Outlook is for war, then more war
By Mike Carlton
November 27, 2004
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
So wrote H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), the acerbic American journalist and critic rightly known in his day as the Sage of Baltimore. I thank the Herald reader who reminded me of the quote for, with the re-election of George Bush, we can safely assume that Mencken's great and glorious day has arrived. In spades.
The moron and his svengali, the Vice-President Dick Cheney - their majority assured in this last term - are now marching towards the precipice of the lunar right. The imminent departure from the State Department of Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, will remove the last counsels of moderation from the conduct of American foreign and defence policy.
Powell's successor, the ghastly Condoleezza Rice, will be telling Bush only what he wants to hear, just as Donald Rumsfeld does from the Pentagon, which is that the US is locked in a struggle between good and evil which can be won only by fire and sword and, when that doesn't work in a hurry, by more fire and more sword.
Much the same noises will be coming from the CIA, where the White House has installed a hit man to purge the agency of its wimpy small-l liberals, thus ensuring Bush and Cheney get only the intelligence they want to hear. It is a sure-fire formula for more of the catastrophic events we have seen in Iraq.
This month Michael Scheuer, a CIA veteran of 22 years and the former head of the agency's secret unit for tracking Osama bin Laden, resigned in frustrated rage at the incompetence of the Bush Administration.
In a book titled Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, Scheuer argues the switch from the hunt for bin Laden to fighting the Iraq war has inflamed the Islamic world against the US.
He fears that, rightly or wrongly, 1.3 billion Muslims now view the US as a colonial power waging war on Islam with Israel as America's surrogate. The Israeli tail wags the American dog. This, he says, will create a growing hatred that will yield growing violence.
Most dismal of all, Scheuer sees no end in sight. "There's no way out of this war at the moment," he told the CBS 60 Minutes program. "It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war."
Indeed. This is where the faith-based Bushies are leading us, with all their moralising claptrap about the dawn of democracy and freedom in the Middle East.
Which neatly takes us to another aphorism from Henry Louis Mencken: "To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason."
ON THURSDAY a woman rang me on air on 2UE, choking back tears. Her name was Gail. She was waiting in a hospital for her husband to emerge from radiation therapy for the asbestos cancer, mesothelioma, which has destroyed his left lung and threatens to take his life.
He had begun work as a roofer at 16, she said, cutting asbestos sheeting. Now 52 - it had been his birthday the day before - he was the wreck of a man. That morning, as they were leaving for the hospital, they had heard on the radio that the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation, which manages payouts to asbestos victims, would be applying for voluntary liquidation. There might be no money left for the two of them.
I cannot remember taking a more wretched call. Gail was in the pits of despair. I could do nothing but lend her an ear, offering what meaningless comfort I could muster.
So let us cut to the chase. The root cause of Gail's misery is James Hardie, the company which made the lethal asbestos products that have devastated, and will continue to devastate, thousands of families like hers.
Hardie's brutal refusal to meet its financial and moral responsibilities to its victims is an outrage, perhaps the greatest in our corporate history.
Each month this disgusting outfit seems to come up with a new and more devious stratagem for getting out from under, all smothered in banal public relations blather. In the latest, from its bolt-hole in the Netherlands, James Hardie set up a shell company in Australia, ABN 60, to deposit $31 million in the compensation fund. That is $31 million against estimated current and future liabilities of $1.5 billion or more.
And even with that derisory pittance there are strings attached. Strings like wire hawsers. Dennis Cooper, the managing director of the compensation fund, says the money cannot be accepted because it would commit the fund to take no further legal action against James Hardie.
"Taking that decision could deprive us of funds and could deprive victims of long-term moneys," he told me. So provisional liquidation it is.
Let us hope there is a corner of hell reserved for James Hardie's board of directors. Asbestos-lined.
Some were not amused
Satire provokes extraordinary responses. Last week's column, all of it satire, drew praise, scorn and fury.
The praise was nice, outweighing the rest, although even I modestly thought that one reader went over the top and out of sight by putting me up there with the founding genius of the genre, Jonathan Swift. But thank you, anyway.
The scorn I can live with. It was along the lines of "not funny ... pathetic ... time you retired", etc. Nothing much I can do about that. If you don't think it works then you don't think it works.
The fury was astounding but rewarding in that it suggested I'd hit a few targets bang on. One seething reader thought it racist to makes jokes about Condoleezza Rice. I would have thought it racist not to make jokes about her, but however.
And in an apoplectic email splattered with obscenities, a lunatic informed me that "Yasser Arafat (pedophile, sodomist, mass-murderer and terrorist)" had died of AIDS.
But "the wheel is turning", he warned me. "And sooner or later (hopefully sooner) it's going to grind you and your kind into meaningless slime."
Deary me. This sort of hysteria is stoked by the majority ratbags of the right in the media who, while complaining loudly that they can never get a word in edgeways, are bent upon silencing any dissent from their strutting world view. This is understandable: to the victor, the spoils. But you have got to acknowledge that Joseph Goebbels took much the same view.
On which note I finish for 2004. A Happy Christmas and New Year to you.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/26/1101219747007.html?oneclick=true#
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By Mike Carlton
November 27, 2004
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
So wrote H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), the acerbic American journalist and critic rightly known in his day as the Sage of Baltimore. I thank the Herald reader who reminded me of the quote for, with the re-election of George Bush, we can safely assume that Mencken's great and glorious day has arrived. In spades.
The moron and his svengali, the Vice-President Dick Cheney - their majority assured in this last term - are now marching towards the precipice of the lunar right. The imminent departure from the State Department of Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, will remove the last counsels of moderation from the conduct of American foreign and defence policy.
Powell's successor, the ghastly Condoleezza Rice, will be telling Bush only what he wants to hear, just as Donald Rumsfeld does from the Pentagon, which is that the US is locked in a struggle between good and evil which can be won only by fire and sword and, when that doesn't work in a hurry, by more fire and more sword.
Much the same noises will be coming from the CIA, where the White House has installed a hit man to purge the agency of its wimpy small-l liberals, thus ensuring Bush and Cheney get only the intelligence they want to hear. It is a sure-fire formula for more of the catastrophic events we have seen in Iraq.
This month Michael Scheuer, a CIA veteran of 22 years and the former head of the agency's secret unit for tracking Osama bin Laden, resigned in frustrated rage at the incompetence of the Bush Administration.
In a book titled Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, Scheuer argues the switch from the hunt for bin Laden to fighting the Iraq war has inflamed the Islamic world against the US.
He fears that, rightly or wrongly, 1.3 billion Muslims now view the US as a colonial power waging war on Islam with Israel as America's surrogate. The Israeli tail wags the American dog. This, he says, will create a growing hatred that will yield growing violence.
Most dismal of all, Scheuer sees no end in sight. "There's no way out of this war at the moment," he told the CBS 60 Minutes program. "It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war."
Indeed. This is where the faith-based Bushies are leading us, with all their moralising claptrap about the dawn of democracy and freedom in the Middle East.
Which neatly takes us to another aphorism from Henry Louis Mencken: "To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason."
ON THURSDAY a woman rang me on air on 2UE, choking back tears. Her name was Gail. She was waiting in a hospital for her husband to emerge from radiation therapy for the asbestos cancer, mesothelioma, which has destroyed his left lung and threatens to take his life.
He had begun work as a roofer at 16, she said, cutting asbestos sheeting. Now 52 - it had been his birthday the day before - he was the wreck of a man. That morning, as they were leaving for the hospital, they had heard on the radio that the Medical Research and Compensation Foundation, which manages payouts to asbestos victims, would be applying for voluntary liquidation. There might be no money left for the two of them.
I cannot remember taking a more wretched call. Gail was in the pits of despair. I could do nothing but lend her an ear, offering what meaningless comfort I could muster.
So let us cut to the chase. The root cause of Gail's misery is James Hardie, the company which made the lethal asbestos products that have devastated, and will continue to devastate, thousands of families like hers.
Hardie's brutal refusal to meet its financial and moral responsibilities to its victims is an outrage, perhaps the greatest in our corporate history.
Each month this disgusting outfit seems to come up with a new and more devious stratagem for getting out from under, all smothered in banal public relations blather. In the latest, from its bolt-hole in the Netherlands, James Hardie set up a shell company in Australia, ABN 60, to deposit $31 million in the compensation fund. That is $31 million against estimated current and future liabilities of $1.5 billion or more.
And even with that derisory pittance there are strings attached. Strings like wire hawsers. Dennis Cooper, the managing director of the compensation fund, says the money cannot be accepted because it would commit the fund to take no further legal action against James Hardie.
"Taking that decision could deprive us of funds and could deprive victims of long-term moneys," he told me. So provisional liquidation it is.
Let us hope there is a corner of hell reserved for James Hardie's board of directors. Asbestos-lined.
Some were not amused
Satire provokes extraordinary responses. Last week's column, all of it satire, drew praise, scorn and fury.
The praise was nice, outweighing the rest, although even I modestly thought that one reader went over the top and out of sight by putting me up there with the founding genius of the genre, Jonathan Swift. But thank you, anyway.
The scorn I can live with. It was along the lines of "not funny ... pathetic ... time you retired", etc. Nothing much I can do about that. If you don't think it works then you don't think it works.
The fury was astounding but rewarding in that it suggested I'd hit a few targets bang on. One seething reader thought it racist to makes jokes about Condoleezza Rice. I would have thought it racist not to make jokes about her, but however.
And in an apoplectic email splattered with obscenities, a lunatic informed me that "Yasser Arafat (pedophile, sodomist, mass-murderer and terrorist)" had died of AIDS.
But "the wheel is turning", he warned me. "And sooner or later (hopefully sooner) it's going to grind you and your kind into meaningless slime."
Deary me. This sort of hysteria is stoked by the majority ratbags of the right in the media who, while complaining loudly that they can never get a word in edgeways, are bent upon silencing any dissent from their strutting world view. This is understandable: to the victor, the spoils. But you have got to acknowledge that Joseph Goebbels took much the same view.
On which note I finish for 2004. A Happy Christmas and New Year to you.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/11/26/1101219747007.html?oneclick=true#
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