Tea bags and broomsticks

So it wasn't the trip to the altar she was expecting, nor the kind of sacrifice she wanted to make for love. I guess leaving blood on a Satanic altar is one way to lose your virginity. No wonder why the woman thinks lust is evil. To her, a penis is the same as a pitchfork.

But before we dismiss the crack-tea-pottery of Christine O'Donnell, let's keep in mind that the more a mama grizzly is cornered, the harder she scratches, especially when her cubbette is in trouble. She may be hiding behind Palin's skirts, but like Yosemite tourists behaving badly, the tea baggers will just keep leaving more food for the bears. The more resources they consume, the stronger they get; the harder they fight.

What killed Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware's Republican primary last week was low voter turnout. The caution expressed in this column after O'Donnell's den-mate, Rand Paul, won in Kentucky still holds true. We cannot say these people are unelectable, because they managed to get elected. So the only way we can get these folks out of politics is to vote them out, defensively. They may be clawing out only a small, conservative corner of the electorate, but they are noisy and get all the attention. Only the rational sanity of the majority of Americans showing up to vote can upstage the Tea Party spectacle.

So when Bill Maher reveals he has intercepted O'Donnell's owl-borne invitation to Hogwarts, we can laugh, but make sure you're guffawing all the way to the voting booth, that you're tittering as you present your voter ID, that you're snickering when you see Diebold across the voting screen, then just let your belly explode with laughter when you vote against these people. That way, when it's morning in America, it won't look as dark as the long, Alaskan winter night.

-PBG

We Stood Up!

Now it's time to march!

When I started this blog in 2005, one of the first comments I made was that we needed to stand up in order to get the one party government Republicans to stand down.

In 2006, when we actually started to make some gains, and became the majority party in Congress, it appeared we were on the right track. I was bitter, to be sure, about the South's unwillingness to catch up to the changes the rest of the country appeared to be going through.

Tonight, though the Electoral map shows that the last factor has not really shifted much, most of the rest of the country is heeding the call for change. Democrats, Independents, minorities, the young voters, the old, all stood up. Even the South has begun to shift, with Virginia, North Carolina and Florida choosing the man for the times rather than holding on to old time values.

We still have a long way to go, for it was (arguably) only the darkness of the last eight years that brought us to this new morning. But now that we have woken up, though some still slumber, we must take on our new challenges and not let up. Now that we are awake we must work. We must march. We must continue to fight and hold on to what we have gained. Stand up for what we believe in and work to make it so.

What can you do to help President-elect Barack Obama?

-PBG

Post Traumatic Bush Disorder

How John McCain was screwed twice by the 43rd President of the United States

The experts say that the condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) shows up three to seven years after a veteran's return from war. Five-and-a-half years since the beginning of the Iraq War, seven years since the abuses at Enron and the shock of September 11, could the stock market's crash last week and the country's humongous deficit be symptoms of a serious national psychiatric disorder, a dysfunction that happens to a country when its leaders choose to ignore the stress potential of our looming housing and credit crisis? In other words, my friends, our economy - and maybe our entire country - could be suffering from a collective case of PTSD.

We have already stopped listening to the words of calm the president and his minions offer up as as if it were a narcotic salve for our economy's ills. Wall Street itself has begged the administration to just shut the heck up. As the NY Daily News put it in an October 10 report:

"Just as he did on Monday and Tuesday - and three other times last week -Bush told the country he was on top of the growing crisis. Each time,the market tanked."

If the trauma inflicted by George W. Bush has had this kind of effect on us, pity poor John McCain. Bush's shortcut to the White House in 2000 ran right over him, before body checking Al Gore, and systematically dismantling the financial infrastructure of our country for the benefit of his cronies. Now the actions of the lame duck Bush administration have put their Haliburton supplied truck in reverse to run over him again. They must have something against him. I bet that's the way McCain feels.

What must it be like to be locked in a Viet Cong prison more than thirty years after you were physically released? This is an idea that came from one of my friends who does counseling: John McCain suffers from PTSD. Really, it would explain a lot about his legendary rages and his manipulability at the hands of his masters - I mean campaign staff.

Sarah Palin was just another emotional outburst for Johnny Mac. Now that the zealots her rhetoric has inflamed are talking about anger and violence, Senator McCain is doing a little anger management style calming, deflecting their rage as he has learned to deflect his own.

Back in May, 2008, when the McCain campaign released the candidate's medical records, it was only since 2000, and did not "speak directly to the [psychological] effects of his years as a prisoner of war," according to several articles published at the time.

But these accusations are not new to McCain. According to a May 2008 article on salon.com:

"During McCain's first White House run, his unsuccessful battle with George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1999 and 2000, he faced a whispering campaign from rivals that suggested his Vietnam ordeal had permanently damaged his psyche -- specifically, that his famed outbursts of temper might be a sign of something serious, like post-traumatic stress disorder."

While I do not subscribe to a "whispering campaign" tactic, especially one prosecuted by the likes of Karl Rove (whose 2000 "dirty tricks" may have actually contributed to McCain's current condition), there are questions that need to be answered.

It is hard to imagine what McCain's five-and-a-half years of deprivation, torture and broken bones in the Hanoi Hilton may have done to the senator's young mind. It is also hard to imagine that every time he tries to raise his damaged shoulders, he is not reminded of his time in captivity and his two suicide attempts.

The McCain campaign assured the Washington Post that their candidate "has never received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder," even though salon.com points out that "they failed to note that it would have been impossible for McCain to receive such a diagnosis -- since the term 'post-traumatic stress disorder' was not in use until seven years after McCain's release from captivity."

That is something left out of the Washington Post's pre-analysis of McCain's May release of medical records. They cite research from the Robert E. Mitchell Center for Prisoner of War Studies, which follows its mission, "to aid, comfort, and ease the repatriation of past and future prisoners of war by means of lessons learned from the evaluation of former prisoners of war." The Post story says that the Pensacola based the Navy research center found that Vietnam fliers were somehow different:

"The naval aviators who were imprisoned in Vietnam are in their 60s and 70s. Both now and in the years immediately after their release, they have seemed unusually resistant to psychological damage from the experience.

"The lifetime prevalence of PTSD in all the Pensacola POW studies [since World War II] is 24 percent. In the naval aviators, however, it was 4 percent from 1979 to 1983, when the disorder was most likely to appear."

They go on to say that the center has found an anomoly in officer POWs as a whole. "Research on World War II prisoners found that officers as a group had far less psychological trauma than enlisted men."

This exception may have been what Cindy McCain was referring to in a recent interview with Fox News reporter Marie Claire. In response to a question about her husband's POW related trauma, whether or not he had "night sweats," the senator's wife said, "The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing."

Other researchers, however, have found that while PTSD may not be prevalent, they were able to "identify something called 'late-onset stress symptomatology' or LOSS, which came to light after 562 combat veterans -- about 300 of them POWs -- answered a long questionnaire. The syndrome involves the return of troubling memories late in life, along with emotional anguish and guilt, often triggered by retirement and friends' deaths."

A 2007 study by Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, and National Center for PTSD at Boston University describes LOSS as:

"a phenomenon observed in aging combat veterans who (a) were exposed to highly stressful combat events in their early adult years, (b) have functioned successfully throughout midlife with no history of chronic stress-related disorders, but (c) begin to register increased combat-related thoughts, feelings, and reminiscences commensurate with the changes and challenges of aging."

So is John McCain suffering from PTSD? It is difficult to say, however it is entirely possible that he has shown, is showing or will show signs that he is suffering from LOSS as he ages and encounters "the challenges of aging." Perhaps his scrapes with the politics and policies of George W. Bush present the Republican nominee wityh just such a challenge.

One can only hope that when we are a lifetime away from this presidency, that we are further along in our recovery than the soldiers who have been traumatized by the wars they fought when they were young.

-PBG

Shadowy Perspectives in the Time of Politics

The Relative Importance of Past Elections

There is a sense now that this could be the most important presidential election ever for our country. You hear it from this side of the aisle all the time. It is an important time for change, so vote because this election will be the one that changes our path. This election will determine if we can turn a downward socio-economic spiral into a surge upward. This election will get us away from policies based on war and toward policies based on diplomacy. This election is about the future.

But truth hides in shadowy perspectives on the past. I mean, if we go ahead, say, eight years, would we look back on this election with the same kind of intense gravitas which we ascribe to it now? More? Less? Certainly I can point to three presidential elections in my lifetime that seem very important now, though they did not necessarily occur that way at the time.

1968

1968, in fact, was one that was just as important then as it is now. The country was deeply divided over age, over race, over rights and over another unwinnable war. There is no doubt that the intensity of that election and its subsequent result changed the way an entire generation approached politics and public service.

1980

I think that one election to which we were not tuned in all the way was, in hindsight, 1980, Reagan/Carter. Reagan was elected only because he represented a clear difference from our pal Jimmy, who had a very tough administration. Even with a Democratic majority, he kept hitting roadblocks. That and the events in Tehran were Carter's undoing. Reagan promised to bring us out of what Carter called our "national malaise."

I don't think anyone foresaw how wildly popular Reagan would become, that he could take the Marines on a little tap dance through Grenada and call it a war, or that he could get away with fighting the Communist backed Sandinista government in Nicaragua by sending weapons to the Contras in exchange for cocaine sold to Americans by the CIA, or that he would be able to send arms to Iran via Israel to get hostages back, or that he could sell arms directly to the Iranians and use some of the money to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.

So 1980 saw the election of someone who we all knew would be difficult for progressive values, but we had no idea he would stay so busy sticking our collective noses where they didn't belong.

2000

The last, most important election was 2000. As my wife says, we knew we didn't like him but we didn't expect that W was actually dangerous. Who really knows what would have happened had the will of the people prevailed? Would a Gore administration have paid closer attention to the warnings before 9/11? We almost certainly would not have invaded and occupied Iraq:

"It is impossible to succeed against terrorism unless we have secured the continuing, sustained cooperation of many nations. And here's one of my central points; our ability to secure that kind of multilateral cooperation in the war against terrorism can be severely damaged in the way we go about undertaking unilateral action against Iraq."-Al Gore, Commonwealth Club, Sept.23, 2002

We probably would not have raided Social Security. There would most likely be no federal deficit. Really, in this case, hindsight reared its head quickly, followed four years later by intense regret.

Now we find ourselves in another "most important election." Is it? Only time will tell.

-PBG

An Undigested Bit of Beef: Fear, Reality and Scrooge

" '...You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'


"Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones."

-Scrooge's reaction to the presence of Marley's Ghost
from "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, Plain Label Books, pp. 35-36.

Like Scrooge's unwelcome visitor, it comes as no surprise that George Bush's and Dick Cheney's chains are weighted with a 21st century version of old fashioned corporate greed, but they have added to Marley's burden of "cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds and heavy purses wrought in steel."

They also drag on the floor the shears that shredded our rights and our values, and their shoulders hunch from the weight of the coffins of the more than 6,000 American dead of September 11 and the Iraq War. Shattered lives dangle from the tattered cuffs of their muddy blue suits, which reek from the mildewed walls of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

Like Scrooge, we sit incredulously in fear, pouring out our wit through pen and punditry to try to cope with the chill rattling through our collective bones. Were that we could dismiss it as "an undigested bit of beef." But cuisine plays no cameo in America's misfortune these last seven years. Fear is now an institution in our country. The scary status quo from semi-transparent politicians is a warning not to make our institutional fear Constitutional.

Like Bob Cratchit, the faithful buy their turkeys and hams and plea with us to reform our waggish ways. They hold up their children, their future, and ask us to embrace it. "God bless us, everyone." It is important to them that we hold that ideal closely.

Last year's election was our "Bah, Humbug" to the Bob Cratchits of this country, but after a year it seems that the halls of Congress are haunted by ghosts who take our representatives into a nightmare scenario, leaving them terrified of lying beneath the lonely headstone of un-Americanism or worse: un-electability.

It seems so unreal, this nightmare of congressional capitulation. Thank God, there's still some sanity in Washington. You won't see Russ Feingold or Dennis Kucinich running out into the snow Christmas morning looking to appease the fearful. If not for the few who act fearlessly to extinguish the flames of unreasonable paranoia, we would be the goose Scrooge brings to Christmas dinner.

-PBG