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Over on Rabookie’s blog a couple of days ago, I mentioned a letter I had written to President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon back in 1969, and a couple of people have asked to see the letter.

Apparently I’ve always been a rather copious letter writer, though probably not on the order of, say, the late Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran to his secret lady love in the USA. And not all of my letters have been love letters.

Before the advent of e-mail, I wrote a great many caustic and/or whimsical snail mail letters to corrupt and lying politicians, idiotic corporations, and various other duplicitous ne’er-do-wells whose hypocrisy I deplored. And if you can believe it, I’ve saved all this crap, among many other pieces of paper of no interest to anyone but myself, in 7 filing cabinets and assorted cardboard boxes. After much searching, I finally located the letter to Nixon.

Here’s the setup. In 1969 Dick Nixon was in the White House, and the war in Viet Nam was in full swing. The body bags were piling up on the Saigon loading docks and on the evening news. Tricky was not yet talking about the withdrawal of our troops from Viet Nam on the basis of “peace with honor”, and Watergate had not yet happened, to disclose once and for all time his profane lack of personal and political integrity.

I, meanwhile, was in college, having already dropped out once and hightailed it back when I was reclassified 1-A by my local Chicago draft board. I had a low draft lottery number. I was struggling mightily to stay in school and graduate on schedule so as to meet the draft board’s mandate of  “making normal progress toward one’s degree”, a requirement if one were to maintain the deferment and escape the dreaded war in Viet Nam. I was, to coin a phrase, a chickendove.

In the spring quarter of 1969 I was somewhere in my junior year and had as yet elected no major, a “minor” problem that was eventually resolved by creating and receiving grudging approval for a “special major”, an interdisciplinary concept which had been newly inaugurated in the permissive ‘60’s. (It was, as it happens, “Urban Education”.) I did know that I had no interest in or aptitude for the hard sciences. But there were “distributive requirements” to be fulfilled, so I was taking a Chemistry course for non-science majors. A “gut” course, as we called them back then. The course required that we read a few books, and write a paper.

Being a rebel even back then, I did what I wanted to do, and the devil take the hindmost. My solution to the paper requirement was a 2.5-page letter to Tricky Dick, based on one of the books I had read. And here it is, below.

Caveat: If I were to write the letter today it might be a bit more articulate and caustic, containing vocabulary words that Nixon’s Press Secretary would not be familiar with. It would be gender-neutral; the women’s liberation movement was in its infancy at the time, and I went to an all-male college. It would, had I given the matter greater consideration, have taken into account the necessity for a Constitutional amendment. But I was a callow youth back then. What did I know?

A discerning reader may also note the implications for my own current mental state. 

Anyway, here’s the letter, verbatim, complete with the date that I finally mailed it to the White House. I hope you appreciate all the typing. This was, after all, written in the days before personal computers. 

                                                            [My home address at the time]
                                                            July 13, 1969

President Richard M. Nixon
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Nixon:

In a chemistry course at Dartmouth College, I became aware of a fact which made me call into question your qualifications for the office of President of the United States, the single most crucial role to the development and destiny of our Great Nation. This new awareness has greatly exacerbated my already-deep skepticism of the wisdom of your policies and those of your Presidential predecessors, as manifested in your involvement in and escalation of the Viet Nam war; your abortive, almost totally ineffectual attempts at solving the present domestic racial crisis; and your continuing inattention to the mounting problems of environmental pollution. Without dwelling on the specifics of these problems since, in fact, my hypothesis transcends them, I wish to propose both an explanation for and a solution to the more general problem of incompetent and in fact detrimental White House leadership.

As you know, the minimum-age requirement for Presidential candidacy is thirty-five years of age. Ostensibly, this is because age implies experience; thus, the older a man is, and consequently the more experienced he is, both in the workings of government and in “the art of living” in general, the more competent he is assumed to be in his duties as President. However, my hypothesis refutes this assumption.

In a book by Lawrence Lessing, DNA, At the Core of Life Itself (for which he was awarded the 18th annual Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Award), I learned that bio-chemical experimentation has proved fairly conclusively that learning and memory are closely related to the production of RNA (ribonucleic acid), which in turn is responsible for the synthesis of proteins necessary for the proper functioning of the brain. This RNA in the brain is produced both in the neurons (nerve cells) and in the glial cells which surround each neuron. The theory was first formulated, after extensive experimentation, by Holger Hyden, a Swedish neurobiologist, and has since been substantiated by other scientists. It holds that “in the acquisition of new sensations or learning, modulated sensory impulses trigger in the neuron and its glial cells the production of specific RNA of a type not present in the cell before. These molecules of RNA store the memory of each impulse and are then available for its re-evocation.” (Lessing, pages 71-72) Many research experiments, of which Lessing cites numerous examples, have recently suggested that retention of memory, learning, and other brain functions are dependent on RNA-protein synthesis.

The reasons for my concern over your capability to lead a nation stem in large part from the fact, as Lessing goes on to point out, that the brain deteriorates with age. “Brain neurons, unlike most of the other body cells, do not divide or replenish themselves after development, and show only moderate growth through life…The penalty is that gradually neurons die and are not replaced. After a man reaches about thirty-five, on the average, he loses an estimated 100,000 neurons a day.” At the same time, “the brain’s glial cells continue to reproduce at a slowing rate.” (Lessing, pages 75-76; emphasis mine) The consequence is that after the age of thirty-five the brain’s crucial supply of RNA begins to diminish rapidly, since both of its sources deteriorate with age. Thus the proteins necessary for the brain’s proper functioning are produced in increasingly smaller and less sufficient quantities as a man grows older, and his ability to learn and to remember what he has learned is correspondingly impaired.

It follows from all this that, if the President of the United States (who is, after all, a man like the rest of us) becomes less and less able to learn from his day-to-day experiences as President, and also to call upon the experiences which he has accumulated during his lifetime (and even if he is elected at the age of thirty-five, something which has never happened in our country’s history, he is starting at a disadvantage), the age-experience rationalization is rendered invalid. Thus a man over thirty-five is, in fact, less rather than more qualified to be President, and the responsibility of the Presidency should be delegated to a man under thirty-five.

I therefore call upon you, President Nixon, in the interests of both science and humanity (two fields whose interests coincide so seldom that it is significant when they do), to voluntarily “abdicate” your “throne” as President of the United States, and to turn it over to a younger man, a man under thirty-five, a man whose neurons and glial cells are still capable of dealing with the critical problems which face our nation today.

                                                            Respectfully and patriotically yours,
                                                            [My signature here]

P.S.: If you do follow the dictates of reason and conscience (for once) and decide to step down, may I suggest the man whom I feel would be the best choice for your Presidential successor – Mark Rudd.

[Editor's note:  I'm getting too much good stuff piled up to post, and I like to leave it up for several days before posting the next thing, in order to elicit the maximum dialogue.  I may step up the pace of posting just a bit.  Please visit often.  ]

I suppose there are some True Patriots out there who consider Garrison Keillor to be rather to the left of Lenin and Trotsky. For most of us, though, you don't get much more "middle America" than Garrison Keillor.

[Garrison Keillor is the host of the American public-radio show "A Prairie Home Companion."]

ST. PAUL, Minnesota -- These are troubling times for all of us who love the United States, as surely we all do, even the satirists. You may poke fun at your mother, but if she is belittled by others it burns your bacon.

A blowhard French journalist writes a book about America that is full of arrogant stupidity, and you want to let the air out of him and mail him home flat.

You hear young people talk about America as if it's all over, and you trust that this is only them talking tough.

And then you read the paper and realize America is led by a man who isn't paying attention, and you hope that somebody will poke him. Or put a sign on his desk that says, "Try Much Harder."

Do we need to impeach him to bring some focus to this man's life? The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever, plus being blind.

The Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker carries an article by Jane Mayer about a loyal conservative Republican and U.S. Navy lawyer, Albert Mora, and his resistance to the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

From within the Pentagon bureaucracy, he did battle against Donald Rumsfeld and John Yoo at the Justice Department and shadowy figures taking orders from Dick (Gunner) Cheney, arguing America had ratified the Geneva Convention that forbids cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, and so it has the force of law. They seemed to be arguing that the president has the right to order prisoners to be tortured.

One such prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise volumes and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself.

When the Senate approved the Torture Convention in 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Is the law a law or is it a piece of toast?

Wiretap surveillance of Americans without a warrant? Great. Go for it.

How about turning over American ports to a country more closely tied to 9/11 than Saddam Hussein was? Fine by me. No problem.

And what about the war in Iraq? Hey, you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie. No need to tweak a thing.

And your blue button-down shirt - it's you.

But torture is something else. When Americans start pulling people's fingernails out with pliers and poking lighted cigarettes into their palms, then we need to come back to basic values.

Most people agree with this, and in a democracy that puts the torturers in a delicate position. They must make sure to destroy their e-mails and have subordinates who will take the fall.

Because it is impossible to keep torture secret. It goes against the American grain and it eats at the conscience of even the most disciplined, and in the end the truth will come out.

It is coming out now.

According to the leaders of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, America is practically as vulnerable today as it was on 9/10. Its seaports are wide open, its airspace is not secure (except for Washington), and little has been done about securing the nuclear bomb materials lying around in the world.

They give the administration Ds and Fs in most categories of defending against terrorist attack.

Our adventure in Iraq, at a cost of trillions, has brought that country to the verge of civil war while earning us more enemies than ever before. And tax money earmarked for security is being dumped into pork barrel projects anywhere somebody wants their own SWAT team.

Detonation of a nuclear bomb within our borders - pick any big city - is a real possibility, as much so now as five years ago. Meanwhile, many Democrats have conceded the very subject of security and positioned themselves as Guardians of Our Forests and Benefactors of Waifs and Owls, neglecting the most basic job of government, which is to defend the country.

We might rather be comedians or daddies or flamenco dancers, but we must attend to first things.

The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now.

The Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense.

Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence.

I've just finished reading a book entitled Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Spoke in the Wheel, by Renate Wind. It is, of course, about the (relatively) young German theologian who was put to death by the Nazis for advocating and practicing Christian (personal and institutional church) resistance to Hitler's Third Reich.

What is uncanny, though it's a relatively minor theme in the book, is how closely the rise of Hitler's "National Socialism" parallels the ascendancy of the neoconservatives here in the U.S. during the past decade. Hitler's accretion of power is gradual, and most of the German citizens acquiesce at each step of the way, either through fear or through the desire to curry favor and maintain their own position in society. War is portrayed by the Nazis as "defense of the fatherland" rather than as the megalomaniacal imperialism which we now see so clearly. Bonhoeffer finds himself increasingly isolated and without a power base as the fascist screws tighten around him.

Bonhoeffer was upper middle class, and he certainly could have used his position in society to save his own butt. He was, in fact, enabled to sit out the war in New York City should he wish to do so. But after an intense personal agony in his soul remarkably similar to that of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, he chose to return to Germany, knowing that he faced almost certain death, out of a greater loyalty to his small "flock" back home.

An interesting side note is that German pastors were required to enlist and serve as soldiers in World War II, and most did so, committing unspeakable atrocities while under military orders. Largely through his connections, Bonhoeffer was able to avoid military conscription. But he chose to work for the Abwehr, one of the Nazi spy agencies. While appearing to have "sold out" to the Nazis, as a double agent Bonhoeffer was in fact involved in several plots (which failed) to assassinate the Fuhrer. Though a pacifist, he concluded, again after intense soul-searching, that there were times when the lesser sin was to take the life of the despot who was responsible for the murder of millions.

The time may be coming when American Christians, and others "of conscience", will be called upon to make some of the choices that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had to make.  Perhaps it has already arrived.

    “…The Economic Policy Institute recently reviewed dozens of studies of what constitutes a ‘living wage’ and came up with an average figure of $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, which amounts to a wage of $14 an hour. This is not the very minimum such a family could live on; the budget includes health insurance, a telephone, and child care at a licensed center, for example, which are well beyond the reach of millions. But it does not include restaurant meals, video rentals, Internet access, wine and liquor, cigarettes and lottery tickets, or even very much meat. The shocking thing is that the majority of American workers, about 60 percent, earn less than $14 an hour. Many of them get by by teaming up with another wage earner, a spouse or grown child. Some draw on government help in the form of food stamps, housing vouchers, the earned income tax credit, or – for those coming off welfare in relatively generous states – subsidized child care. But others – single mothers for example – have nothing but their own wages to live on, no matter how many mouths there are to feed.”

p. 213

    “Forty years ago the hot journalistic topic was the ‘discovery of the poor’ in their inner-city and Appalachian ‘pockets of poverty.’ Today you are more likely to find commentary on their ‘disappearance,’ either in a supposed demographic reality or as a shortcoming of the middle-class imagination.”
    “…the particular political moment favors what almost looks like a ‘conspiracy of silence’ on the subject of poverty and the poor. The Democrats are not eager to find flaws in the period of ‘unprecedented prosperity’ they take credit for; the Republicans have lost interest in the poor now that ‘welfare-as-we-know-it’ has ended. Welfare reform is a factor weighing against any close investigation of the conditions of the poor. Both parties heartily endorsed it, and to acknowledge that low-wage work doesn’t lift people out of poverty would be to admit that it may have been, in human terms, a catastrophic mistake. In fact, very little is known about the fate of former welfare recipients because the 1996 welfare reform legislation blithely failed to include any provision for monitoring their postwelfare economic condition. Media accounts persistently bright-side the situation, highlighting the occasional success stories and downplaying the acknowledged increase in hunger….”
    “You would have to read a great many newspapers very carefully, cover to cover, to see the signs of distress. You would find, for example, that in 1999 Massachusetts food pantries reported a 72 percent increase in the demand for their services over the previous year, that Texas food banks were ‘scrounging’ for food, despite donations at or above 1998 levels, as were those in Atlanta. You might learn that in San Diego the Catholic Church could no longer, as of January 2000, accept homeless families at its shelter, which happens to be the city’s largest, because it was already operating at twice its normal capacity. You would come across news of a study showing that the percentage of Wisconsin food-stamp families in ‘extreme poverty’ – defined as less than 50 percent of the federal poverty line – has tripled in the last decade to more than 30 percent. You might discover that, nationwide, America’s food banks are experiencing ‘a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet’ and that, according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs.”

pp. 216-219

    “When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view them with a certain impatience, if not disgust. The welfare poor were excoriated for their laziness, their persistence in reproducing in unfavorable circumstances, their presumed addictions, and above all for their ‘dependency.’ Here they were, content to live off ‘government handouts’ instead of seeking ‘self-sufficiency,’ like everyone else, through a job. They needed to get their act together, learn how to wind an alarm clock, get out there and get to work. But now that government has largely withdrawn its ‘handouts,’ now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy’s – well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?”
    “Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame – shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else...”

pp. 220-221

"There ain't no life nowhere."

Edit:  I've been reading Nickle and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich.  Don't read it unless you want to become profoundly depressed.  Unless, of course, you've already "got yours" and don't give a damn about anyone else.  In which case you won't be reading it anyway.

This article will appear in the March 6, 2006 issue of "The Nation" magazine.

This column will be my last "Letter From Ground Zero." The series will be succeeded by another, "Crisis of the Republic." Until recently it seemed possible to trace the main developments in the Bush administration's policies back to that horrible, fantastical day in September 2001, as if following an unbroken chain of causes and effects. Now it no longer does. The chain is too entangled with other chains, of newer and older origin.

The war against Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his headquarters and support from the ruling Taliban, was, for better or worse, a clear response to the attack on the United States. The Patriot Act and the reorganization of the national security apparatus likewise were responses to September 11. But with the launch of the Iraq War, the subject was already beginning to change. The political support for the war still flowed from 9/11, but the administration was already veering toward other objectives. For one thing, we know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others had wanted to attack Iraq since their first days in office, and, for that matter, even before. For another, the war proved to be a kind of test case of a far more sweeping revolution in American foreign policy, soon outlined in the White House document of 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, which set forth American ambitions for nothing less than global hegemony based on military superiority, absolute and perpetual, over all other nations. Many friends of this policy frankly and rightly called it imperial.

The Iraq test case has failed; in doing so it has tied down forces that otherwise might have been given further aggressive missions. The imperial plan stalled -- as the nuclearization of North Korea without an effective American response, among other things, attests. Nevertheless, the administration's international ambitions had a scarcely less sweeping domestic corollary, for which no master strategic document was supplied: a profound transformation of the American state, in which, in the name of the "war on terror," the President rises above the law and the Republican Party permanently dominates all three branches of government. That project had even less to do with 9/11 than did the Iraq War. Its roots can be traced at least as far back as the election of 2000, when the Supreme Court improperly interjected itself into the electoral dispute in Florida and a majority consisting of Republican-appointed Justices awarded the presidency to the man of their own party. Or perhaps we need to look back even further, to the attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to knock a Democratic President out of office by impeaching him for personal misbehavior accompanied by a minor legal infraction. (If those standards were still in force, President Bush would have been impeached eleven times over by now.) Obviously, these events had nothing to do with 9/11 or the Iraq War. Their roots are older and deeper. To arrange all the new developments, domestic and international, under the heading "Letter From Ground Zero," as if it all began with Osama bin Laden, would therefore be misleading. It would be a kind of lie.

For the series' new title, I want to acknowledge a debt to Hannah Arendt, who in 1972 published a book of essays titled Crises of the Republic. My single-letter change in her title reflects a belief that today the many disparate crises of the past have combined into one general systemic crisis, placing the basic structure of the Republic at mortal risk. At the forefront of concern must be the question: Will the Constitution of the United States survive? Is the American state now in the midst of a transmutation in which the 217-year-old provisions for a balance of powers and popular freedoms are being overridden and canceled? Or will defenders of the Constitution step forward, as has happened in constitutional crises of the past, to save the system and restore its integrity?

The obvious precedent is Watergate. Then as now, the presidency became "imperial." Then as now, a misconceived and misbegotten war led to presidential law-breaking at home. Then as now, a quixotic crusade for freedom abroad really menaced freedom at home. Then as now, the law-breaking President was re-elected to a second term. Then as now, the systemic rot went so deep that only a drastic cure could be effectual. Then as now, opposition at the outset consisted not of any great public outrage but the lonely courage of a few bureaucrats, legislators, and reporters. Then it was the war in Vietnam; now it is the war in Iraq and the wider and more lasting "war on terror." Then it was secret break-ins and illegal wiretapping; now it is arbitrary imprisonment, torture and, again, illegal wiretapping. Then it was presidential assertion of "executive privilege"; now it is a full-scale reinterpretation of the Constitution to give the "unitary executive" power to do anything it likes in "wartime."

Of course, there are obvious differences. In the early 1970s, the opposition party controlled both houses of the legislature, which launched vigorous investigations and, eventually, impeachment proceedings. Now of course the President's party controls the legislative branch and possibly (it's still too early to say, given the traditional independence of the judiciary and its consequent unpredictability) the judicial branch as well. Then, the movement against the war had forced a decision to withdraw; now the anti-war movement is much weaker. On the other hand, when the crisis began back then, the President's popularity was high; now it is low.

Yet what remains most striking and most surprising is the degree of continuity of the systemic disorder in the face of radical, galloping change in almost every other area of political life. After all, the cold war, which seemed at the time to be the seedbed of the Watergate crisis, ended sixteen years ago, in the greatest upheaval of the international system since the end of World War II. How is it, then, that the United States has returned to a systemic crisis so profoundly similar to the one in the early 1970s? By looking at external foes, are we looking in the wrong place for the origins of the illness? Is this transformation what a more "conservative" public now wants? Or is there instead something in the dominant institutions of American life that push the country in this direction? Those are some of the questions that will be taken up in "Crisis of the Republic."

Jonathan Schell is The Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. He is the author of "The Unconquerable World" among many other books.

This article will appear in the March 6, 2006 issue of "The Nation" magazine.

The latest round of culture wars does neither side any good. The western civilisational fundamentalists insist on seeing Muslims as the other - different, alien and morally evil. Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons in bad faith. Their aim was not to engage in debate but to provoke, and they succeeded. The same newspaper declined to print caricatures of Jesus. I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the "religious pain" that is felt by believers of every cast when what they believe in is insulted. I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis.

But the cartoon depicting Muhammad as a terrorist is a crude racist stereotype. The implication is that every Muslim is a potential terrorist. This is the sort of nonsense that leads to Islamophobia.

Muslims have every right to protest, but the overreaction was unnecessary. In reality, the number of original demonstrators was tiny: 300 in Pakistan, 400 in Indonesia, 200 in Tripoli, a few hundred in Britain (before Saturday's bigger reconciliation march), and government-organised hoodlums in Damascus burning an embassy. Beirut was a bit larger. Why blow this up and pretend that the protests had entered the subsoil of spontaneous mass anger? They certainly haven't anywhere in the Muslim world, though the European media has been busy fertilising the widespread ignorance that exists in this continent.

How many citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by recognising no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes." Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the media.

What I find interesting is that these demonstrations and embassy-burnings are a response to a tasteless cartoon. Did the Danish imam who travelled round the Muslim world pleading for this show the same anger at Danish troops being sent to Iraq? The occupation of Iraq has costs tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Where is the response to that or the tortures in Abu Ghraib? Or the rapes of Iraqi women by occupying soldiers? Where is the response to the daily deaths of Palestinians? These are the issues that anger me. Last year Afghans protested after a US marine in Guantánamo had urinated on the Qur'an. It was a vile act and there was an official inquiry. The marine in question explained that he had been urinating on a prisoner and a few drops had fallen accidentally on the Qur'an - as if pissing on a prisoner (an old imperial habit) was somehow more acceptable.

Yesterday, footage of British soldiers brutalising and abusing civilians in Iraq - beating teenagers with batons until they pass out, posing for the camera as they kick corpses - was made public. No one can seriously imagine these are the isolated incidents the Ministry of Defence claims; they are of course the norm under colonial occupations. Who will protest now - the media pundits defending the Enlightenment or Muslim clerics frothing over the cartoons?

It's strange that the Danish imams and their friends abroad ignore the real tragedy and instead ensure that the cartoons are now being reprinted everywhere. How will it end? Like all these things do, with no gains on either side and a last tango in Copenhagen around a mountain of unused butter. Meanwhile, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine the occupations continue.

Tariq Ali is the author of Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Email: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com

On a lighter and certainly less political note than the last entry, I always enjoy the following, which happens each year.   However, I think these entries are for the most part quite clever, written by GOOD and talented writers rather than bad writers.  Some of them look vaguely familiar, as if I've seen them before.  Anyway, for those of you who haven't already come across this, enjoy.

**********

EDIT:  In the interest of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting - my own integrity, as it were - I feel constrained to post a rebuttal to the statistics below, found at snopes.com and submitted privately by a loyal reader of my blog who chooses, as a general rule, to remain silent and anonymous.  Snopes.com is a good source of information on "facts" that are suspected of being an "urban legend".  For some reason I didn't suspect the information below of falling into that category, and will no doubt continue to believe that the corruption occasionally exposed in our politicicans and corporate executives is only the tip of the iceberg.  I'm sure I'll keep knowing, in my heart of hearts, that the Bush administration is one of the worst in American history.  Nevertheless the question of how to discern the "truth" of what we read on the internet is once again raised.  Maybe I'll just start blogging about my own life, and leave politics and religion to the "experts".

At any rate, here is what snopes.com has to say:

[Collected on the Internet, 2001]

**********

I'm sure many of you have seen this before. So have I, but it's always sobering. And statistics like these leave me very conflicted, as I'm sure we'll discuss in the Comments.

NBA or NFL?????

36 have been accused of spousal abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

19 have been accused of writing bad checks

117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3 have done time for assault

71, repeat, 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 currently are defendants in lawsuits, and

84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?

Give up yet? . . . Scroll down, citizen!

It's the 535 members of the United States Congress. The same group of idiots that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line.