Hang-time Michael Jordan does't envy

It does my heart good to be able to continue the Dead Despot of the Week honors for another week. This week’s honoree is really a no-brainer: Saddam.

It would be easy to post a litany of his crimes and horrors, but I think that there is an important other side to the death of this tyrant that needs discussion. That other side is our complicity in the crimes of despots, especially during the Cold War.

Jesse Jackson had a great quote to that effect: "It will not increase our moral authority in the world. ... Saddam's heinous crimes against humanity can never be diminished, but he was our ally while he was doing it. ... Saddam as a war trophy only deepens the catastrophe to which we are indelibly linked."

During the Cold War we backed an awful lot of despots. Our national strategy was that the most important conflict in the world was ours against the Soviets. As a result, we did not care much who we supported as long as they were going to counter the Ruskies in our geopolitical chess game. This approach to foreign policy left us entirely tone deaf to what was actually happening in the Arab world.

Saddam was ok as long as he was fighting the Iranians for us. He used chemical weapons against the Iranians during that war with our complicity. We provided him with the satellite images necessary to make best use of his weapons. When he turned them against his own people in the north we were peeved, but we could forgive him. His crimes against his own people only became a problem when he would not play our.

The case of Saddam illustrates the broader problem the U.S. is going to have as long as our foreign policy is completely self-centered. We will continue to back the enemy of our enemy, no matter what kind of monster that is. In the end, this can cause terrible long term problems, just look at Iraq.

As I reflect on the execution of Saddam, I keep thinking about the famous clip from the 70’s of Donald “Duck and cover” Rumsfeld shaking his hand. Much of the chaos that is happening in Iraq now is the result of Saddam’s brutality for 30 years. We propped him up during that time, and sadly we are now reaping what we helped to sow.

That being said, I don’t shed a tear for him. He richly deserves to be this weeks honoree.

Banana Phone

Warning: do not click on this link. It is a silly and funny musical number called "Banana Phone." It will make you laugh, but will be stuck in your brain, possibly forever. The Surgeon General says it may, in fact, cause cancer.

http://www.allmedia.com.au/bananana/

I love it, but it is dangerous. You have been warned

A nation’s flags trip and fall to half-mast

America's first accidental president has passed on, 93 years young at the time. This is the last thing in the world Chevy Chase needed to hear.

Though Ford will always be remembered for his pardon of Richard Nixon, he does not qualify for Dead Despot of the Week honors. I feel conflicted about this defining moment in the Ford administration. Watergate was such a taint on the nation that something dramatic was certainly necessary to return dignity and confidence to the presidency.

However, pardoning Tricky Dick had precisely the opposite effect on many Americans. The sense that Nixon got away with it all has always been a burr under my saddle. The fact that he never actually had to face the music has left me and many others feeling cheated. Even when Nixon resigned he was defiant. "I am not a crook." A conviction would have knocked the smugness out of him, even if a pardon saved him from jail.

Ford once joked that he knew he was going to hell over the pardon.

On the other hand, I believe Ford’s assertion that there was no trade-off made. There was no deal. I have also read recently that even Ted Kennedy believes, in retrospect, that the pardon was the right thing to do.

Perhaps this is a case where there was no perfect answer, and an honest man took the least objectionable course as he saw it.

But beyond the personal sadness his family feels now, there is additional tragedy in the passing of the 37th and a half president. The death of Gerald Ford has left Chevy Chase with even less to be funny about (unless he is a pallbearer at the funeral and does some of those hilarious pratfalls).

In addition, there is another victim here: Squeaky Froam.

Squeaky missed her one chance to be a famous presidential assassin, and will never get another shot at it. She won’t be a famous John Wilks Boothe or Lee Harvey Oswald, at best she will be a John Hinkley or one of the nuts who tried to bump off Clinton. She will go down in history, like so many others out there (myself included), for not killing Gerald Ford.

In the end, The Bard said it best: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them. For Gerald Ford it was none of these. However, when he took office, the country was boiling over and ready to pop. For all his perceived mediocrity, Ford managed to stem a lot of the bleeding. That won’t get him a lot of long lasting accolades, but perhaps he is owed some overdue respect.

No Longer Living in America

This week we have a very special “Dead Despot of the Week:” James Brown.

Now, stay with me on this one. As the Godfather of Soul, James Brown was a towering figure in the music business. In fact, he was known as the “Hardest Working Man in Show-Business.”

Now, I am not a scholar of the Mafia, but I do know that typically Godfathers have to commit a lot of murders on their way up. Just look at the movie.

When you figure in the “hardest working” reputation that he cultivated, and I have a feeling that the late Mr. Brown was a brutal figure that ruled the music scene with an iron fist. The fact that nobody will testify about it even after his death is a testament to the brutality of his reign.

Here is all the proof you need: Ray Parker Junior.

After the Ghostbusters’ theme song was a big hit, what did you hear from Mr. Jr.?
Nothing.

(For more information on, see this site: http://www.rayparkerjr.com/http://www.rayparkerjr.com/

For goodness sake they went to Bobby Brown for Ghostbusters II. Not only was this a demotion for Mr. Junior, it was installing another Brown into the franchise. Typical mob tactics: Nepotism and a possible savage beating.

And that is why the late James Brown is Swam Wisdom’s “Dead Despot of the Week.”

Dead Despot of the Week

Congratulations to Saparmyrat Niyazov, you are the "Swamp Wisdom's Dead Despot of the Week." As the first official winner, you are the the yardstick by which all other X-presidents for life will be judged. This award was inspired by the lifeless corpse of Augusto Pinochet. So Saparmyrat Niyazov, you deceased douchebag, this is your life. Enjoy the award in hell. Lets hope we can award this every week.

"The death by heart failure of Saparmyrat Niyazov, after more than 20 years in power, was announced on 21 December 2006. The late leader styled himself Turkmenbashi, or Father of the Turkmen. A cult of personality is everywhere in evidence. Turkmens are expected to take spiritual guidance from his book, Ruhnama, a collection of thoughts on Turkmen culture and history.
Born in 1940, he became Turkmen Communist Party chief in 1985. In 1991 he was elected the first president of independent Turkmenistan, and in 1999 the Mejlis - the supreme legislative body - made him president-for-life.
The president sought to influence even mundane aspects of people's lives. When he quit smoking after major heart surgery in 1997, he ordered all his ministers to do likewise and banned smoking in public places. He later declared a ban on young men wearing beards and long hair. He also banned opera and ballet and the playing of recorded music on television and at public events and weddings.
Mr Niyazov was intolerant of criticism and in effect there was no domestic opposition under his rule. "

Goode o'l boy

Thank goodness for Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) has taken a firm stand against the decline of America, personified by an honest to goodness Muslim being elected to Congress.

God help us.

Goode wrote a letter to his constituents, warning that the nation needs immigration reform quickly or there will be more Congressmen taking the oath of office on the Koran and more Muslims in the country.

Not only did he say this, he defended the comments and stood by them when asked about them.

This is such low hanging fruit for someone like me that I am almost giddy to take a swipe at him. So, here goes:

I wonder if Rep. Goode will be nominating Millard Fillmore for president this year, as he is clearly joining the “know nothing party.”

I wonder if Trent Lott is pissed the guy isn’t from Mississippi?

Hmmm, reform immigration before we have more Muslims? I say legalize euthanasia before we have more stupid old crackers like him.

Hey, if his career in Congress ends, he can always go to Denmark and be a cartoonist.

Hey, if that falls through he can join the Pope’s writing staff.

If he needs a new writer himself, I bet Judith Regan is free these days.

Anyway, that’s about as much Christmas spirit as I can muster. Happy Holidays (unless one of those holidays is heathen, in which case, enjoy your damnation).

The only man who will be Chile in Hell

I am sure I speak for all of my loyal readers when I say: I am gonna miss Augusto Pinochet.

He was proof that the old axiom “only the good die young” works in reverse too. That bag of snake venom and gravel lived to 91. Just for comparison, here are some comparisons:

Strom Thurmond: 101
Abe Lincoln: 56
Richard Nixon: 81
Frank Sinatra: 83
Dean Martin only 78.

See a pattern here? I think it is pretty iron clad.

It is amazing that there is actually any controversy at all about his reign. Under his dictatorial leadership there was steady economic growth, but the cost was in human rights. In the name of fighting communist terrorists, thousands were killed. There were also thousands tortured or simply disappeared.

What amazed me more than anything was a quote from Maggie “the iron lady” Thatcher, who remarked that Pinochet had “saved Chile for democracy.”

This is the same sort of Orwellian logic that has allowed the abridgement of habeas corpus, the use of secret prisons, the use of unwarranted telephone tapping and the like.

Our leaders have never done anything as terrible as Pinochet, but the iron clad rule holds. You can not destroy democracy to save democracy. If the values of democracy are sacrificed, then democracy is hollow. My hats off to the people of Chile for building a democracy in their country, but that has been in spite of Gen. Pinochet.

On the bright side, I’m sure he’s up in heaven with all the other heroes of the 20th century like Idi Amin, Ty Cobb and Joseph McCarthy.

Who’s living in a police state?

We are.
Actually, we aren’t, it is much closer to us living in a “prison state.”
I just ran across a fascinating story, which states quite clearly that the U.S. has the world’s largest population of people behind bars, on parole or on probation.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061209/ts_nm/usa_prisoners_dc
We are also the leader in terms of per-capita prisoner population, so there is no wriggling out of it. We are ahead of nations like China and Russia, despite being smaller than them. In fact, we are almost ahead of them combined, according to the study. We are also ahead of nations like Syria and Iran as a proportion of our population. We incarcerate more drug offenders than Western Europe incarcerates for everything… combined.
This should be a major wake-up call.
We need to figure out why we have so many criminals, and we need to figure out why “being tough on crime” is not actually making us safer.
In my opinion part of the answer is clear. We have to do a better job of providing opportunity and social services to those at the lowest socio-economic level so that there are better choices than crime to make a living. Furthermore, the children of these lower class households need to be cared for in quality schools and daycares so that their parents can work, and so that they grow up feeling like they are part of the greater community of productive citizens.
Perhaps even more importantly, we need to look at our “War on Drugs” and ask the same questions the Iraq study group asked.
Are we winning? If not, how do we win? Finally, if we can’t “win”, how can we improve the situation
The answer I come up with is that we are not winning the war on drugs. Furthermore, just like the war in Iraq, civilian populations are being destroyed in our attempt.
It would be disastrous to simply legalize everything tomorrow, and open the prison doors. However, limited legalization and amnesty needs to be looked at honestly.
I don’t feel we can sustain a free society if we continue to lead the world in people who are not free. The first step is taking our heads out of the sand.

Sharpton '08

Hurricane Katrina was a slap in the face.

We all looked at the vast sea of African Americans stranded and flooded out, and said: “Oh my, maybe there are still race issues in America.” But the shock wore off, and despite recent news about the Bush administration cutting the proposed budget for levee rebuilding by more than 60%.

Then Michael Richards has a melt down on stage, and we all are reminded that “oh yeah, we never did deal with this, did we?”

The issue of race is a very tough one. People who bring it up are often attacked on one side as bigots, or on the other side as whiners. As a result, the media and white America are hesitant to really engage the issue. In fact, it is hard to even identify what the big question is anymore.

So, here is my stab at it:

Blacks are disproportionately poor, undereducated and incarcerated. The promise of civil rights was that this was supposed to go away. In time, as institutional barriers were removed, the demographics of poverty were supposed to even out across the races. But this is not happening, or at least it is happening so slowly that many don’t perceive progress.

Then, occasionally, somebody does something stupid and insulting, like Mr. Richards, or President Bush (Katrina non-relief, or submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court against affirmative action on Martin Luther King Day), or Trent Lott, and the suspicion that the racism is still alive and rampant seems to be confirmed.

We in the white-world see the legal leveling of the laws and now we don’t know what to do now to make things better between the races. We see a few dinosaurs out there who are openly bigoted, but we see them as the exception rather than the rule.

The race question boils down to this, in my opinion: If racism is largely a thing of the past, then why are so many blacks so hopelessly poor?

I think the answer is that racial attitudes have been slow to reach the neutrality we aspire to, so there are latent problems of bigotry. It is only 40 years since the civil rights movement, and hearts sometimes take a generation or two to catch up to what we aspire to. I don’t know what, if anything, we can do to overcome this besides waiting.

But the bigger issue, I think, is that we are becoming a more class-stratified society. Wealth is being concentrated more and more every day in fewer and fewer hands. Those at the bottom have fewer opportunities for upward social mobility. Unfortunately, those who had less when this trend started in the early 80’s were caught holding the short straw. I think that race is secondary to class now in terms of explaining lack of opportunity. I believe that racism is on a heavy decline, but that lack of new opportunity leaves blacks stuck in the same position they would be in if there were pervasive racism.

In order to fulfill the ultimate American ideal of everyone being able to succeed based on how hard they work we will have to take a hard look at not only race, but also class. We will have to admit to ourselves that some of us got a big head-start in life, and others were held up. We will have to admit to ourselves that sometimes we succeed because of things that we did not do, and that others fail because of things they did not do.

In my opinion if we address the issue of concentration of wealth we will make great strides on race.

Words, Words, Words

Have you heard that NBC news has decided to start calling the Iraq war a "civil war"?

Several news organizations have followed suit, but not FOX. Fox has responded by downgrading it from "sectarian violence" to "unfriendly pizza party."