon Johnson's resignation (decision not to stand for re election) and that, along with the Viet Cong's winning strategy and military effectiveness,   finally brought the American public to its senses and the  realization the war was unwinnable. So  Nixon declared we have won an honorable victory,  and got out.

Mad Dog's own brother finished his surgical internship and found himself on a boat to Vietnam, first as ship's doctor, and later going up river on a swift boat, where he ducked a rocket or two fired from the shoreline, tromped up a hill, visited a village in the program to bring Western medicine to the villagers, to win the hearts and minds of villagers, who spoke no English. The villagers prepared a meal for the visiting doctor.  A translator listened to the symptoms of the villagers who wanted to see the doctor, and translated: "Same thing, doc." Mad Dog's brother wore a sidearm then, but he does not own a gun now. He doesn't need an AR-15 to know about his own courage, or to proclaim it to others. The only way you'd ever know he ever was in Vietnam would be to see the pictures he took of the villagers, which hang on the wall of his home study. And there is not a gun to be seen in those pictures, just faces, suffering and humanity.

George McGovern, who tried to end that war, had won a silver star in WWII.  Never saw McGovern brandishing a weapon. 

Somehow, the guys who have the big thing, don't need to wave it around. 

Which makes you wonder about the guys who seem to need to display the big stick.

ADDENDUM!!!
Since posting this blog, Mad Dog has read Gail Collins in today's New York Times and is informed it was not Mr. Sessions, but his South Carolina twin, Lindsey Graham, the other Senator from South Carolina Mad Dog had heard on the radio. (These South Carolina politicians--Graham, Sessions, Francis Underwood--who can keep them straight?  They all look alike. They all sound alike. I'm a white man and I still can't distinguish among them.)

Actually, in some ways, it makes the story better. At first, Mad Dog was distressed because the story was about a man who had hidden in the reserves, and seeing the photo on line 

Mr. Graham looked like the real article. Look at those camo fatigues. And his biography says he served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, having been in the Air Force in the mid 1980's.  
But, turns out, although Mr. Graham claimed such service, he never got out of South Carolina. He later replied, "I never said I was a combatant."
Do da word "poser" mean anything to you, Mr. Graham?