South Of Heaven

How the GOP is eliminating rape

You thought that the big victories for the GOP would put them into gear cutting the deficit and ending all those illegals who are sapping the blood out of our country.

No, they are eliminating rape. By changing the definition.

Trafficking in outrage

 
I was trying to write a piece on Jared Loughner, but it’s difficult to make sense out of an insane man’s ramblings. My point was that having lots of talk from the right about using guns to resolve problems, even if they are only being metaphorical, is dangerous talk because not everyone can tell the difference. However, you can’t couch everything you say in order prevent the insane from misinterpreting you. Every few years some nut commits a horrible crime based on his interpretation of the Bible, and there are plenty of horrible crimes committed by sane people based on the Bible, for that matter.

 
The problem is that insanity is a relative thing. Byron Williams is sitting in a jail after a shootout with California state troopers. He was on his way to San Francisco to shoot lots of people at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU. His only real source of information about the Tides Foundation had to have been Glenn Beck. I’d never heard about the group. Beck, as is his manner, diagrammed how George Soros, today’s International Jew, was using the organization to destroy America.

 
Just for a moment, suppose Beck is absolutely correct and the Tides Foundation is working to destroy America. If you are really a patriot shouldn’t you want to do something about it?

Here is a video made by Loughner, strolling through the Pima Community College campus one night after he was kicked out and his parents had been told he wouldn’t be welcomed back until he’d passed a mental examination:

The guy sounds crazy, eh? He mentions mind control although he doesn’t go into detail about how the mind control works.

 
Let me introduce you to David Wynn Miller, a speaker on the rightwing circuit. One of his principle points is that government controls people by their control of language. It has something to do with adverbs. He also believes that adding hyphens and colons to your name makes you non-taxable in the eyes of the law. Thus, “:David-Wynn: Miller”. This theory hasn’t done well in court. According to Miller there is some connection to the Swiss postal service and the New World Order. He personally has claimed to be a judge and the King of Hawaii.

Miller also is associated with the sovereign citizen’s movement which has something to do with the Christian patriot movement and the Christian Identity movement and other fringe groups. These groups are anti-Semitic.

There is something about the right to print money, which I think brushes up against Ron Paul territory. That was another of Loughner’s obsessions, the illegality of US currency.

As far as I know, David Wynn Miller is not crazy. People come to listen to him speak at seminars. People believe him. People have gone to jail on tax fraud and other charges after trying to use his theories in court. Miller himself  believes that Loughner has visited his website because of some of the things that Loughner has said.

Here is an article that better connects the dots between the two.

(If you think that these theories about money are wacky, go here for an hour-long show about money. It answers questions like where the money went when your house lost half its value recently.)

While people are now sitting in jail for following his theories of tax law and how colons and hyphens makes one a non-taxable human, I don’t think he’s ever told anyone to shoot a Congressional representative.

 
But Sharron Angle, who failed to unseat Harry Reid last fall, said this:  "What is a little bit disconcerting and concerning is the inability for sporting goods stores to keep ammunition in stock ... That tells me the nation is arming. What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways?" Since the Second Amendment is the right to bear arms, what the hell is she talking about? And why shouldn’t that be interpreted as shooting for what you can’t get in an election?

 
Sarah Palin, whose motto is “Don’t retreat, reload”, and who had Giffords’ Congressional seat targeted with a gunsight on her website, was outraged that anyone would in any way blame her for any rhetoric that might have pushed Loughner into shooting Giffords. And now that we are know more about Loughner, it’s pretty clear that he’s schizophrenic and was not processing information clearly, whether or not he visited Palin’s website.

But we know that Byron Williams was inspired by Glenn Beck. Here Beck talks about how he wants to kill Michael Moore. And he hears a voice asking him what would Jesus do. Just a joke, right?

Before anyone sends any apologies to Palin, take a look at a news story about her outrage. “Blood libel” historically is the accusation that Jews kidnapped and killed Christian children because they used their blood in the making of matzos. In discussing this horrible incident where the first Jewish Congressional representative in Arizona is targeted for assassination and a nine year-old girl was murdered, you’d think that Palin would have steered away from the term.

But that’s not what Palin is doing. Palin traffics in outrage, and I wouldn’t be surprised that she, or her handlers or speechwriter, specifically chose that term for precisely that reason. Her supporters around the country are all outraged that the liberal media is picking on her again, or some twaddle. And it serves on another level. For the anti-Semites who follow her using the term to defend herself gives those folks a good chuckle.

 

Sodomy in Afghanistan

 
One of the byproducts of keeping your women under wraps and making heterosexual behavior damned near impossible, is that the urges eventually manage to work their way out in other forms. From Asia Times:

Social scientists attached to the Second Marine Battalion in Afghanistan last year circulated a startling report on Pashtun sociology, in the form of a human terrain report on male sexuality among America's Afghan allies. The document, made available by military sources, is not classified, just disturbing. Don't ask, don't tell doesn't begin to qualify the problem. These are things you didn't want to know, and regret having heard. The marines got their money's worth from their Human Terrain adjuncts, but the report might have considered whether male pedophilia in Afghanistan has a religious dimension as well as a cultural one. I will explain why below.

Most Pashtun men, Human Terrain Team AF-6 reports, engage in
sex with men - boys - in fact, the vast majority of their sexual contacts are with males. "A culturally-contrived homosexuality [significantly not termed as such by its practitioners] appears to affect a far greater population base then some researchers would argue is attributable to natural inclination. Some of its root causes lie in the severe segregation of women, the prohibitive cost of marriage within Pashtun tribal codes, and the depressed economic situation into which young Pashtun men are placed."

The human terrain team responded to scandalous interactions between Pashtun fighters and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops, some reported with hilarity by the media. An article in the Scotsman of May 24, 2002, reported, for example: "In Bagram, British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat – being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers. An Arbroath marine, James Fletcher, said: 'They were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village.' While the marines failed to find any al-Qaeda during the seven-day Operation Condor, they were propositioned by dozens of men in villages the troops were ordered to search."

Another interviewee in the article, a marine in his 20s, stated, "It was hell. Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing makeup coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises."

The trouble, the researchers surmise, is "Pashtun society's extremely limited access to women," citing a Los Angeles Times interview with a young Pashtun identified as Daud. He only has sex with men, explaining: "I like boys, but I like girls better. It's just that we can't see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful."

Many of the Pashtuns interviewed allow "that homosexuality is indeed prohibited within Islam, warranting great shame and condemnation. However, homosexuality is then narrowly and specifically defined as the love of another man. Loving a man would therefore be unacceptable and a major sin within this cultural interpretation of Islam, but using another man for sexual gratification would be regarded as a foible -undesirable but far preferable to sex with a ineligible woman, which in the context of Pashtun honor, would likely result in issues of revenge and honor killings."

How prevalent are homosexual relations among Pashtuns? The researchers note that "medics treated an outbreak of gonorrhea among the local national interpreters on their camp. Approximately 12 of the nearly 20 young male interpreters present in the camp had contracted the disease, and most had done so anally. This is a merely anecdotal observation and far too small of a sample size to make any generalizations regarding the actual prevalence of homosexual activity region-wide. However, given the difficulty in procuring such data, it may serve as some indicator."

Through Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel The Kite Runner, Western audiences caught a glimpse of what the military team calls "an openly celebrated cultural tradition. Kandahar's long artistic and poetic tradition idolizes the pre-pubescent ‘beardless boy’ as the icon of physical beauty. Further, even the newly re-emerging musical nightlife of southern Afghan cities idolizes pre-pubescent boy performers, whose star status lasts only as long as their voices remain immature."

"Kandahar's Pashtuns have been notorious for their homosexuality for centuries, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taliban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationship. It is called the homosexual capital of South Asia. Such is the Pashtun obsession with sodomy - locals tell you that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior - that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilizing the Taliban," the report adds.

Although the Taliban discouraged open display, it "should not be viewed as free of the culture and tradition of homosexuality of the Pashtun world of which it is a part" the authors add.

"Men who take on a halekon [young male lover] often attempt to integrate the boy into their families by marrying him to a daughter when the boy is no longer young enough to play the 'beardless' role. This maintains the love relationship between the father and son-in-law which inevitably makes difficult the establishment of a normal relationship with the wife," the human terrain Team explains.

The team's results are striking, but they place too much emphasis on the weirdness of Pashtun tradition and give too little attention to the broader role of homosexuality in Islamic (and especially Sufi) culture. What scholars now consider the Golden Age of Islamic love poetry, the Persian high middle ages, made homosexual pederasty the normative mode of love. While Petrarch wrote sonnets to Laura and Dante longed for Beatrice, their counterparts in the canon of Islamic poetry, Hafez and Rumi, wrote of their infatuation with young boys.

Afghanistan's own Sufi poet was the 17th-century bard Abdul Rahman Baba, of whom little is known except that he is said to have eloped with a young boy named Mujnoon. He is generally portrayed as a premature flower-child dedicated to peace and love; that must be what the Taliban thought as well, for they placed a bomb in his tomb in March 2009. According to the limited available criticism of Rahman's work, his Pashto poems are closely related to the Persian style of Rumi.

The prevalence of homosexual pedophilia in classical Islamic poetry, Persian as well as Pashto, suggests that the human terrain team may have missed an important dimension, namely the religious. In a study entitled Sufism, Sodomy and Satan published in this space August 12, 2008, I argued:

Sufi pedophilia cannot be dismissed as a remnant of the old tribal practices that Islam often incorporated, for example, female genital mutilation. Genital mutilation is a pre-Islamic practice unknown in the ancient and modern West. Even though some Muslim authorities defend it on the basis of Hadith, no one has ever claimed that it offered a path to enlightenment. Sadly, pedophiles are found almost everywhere. In its ascendancy, Sufism made a definitive spiritual experience out of a practice considered criminally aberrant in the West. But pederasty as a spiritual exercise is not essentially different in character from the furtive practices of Western perverts. As the psychiatrists explain, pederasty is an expression of narcissism, the love of an idealized youthful self-image.

All forms of contemplative mysticism involve the danger that the object of adoration into which one dissolves might turn out to be one's self. It sounds well and good to seek God in the all, that is, no place in particular. The trouble is that if one tries to dissolve one's self into the all, one's self becomes part of the all. The lover cannot distinguish himself from the all. The self and the all are the same, and one loves one's self. There is no other in Sufism, only your own ego staring back in the carnival mirror of mysticism. The adept does not worship a God who is wholly other - YHWH of the Hebrew Bible or Jesus of the Gospels - but a younger and prettier version of himself. In that respect, pedophilia in Afghanistan may have a distinctly religious motivation.

And you thought things were hard in your neck of the woods.

 

Do you know what you don't know?

There was some discussion yesterday over at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle's website) about the parents of the assassin Jared Loughner that pretty much went like How didn't they know their son was crazy?

This pointed me to an article an emailer sent me, here. The article starts out with the case of a bank robber whose short, very portly body shape made him very identifiable. When apprehended he was surprised that the video cameras in the banks captured his image. He believed that squirting lemon juice on yourself would blur your image on a video film. This belief had been confirmed prior to the robberies because he'd squirted lemon juice on himself and then looked at himself in a mirror and couldn't see himself.

You'll have to read to the article to find out why the scientific method didn't work for him, but that's not the main thing here. The overall topic is what you know you don't know versus what you don't know you don't know. I may not know the capitol of Vermont off the top of my head but I can look it up if I need to. I was reading about genetics and DNA in regards to human evolution and I realized I was in way over my head. But at least I know I don't know. I don't know what I don't know I don't know.

If you try to get into a conversation about comparative religion in, say, Afghanistan, you will generate anger and perhaps murderous rage because not only do people there not know, they are taught that not knowing is the way to know the truth. Not to pick on Afghanistan or Muslims. You'll find similar confidence in not knowing something across the globe among people of faith.

Over my life I've read lots about America's political assassinations. When someone talks ignorantly about a topic and I jump in to correct their misinformation I often get a response such as, I don't have time to waste on conspiracy theory. Now, I generally stay away from theory in these discussions unless I'm backing it up with lots of facts. And it's not so much any theory I'm advancing as fact as dimpling their theories.

But in these cases I am puncturing assumptions that others aren't willing to address. Much like religion. And let's face it, for most things we use mental shorthand. Over the course of a lifetime we have all sorts of things we presume we know because at some point someone in authority told us it or we somehow rationalized it. And a lot of that may be true. But not the lemon juice thing.

 

More wisdom from Limbaugh

In another explanation of inequality, Limbaugh gives his audience a reason to discriminate.

In a polemic almost worthy of Ayn Rand herself, radio host Rush Limbaugh explained Friday why equality is impossible and declared that "some people are just born to be slaves."

But that's fine, Limbaugh explained, because "everybody's needed for something."

"There is no equality," Limbaugh said on his radio show. "You cannot guarantee that any two people will end up the same. And you can't legislate it, and you can't make it happen. You can try, under the guise of fairness and so forth, but some people are self-starters, and some people are born lazy. Some people are born victims. Some people are just born to be slaves."

Limbaugh seemed to be echoing the "objectivist" philosopher Ayn Rand's belief that only a few gifted people are capable of moving society forward, while all others must depend on the efforts of the elite few for their well-being.

"Some people ... are born and they're not going to take anything from anybody," Limbaugh continued. "They're going to be totally in charge of their lives. They're not going to sit around and wait for something. They're going to make it happen. You can see this throughout the American population."

Limbaugh went on to postulate that the existence of "self-starters" and those "born to be slaves" was "probably a matter of intelligent design."

"The vast majority of people are not self-starters," Limbaugh continued. "And in a way, it all works out. Because everybody's needed for something."

In another field, it would be the explanation the grifter gives for fleecing people. It's the same logic used to promote a fuhrer.

The problem I have with his analysis is that slaves tend to work a lot harder than slaveowners, so it's not people who aren't "self-starters" who become slaves. Where slavery has existed, there are strong laws to keep slaves (and their offspring) slaves. No one walked into a kindergarten and said, "You, over there, you're a slave. And you, over there, you're a slaveowner."

In fact, one's position of power is much like how most people get rich. They inherit it. Limbaugh's exhalations are pretty much justification for a system of inequality from which he benefits. His audience, mostly whiter and a lot poorer, see rants like this as a reason for why they're superior to (fill in the blank). I may be poor, white and going nowhere, but at least I'm not a n*gger.

Thus, people work and vote against their own self-interests, over and over.

Lee Hamilton, coverup artist

A couple of decades back I called Democratic Representative Lee Hamilton a coverup artist. He was always on key committees where he'd discourage investigations into all things national security.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has become the latest voice of influence to sing the praises of former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who is almost universally hailed in U.S. power circles as a modern-day Wise Man, a Democratic centrist who shuns partisanship and puts love of country over politics.

But the sad truth is that Lee Hamilton has done great damage to the U.S. political process by elevating bipartisanship above a commitment to the truth. One reason why many Americans buy into baseless conspiracy theories today is that Hamilton failed to expose real conspiracies when he was in Congress.

For instance, it was surely "bipartisan" in August 1986 when Hamilton joined other members of the House Intelligence Committee, including Rep. Dick Cheney, in concluding that stories about White House aide Oliver North running money and guns to the Nicaraguan contras were false.

Hamilton, then the committee’s chairman, accepted denials from North and his boss, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, and agreed to kill a proposed congressional investigation into what was then known as “the North network.”

Since I and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger had been writing the stories about North’s secret operation (based then on about two dozen sources), I got a call from one of Hamilton’s aides and was told that Hamilton and the panel had the choice of “believing you and your 24 sources or these honorable men. And it wasn’t a close call.”

It was, however, an erroneous call. And it was not without consequences, both in the larger scheme of things and on the personal side.

At the AP that summer, Barger had been assigned to the overnight desk as a way to transition him onto the AP regular staff (he originally had been hired into a temporary position to work with me on the North project). However, in August, Barger was informed that his time on the overnight would be extended indefinitely, a development that prompted Barger to quit.

If Hamilton had done his duty – by insisting on a real investigation to get at the truth about North's network instead of caving in to Cheney and the other Republicans – our situation at AP would have been quite different. With a congressional investigation validating our reporting, I probably could have sprung Barger from his overnight assignment and kept our team together.

Instead, Hamilton’s out-of-hand rejection of an investigation amounted to a repudiation of our work – our critics quickly noted that even the Democrats deemed our reporting not worthy of pursuit – and AP management was left with an impression that we had taken the news agency out onto a dangerous limb.

In the bigger picture, Hamilton was demonstrating what would become his M.O., putting bipartisanship and collegiality ahead of truth and accountability.

For the next few months, the AP investigation of North, which also had lifted the curtain on the Reagan administration’s tolerance of contra drug trafficking, remained in limbo.

However, on Oct. 5, 1986, one of the last planned flights by North’s little contra-supply air force was shot down over Nicaragua. One American onboard, Eugene Hasenfus, survived and began talking.

Between Hasenfus’s account and documents that were recovered from the plane, it became clear that not only were our earlier articles about the North network true but that the secret contra supply operation was bigger and more sophisticated than we had understood.

Nevertheless, President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush and other officials continued to deny a U.S. government connection to the downed plane. Apparently, the White House remained confident that it could fend off the growing evidence. After all, it had successfully co-opted Hamilton and the intelligence committee in August.

But the scandal continued to grow. In early November 1986, a Beirut newspaper disclosed Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostages deals with Iran.

Reagan and his subordinates issued another round of hearty denials, but their bluster was finally not enough. By late November, the two disclosures – the contra supplies and the Iranian arms deliveries – became linked when evidence emerged that North had crossed the two operations by diverting profits from the Iran arms sales to fund the contra war.

The Iran-Contra scandal was born. Yet, despite Hamilton’s earlier failure to detect the secret North network, the House Democratic leadership still turned to him to lead the investigation.  Hamilton was made co-chairman of the joint congressional Iran-Contra probe, with Cheney assuming the role as the administration’s chief defender.

As the Iran-Contra investigation picked up speed in early 1987, I was offered a job at Newsweek, and – given all the strife that had surrounded our investigation at AP – I decided it was the right time to leave.

My first stories at Newsweek revealed that the Iran-Contra scandal reached much higher than had been known and that the White House had begun a frantic cover-up aimed at shielding Reagan from possible impeachment.

Amid this new investigative momentum, there also was an opportunity to examine possibly the darkest part of the Iran-Contra underbelly, the Reagan administration’s concealment of contra-connected cocaine traffickers – out of fear that Americans would recoil if they knew this ugly reality about Reagan’s “freedom-fighters.”

However, it soon became clear that Hamilton envisioned his role not as a determined pursuer of the truth but as a conciliator seeking a bipartisan solution that would bring the nasty scandal to a politically acceptable conclusion without damaging the capital’s fragile political comity.

In 1987, Hamilton undertook a series of decisions that altered the course of American history, at least as it is available to the public. Over the resistance of other Democrats on the Iran-Contra panel, Hamilton struck a generous deal with Cheney and the Republicans to grant North immunity in exchange for his testimony, without requiring pre-hearing questioning.

Hamilton also didn’t push very hard against the White House insistence that the scandal was just the work of a few overzealous underlings. Though Reagan was chastised for enabling violations of law, he mostly got a pass, as did Vice President Bush despite strong evidence that Bush’s office was overseeing the entire operation.

As the committee’s final report was being written, some Democratic investigators pressed for inclusion of their discovery of a covert domestic propaganda campaign that the White House had organized to intimidate journalists – and even members of Congress – who brought to light unflattering information about the contras.

The investigators prepared a draft chapter dedicated to this remarkable discovery, but three “moderate” Republican senators – William Cohen, Warren Rudman and Paul Trible – balked at signing the majority report if it included this explosive new information.

Eager for some GOP support – since Cheney and the other Republicans were preparing a minority report denying any Iran-Contra wrongdoing – Hamilton agreed to delete the chapter although allowing a few of its findings to be sprinkled into the executive summary.

Hamilton got his three Republican signatures, but the “compromise” meant almost no American would understand how the public had been manipulated by pro-contra propaganda.

As for the contra drug trafficking scandal, the Hamilton-led investigation chose to take testimony only behind closed doors and to exclude the topic from the final report. That “compromise” served to solidify Washington’s misguided conventional wisdom that the contra-cocaine issue was a “conspiracy theory.”

In 1996, nearly a decade later, investigative reporter Gary Webb revived the contra-drug scandal with a series for the San Jose Mercury News, describing how contra cocaine helped fuel the nation’s crack epidemic. But his reporting was widely ridiculed by the major U.S. news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which reflected Hamilton's earlier brushing aside of the contra-cocaine problem.

It would take until 2000 for the House Intelligence Committee – long after Hamilton had left the panel – to grudgingly acknowledge that the earlier stories about Reagan’s CIA protecting contra drug traffickers were true.

Read it all. Nice to see others catching up with me.

Ryan's wrong

Here.

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.

And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.

Rep. Ryan is selling the same crap that has blown up our deficits and reduced our living standards since Ronald Reagan first invoked the trickle-down theory of economy back in the eighties.

By the way, Ryan also wants to privatize Social Security (as George W. Bush wanted to do in 2005). Would you have liked to have your benefits dependent on Wall Street in 2008?

Start with the simple stuff

Bob Herbert has an op-ed in the New York Times about the decline in the college education of Americans. We're down to 12th on the list of 36 industrialized nations in the percentage of college grads. I'm guessing that we're doing worse regarding the sciences.

Herbert waxes on about people caring more about Lady Gaga than studying. Whatever. Let's make it simple. People are putting themselves impossibly in debt in order to get through college.

Back in the sixties, when I arrived at college age, most states had state colleges that just about everyone could afford, and community college systems that helped feed those state colleges for practically free. If you want to produce lots of college grads it's really easy: Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, don't go into Iran. Then take half that money and sink it into our educational system. The other half? Don't spend it.

Robert Scheer is almost right

It's the game within the game.

Robert Scheer almost has it right about the Clinton nostalgia surrounding Chelsea's wedding. Almost.

Out of respect for privacy, even concerning famous people, I wasn't going to write about the marriage of Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating from Stanford. Hopefully Marc Mezvinsky won't follow in the footsteps of his financier father, "Fast-Talkin' Eddie," as they called him back in Iowa, a former Democratic House member who just completed a five-year federal sentence for dozens of fraud felonies.

Anyway, Chelsea also worked at a hedge fund, her mother dabbled in banking shenanigans in her Whitewater days and father Bill's radical deregulation made it a lot easier for financial plunderers to stay on the right side of the law. So the Clintons and the Mezvinskys have a lot in common. I hope their children will do better, and I was going to simply wish them well until I read Tina Brown's paean to power, "Why America Needed Chelsea's Wedding," in the trend-chasing Daily Beast, which she edits.

It was then that I realized that the revival of the Clinton legacy was on in earnest. Brown, a prominent Brit import, is an expert on refurbishing tarnished royalty, as she demonstrated with her gushing tribute to the Clinton wedding as "a happy throwback to the carefree 1990s." So carefree that no one of importance, certainly not in the Clinton White House, took serious stock of the collapse of hedge funds like Long-Term Capital Management, a harbinger of disasters to come.

He didn't touch on any number of things that happened during the Clinton years such as the trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA and other pro-offshore legislation (backed by Republicans and "moderate" Dems), anti-gay legislation like the Defense Of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell, the increase in drug penalties which only worsened the failed drug war and a number of other things which hurt the average American while helping to make the rich get richer.

But this is what disturbed me:

This all reminds me of the pass given that last attempt at American royalty, when the legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy came to be whitewashed so that his reckless decisions to invade Cuba and Vietnam were not to be mentioned.

This is why it bothers me:

Robert Scheer was an activist reporter back in the 1960s during the Kennedy Administration. Reading that sentence a casual reader would presume that JFK alone decided to invade Cuba and Vietnam, and that all blame should be put at his feet.

In fact, the plans to invade Cuba were made by the CIA in the Eisenhower Administration. When Kennedy took office he was suspicious about the plans but went along. It was because the CIA misled the President that in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles and threatened to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces. The best evidence is that throughout JFK's Administration there was a battle between the President and the intelligence community and that the CIA did things in spite of JFK's disapproval. And that is why Allen Dulles ended up sitting on the Warren Commission and there was not one mention of the CIA in the Warren Report. A pretty good recent book about JFK's years as President would be Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot (which is very good until the chapter where he relies on intelligence asset Walter Sheridan to discuss the Jim Garrison investigation).

The example of Vietnam is even worse. America was involved in Vietnam since WWII, first to prop up the French colonial regime, then moving in after the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in the early fifties and helping to divide the country into North and South Vietnam. When Kennedy took office in 1961 America had been involved in Vietnam for two decades. Again, Kennedy inherited the Vietnam mess from the Eisenhower Administration and like his dissatisfaction with the CIA he was dissatisfied with the military's ability to wage a winnable war there. In the weeks before his assassination Kennedy wrote a secret National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM 263) calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam at a thousand a month. At that point there was between ten and twenty thousand American troops in Vietnam (although many were "temporarily dutied" there and would show up as being elsewhere, perhaps on military bases in the U.S. and were thus hidden on paper). Just days after JFK was assassinated NSAM 273 was released, authorizing increases in troop strength in Vietnam if a Gulf of Tonkin-type event occurred. How convenient that soon thereafter the Gulf of Tonkin event did occur and soon the several thousand Americans under Kennedy became over a half-million Americans under LBJ.

We also know that in the early 1970s CIA agent E. Howard Hunt confessed to forging cables that strongly suggested that the assassination of Diem, the puppet leader of South Vietnam, was done at Kennedy's orders. In other words, the intelligence community was actively smearing JFK after his death. Why were they trying to kill him again?

I haven't seen JFK given a pass on these two events. I've seen him falsely charged with masterminding them, and I've seen these charges repeated over and over by people who now should know better.

In short, Scheer is repeating the CIA story, that these events that Kennedy either was misled into allowing or which he opposed, actually sprang out of Kennedy's evil mind.

In the sixties Scheer worked at Ramparts Magazine, a truly radical magazine at the time which did some amazing reporting. If you had reached adulthood in the sixties and were part of the anti-war movement the one thing you knew was that in every meeting of every peace group there were going to be informers. Declassified information showed that police intelligence agents (the old "red squads"), the FBI, the CIA and even the many different military intelligence groups all had people infiltrating the peace movement.

That's why I've always been suspicious of William Ayer, who'd been part of the Weather Underground. It was usually an agent provocateur who would be the one suggesting violent actions. It was a strategy sure to discredit true peace movement people. And yet Ayer managed to escape going to jail. And then years later he was able to pop up during the 2008 Presidential election to besmirch Obama by the most tenuous of connections. (I am not defending the Obama Administration's most depressing similarities to Dubya's, just saying that the Ayer card suggests a classic "jacketing" propaganda technique.)

Ramparts had a number of interesting people working for it. The neo-conservative David Horowitz, then allegedly a radical leftist, edited the magazine and was also involved with the Students for a Democratic Society, the radical student group most heavily infiltrated by government agents. Was Horowitz a radical who switched to being a radical conservative later in life or was he a government agent who eventually got to play another role?

Robert Scheer is still the radical. And his criticisms of Clinton are good, as far as they go. I suspect that Bill Clinton, who when a student at Oxford went behind the Iron Curtain during his "anti-war" days, may have actually been taking notes for others (remember that Gloria Steinem admitted in a NY Times article that she ran a propaganda shop for the CIA at an early sixties international youth festival). A closer look at Bill Clinton's radical days, or Hillary's summer working for the law firm in Oakland, California that represented the Black Panthers, might reveal a pattern of people being in places where they could collect information that would aid government intelligence interests. Hillary went on to work for the Democratic committee for Watergate. Considering how many people with intelligence backgrounds were insinuated throughout that scandal would it be a surprise if they had informants on the committee staffs? And when CIA pilots who flew weapons to the contras in Central America came back and dumped sacks of cocaine in Mena, Arkansas, guess who was the governor. (Asa Hutchinson, the Republican federal prosecutor in that corner of Arkansas who failed to prosecute that smuggling operation, later ended up as the head of the DEA in the second Bush's administration.)

But perhaps repeating old canards generated by the CIA is more telling. Scheer should know better. And maybe he does.

How it works

I wrote a song, "Skeleton Crew", about how big business can screw the little guy. It goes, "A company can do things a good man would never do, like change its name and move..."

Seems that British Petroleum is considering a name change.

John Kleine, executive director of the BP Amoco Marketers Association, which represents the US distributors, told The Sunday Telegraph that the subject is raised in the course of nearly every conversation he has with members.

"They are interested in where the brand is going, and want it to be returned to its premier place," said Mr Kleine.

But he admits that many question whether a return to the Amoco brand – which BP abandoned at the forecourt shortly after merging with the US oil giant in 1998 – might encourage customers to return.

"Those fires have been fuelled in the last week by a former Amoco executive [Bob Dudley] being named to assume the role of chief executive," Mr Kleine said.

He also pointed out that although Amoco's trademark blue and red torch had been largely switched for BP's yellow-and-green sunflower logo, the Amoco name lives on as BP continues to use it for its premium fuels business.

Although it remains unclear whether there is enough groundswell of consensus for BP to change its brand in the US, Mr Kleine believes that the issue will be brought up at the distributor's annual meeting with the oil giant's senior management team in October.

Hmm. Amoco. I used to pump up my bike tires at an Amoco station. And buy bottles of Yoohoo in their soda machine... So comforting...