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This is getting ridiculous

Political Bankruptcy

Recently I had an opportunity to see Michael Moore’s latest titled Sicko. Sicko is a devastating indictment of the US healthcare system. In a work that evokes the great muckrakers of the past Moore tackles a deep and complex subject in a coarse, and at times, vulgar way. That shouldn’t be taken as an indictment of the film or the message. Moore is quite effective at driving his point home, devastatingly so at times.

I am not a big fan of Moore’s work but Sicko is a profound moving movie with an effectively delivered and important message. American healthcare needs to be reformed and it needs to be reformed sooner rather than later. Hopefully our politicians will wake up and do something and if they don’t Sicko may wake up enough people to prompt some action. I highly recommend Sicko and I hope Moore stays out of politics.

“Buying the War” was finally broadcast last night and it may well be called Moyers’ finest work ever. In “Buying the War” Moyers presents a sobering inside look at how nearly the entire journalist profession shirked its most basic tenets and became complicit in pushing the US into a war based almost entirely on lies.

These are strong words coming from me, if you peruse some of my posts from that time you will find that in general I was quite hawkish. (As an aside, how do I feel now? I was lied to, I was manipulated, I was used, so was my country, and our soldiers. The war should have never occurred and the administration did everything in its power to fool its own citizens. I am deeply pissed off and ashamed I didn’t question the party line more. I showed my wrath last election and will show it the next one as well.)

In any case, Bill Moyers “Buying the War” is a stunning first show for the new Bill Moyers Journal series on PBS. Its programs like this that make me glad I have a tv. You can watch is online as well over at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html.

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Barack Obama announces his "Presidential Exploratory Comittee" , the latest euphemism for he is running for President. I wish him well, I suspect we are in for a very bruising presidential election. 

Barack is an incredible guy, he is quite likeable and may give all comers a real run for their money. His life has been a classic immigrant's tale of overcoming. Born to a white mother and a black immigrant father from Kenya, he epitomizes what is best in America. His embrace of the African-American experience will garner him support from the African American community (although there appears to be murmurs that the traditional African American leaders like Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson may not approve) and his championing of traditional American values will win him many white supporters (not to mention more than a few Republican defectors sick of the cesspool the party has become). Hopefully he will be able to live up to the ideals he frequently talks about, he has a real chance at changing the face of Washington.

Obama's oft mentioned weaknesses, his inexperience and youth, may also turn into his greatest strengths and allow him to differentiate himself from the typical calcified Washington political hack. If he is elected (or even if he wins the primary) it could signal the handover of power to a new generation, similar to Clinton's win in 1992. How different? Anyone's guess at this point, although honesty will hopefully play a big part (in a brilliant move Obama has publicly admitted to using cocaine in his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind", how is that for honesty). Another similarity with Clinton is that they both have the ability to mesmerize an audience, Obama's keynote at the 2004 Democratic Convention was a superb example of that. It is absolutely critical that Obama use the momentum he now has to educate the people as to his plans for America, in particular Iraq & the war on terror, and resist knee-jerk responses.

John Edwards has announced and now Obama has made the presidential race just a little more crowded. Lets hope they stick to the high road.

A bruising election anyway you look at it. Viriginia and Montana went down to the very end. Hopefully we aren't going to have 2 years of deadlock at this point.

Why do we constantly hear that our public officials are out of touch? Good question, US Senator from Alaska Ted Stevens (R) gave a brilliant overview of the internet. Wired has a great piece here and the audio can be found here.

These are our goverment officials who are supposed to foster innovation and help the US be a world leader in technology. Sorry, I'm too busy laughing, tubes… 

Fascinating reading over at: http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_2607.shtml

A fascinating little piece by Victor David Hanson, classicist and author of such works as Ripples of the Battle and A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, over at the National Review. Hanson’s basic thesis is that Iran and Iran’s president (& indeed many in the third world) fundamentally miscalculate the ability of the west (& the US in particular) to rise and meet the challenge posed by those who dare to cross the line. Hanson writes:

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

I simply love that paragraph. Read it again and digest what it says. Look at history, during the last century far too many barbaric brutal dictators made the same mistake and miscalculated the ability of the west to meet the challenge. For all our problems I don’t believe the west has anything to fear, we are inevitably sliding into a world where many more billions are going to be tormented by trying to decide which iPod to buy. And if you ask me that is far better than any alternative offered by any petty third world dictator.

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This is amazing, China just doesn't miss a beat.