The Blue State Mailbag

I’ve received some remarkably interesing correspondence since a slim majority of American voters endorsed Bush’s Fascism Lite on Tuesday.

From Ted W.:

As a New Yorker I feel compelled to thank you for your recent piece “Guilty, Disgusted, American.” It captures the strong emotional and indignant response of so many of us. On the ferry, subway, busses — much commiserating is going on — with strangers mutually expressing disappointment, rolling their eyes at newspaper headlines, shaking their heads in disgust. I just read last night that “gay marriage” passed in Saskatchewan. An issue that made masses of Americans cuckoo gets passed without much ado — in Saskatchewan! I guess Saskatchewan — and much of Canada for that matter — is the Devil’s Land. Anyway, thanks. When I read your piece I felt I was reading my own thoughts. This administration can rant and rhapsodize about mandates all it wants: they’re going to have an increasingly angry and confrontational number of Americans to contend with.

I suspect that the Bushies don’t much care about the vast majority of Americans who oppose their policies. (Even many Republicans say this marginal election victory doesn’t constitute a mandate.) All we do, after all, is march around in the streets, waving signs and chanting slogans. That stopped scaring presidents around 1974.

From Colleen:

I read your column today and all I have to say is that I feel your pain and disgust. I live in Indiana so I’m smack in the middle of Fundagelical Stupidity. I’ve rarely left the house in the past couple of days. I have a 9 yr. old son and I’m more afraid of 4 more years of the Bushiban than I am of “Islamic Terrorists”. What’s the matter with these people. If we didn’t have such a suck-ass foreign policy, we wouldn’t need to worry about terrorists in the first place. I’m more angry at the majority of the public than I am at Dubya being in the WH. And “moral values”? What the hell is that about. They line up blindly and stupidly behind a man that shares their hatred of gays as well as his obsession with a fetus. Do they realize that all the bodies that have piled up in a war they pop popcorn to watch with their feet propped up and big smiles on their faces were once a fetus? Guess that doesn’t matter to them since the majority of the bodies are Arab or Muslim. I think they’re all brain damaged. Take care Ted. And thank you so much for your writing. I love your columns and books. It’s writers such as yourself that keep me hanging on because at least I know there are sane people still out there.

I do find the “moral” issue fascinating. People who voted for Bush endorsed the torture of thousands of innocent people at Abu Ghraib. Was that moral? Bush and his cronies gave the orders for that torture to occur. It came from the top. People who voted for Bush endorsed the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. And for what? Not liberation. To line Dick Cheney’s pockets with $1 million a year he would never have received had Iraq not been invaded and Halliburton–on the verge of bankruptcy in 2001–not received no-bid contracts. Was the murder of 100,000 people moral?

Good people can disagree about abortion. I consider it murder of an unborn fetus, yet I believe women must possess the right to carry out such murders. But only three kinds of people can endorse the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq: the ignorant, the stupid and the evil.

From Jeff:

Ted, I wanted to say thanks for you latest column. Being a Canadian these days is a lot like living next door to a well-armed religious maniac given to fits of unprovoked violence, who thinks what I have is his. It’s work such as yours which keeps me from lapsing into an intellectually lazy, though perhaps emotionally satisfying, anti-Americanism.

And they say I hate my county! I’m a pro-US propagandist!

From Keith:

Having been a devoted fan of your work for some time, I felt that this week above all was the right time to send this note of profound thanks. Your work has been a source of amusement, information and inspiration to me, and I consider you a hero. This statement has been far too long in coming, but especially now that our worst fears seem to have been confirmed, I felt you might welcome this. Your commitment is so clear that some might assume you do not require positive feedback, but nevertheless I felt you might like to hear that you are certainly not laboring in futility. I appreciate your efforts and your passion, more than I can communicate in just a short note of gratitude, but this will have to suffice. I can always count on you to articulate what I sometimes cannot quite express, and though I read and rely on a great many sources, I always return to your column and cartoons for the most lucid and passionate views online. I can’t count the times I’ve thrown up my hands when trying to make some point to like-minded (or not-so-like-minded) friends, and simply sent them the link to your latest column. I wish I had your skill and I greatly admire your courage in spreading it. As you’re probably bombarded with email (both supportive and critical), I expect no reply. Your efforts are more than enough thanks.

I’m blushing.

I frequently receive emails from right-winger supporters of the Bushiban (thanks, Indiana FOR!) asking why I decry the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis at the hands of US forces while ignoring the mass murders allegedly committed by Saddam Hussein during his tenure as dictator of that beleagured country.

First the Lancet study about the 100,000 deaths, from the International Herald Tribune on Oct. 16:

More than 100,000 civilians have probably died as direct or indirect consequences of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, according to a study by a research team at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The report was published on the Internet by The Lancet, the British medical journal. The figure is far higher than previous mortality estimates. Editors of the journal decided not to wait for The Lancet’s normal publication date next week, but instead to place the research online Friday, apparently so it could circulate before the U.S. presidential election.

The finding is certain to generate intense controversy, since the Bush administration has not estimated civilian casualties from the conflict, and independent groups have put the number at most in the tens of thousands.

In the study, teams of researchers fanned out across Iraq in mid-September to interview nearly 1,000 families in 33 previously selected locations. Families were interviewed about births and deaths in the household before and after the invasion. Although the paper’s authors acknowledge that thorough data collection was difficult in what is effectively still a war zone, the data they managed to collect are extensive: Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it. Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and chronic diseases. Afterward, violent death was far ahead of all other causes. “We were shocked at the magnitude but we’re quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate,” said Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins study team. He said the team had excluded deaths in Falluja in making their estimate, since that city was the site of unusually intense violence.

In 15 of the 33 communities visited, residents reported violent deaths in the family since the conflict started in March 2003. They attributed many of those deaths to attacks by coalition forces – mostly airstrikes – and most of the reported deaths were of women and children.

The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers found.

“The fact that more than half of the deaths caused by the occupation forces were women and children is a cause for concern,” the authors wrote.

Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam murdered 290,000 Iraqis, plus 100,000 Kurds during the 1988 war with Iran. That makes a total of roughly 400,000 dead. As far as I know, no conservative supporter of the war has accused Saddam of higher numbers than that.

Now the comparison.

For the sake of kindness to Bush, we’ll leave out the Iraqi soldiers we killed during the invasion, as well as members of the Iraqi resistance. We’ll even leave out those who died in US custody. We’ll just count the Lancet’s 100,000 civilians.

Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for 35 years. He killed 400,000 people during that time. That equals a little over 10,000 Iraqis per year. George W. Bush, in just a year, killed 100,000 people.

George W. Bush kills Iraqis at ten times the rate of Saddam Hussein.

Only an idiot would call this liberation.

Why Did Ohio Fall?

There were widespread irregularities in Ohio. A corrupt Secretary of State who rejected voter registration cards because they weren’t printed on the correct cardstock, GOP goons posing as “challengers” in African-American-dominated cities, and of course–those Diebold machines. It is entirely likely that Ohio was stolen every bit as much as Florida was in 2000. We’ll have to wait and see as history makes its judgement.

In the meantime, there remains the question of why the margin in Ohio was so tight. Why did a state in which more than 60% of those polls said the economy was lousy turn out half, or nearly half, its voters for Bush?

This is NAFTA coming home to roost. When Kerry campaigned with a promise to bring good jobs back to the US, he had no credibility, running as a member of Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. Ohioans know that the big drain of manufacturing jobs really took off after Clinton signed NAFTA and GATT.

If the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cost Democrats the South, it was worth it. But addiction to unfair “free trade” treaties may have cost Democrats the industrial Midwest. If so, it wasn’t worth it. And it might be fatal to the party.

It’s time for the DNC to agitate for an end to NAFTA and other failed free trade agreements.

A FOR email from this morning says it well. When are Democrats going to wake up and stop running away from the “L” word? You can’t outRepublican Republicans–especially not this merry crew

There’s no one left. Watch any news channel, read any interview every single Democrat is saying the same thing. “I go to Church,” “I’m a Christian,” “next time we need a canidate who can speak to the christian conservative.” If the new Democratic plan is to replace the conservative Republicans as the Republicans begin to dabble with dictatorship, then who represents me…shouldn’t everyone feel represented in a democracy? Shouldn’t everyone have a voice? Isn’t that the idea? I like to think that when a majority of the people make a decision it’s usually a good one, but is this the worst fuck up by a majority of Catholics since Galileo?

Unite? Never!

I received the following missive from a conservative Notre Dame student (anonymity protected in recognition of his all too rare civility in expressing disagreement:

I waited for your blog to be updated on November 2nd. And then on November 3rd.

Finally, today, I see a response and I am disappointed. I did not expect that

you, of all people, could move past the results shown on Tuesday, but I hoped

that you would. I continue to hope that the nation will unite behind Bush–as

well as help steer him on the best path if he moves away from it.

Forgive me for being unforgiving, but George W. Bush is a geocidal maniac. He killed more than 100,000 people. But even if I were inclined to look past his status as one of the worst serial killers in human history–and my heart just isn’t big enough, I’m afraid–does Bush strike you as the kind of guy looking for advice and counsel to help him along the best path? Does his idea of the best path seem similar to mine? Yours?

Democrats owe Bush exactly the same level of loyalty and unity as John Kerry would have received from the Republicans in Congress and on talk radio. You remember–the kind Bill Clinton enjoyed, when Rush Limbaugh counted down the days under illegitimate occupation we were suffering under the yoke of Bill. That level of unity.

Bush Thinks Mandate is a Gay Porn Magazine

Now the twit is claiming a mandate? Even if he really did win 51-48–a highly doubtful proposition, considering the hijacking of Ohio–you have to be pretty high on Karzai’s heroin stash to think that constitutes a mandate for radical Republicanism. 70-30–now THAT would be a mandate. And even then, would it really be a great idea to completely run roughshod over the aspirations and beliefs of 30 percent of the citizenry?

Don’t answer that.

Column is going up shortly, or so I’m told.

American Postmortem Miscellany

To paraphrase a friend, the people now have the government they deserve. The trouble is, so do we.

I’ll be filing my cartoons and column for this week later today; they should start going up overnight. My thoughts and reactions will follow during the coming days and weeks.

My progressive friends: I know you are disheartened. So am I. A record turnout should have ensured a Kerry sweep. And there’s no doubt that we will never know whether the Ohio vote count was legitimate. One thing is certain, however:

Bush is still not the legitimate president of the United States. He ran on an incumbency he never earned.

We must remain informed. We must keep working to educate and organize the citizenry. We must reform the Democratic Party. (Please, Terry MacA, step down!) Now, when the hour is darkest, is the most important time to stay focused on what must be done. Don’t mourn, organize!

Now the shitstorm begins. Calls for a consumpion tax or flat income tax, privatizing Social Security and invading Syria (the Bushies shut the embassy in Damascus) are being heard. The neofascists are wilding. Keep your head down. America’s time will come soon eough.

By the way, a French edition of my book “To Afghanistan and Back” is now available.

You Know What To Do

On December 20, 2000, the US Supreme Court illegally halted the 2000 presidential vote count in Florida. Since then we have been ruled by a dictator with no more legitimacy than Saddam Hussein. Today it is the duty of every patriotic American to restore democratic rule to the United States by casting a vote for any candidate other than George W. Bush. This especially includes Republicans, who should reject such anti-GOP policies pursued by the Bush Junta as deficit spending and wars of colonial aggression. Party labels do not matter today. Today there are only two kinds of Americans: patriots and neofascists. You know the right choice.

America, and the world, are counting on you.

Book TV on C-SPAN

A talk and Q&A session I gave a few weeks ago at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company will be broadcast on Book TV on C-SPAN2 on Monday, November 1 at 7 pm Eastern Standard Time. The subject was why and how the US invasion of Afghanistan was every bit as unjustified and oil-motivated as the attack on Iraq.

P.S. Thanks to several Friends of Rall for emailing me corrected URL information.

Three Years Later

Well, well—Osama’s back, and just in time for Halloween! And he’s got something new for Americans: an admission of involvement in 9/11, something that until now we’ve had to take the Administration’s (cough) word (hee hee!) about. Perhaps Colin Powell will cough up that white paper he promised back in September 2001 showing the government’s evidence that Al Qaeda was involved. (Egyptian Islamic Jihad, of course, recruited the hijackers. But you already knew that. Didn’t you?)