Toppling Dominos: Today Fallujah, Tomorrow Austin

In 1968, we heard about light at the end of the tunnel and turning the corner. We heard about winning hearts and minds. Just now, I heard the former military proconsul—Brigadier General Jay Garner (US Army, Retired)—repeat those same phrases about Iraq on NPR ("Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conen). Then, I read W's latest pronouncement about Iraq. The President trotted out the domino theory about the Insurgents (Viet Cong in 1968). If we don't stop the Insurgents in Iraq, we will be dealing with them in Austin. (How in hell those Insurgents are going to travel from Baghdad and Fallujah to Austin is still murky.) If this is (fair & balanced) babble, so be it.

[x The American Prospect]
Stay the Course: Join us in the world of George W. Bush, where you never have to change your mind -- or the oil in your car.
By Charles P. Pierce

Just recently, I decided to be a little more flexible about being obstinate. When I was growing up, we were taught that it was not such a good thing to be obstinate. In fact, I first heard the word “obstinate” from a nun who was telling me that I was obstinate, and for a while I thought it was something like being a Methodist. I gradually came to learn that what Sister was talking about was that I wasn't being flexible enough in my thinking to accept unreservedly every word of rigid dogma that was being spooned into me. This made me even more confused than the doctrine of transubstantiation did -- and I spent a lot of years as completely baffled, which I might have been anyway, but surely the nun didn't help matters at all.

Anyway, I was in college before I realized that being a bit less inflexible on certain important personal issues not only made me more relaxed but also guaranteed I’d never have to stay in on Saturday night. At that point, I decided that I was going to be stubborn about being flexible. Now certain important Christian thinkers, beloved in the motels that dot that lovely New Orleans neighborhood known as Out By The Airport, might term me a “moral relativist” for having lived my life this way. I might even well be called a “pagan,” though I'm not, largely because I look stupid in antlers. To hell -- you should pardon the expression -- with the hot-sheet parsons, I figured. I was happy.

Then George W. Bush changed my life.

He showed me at last that the nun had been wrong, that being obstinate was all that really matters in this life. No more sifting of endless options. No more of that exhausting reflection. Decide what you're going to do and, evidence and common sense be damned, just go do it. Who are you going to believe, yourself or your own lying eyes? It was not a good thing to be stubborn about being flexible. Far better to loosen up and get really obstinate.

(I took the president quite seriously as a role model because, well into adulthood, he apparently was quite stubborn in his flexibility toward the healing properties of strong drink and toward the relative necessity of actually working for a living. Of course, he was most stubborn in his flexibility toward the state of Alabama in 1972 -- which he evidently regarded as a noncorporeal state, much like the state of grace in that you didn't have to be there to actually be there.)

Now, I do not have a large military and a compliant Congress, so I am unable to start a war and then obstinately insist that the country I have invaded is rapidly turning into Rhode Island when all the available evidence indicates that it actually is turning into the Land of Mordor. However, it’s an approach easily adapted to the small but surmountable problems of daily living.

Like the oil light, for example.

For a week or so, the oil light on my dashboard was blinking red. Then it went red and stayed that way. Many of my friends pointed out that this could not be a good thing. I kept driving the car until, one afternoon, there was a loud pinging sound and a rod came flying through the hood and killed a pigeon about 10 feet above my car. We towed it into the shop (the car, not the pigeon, which had fallen on the hood and stayed there), where the mechanic clucked at me.

“How long had the light been on?” he asked.

“Well,” I told him, “the light isn’t the important thing. The thrown rod isn’t the important thing. Not even the pigeon is the important thing. The important thing is that I had gotten where I was going all those days. Until I couldn't, of course.”

He was dubious. He pointed to the hole in the hood. He pointed to the corpse of the pigeon.

“Your car,” he said, “cannot move any more.”

“Nonsense,” I told him. “My car is on the march and it isn't going back.”

“It isn't going anywhere,” he carped.

This went on for about half an hour. Ordinarily I’d have been concerned about not having a car, and about how much the repairs would cost, and I might've even spared a moment to regret the loss of the pigeon, which really was a mess. But this was much better. I simply insisted that there was no problem here, over and over again, and then I walked home.

A neighbor greeted me on my front lawn.

“Thank God you're back,” he said. “There is a huge snapping turtle in your backyard.”

I looked over the fence, and he was right. The thing was big and lumpy and unsightly enough to be governor of California. I came back around the front.

“It's OK,” I told my neighbor. “It's gone.”

There was a loud champing sound behind me.

“My lord,” said my neighbor, “it's eating the picnic table.”

“No, it isn't,” I told him. “The picnic table is on the march and it isn’t going back.”

“It's a pile of splinters,” said my neighbor, “and now the thing is after the fence.”

“It’s doing no such thing,” I told him. “Look, there's a new section of fence right there.”

My neighbor had started backing away at this point.

“No,” I told him, “look: It's a great new section of fence, fresh paint and everything.”

The champing sound got louder. I think my neighbor was running now.

I went in the house and luxuriated in my newfound peace. It is liberating only to make one decision a day, and to stick to it, no matter what evidence arises to the contrary, no matter how many pigeons die or how many turtles attack. I felt great moral clarity about myself. I felt at one with the American people -- at least those American people who don’t fix my car or live on either side of me. A couple of more days and this just might be a foreign policy or something. Then I can find someone to deal with the turtle, which is starting up on the gazebo out back.

Colin Powell's number is around here someplace.

Charles P. Pierce is a Boston Globe Magazine staff writer and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.

Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc.

A 40-Year-Old Tall Tale

Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States. I have some prime beachfront property for sale in Yuma, AZ. There was a magic bullet in Lee Harvey Oswald's carbine in 1963. If this is (fair & balanced) nonsense, so be it.

[x SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER]
History buffs, scholars deride JFK inquiry
By ERIC ROSENBERG

WASHINGTON -- A group of historians and researchers marked the 40th anniversary this week of the Warren Commission report by deriding the government's official investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The report, the group said, was so badly botched that most Americans have little confidence in its central conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

The Warren Commission, led by then Chief Justice Earl Warren, "was a complete and utter disaster," sowing only "doubt, confusion and distrust" of government, said Jim Lesar, author and head of the non-profit Assassination Archives and Research Center.

"Why should we believe the Sept. 11 commission report, or for that matter any congressional or governmental report," when the Warren Commission report is so flawed, he said.

Lesar's organization co-sponsored a conference here recently that focused on the likelihood of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

In the four decades since the assassination, Americans have grown increasingly suspicious of the Warren Commission's findings.

A Gallup poll taken in 1963 found that 52 percent of Americans believed Oswald was part of a greater conspiracy to kill the president.

But a Gallup poll taken last year around the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination found that three-fourths of Americans believed Oswald was part of a greater conspiracy. A similar Gallup poll in 2001 found that 81 percent of those polled believed there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy.

Intoning the view of many Warren Commission critics, David Wrone, a former professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, called the commission's report a work of fiction.

"Historically, it stands up there with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Wrone told about 100 attendees, referring to the czarist-era forged document that purported to detail a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a renowned pathologist who served on a House committee's investigation into the assassination in 1978, said that one of the Warren Commission's greatest failures was in not challenging a poorly performed autopsy of the president.

Wecht said that the attending physicians who autopsied Kennedy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in suburban Washington, D.C., were not experienced in gunshot trauma.

They didn't even extensively photograph the autopsy as is common practice.

The autopsy was replete with "deficiencies, ineptitude and incompetence," he said.

Eight days after the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination, President Johnson established the Warren Commission by Executive Order 11130.

It also included Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga.; Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky.; Rep. Hale Boggs, D-La.; Rep. Gerald Ford, R-Mich.; former CIA Director Allen Dulles; and John McCloy, a high-profile lawyer and former president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Ford is the sole surviving member.

After a 10-month investigation, the commission in 1964 concluded that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy from a sniper's lair in the Texas School Book Depository's sixth floor.

The commission concluded in its 912-page tome -- supported by 7,000 footnotes and 26 volumes of exhibits and testimony -- that Oswald fired three shots, killing Kennedy and seriously wounding Texas Gov. John Connally.

The crux of the conclusion that Oswald acted alone rests on the controversial "magic bullet" theory, that the wounds to Kennedy's throat also caused Connally's extensive injuries.

If the commission acknowledged a fourth bullet, then that would be beyond the limitations of the bolt-action rifle Oswald is alleged to have used. Therefore, a fourth shot would have had to come from a second gunman.

© 2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer