Rainy Sunday

It's hard to believe I haven't been to Haiti in 15 years, since I used to commute there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But this week the news that the earthquake reeked havoc outside of Port-au-Prince brought forth memories of the lovely town of Jacmel, Petit-Goave and Leogane. In Leogane, the media reports that every building had collapsed. Jacmel has been devastated but the arts cooperative there is broadcasting videos that have been posted at the New York Times website.

Last night, the military hospital ship left Baltimore with a cheering crowd saying goodby. Fairfax emergency workers have been there several days and report having rescued about a dozen people alive from the rubble. But think about how time-consuming that work is. The USS Bataan shows up today. The northern port of Cap Haitien is being prepared for food deliveries from Miami. In the best of times the harbor is simply a port of call for cruise ships, not a container cargo depot. The U.S. military seems confident that they can get the harbor of Port-au-Prince up and running again. The satellite photos show the cranes and docks have collapsed--with containers from past shipments sunk in the sea. Over a dozen food distribution points have been established around the capital and some progress is being made to establish tent facilities for the hundreds of thousands who are homeless. Aid workers, who experienced the Tsunami disaster, say this is several times more challenging because the country simply has no infrastructure of any sort.

The Marines left Camp LeJeune Friday and claim their ships are well-equipped to deal with the wreckage at the port. Drone satellite images are being used to direct relief efforts but one shot I saw was that the cathedral basically collapsed leaving only the outside supporting walls. The Red Cross has a massive convoy of food, water and medical equipment coming overland from the Dominican Republic today. While the Port-au-Prince airport is filled with relief supplies, prompting dismay from Haitians, who are trying to gather there.

Secretary of State Clinton met with Preval yesterday in Haiti. But what people don't realize is that not only have the government buildings collapsed but many members of the cabinet and parliament were killed. Authorities are still trying to locate the living members of the government. Old Baby Doc sent a message of solidarity from Paris to the people. Baby Doc has supported himself as a gardener since he was deposed but yesterday he pledged the money in his mother's foundation to the relief effort. Actually, that's quite sly. Swiss authorities have a hold on the foundation funds because they were stolen from the government. This is a trick to force the Swiss to release the funds. Meanwhile, Rev. Aristide wants to retrun to Haiti to help in the reconstruction.

President Obama introduced the new Bill Clinton-George W. Bush relief effort at the White House. George W. looked listless and maybe back on the booze. But he did say,"Send your cash", which runs counter to the Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly message. Bill O' wants a full accounting of all the money. Funny, he never asked for an accounting of the missing $250 billion in aid to Iraq--which is still missing. The aid workers say they have already blown through $50 of the $100 million pledged by Obama to Haiti. The burn-rate for such an operation is just fantastic.

I could do without the cheerleading articles that propose that this is the beginning of a new day for Haiti. I would hope it is but I doubt it. Haiti was last a viable nation-state just before the rise to power of Papa Doc. Look at those wonderful Haitian paintings and the lush natural backgrounds. I used to think that was a type of magical realism. Instead, Haiti really did look like that. Today, when you fly over it ,it is an environmental wasteland with almost total deforestation. As one missionary said yesterday," Once we run out of fuel, we'll burn charcoal, when we run out of charcoal, we'll burn books."

For those of us who celebrate the civil society, Haiti should be a warning. Today, it has more NGOs per acre than any other country. This is the result of the American policy of funneling aid to Haiti, exclusively through the NGO community. This may be beneficial for the current catastrophe but it's not a good formula for success in reconstruction.

General Honore of Katrina fame criticized the Haiti relief efforts as not being timely enough. He intends to run in the Republican primary against Diaper Dave Vitter. Which serves as the perfect segue to the latest on gay marriage. Diaper Dave says that gay marriage is "worse than Katrina." The New Orleans madam who serviced Dave always said he had exquisite taste in lingerie. It was the D.C. Madam who used to put the diapers on him. New Gingrich, who left his first wife on the operating table, blames the "gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us." I guess everyone will be forced to marry a gay. The devoted husband Senator John Ensign says that "marriage is the cornerstone on which society was founded." But the conservative Republican contributor to Fox News , Margaret Hoover, the great-great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, is coming full out for gay marriage and especially the case Ted Olson is making both in court and in Newsweek. She criticizes the Republican Party for abandoning its past history of encouraging freedom for minorities and invokes no less an expert than Dick Cheney as saying "Freedom means freedom for everyone." Part of her argument is that Republicans know alot of gay people and many are family members so why shouldn't they have rights. I guess this is code that most gays and lesbians are white and alot are middle-class. But the sentiment is good.

But Liberty University, Falwell's old outfit, has just pulled out of the CPAC conference--not because the John Birch Society is sponsoring it, but because GOProud, a conservative gay group is participating.

In case you missed it, Cheney's Raiders, the Al Qaeda wing created by our former Vice President in Yemen, have suffered massive losses this week, including the death of their leader. The same goes with Al Qaeda in Pakistan and some of the more militant Taliban. Another example of Obama's weakness in the war against terrorism. The administration has urged Afghanistan to make offers to reincorporate the Taliban back into society--with the view of further isolating the remains of Al Qaeda. My wisecrack is the Taliban is already there with their lucrative drug deals with Karzai's brother, a CIA asset.

Cindy Sheehan is back at it again. This time she led a demonstration against the CIA headquarters for their use of drones. Then her group tried to picket Cheney's house but were forced away. At least she got the second target right.

The Pakistan newspaper DAWN printed an article by someone from Waziristan that welcomed the predator attacks on Taliban and Al Qaeda positions. The author claimed that people welcomed someone attacking those people who were keeping the province hostage. She went on to condemn the Pakistan army operations because they were the primary reason civilians and children got killed. This runs against the narrative that Cindy Sheehan and others are proposing.

President Obama is in Boston today for the Senate campaign. With elections Tuesday, Republicans believe if Brown wins they can stop health care reform. Mitch McConnell says that this vote is against increases in your medical insurance rates. Our journalists never question these assertions. Everyone and their grandmother knows that rates will increase without health reform from 18-35% per year and that tens of millions more people will not be able to afford it. But I guess this doesn't matter. Andrew Sullivan calls Coakley a "hack politician", while giving Brown a by. Actually, she's a lackluster campaigner that took the election for granted but she has been an able Attorney-General, dealing with some complex nuts-and-bolts issues. Brown's qualification for the Senate is that he has four houses and is filthy rich. But neither candidate is senile, which undercuts both their qualifications. Remember the GOP battle-cry in the last Georgia Senate campaign,"Elect Saxbe Chambliss and you'll stop Socialism". I haven't heard a peep out of him yet. I hope Michael Steele is pouring RNC money into this campaign. Then everyone wakes up on Wednesday and realizes their broke for 2010.

The Left is bugging me also. In a future post, I'll run through the whole list of Obama's accomplishments. But I get tired of hearing that what has been done isn't good enough. It may not be adequate to the total crisis the nation is facing but it's more than I thought was possible given the very conservative nature of our institutions and the merciless resistance being put up by all the major financial and national security interests in the country. Maybe Joan Baez was right, President Obama should have been content to lead a social movement and not run for President.

The Fox News poll this week showed that only single digits of the country believe Obama is responsible for the economy and about 30% blame Bush and another 20% blame Congress. Asked would the country be better off with McCain, an overwhelming percent said no. And this was a poll that tilted toward Republicans in makeup and questioning.

Meanwhile John McCain was given the honor of "Hero of the Nation" by Georgia for his support of their claim to South Ossetia and Abhazia. McCain still tone-deaf returned to Washington several days after the flap over the Reid comments about Obama died down to opine that Reid should be resign and that the whole thing with Lott shows a double standard. The caravan had already left town by then, John.

Possibly the Last Post of 2009

I've kept my New Year's Resolution simple: I'm not putting plastic explosives in my underwear and I'm getting a haircut. Everything else is up for grabs.

Here's hoping this year brings some peace and calm to our troubled country as well as economic recovery.

A tip: When ever you hear Dick Cheney mouth off, it means that something has occured legally behind the scenes. Cheney's tirade accusing a man of escalating the war in Afghanistan, sending predators to pick off Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Yemen of "pretending we're at war" comes the day it appears that Cheney was explicitly linked to a mass of legal violations in the torture of detainees. Even, according to the legally unsound Bush torture memos,the waterboarding of detainees was illegal "if it wasn't aimed at preventing future attacks on the United States." Apparently, as I have written before, the whole rash of waterboarding was aimed solely at establishing an Al Qaeda--Saddam Hussein to justify the Iraq war and nothing else. The primary pusher of this was Dick Cheney, who was obsessed by the subject. It's ironic that the very administration he attacks is actually trying to protect him. It's like a giant case of chicken.

If you read the White House answer to the Cheney charges, a subtext can be read about basic American strategic errors committed during his watch. Shortly after 9-11, the United States decided to attack Afghanistan and then were planning to "pick off the low-hanging fruit" in Somalia and Yemen. The idea was to wipe out Al Qaeda in both places but the plan got sideswiped by people like Cheney who wanted the war in Iraq. We see the fruits of this blunder today as Al Qaeda restores itself in Yemen and the Obama Administration plays an almost eight-year old game of catch-up in Afghanistan. The underwear bomber incident only underscores the strategic blunder of the Bush Administration during these critical years. Cheney knows this in heart of hearts.

I believe Dick Cheney is coming close to the Nixon zone when Nixon became non compis mentis during the Watergate investigations. Alot of this has a background in the second Bush term. During the first term, Cheney studied the Threat Matrix-we knew the Matrix would come into this. This was all the unfiltered intelligence on every threats against the United States and the President from around planet earth. Most intelligence analysts said these were garbage. Cheney read them everyday and presented them to President Bush everyday. If you inhabited this world, you would go stark raving barkers.

The two personalities Bush personnel said needed a muzzle were Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. The whole Valerie Plame incident gave Bush the excuse to usher Rove out the door and banish Cheney to the Vice Presidency. By 2004, President Bush understood in his own peculiar way that Cheney's way was the wrong way. You began to see langauge about closing Gitmo and we now know that the torture memos were being revised,if not rescinded. All the Cheney rhetoric now is in part to re-fight the bureaucratic battle he lost.

But now with the CIA's Inspector General's Report somewhere in the limbo of being released and the OPR report on the torture lawyers promised soon, the stakes become a little higher.
God knows what will emerge with the millions of e-mails recovered recently because they cover the whole time period of the outing of Valerie Plame and some of the torture times.

It is not incidental that Cheney claims Obama will release hard-bitten terrroists when it has become known that it was what he personally ok'd with the release of the two men who taught the underpants bomber about explosives. My jokes about Cheney's Raiders, referring to Gitmo detainees released to Yemen and Saudi Arabia under the Bush Administration, literally turn out to be true. He was the man who personally approved their transfers. And they are all back in the field.

(Parenthetically--Could we release the remaining Uighurs from Gitmo? If real Al Qaeda people can got to art therapy classes in Saudi Arabia, why can't people who had nothing to do with nothing be released?)