Health Care You Die; Torture Good

A week away across the midwest to Ohio. It was the first time I've watched television for a year and came away with that feeling one used to get in the sixties when ads were aimed at making you neurotic and anxious about your Bad Breath and Body Odor. Now one is assaulted with medicines for ailments I never heard of. From incontinence, female heart disease, erectile dysfuntion, and ringing in your ears. I thought 50 was the new 30 but you would never know from watching mid-50 year olds suffering from prostate and strange bladder diseases. You would think my generation is reaching crepitude at a blistering pace. And maybe we are.

The good news if this is our condition is that the Republicans tell us we are all going to die. not from Al Qaeda or jihadis, but from Obama's healthcare plan. Michael Steele reversed historical GOP position against medicare and issued a Bill of Health Rights for Seniors, which will preserve Medicare coverage and prevent the Democrats from summarily executing senior citizens through Death Panels. The GOP is warning fellow party members that the Democrats will be using party registration to deny Republicans healthcare. So it's best if everyone registers as an independent just in case. If you are a veteran, you're going to die because of the Democrats' Death Book, which advises serious ill veterans about their end of life options. And in case, you haven't gotten the message, the Democrats will put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor. In fact, it's all going to be run like the DMV--which is actually run at a state level. If a public option is chosen, millions of Americans will lose their private health insurance and they too will die. Even John McCain argues that a public option will destroy the private health insurance industry. And the beat goes on. Real Republican members of Congress are saying on the floor that health care reform is going to kill people. There are actual members of Congress, not the public, who believe Government will intervene in Medicare--at the last notice this was a government-run program.

The birthers and Rush Limbaugh have raised a more serious threat--male circumcision. The birthers believe Obama is not circumcised--which would indicate what I'm not sure. Rush Limbaugh is afraid that under Obama's healthcare he would be cirumcised. All of this was heard in the background as the Center for Disease Control put out a report how circumcision would help control certain illnesses. Naturally, since a black man is President, he's going to sick Eric Holder on white males and shear off their foreskins.

This fear-mongering raises the delicate topic of Death itself. For a party, which is dominated by evangelical Christians and observant Jews, why would death actually be such an issue? If death is not the end, then isn't it worst to go bankrupt through illness and become incapacitated through catastrophic illness? Isn't the long-term effects of destitution on the future of one's family more horrifying than death itself? Let's face it--America is one of the least death obsessed cultures in the world and by talking about it the idea is to raise irrational fear. If you preserve the status quo, you live; if you change, you die. It doesn't matter that the insurance and drug companies are coining money at the people's expense because I'm still alive. And if you change the system,there might be unintended consequences which with long odds might, might result in you not gettting treatment for some obscure and relatively rare sickness.

I'm not sure I know where the Republicans are going with this. I know for sure if Republicans are returned to power, they will sure as shooting drastically cut Medicare and Social Security benefits in the name of cutting the deficit. Many such as John McCain and Newt Gingrich are on record, saying so. There is some archetype that still exists in the Republican Party, which causes an almost knee-jerk reflex to undo the safety net first created by Franklin Roosevelt. I had long thought that had passed. But the rhetoric these days from the base is even blaming Roosevelt for prolonging the Great Depression and arguing that Barack Obama is doing the same through the stimulus package and the increased deficits. There is little self-reflection here that Republicans historically are the big deficit-spenders, almost totally for political motives. In a time when it looks like the United States will be lingering around 10% unemployment for some time, people are naturally anxious, people are worried. So one political strategy is to exploit this anxiety and create real fear. However, if you create fear, you must have something to replace it with--so far the Republicans are found lacking.

Not lacking in entertainment value is the Great Glenn Beck. Dozens of sponsors are fleeing Beck show as he has turned up the amp of his rhetoric against Obama, who now is going to create civilian national security corps to implement policy from the census-taking to poll-watching. Beck, a self acknowledged recovering alcoholic, has been barking lately that he will go down with his ship and re-emerge on a larger stage--hinting that if his 9-12 project goes el floppo or violent Australian mogul will give him the heave-ho. Glenn Beck will then team up with his best fan Sarah Palin and tour the country as ther conservative's version of Elmer Gantry and Aimee McPherson. If you think his incoherence and misinformation is deliberate, it's not--he's that ignorant of political affairs and history. But, there is a role for a conservative/libertarian version of the Jerry Springer Show. I'm not sure Glenn Beck is the best choice but he is ably carrying on to sell atheist Tom Paine to the religous right. And his ratings are knocking off Bill O'Reilly. Alot of the reasons to watch is to guess when he's going to cry and if he is going to commit suicide, which is an unfortunate occurrence in his family. He's like Howard Beal in Network screaming ,"I can't take it anymore" with the cynical television producer checking his ratings. So, do, please keep asking questions.

The conservative movement has fully embraced the Radical Left. There are now seminars on Saul Alinsky's theories of organization for Town Hall conservatives. It seems Republicans got the idea that the entire Obama campaign could not have succeeded without the mastery of these Alinsky principles. Even side figures as movie star Jon Voight claims that Obama is governing based on Saul Alinsky's writings. A lot of this comes from the work done by the Republican Opposition Research on Hillary Clinton, whom they thought would ultimately secure the Democratic nomination. Secretary of State Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Alinsky. So why let 1,000s of pages go to waste. A spokesperson for the Alinsky Institute said, however,"We would never call Mayor Daley of Chicago a Nazi because our goal is to work with people in power." This obvious point has gone unnoticed.

Karl Rove--still avoiding jail--was out on the hustings this week to say that this year the Republicans would be defined as to what they are against. He claimed--presuming he would still have a say in the Party he wrecked--that in 2010 Republicans would define what they are for.

Meanwhile, the Dailykos, which uses the polling firm Research 2000, published a blog called " Political Re-Alignment on Steroids". The piece dissected the recent decline in Obama's polling and ascertained his and the Democrats' strengths according to region. The bottomline is that Obama's approval ratings are basically incredibly strong throughout the country, except in the South. The South, which constitutes 21% of the country, is the only region that shows Republican strength. Generic congressional questions show Republicans with slight leads over Democrats. Everywhere else Democrats have 5 to 1 leads over the generic Republican. Obama's approval rating among White Southerners is a dysmal 9%. With nation-wide approval of congressional Republicans only slightly above 12% or in other polls at about 20%, what appears from digging deep in the Research 2000 numbers is that the Republicans have become a regional party far faster than anyone realised. What is also occuring is that whatever support Republicans used to have among non-whites is vanishing at an even faster rate.

But if health care makes you die, torture makes you good. Eric Holder finally appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the cases of abuse by CIA personnel involved in the torture of detainees. In my opinion,this was inevitable if not necessary because of the obligations of the United States and once stated ideals of advancing human rights. Immediately, the CIA started their Beltway political maneuvering and started to beat the drum of morale falling. What about the morale of those intelligence personnel who thought torture was wrong and have carried out their difficult tasks within the law? I've never understood the morale issue of punishing people who did wrong. Our town paper, The Washington Post today tried to feed the old saw that torture works by publishing a long story about how Khalid Sheik Mohammed after being water-boarded a cosmic number of times became a solid citizen and turned to a new life as a lecturer to the interrogators and assembled military and intelligence personnel on the theology and strategy of Al Qaeda. This was to back up Dick Cheney's claim that everything we know about Al Qaeda comes from the torture program. He no longer argues that imminent threats were averted because the CIA Inspector General's report clearly states this isn't true. But it does say lives were saved--but nobody knows whether they could have been saved without torture. But that's enough to serve as talking points for Republican members on the Hill who have come to the defense of the CIA interrogators. Dick Cheney called these people professionals but the record is showing they had very little training and were often contractors who had no experience in interrogation.

I have doubts about Obama's new interrogation oversight panel, which will be located at the FBI. First, he got it right that the CIA has no experience in interrogation. Only the FBI and the military do and in the case of Al Qaeda, the most successful interrogations were conducted by the FBI without the use of torture. The most successfull actually involved given a diabetic terrorist a sugar-free cookie. But I have deep misgivings about the President of the United States actually being in charge himself of the interrogation program, reporting through his National Security Council. As we saw under Reagan, the National Security Council should not be a policy implementing body.

We end with the war in Afghanistan. No one should be surprised about the irregularities reported in the Afghanistan elections. Nor should one be surprised by the increased casualties taken by our military personnel. Rather one should raise questions of what is our ultimate purpose there. Only a few months ago General Petraeus confirmed what others had already reported--Al Qaeda was not there; it was in Pakistan. Do we want to nation-build and defeat a nationalist fundamentalist group, who have no international terrorism capabities or intent? Or are we after Al Qaeda? My fears are that Al Qaeda will eventually move out of Pakistan and set up shop once again in Yemen and Somalia. Because their ultimate goal is the liberation of Saudi Arabia and its sacred shrines. There is evidence now that at least with proxies this is taking place. But I suspect the leadership will move there as well. Then we will be pouring money and men into a war that like Iraq was peripheral to any war against terrorists.