Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Marty Kaplan: The Founders Fumbled. "The system worked" is what so many of us breathed with relief when Nixon fled Washington in disgrace. No matter that it was Nixon's own paranoia -- in the form secret White House tape recordings -- that did him in, not just the majesty of a Senate investigation; no matter that it took the luck of Barry Goldwater's it's-time-for-you-to-go statesmanship, and the offended ego of a Deep Throat, not just the splendor of the Fourth Estate, to get him to quit. What we told ourselves was that the country escaped its worst constitutional crisis ever because the Constitution contained within itself the mechanisms needed to overcome catastrophe. Looking at what's happening in Washington today, I can't help thinking that it's time to revisit that awe. We treat the Constitution like fundamentalists treat the Bible; we treat the Founders like Deities; we hold an unshakable faith in the inherent perfection of our system, believing it no less exquisitely wrought than the finely balanced network of our veins and arteries, no less miraculous than the workings of our cells and organs. But cells can go screwy, and sometimes no immune system can save us from cancer. Genes can make mistakes, and sometimes no homeostatic mechanism, however ingenious its feedback loops, can restore our equilibrium. The Founders were awe-inspiring craftsmen, but they weren't magicians, they weren't prophets, and they weren't gods. Is it so unreasonable to wonder whether the charter they wrote more than two centuries ago isn't insurance enough against the madmen who now rule us? Sure, it's encouraging to see Congress rouse itself from its six-year slumber and begin to push back. But will it really change anything? Bush is certifiably delusional, but impeachment is off the table, because Democrats can't muster the kind of political will and outrage at a tragically misconceived war that Republicans could summon for a blowjob. Cheney is an outlaw, a Rasputin, a tyrant, a liar, but there is no check to check him, no balance to balance him. Throughout the executive branch, secrecy reigns, laws are violated, scholarly whackballs formulate doctrines like the "unitary executive," but neither the courts nor the Congress have the cojones or the clout to intervene. Citizen-statesmen were supposed to govern us. Farmer-legislators were supposed to lead us. Where are our wise men today? Colin Powell, instead of blowing the whistle, sulks in his tent; Rumsfeld rants on the moor; George Tenet takes a bullet for The Man and gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Condi Rice appears as oblivious of her humiliation as any of the pathetic victims on American Idol; Paul Wolfowitz, the stain of our neocon nightmare on his hands, plays not Lady Macbeth, but Mother Teresa. Sweet reason, the faith of our rationalist Founders, has been supplanted by strategic pseudo-science. Contested facts are adjudicated not by evidence, but by polling, and by mud-wrestling. Swift Boating is the new epistemology. Propaganda -- the breathtakingly big "big lie" -- is triumphant, its practitioners on the federal payroll, but Washington's courtier culture precludes calling a Goebbels a Goebbels. Though protected by the First Amendment, the media are less a Fourth Estate than a Fifth Column, a source of narcotizing infotainment. The Murdoch-Moonie axis has become the MSM. George W. Bush, the oligarchs' tax-cutting choice for the 2000 nomination, loses the election, but no Supreme Court rescues the nation. The largest transfer of wealth from the middle to the top in the history of the industrial world occurs, but the politico-media culture calls it sour grapes to recall the origin of that silent coup, and class warfare to assess its consequences. The harpies of hate -- the Coulters, the Limbaughs, the O'Reillys -- spew bile, but the free marketplace of ideas beloved of Jefferson and Madison is incapable of marginalizing them, because Satan is vastly more entertaining than Socrates. The Republican Party is the puppet of right-wing fundamentalists, witch-hunters, Armageddonists, Father Coughlins, Elmer Gantrys, Cotton Mathers, but no constitutional bar to established religion protects us from theocratic fascism. A robust democracy depends on an educated citizenry, said the Founders, but the majority view that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 proves how effective a bulwark our educational system is, against the onslaught of relentless mendacity by our leaders. I wonder what we will say, looking back at 2000-2008. "The system worked"? No matter what this Democratic Congress does, how can we call the generations of broken crockery these ideologues have bequeathed us a sign of a healthy system? However this war ends, how can we call its existence anything but a megalomaniacal abuse of power? Whatever vermin the oversight committees at long last uncover; whatever the prosecutions and trials of apparachiks may finally reveal and punish; however historians diagnose our good-German complicity with demagogues, our Stockholm-syndrome affection for the bullies, our frog-in-a-warming-cauldron capacity for denial -- no matter how we ultimately awaken from this madness, it will not be with the comfort that our Constitution alone was enough to prevent us from spending this long season in hell. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 9:01:45 AM    comment []

Bob Geiger: Young Marine Dies Of PTSD - And Neglect. Jonathan Schulze was a United States Marine. He died earlier this month at the age of 25 -- not in Iraq, but back home, in Minnesota. He died of wounds received during his seven-month tour of duty in Iraq, wounds different from the ones that earned Schulze two purple hearts. This young man died of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of wounds to the soul and not the flesh. He died because the government that was there to send him far away to fight in 2004 wasn't there for him when he got home. Schulze had a harrowing time in Iraq, spending time in the heated battles of Ramadi in April, 2004. While he was there, 35 Marines in his unit were killed, including 17 of them in just 48 hours of combat. The young Marine was wounded twice in battle but returned home to rebuild his life and to cope with the things he had seen, things he had done and friends he had lost. But, by the time he was discharged from the Marines in late 2005, he was deeply troubled with images of combat and violence that he could not get out of his mind. According to Minnesota press reports, Schulze went to the Veterans Administration (VA) center in Minneapolis on December 14, 2006, met with a psychiatrist and was told that he could only be admitted for treatment four months later, in March. On January 11, 2007, accompanied by his parents, he went to the VA hospital in St. Cloud, Minnesota and told people at that VA facility that he was thinking of killing himself. They told Schulze that they could not admit him as a patient and sent him on his way. The next day, January 12, Schulze called the VA, reiterating that he was feeling suicidal. He was told that he was number 26 on the waiting list. A man who had risked his life in Iraq and done everything that was asked of him by the United States government, was told by that same government that his sacrifice would be repaid by being 26th on a list of Veterans similarly crying out for help. "Jonathan wanted help so bad," said Marianne Schulze, Jonathan's stepmother. "At the end of the conversation, Jonathan got off the phone so distressed." On January 16, Schulze called his family and told them that he was going to do it -- he was going to kill himself. His family called the local police, who raced to his house, kicked in his door and found him hanging from an electrical cord. Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful. Having read about Schulze while on a trip to Minnesota, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) brought the story to the floor of the Senate and read it into the record on Monday. "The story is nearly unbelievable to me," said Dorgan in a speech on the Senate floor. "The newspaper description of the flag-draped coffin of this young marine who earned two Purple Hearts fighting for his country in Iraq contains a sad, sad story of a young marine who should have gotten medical help for serious psychological problems that were the result of his wartime experience." The Marine's family says that he couldn't sleep, would have nightmares reliving the combat he had experienced and suffered from vivid flashbacks when awake. "He was a delayed casualty of the Iraq war," his father, Jim Schulze, a Vietnam Veteran, said of Jonathan. Jonathan Schulze, who leaves behind his fiance, a 6-month-old daughter and who had another baby on the way, was a machine gunner who wrote often to his parents about what he was experiencing in Iraq, the firefights, the bombings and dismembered bodies blown apart by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). "I pray so much over here and ask God to keep me out of harm's way and to make it back home alive and in one piece," he wrote to his parents in 2004. "I bet I easily pray over a dozen times a day and I always pray while I am on patrol as I am terrified of getting hit by an IED aka a bomb. Our vehicle elements and Marines on patrols are getting hit hard by these bombs the Iraqis plant all over and hide on the ground." He survived all of that only to come home and find neglect, the results of an administration big on tax cuts for the wealthy, but not real strong on taking care of Veterans returning home from the war created by the George W. Bush and, until this month, left unchecked by the do-nothing Republican Congress. As is often the case when things like this happen, the VA is citing privacy laws and won't talk about the Schulze family's account of what happened to Jonathan or issue any comment at all. But Senator Dorgan says he's going to press for answers. "I am going to ask the inspector general to investigate what happened in this case," said Dorgan on the Senate floor. "What happened that a young man who was a marine veteran with two Purple Hearts turns up at a VA center and says: I am thinking of committing suicide, can you help me, can you admit me, and he is told: No, the list is 26 long in front of you?" "Are there others who show up at a VA center and say: I need help, only to be told no help is available? I hope that is not the case. It is the unbelievable cost of war." You can read more from Bob at BobGeiger.com. [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed] 8:59:54 AM    comment []

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