Diplomacy, at the highest level.

[First Lady] Michelle Obama with former President George W. Bush. It is a skill to build respect for people diametrically opposed to your value system, and even deeper a skill level to develop working relationships with these people in one's life and work. It is a skill not in the Trump White House. Crudeness, like cowardice, has no grace, no value to the evolution of spirit because it serves only self... - Gregory E. Woods, "Dawn Wolf", Keeper of Stories 5/16/18 

President Barack Obama walks with Nancy Reagan in the Diplomatic Room of the White House in 2009.

OBAMA'S PRESIDENCY

President Bush poster in 2010

"Pity that Americans didn't keep their promises to work together, and to engage in intelligent discourse during Obama's presidency. Politics and governing is a series of relationships based upon conflict. This fundamental, but important aspect of American culture is reflected in a myriad of ways. Principally it shows itself in marriage: this condition of existence, this paradigm we treasure. Eventually it will do its inevitable job and divorce us from our myths into a self-evident reality we will not be able to live with!" - Gregory E. Woods 

DEMISE: the conservative contribution to America

Eva Longoria's exquisite form in dark purple gown !!

Slaying a Herd of Sacred Cows

November 17, 2010

Here we go again! The chairmen of the presidential, bipartisan deficit commission recently offered President Obama a slew of sacred cows to be sacrificed on the altar of fiscal responsibility. What makes this abomination of desolation so hypocritical is that former Clinton White House Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles, and former senator, Alan Simpson (R-Wyo), have hatched a plan to send tax payers to the rescue…again, to save the country from the consequences of nearly 25 years of Conservative rule since 1980. And by the way, I am soliciting suggests for a new label to replace “Conservative.” It has become increasingly difficult to define conservatism. One of the bedrock principles of conservatism has been fiscal restraint; however, this pragmatic approach was killed long ago by President Ronald Reagan.

Reagan, the consummate performer, convinced his goose-stepping followers that trickle-down would benefit the entire country. But what trickle down did was place the nation on a spending binge that nearly caused a global, economic meltdown. To be sure, Reagan’s fiscal policies did not cause the mortgage crisis, the gas crisis, the near insolvency of the U.S, automobile industry, and the banking crisis, but it was the trigger that set the entire nation on a pork-feast at the hyper-deficit trough. If we consider what happened to America economically during the eight years of the Reagan Revolution, it amazes me that anyone who calls themselves a Conservative (there I go with that word again) can still pay homage to his legacy.

When Reagan succeeded President Jimmy Carter in 1981, the public debt was $998 billion, or two notches south of $1 trillion; however, when Reagan passed the baton to George H.W. Bush, the debt had exploded to nearly $3 trillion. This is a staggering demonstration of financial mismanagement. To place this level of reckless disregard in its proper perspective, one must consider that in eight years, Reagan tripled what it took the country 204 years to accrue in deficit spending. This is astonishing! Yet, former President Ronal Reagan is still revered in nearly mythological proportions. In fact, I understand that there is a move by Conservatives (there I go with that word again) to nominate him for a posthumous Nobel Prize.

There are three certainties in life: Death, taxes, and the requirement that every GOP leader genuflect before the portrait of Ronald Reagan that hangs in the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Why? Because Reagan was the first president to demonstrate that you can overspend beyond your wildest imagination if you could convince the country that an enemy was looming: Reagan, of course, had the former Soviet Union; H.W. Bush had Saddam; and Dubya had bin Laden. Now watch very carefully, because the hands are indeed quicker than the eyes – During the 20-year reign of the Republican presidents since 1980, the United States has spent nearly $8 trillion on defense…you still watching?

· Russia disintegrated without firing one single bullet in self defense;
· Saddam was held up in a hole the size of my walk-in closet; and
· The last I heard, Osama bin Laden was last seen walking through the streets of Anacostia.

Did you see that?

This entire performance took place; not because of the trillions that were spent, but in spite of the trillions it cost the American taxpayers. According to one analysis of global defense spending, the U.S. spends more money on defense than the rest of the world combined. The United States spends nearly 57 percent of all military expenditures world-wide. The runner up to this dubious honor and the bronze medal winner go to China and Russia respectively with a combined military spending of $115 billion, or 10 percent of total global military expenditures. America’s closest NATO ally, France, spends about $45 billion per year, or four percent of the total global military expenditures.

Simple mathematics shows me that NATO is getting a free ride at the expense of the tax payers in this country. So let me make sure I have this right: The presidential deficit commission is recommending the elimination of the sacred mortgage deduction; increasing the age of retirement under Social Security; eliminating “all the expensive and popular deductions,” which almost certainly means cafeteria plans, charitable contributions and childcare deductions; programs to assist the poor would be drastically cut back; and an increase in the amount of income subject to Social Security taxes. To be fair, the Commission is also recommending a $100 billion cut in defense spending, but if we assume that the Military Industrial Complex will just roll over and play dead while the surgeon cuts, this would simply reduce America’s percentage of global defense spending from 57 percent to 48 percent.

But as the old saying goes, “Talk is cheap.” Therefore, in addition to my criticism of the plundering of the American treasury, I offer this recommendation: Let’s go back to where the Conservatives (oops, there I go again) ran off the track during the Reagan administration, and reduce military spending to those 1981 levels. This would erase nearly $400 billion in spending overnight, but here is the good part: The $317 billion defense budget during Reagan’s first year is still three times more spending than China and Russia combined, but what it does additionally is require NATO to shoulder more of the burden for living in a relatively safe world.

Although I do not subscribe to Marxism; I must say that Marx’s case on the misunderstood power of the working class is profound. Now that I’ve made my point, here is the overriding issue: Will you sit back and permit your congressional leaders to take the crumbs that Reagan gave you in trickle down, or will you make your political leaders accountable for the decisions that they make? Perhaps demanding that this nation’s vaunted, overpriced military capture bin Laden would be a great first step. With this nation’s almost surreal intelligence apparatus, unless bin Laden is communicating with carrier pigeon, surely we should have captured him by now…if that was a national priority. However, what seems to be most important to our leaders today is to push back the gains, benefits and amenities afforded to the working class over the last 75 years and not the capture of Osama bin Laden.

And unless a chorus of opposition is heard, over the next few years, the citizenry will be scratching their collective heads, wondering how their politicians did it to them again. Well, here is the memo: It is called forgetting the past. –David R. Tolson, author, scholar

The Christian right is our own brand of extremism.

COMMENTARY


Made-in-America Wahhabism

The Christian right is our own brand of extremism.
By William Thatcher Dowell

William Thatcher Dowell edits Global Beat for New York University's Center for War, Peace and the News Media. He was a Middle East correspondent for Time magazine from 1989 through 1993.

March 8, 2005

There is a certain irony in the debate over installing the Ten Commandments in public buildings. The Second Commandment in the King James edition of the Bible states quite clearly: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the Earth below, or that is in the water under the Earth." Few people take this as a prohibition against images of stars and fishes. Rather it cautions against endowing a physical object, be it a golden calf or a two-ton slab of granite, with spiritual power.

In trying to promote the commandments, the Christian right seems to have forgotten what they are really about. It has also overlooked the fact that there are several versions: Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34:12-26, and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Different language in Catholic Bibles and the Jewish Torah offer more variants.

Which should be enshrined? That is just the kind of debate that has been responsible for religious massacres through the ages. It was, in fact, the mindless slaughter resulting from King Charles' efforts to impose the Church of England's prayer book on Calvinist Scots in the 17th century that played an important role in convincing the founding fathers to separate church and state.

The current debate, of course, has little to do with genuine religion. What it is really about is an effort to assert a cultural point of view. It is part of a reaction against social change, an American counter-reformation of sorts against the way our society has been evolving. Those pushing to blur the boundaries between church and state feel that they are losing out— much as, in the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalists fear they are losing out to "Western values."

The reactions are remarkably similar. In the Arab Middle East and Iran, the response is an insistence on the establishment of Islamic law as the basis for political life; in the United States, school districts assert religious over scientific theory in biology class, tax dollars are going to the faith-based, and the Ten Commandments are a putative founding document.

In fact, George W. Bush may now find himself in the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultrareligious Wahhabi movement —the movement that is spiritually at the core of Al Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the Saudi royal family repeatedly found itself held political hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues. The evangelical movement in the U.S. nudged the president back into the White House, and Bush must now try to pay off the political bill for its support.

In Saudi Arabia, what drives the Wahhabis is a deep sense of grievance and an underlying conviction that a return to spiritual purity will restore the lost power they believe once belonged to their forefathers. A belief system that calls for stoning a woman for adultery or severing the hand of a vagrant accused of stealing depends on extreme interpretations of texts that are at best ambiguous. What is at stake is not so much service to God as the conviction that it is still possible to enforce discipline in a world that seems increasingly chaotic.

The Christian right is equally prone to selective interpretations of Scripture. In its concern for a fetus, for example, the fate of the child who emerges from an unwanted pregnancy gets lost. Some fundamentalists are even ready to kill those who do not agree with them, or at least destroy their careers. They seem to delight in the death penalty, despite the fact that the Bible prohibits killing and Christ advised his followers to leave vengeance to God.

Just as in the Middle East, the core of U.S. Puritanism stems from a nostalgia for an imaginary past — in our case, a made-up United States peopled mostly by Northern Europeans alike in the God they worshiped and in their understanding of what he stood for. The founding fathers, of course, preferred the ideas of the secular Enlightenment, which, instead of anointing one religious interpretation, provided the space and security for each person to seek God in his or her own way.

Perhaps the strongest rationale for separating religious values from politics is that politics inevitably involves compromise, while religion involves a spiritual ideal that can be harmed by compromise. No less a fundamentalist than Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini once stated that if forced to choose between Islamic law and Islamic rule, he would choose Islamic rule. Yet the effect of that decision has been to betray Islam, as genuine Islamic scholars in Iran have found themselves under continual pressure to change their interpretation of God and God's will in order to conform to political realities.

Religion, when incorporated into a political structure, is almost invariably diluted and deformed and ultimately loses its most essential power. Worse, as we have seen recently in the Islamic world (as in the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials in the Christian world), a fanatical passion for one's own interpretation of justice under God often leads to horror.

The fact is that, as St. Paul so eloquently put it, "now we see through a glass darkly." Men and women interpret the deity, but they are only human and, by their nature, they are flawed. In that context, isn't it best to keep our minds open, the Ten Commandments out of our public buildings or off our governmental lawns and to lead by example rather than pressuring others to see life the way we do? As Christ once put it, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

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