Contagion and brain damage: GOP House shrugs off Zika

By Vincent Boom Batz, M.D.
Health Correspondent with
David Bloviator in Washington

Americans, used to thinking that the nation's number one public health menace was Charlie Sheen, are now confronting the imminent specter of mosquito-borne Zika viruses spreading into any parts of the nation where mosquitoes can be found.

Fortunately, the House Republican caucus is on the job.  Yesterday it authorized an inadequate amount of money to protect Americans from Zika.  The prospect of widespread birth defects paled in their minds when compared to their overriding priorities: saying no to anything put forward by President Obama, and screwing the poor.

Vermin, parasites threatening public health

Not only is the total amount laughably inadequate but it also must be offset by budget cuts elsewhere, unlike multi-trillion-dollar GOP tax cuts for the rich.  This is known in the Republican caucus as “fiscal responsibility.”

The threat is greatest in hot, swampy, heavily populated areas like east Texas.  So of course local Republicans like human fly Louis Gohmert (R – Crazytown), voted, wait for it, against adequate funding to protect constituents from the grim effects of Zika.  He's still an overwhelming favorite for re-election.

You might that the likelihood of infants born with serious brain damage due to pre-natal Zika exposure would be a matter of some concern to First District voters, but apparently in that part of the fever swamp that is Texas, brain damage isn't a public health crisis, it's a qualification for elective office.

Rewriting history, consensus edition

By Douglas MacArthur
National Security Correspondent

We always like to hear what our old Ec. 10 section mates are up to, so we read with some interest Eliot Cohen's '77 op-ed column in today's New York Times, in which he accuses one Donald Trump of threatening the “two-generation-old American foreign policy consensus” that has brought this country to the happy situation it finds itself in today, immersed in no fewer than seven foreign wars.

This puts the tangerine-faced clown on the opposite side of the consensus represented by Eliot, and other stalwarts of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy like George W. Bush and U.S. National Security Adviser Bibi Netanyahu.  Now we hold no brief for said clown, whose foreign policy of cozying up to dictators who flatter him and shunning democratic allies who wound him is best thought of as the strategy of a middle-school girl trying to decide whom she should sit with at lunch.

Eliot Cohen '77, shown here explaining how close we are to
victory in Iraq.

But we wondered a little about Eliot's precious “consensus” to which he attaches such importance.  Keep in mind that Eliot represents the virulent strain of neocon warmongering that led to disaster in Iraq, not to mention certain misadventures two generations ago in a place called Vietnam.  We remember only a little about those days, but it didn't feel to us much like consensus.

Speaking of consensus, here's what Eliot had to say in 2003, after it became clear to the meanest intelligence that Bush, advised by Eliot's gang of armchair warriors, had launched an unnecessary war of choice and thereby blundered into the quagmire in Iraq that has bedeviled us ever since:

To some of Mr. Bush's admirers, like Eliot A. Cohen, a military expert at Johns Hopkins University, tonight's speech was ''an overdue explaining of the case -- he has a sophisticated argument to make about changing Iraq and making it a decent place and a role model for the Mideast, but he doesn't make it often enough,'' or in enough detail. ''I'm struck by the fact that the view of elites, Democrats and Republicans, is that this has to be made to work, and the argument is over how.''  (The New York Times, Sept. 8, 2003).

By the way, here's how the Iraqi consensus was regarded in the same article:

To his critics -- including most of the Democratic presidential aspirants, who believe that Mr. Bush's initial go-it-alone instincts have become his biggest political vulnerability -- the president is wrongly blending the war against terrorism with the effort to build a stable Iraq.

''I think it bears little to no resemblance to the war on terrorism,'' said James Steinberg, who served as President Clinton's deputy national security adviser and is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution. ''There was a theory in this White House that if you were just tough, and knocked Saddam and those like him off, people would not mess with you anymore,'' he said tonight. ''They would no longer regard you as weak.

''Now there is a risk that our muscularity, if not used in a smart way, could make us more vulnerable, not less.'' 

Ya think?

But flash forward to 2016, and the brutal controversy over Iraq has vanished down a memory hole at Johns Hopkins University.  It's been replaced by trade agreements that give to drug and tobacco companies dispute-resolution rights denied to union members and ordinary citizens and promotion of “American values,” such as overthrowing foreign leaders just to show we can without regard to the dangerous power vacuum that invariably ensued and outsourcing U.S.-Iran relations to the Likud Party.
 
The tangerine-faced clown's foreign policy may be ridiculous, but it doesn't scare us half as much as the recrudescence of neocon drum-beating, the results of which can be seen in Veteran's Administration hospitals and outpatient clinics across the land.

As for Eliot's efforts to bury the disastrous consequences of the foreign policies he fought so hard for from his bunker on Massachusetts Avenue NW, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, doesn't he know that there's an Internet?

It Can't Happen Here

“In England [in 1936], as in the United States, millions were jobless. . . .Meanwhile, the demagogic Sir Oswald Mosley led an increasingly aggressive British Union of Fascists, its militants dressed in black tunics, black trousers, and wide black leather belts with brass buckles.  Whenever Mosley was heckled at one of his rallies, he stopping speaking and searchlights focused on the heckler as jackbooted men beat him and then threw him out of the hall.”

– A. Hochschild, Spain in Their Hearts at 94.

Empathy on Capitol Hill: A Beginner's Guide

By Tommy Corcoran
Capitol Hill Correspondent

It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by today's New York Times story on Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R – Bay of Pigs) and her realization that hatred and bigotry directed at trans people are in fact hatred and bigotry.  Unlike most of the rest of us, who were able to tease out this conclusion from our general views about human dignity, she reached this unremarkable conclusion because she has a trans child whom she loves.

How nice.

Now that she has seen the light on equal treatment for trans individuals, perhaps her personal journey of growth will take a few more steps.  We might suggest:

1.  Meet a 12-year-old girl who was impregnated following a rape by a relative.  If she did, maybe she wouldn't consistently vote against access to safe, legal abortion and for defunding Planned Parenthood, a vital source of health services to women.

2.  Meet a hungry family.  Maybe then she wouldn't have voted to cut food stamp funding.

3.  Meet a part-time worker with a sick child.  Then maybe she wouldn't have voted to increase the threshold for employer-provided health insurance to 40 hours a week, thereby allowing Wal-Mart to evade the requirement to provide health insurance to its employees.

4.  Meet a child poisoned by polluted water.  Then maybe she wouldn't have voted to strip EPA of the power to regulate the discharge of dangerous pesticides into the water supply.

5.  Meet an unemployed worker.  Then maybe she wouldn't have voted against infrastructure spending that would have provided tens of thousands of good jobs for unemployed or underemployed factory workers or miners.

Yes, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen's journey to empathy looks like a long one, perhaps even longer than her dream of restoring plutocracy to Cuba.  Wish her (and us) luck.

Information about her voting record extracted from NARAL and ADA records.

Why We Fight, Chapter 38,769

After years of failed overtures, representatives of Mr. Hekmatyar, whose location is unknown, are now said to be finalizing a peace agreement with the struggling government of President Ashraf Ghani, according to representatives from both sides.

. . . .

Many fear Mr. Hekmatyar, known for his habit of breaking alliances, could be a larger political headache in Kabul than he is a military one in the battlefield, at a time when Mr. Ghani’s coalition administration is already bogged down with infighting. Although forces loyal to Mr. Hekmatyar have attacked sporadically — including a 2013 car bombing that killed 16 people, including six American advisers — they have never been considered as serious a threat as the Taliban or the Haqqani network.

Still, Mr. Hekmatyar is exceptionally divisive. He is accused of causing the deaths of thousands during the civil war, including the indiscriminate shelling of Kabul — much like rival warlords who are now allied with the government or have positions within it. After receiving copious cash and weaponry from the Americans during the war against the Soviets, he threw in his lot with remnants of the Communist government, then briefly with Taliban, and then Al Qaeda. In July last year, he was even rumored to have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, though his aides later denied it.

Through it all, he has remained a prolific writer. He frequently sends letters to his commanders and has published dozens of books on political and religious matters, with titles including “Afghanistan – Another Vietnam for America,” “Dreams and Interpretations,” and “Bush, the King of Liars.” [Hard to argue with that one – Ed.] More recently, he has also taken to recorded video messages, modulating his voice like a state-TV anchor as he recites long lectures and answers recorded questions.

 . . . .

According to officials on both sides of the negotiation, some of the last points of disagreement were 

the timing of removing Mr. Hekmatyar and the Hezb-i-Islami militant wing from American and United Nations terrorism lists, and whether Mr. Hekmatyar is willing to renounce relations with extremist groups outside Afghanistan.

Mr. Hekmatyar’s group is demanding to be taken off the terrorism lists before signing the agreement, while American officials have said the process takes time and can happen only after a formal request from the Afghan government when the agreement is signed  . . . .

– The New York Times, May 11, 2016

The climate changes

It's funny how when it's an SEC liability document, even an oil company has to admit that climate change represents a risk, not necessarily to you or me, but to it.  Here's what Phillips 66 said in its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K:

100 years ago today

The New York Times tweeted out a picture of its front page from April 23, 1994 to mark the Yahrzeit of that lovable old criminal Richard Nixon:

Our eyes fell not on the obituary of the Mad Bomber of Cambodia but on the page one story right next to it.  Apparently in those quaint pre-social media, pre-Internet days, the media used to peddle ridiculous stories about “scandals” involving the Clintons, including one Hillary Clinton, all of which vanished upon cursory examination.

How long ago it seems!  For those of you under 40, the term “Whitewater” referred to the investment by the Clintons in a busto Arkansas land deal sponsored by a friend of theirs who turned out to be a crook.  Slightly embarrassing to be sure, but a page one scandal?

The New York Times sure thought so.  We took a look at the April 23 story, to learn why it merited its placement next to the death of a disgraced President.  The perfectly reasonable piece, by Gwen Ifill, recounted Mrs. Clinton's press conference which she held to respond to various media questions about the investment, none of which reflected any conceivable illegality on the part of the Clintons.

She quoted the favorable response of the First Lady's aides, and for balance threw in a dart from then Senator Alphonse D'Amato alleging the insufficiency of her responses.  He especially noted that she did not explain why their partners in Whitewater bore more of the risk of loss.  Senator D'Amato, it will be recalled, made his money through insider trades placed by his crooked brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont, made famous by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Perhaps the Times thought it was doing the Clintons a favor by putting her response on page one, after having run many prior Whitewater non-stories there.  But it's well to remember that as with the other Clinton scandals, there was never anything there.

That same day, Maureen Dowd, not yet a famous Times columnist, provided the “news analysis.”  Amazingly enough, she agreed with the bent Sen. D'Amato, stating that Hillary did not “ever really answer the question of why the Clintons' partners, the McDougals, wound up bearing so much more of the burden of the losses in Whitewater than the Clintons did.”

For good measure, Ms. Dowd attacked the Clintons thusly:

And she was never able to satisfactorily explain why the White House has had so many conflicting stories on so many important issues, and why their explanations have changed so many times in the past few weeks. 

Ah, conflicting explanations made in the heat of a political firestorm.  It sounds as bad as something actually illegal or unethical.  Except it isn't.

At least Ms. Dowd gave her some credit:

With a calm, unwavering gaze, she apologized over and over for whatever customs of the city she and her husband might have violated . . . .

It got us to thinking how much has changed since those long-ago days, when the media and professional or political Hillary-bashers would team up to build a “scandal” out of a bad investment, new drapes for the White House, or a private email address for private emails.

How different it all looks today.  Nowadays, when there's some non-existent “scandal” supposedly attached to Senator Clinton, there's a new made-up problem, posed by a famous Times columnist as follows: “Wouldn’t it be a relief to people if Hillary just acknowledged some mistakes?”  (The New York Times, April 16, 2016)

Who was excoriating Hillary Clinton for failing to apologize with adequate frequency?  Your guess is probably better than her memory.