Month: February 2015

On one hand, there are “lone wolf” jihadists living here and there throughout the world, including the US. On the other hand, untold millions of guns of all kinds are freely available to anyone with the money to buy them. Now you cannot necessarily tell a jihadist or a mental case, for that matter, just by looking at them, but you can easily spot an AK-47, and as long as we live with these two conditions, we are going to experience tragedies right here at home. We cannot eliminate the jihadists or the mental cases, but we could outlaw the murder weapons if only we had the will to do so.

That guy who draws the “Mallard Fillmore” cartoon strip, Bruce Tinsley, seems determined to paint Pres. Obama as anti-Christian. He repeated that insinuation on February 25. By now, the “Hate Obama” campaign should be winding down, shouldn’t it? And why would any respectable newspaper, such as the Mercury News publish such defamatory and blatantly political trash?

According to a Republican member of Congress (on cable TV Thursday morning February 24, 2015), the reason there has been no progress on the immigration issue is because Pres. Obama has refused to invite Congress over to the White House for a discussion. Really?

It is really hard to find the words to respond to Bruce Tinsley’s “Mallard Fillmore” cartoon of February 24, 2015. In it, he has Pres. Obama comparing Christians to jihadist atrocities. Granted, the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition were horrible chapters in Christian history, but come on, isn’t this the 21st century? How low are people like Tinsley, and Lisa, too, for that matter, willing to sink?

As Stephen Kessler writes (February 22, 2015) “Cops are human and flawed like everyone else and so they sometimes make fatal mistakes.” That raises the question: does law enforcement as a career attract people with built-in prejudices and tendencies toward the need to control certain segments of society, indeed to regard some people as the enemy? This attitude could very well underlie the widespread gulf between police and community in too many parts of the country, and that, in turn, would suggest that the most important part of any police chief’s job is to identify those individuals on the force who harbor the “them against us” attitude and help them find another line of work.

No one would dare admit it at the time, it was simply too unpatriotic. Anyone who did make the comparison, publicly, would have been ridden out of town on a rail, so to speak. But things are so messed up now, and the whole Iraq invasion and occupation is now recognized to have been such a monumental blunder that it can be told for exactly what it was: a foreign army invading and occupying a sovereign nation after first destroying that nation’s infrastructure and leaving it unable to continue functioning as a nation. Unfortunately, while destroying their country, we left their army virtually intact. Although disbanded and unemployed they were fully armed with left over munitions that we failed to secure. In World War II, if the Maquis in France or partisans in the Balkans had access to such resources as we left laying around for the Iraqis, how many more Nazis could they have eliminated? In any case, our occupation of Iraq from the standpoint of the native people we had conquered is little different from Hitler’s occupation of Europe.

Hillary has two things going for her: her name and her gender. The Clinton name has dominated Democratic politics for quite a while, and the country might be ready for a woman president, plus there seems to be a widespread feeling that “her time has come,” Is that it? Is that all there is to American presidential politics? Certain people get in line and, when your turn comes up, you play at being president of the United States, the single most important person in the world? Or is there something else? Are there economic and political conditions developed during the past 30 or 40 years which have crashed both the economy here at home, and the reputation of America abroad, that must be approached in a vastly different manner than anything we have tried since FDR? We know how Republicans wield power when they have it (Lord save us!). But all we really know about Hillary’s leadership is the way she tried to produce a health plan when she was First Lady, and it was not a particularly memorable experience. It would be a lot different and we could be a lot more optimistic if Hillary were saying the same kind of things that Elizabeth Warren is saying. But she is not.

Whether he intended to or not, Bruce Tinsley, in his February 11 “Mallard Fillmore” comic strip disclosed the Republican strategy for fending off criticism of their obstructionism during the Obama administration. The strategy is simple: exaggerate! Thus, when anyone points out how much better off we would be were it not for the party of NO, simply blame Obama for promising too much, as Tinsley says: “Lear jets and private islands”. Of course, it really is no exaggeration to point out how much better off the contrary would be if, indeed, Congress had passed the things Obama wanted: a second stimulus, a good agriculture bill, a transportation bill, energy infrastructure, equal pay, etc. Any one of these would have generated more economic activity, more money circulating, and general prosperity. Obama simply showed us the way. He never promised we’d get there without Congress. Congress having done no governing at all since 2008 is fulfilling its promise to destroy the Obama presidency.

The merciless dunking of Brian Williams has been nothing short of excessive. Inflation of military exploits is common in the telling of war stories. They are told after the fact and “sweetened” with each telling. (Just ask my kids). But in Williams’ case, he has already lost that one thing more valuable to a person in his position than any six months of salary, and that is his credibility. For this reason, a multimillion dollar penalty looks more like spiteful piling on than anything else.

Those of us who have a different view of religion than David Brooks has should be grateful to him for telling us how to lead our lives without “faith”. His commentary of February 5, 2015, established his unquestioned authority in all things religious. But on another subject and in contrast to Brooks’ bloviations, it was enlightening to read its Stephen Zunes’ comments on Israel (Feb. 7, 2015) as someone who does, indeed, know what he is talking about. We get very little information about the Israeli-Palestinian situation in today’s media that is not heavily slanted in favor of Israel. So, when anyone describes the situation “on the ground” as it really is in Gaza or the West Bank, they are immediately branded as anti-semitic. People who support the Zionist cause, as I do, should be grateful for the enlightening value of learning both sides of this struggle, and should encourage more dialogue with the likes of Stephen Zunes and Angela Davis. America is doing the right thing by its total support of the nation of Israel surrounded as it is by hostile Arab nations and subjected to continuing attacks by terrorists who know nothing other than violence. Even as we support Israel in its struggle to form a nation, we can also try to learn as much as possible about the other side.