D-I-V-O-R-C-E

I am a child of divorce. Marquardt is right on about the consequences. If this is (fair & balanced) self-disclosure, so be it.

[x Austin American-Statesman]
The children that divorce leaves behind
By Elizabeth Marquardt

Many experts and parents embrace the idea of the "good" divorce — the reassuring concept that it's not divorce itself that harms children but simply the way that parents divorce. If divorced parents stay involved with their child and don't fight, they say, then children will be fine. There's only one problem: It's not true.

In a first-ever national study, which I conducted with sociologist Norval Glenn at the University of Texas at Austin, the grown children of divorce say there's no such thing as a "good" divorce. This telephone survey of 1,500 young adults, half from divorced families and half from intact families — supplemented with more than 70 in-person interviews across the country — reveals that any kind of divorce, whether amicable or not, sows lasting inner conflict.

And loneliness turns out to be one of the abiding legacies of divorce. The frequent absence of their parents — who were living in another household, working or dating — made the grown children of divorce seven times more likely to agree with the statement "I was alone a lot as a child." Many remember no one reaching out to them when their parents split up. Stephen, whose parents divorced when he was 12, recalled his best friend saying, "If you need to talk about anything, you can talk to me." But, Stephen said, he was the only one.

Even at church, the losses and fears of the children of divorce often went unnoticed. Of those who were actively involved in a church at the time of their parents' divorce, two-thirds say no one from the clergy or congregation reached out to them during the most dramatic upheaval of their lives.

Having to grow up too soon is also a recurring theme. Only a small minority of parents incur a lot of conflict after they divorce. But even when the parents don't fight, the children have to take on the stressful new job of making sense of their parents' different beliefs, values and lifestyles — even as their parents are freed to start new lives.

As a result, many grown children of divorce say they felt divided inside. As children they feared resembling either parent too much, because looking or acting too much like one parent could make them an outsider, rejected in the other parent's world. As children they felt much less safe. Just 44 percent of the grown children of divorce strongly agreed that they generally felt emotionally safe as children, compared with 79 percent of those with married parents.

The children were rocked by divorce no matter how old they were when it occurred. Daniel, who was 7 at the time, said that after the divorce, "I had problems sleeping. I would wake up feeling very alone or afraid. Like I had this fear of fires, of war. . . . I always felt like things were lurking around the corners."

Many also recall feeling that they had to protect their parents and felt far less able to go to them for comfort. Katy, whose parents divorced when she was 3, said she was always "on my best behavior" when visiting her father and stepmother. "I didn't want there to be a reason for anyone to look down upon my mother or say anything against her because of me."

More than half of grown children of divorce said they felt the need to protect their mother emotionally, compared with just one-third of those with married parents. Many said the same thing about their father. And in an astounding finding, just one-third of young adults from divorced families say that when they were young and needed comfort they went to one or both of their parents, compared with two-thirds of those with married parents. The grown children of divorce were more likely to say they went to siblings or friends or just tried to deal with their problems alone. They felt their parents were busy working or starting new families, or were preoccupied nursing wounds of their own.

Experts often insist that if divorced parents only minimize their conflict after divorce, then the children will be fine. But we found that only one-fifth of grown children of divorce recall "a lot" of parental conflict after the divorce. Yet they still struggled alone to figure out the big questions in life — what is true, what is right and wrong. The often dramatic contrasts in their parents' beliefs and values, and the silence about the divorce, seemed to leave them little choice.

There's a new generation speaking up about divorce now — the quarter of all young adults who grew up in divorced families. Their stories make one thing clear: A "good" divorce is better than a "bad" divorce, but it's never good. Abusive marriages are bad for children, and divorce is a critical safety valve for kids and parents alike. But most people are not aware that two-thirds of divorces today end low-conflict marriages.

For the children's sake, we need to save and strengthen these low-conflict marriages whenever possible. And if parents must divorce, we should no longer overlook the lonely, divided children left in the wake.

Elizabeth Marquardt, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, is the author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown).

Copyright © 2005 Cox Newspapers LLP

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The Dickster Calls The Kettle Black!

Irresponsible. Reprehensible. Untruthful. The Dickster was describing himself and Dub at the end of the week. These boys are capable of saying anything to anyone at any time. Damn their eyes as good young people die because of their deceit. If this is (fair & balanced) outrage, so be it.














[x Slate]
Cheney's Rules of Evidence: How the vice president argues by deception.
By John Dickerson

Dick Cheney likes to play the heavy—or, as a top aide once put it, "sit in a loincloth with a knife in his mouth." After keeping silent for a couple of weeks following the indictment of his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, Cheney donned the loincloth this week and went back on the attack. He criticized administration opponents, saying that they have lost the "basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate." Their claim that the president "purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence," said Cheney, "is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city."

Welcome back, Mr. Vice President—you're always good for the headlines. What was striking about Cheney's assault was that while denying critics' charges of manipulation and dishonesty involving prewar intelligence, he resorted to exactly the tactics that inspired the criticism. As he did with the prewar intelligence, Cheney told no outright lies, but he exaggerated the case, picked only evidence he liked, and ignored the caveats. Here's how he did it:

Cheney said: "Some of the most irresponsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing force against Saddam Hussein."

By talking about "irresponsible comments," Cheney makes it seem that critics are welcoming insurgent bombs or inviting Saddam Hussein for dinner. But how outlandish, in fact, are these "irresponsible" claims by those who voted to authorize force? The most incendiary quote the administration and GOP committees can offer comes from Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid: "[T]he administration engaged in a pattern of manipulation of the facts … as it made its case for attacking, for invading Iraq." Reid's charge is debatable, but it's hardly the combustible, irresponsible speech Cheney suggests it is. Cheney is setting the bar for irresponsibility so low that any questions about prewar intelligence can be dismissed.

Cheney: "These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions."

Cheney talks only about a narrow question: Did the administration fudge evidence it gave to Congress in advance of the vote to authorize the use of force? That's the most solid ground he can stand on, but even it's still shaky. Cheney does not repeat Bush's claim that members of Congress had access to the same intelligence, because they didn't. But he plays up their unprecedented access to the National Intelligence Estimate before they cast their vote—though Cheney knows that some important caveats were left out of that report. Congress had access to intelligence before bombs started dropping, but the administration decided, in the end, how much and what kind of intelligence that was.

And what the vice president doesn't talk about is all the other ways he, the president, and other members of the war council manipulated evidence in hundreds of speeches and interviews leading up to the war. Cheney, for example, insisted there might be a link between Iraq and the attacks on 9/11 after the administration's official position was that there was no such link. He presented the direst view of Iraq's nuclear program without discussing dissent within the administration about those claims. This was not intelligence data, but these claims were critical to shaping public opinion and putting pressure on Congress to vote for war. He could make a case about why the administration had to be aggressive, but he doesn't.

Cheney: "The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out."

Cheney has branded administration opponents as hypocrites and wimps. His last blow is the fiercest: They are unpatriotic. The president and Cheney invoke "the troops" to shut down discussion. But the troops demand this kind of debate. Soldiers aren't in a position to be critical and shouldn't be, so their elected officials need to ask questions and argue on their behalf. American soldiers are smart and tough enough to weather the public debate. They can handle whatever Harry Reid has to say. Plus, Dick Cheney believes in his position and has plenty of backbone, so why won't he fight the opposition on the merits?

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent.

Copyright © 2005 Slate

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Will The Last Person Leaving Iraq Please Turn Out The Lights?

The Frankster continues to wear out the Bushies. "Mr. Bush's War" is a fool's errand, perpetrated by a fool. Unfortunately, Dub has left Mongolia and is headed back home to spew more nonsense. If this is (fair & balanced) disdain, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
One War Lost, Another to Go
By Frank Rich

If anyone needs further proof that we are racing for the exits in Iraq, just follow the bouncing ball that is Rick Santorum. A Republican leader in the Senate and a true-blue (or red) Iraq hawk, he has long slobbered over President Bush, much as Ed McMahon did over Johnny Carson. But when Mr. Bush went to Mr. Santorum's home state of Pennsylvania to give his Veterans Day speech smearing the war's critics as unpatriotic, the senator was M.I.A.

Mr. Santorum preferred to honor a previous engagement more than 100 miles away. There he told reporters for the first time that "maybe some blame" for the war's "less than optimal" progress belonged to the White House. This change of heart had nothing to do with looming revelations of how the new Iraqi "democracy" had instituted Saddam-style torture chambers. Or with the spiraling investigations into the whereabouts of nearly $9 billion in unaccounted-for taxpayers' money from the American occupation authority. Or with the latest spike in casualties. Mr. Santorum was instead contemplating his own incipient political obituary written the day before: a poll showing him 16 points down in his re-election race. No sooner did he stiff Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania than he did so again in Washington, voting with a 79-to-19 majority on a Senate resolution begging for an Iraq exit strategy. He was joined by all but one (Jon Kyl) of the 13 other Republican senators running for re-election next year. They desperately want to be able to tell their constituents that they were against the war after they were for it.

They know the voters have decided the war is over, no matter what symbolic resolutions are passed or defeated in Congress nor how many Republicans try to Swift-boat Representative John Murtha, the marine hero who wants the troops out. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey last week found that the percentage (52) of Americans who want to get out of Iraq fast, in 12 months or less, is even larger than the percentage (48) that favored a quick withdrawal from Vietnam when that war's casualty toll neared 54,000 in the apocalyptic year of 1970. The Ohio State political scientist John Mueller, writing in Foreign Affairs, found that "if history is any indication, there is little the Bush administration can do to reverse this decline." He observed that Mr. Bush was trying to channel L. B. J. by making "countless speeches explaining what the effort in Iraq is about, urging patience and asserting that progress is being made. But as was also evident during Woodrow Wilson's campaign to sell the League of Nations to the American public, the efficacy of the bully pulpit is much overrated."

Mr. Bush may disdain timetables for our pullout, but, hello, there already is one, set by the Santorums of his own party: the expiration date for a sizable American presence in Iraq is Election Day 2006. As Mr. Mueller says, the decline in support for the war won't reverse itself. The public knows progress is not being made, no matter how many times it is told that Iraqis will soon stand up so we can stand down.

On the same day the Senate passed the resolution rebuking Mr. Bush on the war, Martha Raddatz of ABC News reported that "only about 700 Iraqi troops" could operate independently of the U.S. military, 27,000 more could take a lead role in combat "only with strong support" from our forces and the rest of the 200,000-odd trainees suffered from a variety of problems, from equipment shortages to an inability "to wake up when told" or follow orders.

But while the war is lost both as a political matter at home and a practical matter in Iraq, the exit strategy being haggled over in Washington will hardly mark the end of our woes. Few Americans will cry over the collapse of the administration's vainglorious mission to make Iraq a model of neocon nation-building. But, as some may dimly recall, there is another war going on as well - against Osama bin Laden and company.

One hideous consequence of the White House's Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other. That's already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources to confront that expanded threat.

We have arrived at "the worst of all possible worlds," in the words of Daniel Benjamin, Richard Clarke's former counterterrorism colleague, with whom I talked last week. No one speaks more eloquently to this point than Mr. Benjamin and Steven Simon, his fellow National Security Council alum. They saw the Qaeda threat coming before most others did in the 1990's, and their riveting new book, "The Next Attack," is the best argued and most thoroughly reported account of why, in their opening words, "we are losing" the war against the bin Laden progeny now.

"The Next Attack" is prescient to a scary degree. "If bin Laden is the Robin Hood of jihad," the authors write, then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi "has been its Horatio Alger, and Iraq his field of dreams." The proof arrived spectacularly this month with the Zarqawi-engineered suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman. That attack, Mr. Benjamin wrote in Slate, "could soon be remembered as the day that the spillover of violence from Iraq became a major affliction for the Middle East." But not remembered in America. Thanks to the confusion sown by the Bush administration, the implications for us in this attack, like those in London and Madrid, are quickly forgotten, if they were noticed in the first place. What happened in Amman is just another numbing bit of bad news that we mentally delete along with all the other disasters we now label "Iraq."

Only since his speech about "Islamo-fascism" in early October has Mr. Bush started trying to make distinctions between the "evildoers" of Saddam's regime and the Islamic radicals who did and do directly threaten us. But even if anyone was still listening to this president, it would be too little and too late. The only hope for getting Americans to focus on the war we can't escape is to clear the decks by telling the truth about the war of choice in Iraq: that it is making us less safe, not more, and that we have to learn from its mistakes and calculate the damage it has caused as we reboot and move on.

Mr. Bush is incapable of such candor. In the speech Mr. Santorum skipped on Veterans Day, the president lashed out at his critics for trying "to rewrite the history" of how the war began. Then he rewrote the history of the war, both then and now. He boasted of America's "broad and coordinated homeland defense" even as the members of the bipartisan 9/11 commission were preparing to chastise the administration's inadequate efforts to prevent actual nuclear W.M.D.'s, as opposed to Saddam's fictional ones, from finding their way to terrorists. Mr. Bush preened about how "we're standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes" even as we were hearing new reports of how we outsource detainees to such regimes to be tortured.

And once again he bragged about the growing readiness of Iraqi troops, citing "nearly 90 Iraqi army battalions fighting the terrorists alongside our forces." But as James Fallows confirms in his exhaustive report on "Why Iraq Has No Army" in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, America would have to commit to remaining in Iraq for many years to "bring an Iraqi army to maturity." If we're not going to do that, Mr. Fallows concludes, America's only alternative is to "face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly."

THAT'S the alternative that has already been chosen, brought on not just by the public's irreversible rejection of the war, but also by the depleted state of our own broken military forces; they are falling short of recruitment goals across the board by as much as two-thirds, the Government Accountability Office reported last week. We must prepare accordingly for what's to come. To do so we need leaders, whatever the political party, who can look beyond our nonorderly withdrawal from Iraq next year to the mess that will remain once we're on our way out. Whether it's countering the havoc inflicted on American interests internationally by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo or overhauling and redeploying our military, intelligence and homeland security operations to confront the enemy we actually face, there's an enormous job to be done.

The arguments about how we got into Mr. Bush's war and exactly how we'll get out are also important. But the damage from this fiasco will be even greater if those debates obscure the urgency of the other war we are losing, one that will be with us long after we've left the quagmire in Iraq.

Former NYTimes drama critic, Frank Rich, contributes a regular Op-Ed column in the Sunday NYTimes.


Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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