Year: 2006

Military Refuses to Show Documentary on Vets’ Crises after Service

Jon Ponder
An Army spokeswoman replied: “First of all, I actually only know one place they went to, and that was West Point. … This is more of an activist piece than a documentary,” she said. “If you look at ‘The Ground Truth,’ it has a definite point of view. We don’t say, ‘Don’t go see it,’ but we don’t see why we should promote it.

In the Bush era, when the military censors a documentary about the crisis faced by veterans returning from war, it’s treated as a gossip item in the New York Daily News:

Cher had 5,000 DVDs of “The Ground Truth: After the Killings” made, but unless American soldiers are on her mailing list, they’re not getting to see it.

Army, Navy and Marine Corps base officers have refused to show the documentary, about difficulties Iraq War vets have after they return home, according to director Patricia Foulkrod.

“It’s hard for them to reconnect to their families,” Foulkrod told us. “They’ve been in a very dramatic situation. The adjustment is so difficult. They come back and are offered only minimum wage. We spent so much money on the war, the government didn’t really set aside the proper money to take care of these guys when they get back.”

During one phone pitch to a Colorado base, a commanding officer told a Focus Features distribution exec that the content of the film was “inappropriate” and would be “detrimental” to the servicemen and their families.

Actresses Olivia Wilde (“The O.C.”) and Susan Sarandon are also trying to get the word out. “I understand why the Armed Forces would be afraid to show this film because it shows the huge gap in recognizing and providing help for returning soldiers’ psychological and physical needs,” Sarandon told us.

An Army spokeswoman replied: “First of all, I actually only know one place they went to, and that was West Point. … This is more of an activist piece than a documentary,” she said. “If you look at ‘The Ground Truth,’ it has a definite point of view. We don’t say, ‘Don’t go see it,’ but we don’t see why we should promote it.

“We don’t get too many requests on documentaries,” she said. “It’s usually more things with entertainment value, people saying we’d like to do something nice for the troops – like the movie ‘Sahara.'”

Thanks, Rush & Malloy — doing your bit for the military-industrial complex!

Meyer: Gingrich & House Leaders Are a ‘Group of Weirdos’

Jon Ponder

Every now and then a member of the Gang of 500 wakes up and smells the rancid coffee at GOP HQ. Last week it was Dick Meyer, writing for CBS Online:

Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of ’94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime.

This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the “Contract with America” Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.

Really, it’s just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn’t call a duck a duck, because that’s not something we’re supposed to do…

Unless the subject is the the Clintons, of course.

The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government.

Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace.

Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of ’94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime.More than the others, Newton Leroy Gingrich lived out a very special hypocrisy. In addition to the above biographical dissonance, Gingrich was one of the most sharp-tongued, articulate and persuasive attack dogs in modern politics. His favorite target was the supposed immorality and corruption of the Democratic Party. With soaring rhetoric, he condemned his opponents as anti-American and dangerous to our country’s family values — “grotesque” was a favorite word.

Yet this was a man who was divorced twice — the first time when his wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment, the second time after an affair was revealed.

Gingrich made his bones in the party by relentlessly attacking Democratic corruption, yet he was hounded from office because of a series of serious ethics questions. He posed as a reformer of the House, yet championed a series of deforms that made the legislative process more closed, more conducive to hiding special interest favors and less a forum for genuine debate.

And he did it all with epic sanctimony.

As it happens, a lot of us didn’t have to be in the presence of these guys to figure this shit out. Still, it would have been nice if someone like Dick Meyer had offered this sort of analysis contemporaneously. It’s nice that he apologized but I hope he’ll promise not to wait 12 years to mention it the next time he sees another bunch of weirdos running the country.

Rightwing Rats Desert USS Bush

Jon Ponder

Cold comfort: The list of Pres. Bush’s former supporters grows longer every day. Now even Ken “Cakewalk” Adelman — a loud and agressive cheerleader for the war — has changed his tune:

The weekend after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, Kenneth Adelman and a couple of other promoters of the Iraq war gathered at Vice President Cheney’s residence to celebrate. The invasion had been the “cakewalk” Adelman predicted. Cheney and his guests raised their glasses, toasting President Bush and victory. “It was a euphoric moment,” Adelman recalled.

Forty-three months later, the cakewalk looks more like a death march, and Adelman has broken with the Bush team. He had an angry falling-out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this fall. He and Cheney are no longer on speaking terms. And he believes that “the president is ultimately responsible” for what Adelman now calls “the debacle that was Iraq.”

…”There are a lot of lives that are lost,” Adelman said in an interview last week. “A country’s at stake. A region’s at stake. This is a gigantic situation. . . . This didn’t have to be managed this bad. It’s just awful.”

Next up, every Democrats’ favorite 2008 GOP presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich:

“People expect a level of performance they are not getting,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in a speech.

The conservatives are collapsing under the weight of their immense self-deceptions. We should be swimming in schadenfreude, if only the trap they’ve gotten us into weren’t so damn serious.

Bush Eliminates Hunger. The Word, That Is

Trish

The Bush administration has eliminated hunger in America, and it was much easier than anyone suspected. They have simply quit using the word.

Yes, the folks who brought you “faith-based initiatives” instead of “lack of separation of church and state,” and “healthy forests” instead of “clear-cutting” are proud to present, “very low food security” instead of “hunger.”

Eliminating hunger was much easier than anyone suspected

…in Chicago, at the Holy Family Food Pantry, the people lining up for assistance know exactly what hunger means.

“I’m running out of food, so I got to find somewhere to get some food,” Terry Sutton said.

But according to the new government report, that doesn’t necessarily make him hungry.

Sutton and others like him have “very low food security.”

“When they hear ‘very low food security’ it sounds like bureaucratic jargon. It doesn’t sound like people who can’t get enough to eat,” said Deborah Leff of the Public Welfare Foundation.

Some say that may be just the point.

We can expect Rush Limbaugh to chime in any time with a screed about fat poor people and how they’re all just faking it.

Meanwhile, groups like USA Harvest pick up the Bush administration’s slack by fighting hunger all over this country and Canada, including Houston, where, over one year later, many of the people displaced by Hurricane Katrina still live. A study conducted in September showed them not doing very well.

While about 60 percent of the evacuees surveyed had been employed in New Orleans before Katrina, a little more than 60 percent are now unemployed. Almost 74 percent have an annual income of less than $15,000, and almost 17 percent have an income of between $15,000 and $25,000.

Guess we ought to do something about that. Maybe we should call them “geographically shifted people of newfound leisure” instead.

Foley Is Back But Where Is His Gaggle?

Jon Ponder

Mark Foley is out of rehab and back in Florida where he attended the funeral of his father. His email contacts with teenaged boys are finally being scrutinized by law enforcement.

Even Mr. Foley must be disappointed to be yesterday’s news so soon.

You wouldn’t necessarily know this from watching cable news, however. Mr. Foley’s re-entry has been relegated to “other news,” at the same time that MSNBC is giving us live shots of a brick wall — the back of the building in Italy where Tom and Katie are to be married today. (The lead story is President Bush’s visit to Asia, where we are all anxiously waiting to see if he will follow in his old man’s shoes and vomit at a state dinner.)

Why wasn’t an angry-looking media gaggle there trampling the lawn in Tucson, shouting questions at Mr. Foley as he skulked out of rehab in a baseball cap? Has Old Media given Mr. Foley a pass out of deference to the death of his father?

Does that sound like them?

What has happened here? Where are the cameras that staked out the comings and goings of former Rep. Gary Condit, Scooter Libby, the Enron gang, Elia Gonzalez, Monica Lewinsky and other scandal figures?

Granted, no one has been killed and no stained GAP clothing has popped up in the Foley scandal — but how did it become a non-story so quickly? Just a few weeks ago, Mr. Foley was a major player in the self-destruction of the Republican Congress and the poster boy of GOP sexual hypocrisy. His party leaders almost undoubtedly knew about his fetish for chicken and covered it up. Investigations are ongoing, and the careers of former Speaker Hastert and other former and current Republican bigwigs could hang in the balance.

Even Mr. Foley must be disappointed to be yesterday’s news so soon.

The media gaggles of yore may have been rude, aggressive and unpleasant but, ugly as they were, at least they were doing their jobs.

Bad Week for Mark Foley: Dad Dies, Criminal Probe Announced

Trish

Paging Mark Foley. At last Jon has an answer to his question. He’s been wondering about the whereabouts of the missing former Florida Congressman, who checked into rehab and hasn’t been heard from since.

Turns out his dad died of cancer on Tuesday and Mark did show up for the funeral.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has opened an investigation into whether former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley broke any criminal laws with sexually explicit computer messages he sent to former male teenage pages

Edward J. Foley Jr., a former teacher and high school principal and father of former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, died Tuesday.

Mr. Foley, of Ocean Ridge, had been ill with cancer since 2003. His daughter, Donna Foley Winterson, notified The Palm Beach Post of her father’s death.

…A proud Irish-American who loved to tell stories, preside over family gatherings and play golf, Mr. Foley believed in his family, his church and his community.

Mr. Foley, a native of Newton, Mass., moved to Florida in 1958 after living briefly in Arizona. He came here with his wife, Frances, whom he met in Catholic school. They were married 62 years.

But that wasn’t the only bad news for Mark this week.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has opened an investigation into whether former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley broke any criminal laws with sexually explicit computer messages he sent to former male teenage pages on Capitol Hill.

“It was a preliminary inquiry before, but we found the basis to open up a criminal investigation,” Kristen Perezluha, an FDLE spokeswoman, said Thursday. She did not elaborate. The FBI is also investigating Foley.

…Meanwhile, Foley has returned to Florida to attend his father’s funeral after spending more than a month in an Arizona rehabilitation facility for alcoholism, said his attorney, David Roth.

Wonder what the deal with Arizona is? His parents lived there and he went there for rehab. And let’s not forget John McCain.

Anyway, Mark’s been on a bit of a downward cycle lately. If you didn’t really mind people who can’t accept themselves and try to deny who they are and demonize others just like them, you’d almost feel sorry for him. Or not.

Wingnut Viguerie Calls Republicans Insane

Buck Banks

Right is as right does: One of my favorite crackpot right-wingers, Richard Viguerie, who thinks Barry Goldwater was almost conservative enough, has issued a broadside maligning the Republican “leadership” on Capitol Hill. Under the headline, “GOP Definition of Insanity — Keep the Same Leaders and Expect Different Results,” he writes:

House Republicans have decided to reward failure.

Republicans are like the Biblical Jews who had to wander through the desert for 40 years until that generation of corrupt and immoral leaders had passed from the scene.

Republicans are like the Biblical Jews who had to wander through the desert for 40 years until that generation of corrupt and immoral leaders had passed from the scene.

And Republicans are not going to get to the political Promised Land until they get new leaders who are principled conservatives.

President Bush and congressional Republican leaders in recent years seemed to have adopted a one-word strategy for governing — BRIBERY.

In essence they’ve said to the voters — we’ve got money, you’ve got votes — let’s talk.

But the House Republicans who today selected John Boehner and Roy Blunt as their leaders clearly haven’t gotten the message that the voters sent them November 7: We will not reward Republicans who engage in bribery, expand government and ignore social issues.

Boehner and Blunt’s close ties to big government lobbyists indicates that the Republican Party will continue to represent Corporate America over the interests of Main Street America.

As television psychologist Dr. Phil would say, How’s that working for you, Republicans?

Much as I think Viguerie is as full of it as a port-o-potty at a chili cook-off, I kind of agree with him, though not for the same reasons. Viguerie’s view is that real conservatives — as opposed to Bushco’s neocon lites — would bring back Christian values and disciplined principles to the political process.

To me, it’s about losing losers lost in la-la land. I mean, here are the Repugs, less than a fortnight after getting soundly trounced in the midterms, putting into place the same old leaders who lost the House and Senate. Trent Lott’s “rehabilitation” is a prime example that the elephant party plans to stick with what doesn’t work, and public opinion be damned. If they can just keep that up for the next couple of years ….