Bush tries Abbott and Costello routine

By DOLPH HONICKER

Why does it seem that everything President George W. Bush touches turns to {expletive deleted?}

In a single day in April, while surfing the internet, I ran across several news items that may seem redundant but, as the late author Kurt Vonnegut noted, “And so it goes.” So here it goes:

* A suicide bomber rams an explosives-rigged truck into a U.S. military outpost near Baquhah, killing nine soldiers and wounding 20, in one of the deadliest single ground attacks on U.S. bases since the start of the war in Iraq. Suicide attackers rarely penetrate defenses that surround U.S. troops, says the Washington Post, but “a 10-week-old U.S. counterinsurgency strategy has placed them in outposts and police stations that some soldiers say makes them more vulnerable.”

* World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz meets with senior managers to promise unspecified changes in his leadership and to appeal for their help after ethics complaints over his personnel decisions regarding his companion, Shaha Riza. Not to worry, his newly hired lawyer, Robert S. Bennet, says his client’s “mood is just fine. ... He feels people are trying to interfere with his job to get at world poverty ...” His first act, apparently, was a sweetheart deal for his “companion.” Bush has voiced his full backing of Wolfowitz.

* Mark Dennis Zachares, a former staffer on the House Transportation Committee, agrees to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the public by steering potential clients and inside government information to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff in return for cash, gifts and the promise of a high-paying job on K Street. He’s the 11th to plead guilty in the Abramoff probe. Finally, the last item would be almost laughable if it were not so ludicrous.

* Bush says his confidence in Alberto R. Gonzales has grown as a result of the attorney general’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee despite a performance criticized by senators in both parties.

“The attorney general went up there and gave a very candid assessment and answered every question he could possibly answer, in a way that increased my confidence in his ability to do his job. Some senators didn’t like his explanation, but he answered as honestly as he could.”

I can just see Bush glued to the television watching Gonzales, the Justice Department’s equivalent of FEMA’s Michael Brown (“Ya doin’ a great job, Brownie”), testify.

But wait!

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino later told reporters that Bush actually didn’t watch the testimony but received updates from aides.

Picture this scenario as an aide rushes into the Oval Office to deliver an update.

BUSH: Make it quick. I’m on the line to Baghdad hearing about the great progress we’re making in Iraq. What’s the latest on Alberto?

AIDE: I forgot.

B: Quit stallin’. Let’s have it.

A: I don’t remember.

B: Are ya gonna tell me or not?

A: I don’t recall.

B: Ya been monitorin’ that bleeping TV all mornin’. What is it ya don’t recall?

A: I don’t remember.

B: Ya don’t remember what?

A: I can’t recall.

Abbott and Costello had a similar routine. But theirs was more believable.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

Halberstam: the Best and the Brightest

By DOLPH HONICKER

David Halberstam, three years younger than I, already was an established reporter on The Nashville Tennessean when I arrived in late 1959 as a copy editor.

Hearing on CNN that my old friend was killed Monday, April 22, in a car crash south of San Francisco came as a palpable shock. Dave, like his book about the leaders who dragged us into the Vietnam War, was indeed The Best and the Brightest in the true sense.

I knew him during an era when reporters wrote their stories on paper cut from rolls of newsprint on Royal Upright typewriters that clacked away with the sound of a freight car running over cracks in the rails. Copy editors' tools were pencils and paste pots. It seemed that everyone above the age of puberty smoked in the newsroom. I once had three cigarettes going at the same time and quit cold turkey that very night.

I’ll always remember the first story of Dave that I had to edit. This guy, I told myself, is the absolute worst typist I’ve ever seen -- words xxxxed out, words on top of words. Then I read what he’d written and told myself, this guy is one hell of a writer.

Of course, he went on to prove it by writing 21 books and winning a Pulitzer Prize. He later went to The New York Times where he covered the Congo and then later the Vietnam War where his dispatches outraged generals and the powers that be back in Washington but won him the respect of the grunts on the ground.

Instead of attending the 5 o’clock follies, Halberstam hitched rides on helicopters and rode into the war.

Speaking to a journalism conference in Tennessee last year, according to ESPN, he said government criticism of news reporters in Iraq reminded him of the way he was treated while covering the war in Vietnam.

“The crueler the war gets, the crueler the attacks get on anybody who doesn’t salute or play the game,” he said. “And then one day, the people who are doing the attacking look around, and they’ve used up their credibility.”

Neill Sheehan, who was Saigon bureau chief for United Press International, said: “We were in Vietnam at a time when we were being denounced by those on high. There was tremendous pressure. David never buckled under it at all. He was capable of standing up to it. You could not intimidate David.”

Sheehan recalled how Halberstam once called a general at home for permission to fly to a site of a U.S. defeat. At a briefing the next day, a brigadier general scolded “pitiful, lowly young reporters” for having the temerity to call a general at home.

“General, you do not understand,” Halberstam responded, according to Sheehan, “we are not corporals. We do not work for you. ... We will call a commanding general any time at home to get our job done.”

Despite living a charmed life, tragedy struck in 1980 when an escaped convict killed his brother, Michael Halberstam, a cardiologist, during a robbery.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Dave said in an interview. “You have to get on, and you have to get on with life, and get on with living.”

The one story that set Dave above others while on The Tennessean was one he dug out of a funeral. This couple lived in abject poverty not knowing where their next meal would come from when the husband died. While mourning for him and wondering if she’d have to bury him in potters’ field, she turned over the mattress and found $10,000.

Did she use this money to set her life on a new course? No, she paid the undertaker $10,000 to give hubby a grand exit.

Dave, I’m just one of the tens of thousands of journalists and retired newspapermen and women who’ll miss you.

ESPN had a wonderful quote that you gleaned from the basketball star Julius Irving. It sums up your philosophy:

“Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”

{Honicker is a semi-retired newspaperman. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report}.

It’s correct to shun the bloody hand.

By DOLPH HONICKER

If you found yourself having to confront a man responsible for the unnecessary deaths of over 3,220 of your countrymen plus 50,000 to 650,000 lives in a nation that was no threat to us, would you go out of your way to be polite?

Assume further that your own son was in harm’s way because of this person and he walked and asked, “How’s your boy?”

Responding to President George W. Bush, the Democratic senator-elect from Virginia, James Webb replied, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq.”

When Bush asked again, Webb replied, “That’s between me and my boy.”

Webb later told the Washington Post about his refusal to pass through a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, laying grammar aside, “I’m not particularly interested in having a picture of me and George W. Bush on my wall. No offense to the institution of the presidency, and I’m certainly looking forward to working with him and his administration. {But} leaders do some symbolic things to try to convey who they are and what the message is.”

George Will, a top-chop wordsmith, who can write lovingly of baseball, considers Webb’s response to Bush that of a “boor.”

I disagree.

Webb’s son, a Marine, is in Iraq. Webb himself is a decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, a war from Bush and Vice President Cheney found an exit strategy.

Had I been in Webb‘s combat boots, I’d have had the temerity to answer: “My boy faces death daily, Mr. President. He’s a Marine who volunteered to go to Iraq to fight in your stupid war. May I ask why your two daughters are not over there as well?”

But that’s me. George Will sees it differently.

I remember that when Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost her son in Iraq, tried to see Bush, he snubbed her. Did Will consider Bush’s behavior boorish? Cowardly? Craven?

Will says of Webb: “In a republic, people decline to be led by leaders who are insufferably full of themselves.”

Could this not be said of Bush who is so sure of his king-like divinity that he refuses to admit mistakes and blindly follows his own counsel?

Rather that grasping the essence of Webb’s message, Will parses words. Imagine parsing some of Bush’s verbal goofs.

Webb wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that began, as Will notes:

“The most important -- and unfortunately the least debated -- issue in politics today is our society’s steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America’s top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country.”

While Will focuses on thee words -- infinitely, tier and literally -- I had no problem getting the gist: that the poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, locked away in their gated communities and the country is headed toward third world status unless our deficits and debt are reined in.

A recent issue of The New Yorker offers Webb more reasons for shunning a man who hasn’t learned the meaning of bipartisanship.

On Nov. 15 Bush renominated four of his hardest-right candidates for the federal appeals:

1. A Defense Department lawyer who has been denounced by a score of retired generals and admirals for his role as an architect of the administration’s infamous interrogation regime.

2. A former Interior Department attorney and mining and ranching lobbyist who sees the Clean Water Act as “regulatory excess.”

3. A district court judge whose decisions have been reversed or vacated more than 150 times, including two reversals from the Supreme Court -- one of them in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, no less, in a voting rights case.

4. A former aide to Sen. Trent Lott who is the first such nominee in a quarter of a century to be unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association.

The next day, notes The New Yorker, Bush appointed Eric Keroack as new chief of “population affairs” at the Department of Health and Human Services. A gynecologist, he will oversee Title X, a Nixon-era program that distributes contraceptives to poor and uninsured women.

“Until recently,” says writer Hendrik Hertzberg, “he was the medical director of a Christianist pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as ‘demeaning to women.’”

There’s more.

“One of his odder theories,” says Hertzberg, “makes him a sort of family-friendly Gen. Jack D. Ripper” (of Dr. Strangelove fame). “In Keroack’s case, the precious bodily fluid ... is the hormone oxytocin, a.k.a. ‘God’s Super Glue.’ Apparently, oxytocin is released during certain enjoyable activities, including hugging, massage, and, of course, sex.

“It is also, according to Keroack, the fluid that keeps married couples bound to each other. ...”

Too much fooling around and you lose it.

Unfortunately, Sen.-elect Webb, Keroack’s appointment, unlike the others, does not require Senate confirmation.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker

Eternity’s a hell of a long time

By DOLPH HONICKER

Suppose that an infinite God exists, what can we do for him? Being infinite, he is conditionless; being conditionless, he cannot be benefited or injured. He cannot want. He has. Think of the egotism of a man who believes that an infinite being wants his praise!

-- Robert Ingersoll

He has yet to step forward. But suppose that a highly intelligent man, mid-fifties, in the prime of life, fluent in a dozen different languages, married to an equally intelligent and attractive woman, parents of 2.3 children, their lives never touched by a hint of scandal, ran for president of the United States.

Suppose he already has been a foreign envoy to several troubled countries and helped to leave peace and stability in his wake.

Or, maybe he is a successful university president at a college where academics are the No. 1 priority and where there are no athletic scholarships. Kids just go out and play varsity sports and intramural sports for the fun of it. If a kid is too poor to pay tuition, he is allowed to work his way through via a co-op plan.

He could even be a successful businessman who runs a high tech firm where the employees share in the profits and he, the CEO, is paid only five times what the average worker makes -- not 431 times as much.

This man is considered a pillar of his community, volunteering his time and money for all sorts of efforts to improve his city and state.

He even could be a well-thought-of governor who has put his state on a pay-as-you-go plan, brought unemployment to a minimum and raised education to a high standard.

This hypothetical everyman and his family attend church every week, just so long as it’s a mainstream church and not an off-brand such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or a snake-handling holiness cult.

With a war chest of tens of millions of dollars raised for him in small sums by millions of people who believe in him, would this everyman have an almost sure lock on winning the White House?

You betcha.

Same scenario with a slight difference.

At a nationally televised press conference, a reporter poses these questions to which Everyman responds:

REPORTER: Mr. Everyman, is it true that you and your family do not belong to a church?

EVERYMAN: Yes, it’s true.

R: But surely you believe in God?

E: No, I stopped believing in such myths and superstitions when I was a small boy. But I’ve encouraged my family to seek their own answers on this.

R: How can you expect to lead a Christian nation if you’re not a Christian yourself?

E: First of all, I don’t consider this a Christian nation. We’re a people with all sorts of beliefs -- and unbeliefs.

R: But without the Bible to guide us and the Ten Commandments ...

E: There are many different religions, each with its own bible and each believing it to be the one true religion, although moderates tend to deny this until you pin them down. I don’t need the Ten Commandments to tell me it’s immoral to murder and rape or to steal and lie. There are laws on the books that forbid such crimes. As a young person you learn morality by observation, trial and error. I’ve made my share of mistakes and probably will make more.

R: Aren’t you afraid of going to hell if you don’t accept Jesus as your personal savior?

E: I believe we make our own heaven and hell here on earth. If you’re a normal person -- not a sociopath or a psychopath -- you feel good, or heavenly, when you do the right thing. You feel like hell when you hurt someone, lie or cheat.

R: Where do you plan to spend eternity?

E: Before I was born, I had no memory; I was a nothingness. The moment I die, I’ll return to that nothingness. The idea of eternity -- after what I hope will be a fruitful life on earth -- seems like a terrible bore. Preachers claim the saved will spend eternity singing praises and hosannas to God. Think about it. He, she or it was so intelligent he created the entire universe over a span of billions of years. And now, while this divine being oversees wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, forest fires, porno flicks, AIDS, starvation and poverty on earth, he wants to hear a bunch of yahoos singing his praises in heaven for a few billion more years?

R: This means you’re an atheist.

E. Yes.

R: Sir, I’m being told in my ear-phone that this news conference is being interrupted by a commercial for Viagra to be followed by a bulletin.

BULLETIN: The Party has just announced that it is withdrawing its support for Everyman for president.

Copyright 2007, Dolph Honicker