Jan 2007- Resurrected blog entries

by Robert ScheerOriginally posted at Truthdig.com

Not all lies are created equal. It is understood that there is a chasm of importance between little white lies and big black ones. Most would agree that lying about a consensual sexual affair, even by the president, is of significantly lesser concern than lying about the proliferation of nuclear weapons as an excuse to take the nation to war.

How then is it possible that a Republican-controlled Congress impeached President Bill Clinton over his attempt to conceal marital infidelity but that a Democratic-led Congress will not even consider impeaching this president for far more serious transgressions against the public trust? That is the question that arises from early revelations in the trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

This case’s importance lies not in the narrow charge that Libby committed perjury in testifying about his role in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Wilson; that was merely one facet of a far-ranging plot to deceive Congress and the public about perhaps the most important issue of our time: the prospect of terrorists obtaining a weapon of mass destruction.

The infamous 16-word State of the Union claim by President Bush that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain enriched uranium from the African country of Niger was known to be based on fraudulent documents at the time Bush used this and other false evidence to make his case for war.

The Libby case testimony, centered on the chicanery of the vice president, certainly suggests that impeachable offenses occurred at the highest level of the White House. Just how conscious the president was of the deceits conducted under his authority, what he knew and when he knew it, is precisely what an impeachment trial would determine.

Consider the testimony concerning White House use of former CIA Director George Tenet in the cover-up of the president’s distortions. The record is unmistakably clear that the CIA and other intelligence sources warned the White House before the president’s speech not to make the bogus Niger claim, and that the reference had been voided out in a previous speech. Yet, after Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed this fact more than a year after the invasion, Cheney orchestrated a new deception to shift the blame to Tenet.

That is the smoking-gun revelation in the testimony of Cheney’s former spokeswoman, Cathie Martin, a Harvard-educated lawyer who still works in the White House. Her word is that of a sophisticated and top-level White House insider and, as described by the Washington Post, one that offers a devastating glimpse into the moral depravity of this administration:

“At length, Martin explained how she, Libby and Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley worked late into the night writing a statement to be issued by George Tenet in 2004 in which the CIA boss would take blame for the bogus claim in Bush’s State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Africa. After ‘delicate’ talks, Tenet agreed to say the CIA ‘approved’ the claim and ‘I am responsible’–but even that disappointed Martin, who had wanted Tenet to say that ‘we did not express any doubts about Niger.’ ” Tenet later was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Certainly this deliberate corruption of the integrity of the CIA, the nation’s premier source of national security information, rises to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” which the Constitution holds out as the standard for impeachment. And can there be any more egregious example of betraying the oath of office of the president to uphold the Constitution than his deceiving Congress from the very well of the House on the reasons for going to war? The Constitution clearly delegates to Congress, and not to the president, the exclusive power to declare war, and deceiving our representatives in making the case for war is a far more important crime than the perjury charge against Libby.

Testimony already has established that Libby was nothing more than a pawn used by Cheney in the vice president’s constant and ferocious campaign to trick the nation into war–not a totally surprising quest for a man who had served as CEO for a corporation that has profited so obscenely from the Iraq agony.

Cheney, like some Daddy Warbucks cartoon character of old, has been so blatant in his corruption of the nation’s second highest office that we seem to have become inured to further revelations of his evil influence. Instead of being shocked, we are more likely jaded by even more examples of the man’s use of his office to persistently undermine our democratic heritage. Too bad he wasn’t cursed by an overactive libido.

Good article Marty, but tell us what you REALLY think! – wizzard

Marty Kaplan

“The system worked” is what so many of us breathed with relief when Nixon fled Washington in disgrace. No matter that it was Nixon’s own paranoia — in the form secret White House tape recordings — that did him in, not just the majesty of a Senate investigation; no matter that it took the luck of Barry Goldwater’s it’s-time-for-you-to-go statesmanship, and the offended ego of a Deep Throat, not just the splendor of the Fourth Estate, to get him to quit.

What we told ourselves was that the country escaped its worst constitutional crisis ever because the Constitution contained within itself the mechanisms needed to overcome catastrophe.

Looking at what’s happening in Washington today, I can’t help thinking that it’s time to revisit that awe. We treat the Constitution like fundamentalists treat the Bible; we treat the Founders like Deities; we hold an unshakable faith in the inherent perfection of our system, believing it no less exquisitely wrought than the finely balanced network of our veins and arteries, no less miraculous than the workings of our cells and organs. But cells can go screwy, and sometimes no immune system can save us from cancer. Genes can make mistakes, and sometimes no homeostatic mechanism, however ingenious its feedback loops, can restore our equilibrium. The Founders were awe-inspiring craftsmen, but they weren’t magicians, they weren’t prophets, and they weren’t gods. Is it so unreasonable to wonder whether the charter they wrote more than two centuries ago isn’t insurance enough against the madmen who now rule us?

Sure, it’s encouraging to see Congress rouse itself from its six-year slumber and begin to push back. But will it really change anything?

Bush is certifiably delusional, but impeachment is off the table, because Democrats can’t muster the kind of political will and outrage at a tragically misconceived war that Republicans could summon for a blowjob.

Cheney is an outlaw, a Rasputin, a tyrant, a liar, but there is no check to check him, no balance to balance him.

Throughout the executive branch, secrecy reigns, laws are violated, scholarly whackballs formulate doctrines like the “unitary executive,” but neither the courts nor the Congress have the cojones or the clout to intervene.

Citizen-statesmen were supposed to govern us. Farmer-legislators were supposed to lead us. Where are our wise men today? Colin Powell, instead of blowing the whistle, sulks in his tent; Rumsfeld rants on the moor; George Tenet takes a bullet for The Man and gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom; Condi Rice appears as oblivious of her humiliation as any of the pathetic victims on American Idol; Paul Wolfowitz, the stain of our neocon nightmare on his hands, plays not Lady Macbeth, but Mother Teresa.

Sweet reason, the faith of our rationalist Founders, has been supplanted by strategic pseudo-science. Contested facts are adjudicated not by evidence, but by polling, and by mud-wrestling. Swift Boating is the new epistemology. Propaganda — the breathtakingly big “big lie” — is triumphant, its practitioners on the federal payroll, but Washington’s courtier culture precludes calling a Goebbels a Goebbels. Though protected by the First Amendment, the media are less a Fourth Estate than a Fifth Column, a source of narcotizing infotainment. The Murdoch-Moonie axis has become the MSM.

George W. Bush, the oligarchs’ tax-cutting choice for the 2000 nomination, loses the election, but no Supreme Court rescues the nation. The largest transfer of wealth from the middle to the top in the history of the industrial world occurs, but the politico-media culture calls it sour grapes to recall the origin of that silent coup, and class warfare to assess its consequences.

The harpies of hate — the Coulters, the Limbaughs, the O’Reillys — spew bile, but the free marketplace of ideas beloved of Jefferson and Madison is incapable of marginalizing them, because Satan is vastly more entertaining than Socrates.

The Republican Party is the puppet of right-wing fundamentalists, witch-hunters, Armageddonists, Father Coughlins, Elmer Gantrys, Cotton Mathers, but no constitutional bar to established religion protects us from theocratic fascism.

A robust democracy depends on an educated citizenry, said the Founders, but the majority view that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 proves how effective a bulwark our educational system is, against the onslaught of relentless mendacity by our leaders.

I wonder what we will say, looking back at 2000-2008. “The system worked”? No matter what this Democratic Congress does, how can we call the generations of broken crockery these ideologues have bequeathed us a sign of a healthy system? However this war ends, how can we call its existence anything but a megalomaniacal abuse of power?

Whatever vermin the oversight committees at long last uncover; whatever the prosecutions and trials of apparachiks may finally reveal and punish; however historians diagnose our good-German complicity with demagogues, our Stockholm-syndrome affection for the bullies, our frog-in-a-warming-cauldron capacity for denial — no matter how we ultimately awaken from this madness, it will not be with the comfort that our Constitution alone was enough to prevent us from spending this long season in hell.

The second comment to this article says it for me: If this isn’t a metaphor for Bush’s entire presidency, I don’t know what is.” – wizzard

Contributed by Holly Bailey – Posted: January 30, 2007 2:10:10 PM

Does President Bush have it in for the press corps? Touring a Caterpillar factory in Peoria, Ill., the Commander in Chief got behind the wheel of a giant tractor and played chicken with a few wayward reporters. Wearing a pair of stylish safety glasses–at least more stylish than most safety glasses–Bush got a mini-tour of the factory before delivering remarks on the economy. “I would suggest moving back,” Bush said as he climbed into the cab of a massive D-10 tractor. “I’m about to crank this sucker up.” As the engine roared to life, White House staffers tried to steer the press corps to safety, but when the tractor lurched forward, they too were forced to scramble for safety.”Get out of the way!” a news photographer yelled. “I think he might run us over!” said another. White House aides tried to herd the reporters the right way without getting run over themselves. Even the Secret Service got involved, as one agent began yelling at reporters to get clear of the tractor. Watching the chaos below, Bush looked out the tractor’s window and laughed, steering the massive machine into the spot where most of the press corps had been positioned. The episode lasted about a minute, and Bush was still laughing when he pulled to a stop. He gave reporters a thumbs-up. “If you’ve never driven a D-10, it’s the coolest experience,” Bush said afterward. Yeah, almost as much fun as seeing your life flash before your eyes.

by Kathy FrestonPresident Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” With warnings about global warming reaching feverish levels, many are having second thoughts about all those cars. It seems they should instead be worrying about the chickens.

Last month, the United Nations published a report on livestock and the environment with a stunning conclusion: “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming.

That’s right, global warming. You’ve probably heard the story: emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are changing our climate, and scientists warn of more extreme weather, coastal flooding, spreading disease, and mass extinctions. It seems that when you step outside and wonder what happened to winter, you might want to think about what you had for dinner last night. The U.N. report says almost a fifth of global warming emissions come from livestock (i.e., those chickens Hoover was talking about, plus pigs, cattle, and others)–that’s more emissions than from all of the world’s transportation combined.

For a decade now, the image of Leonardo DiCaprio cruising in his hybrid Toyota Prius has defined the gold standard for environmentalism. These gas-sipping vehicles became a veritable symbol of the consumers’ power to strike a blow against global warming. Just think: a car that could cut your vehicle emissions in half – in a country responsible for 25% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Federal fuel economy standards languished in Congress, and average vehicle mileage dropped to its lowest level in decades, but the Prius showed people that another way is possible. Toyota could not import the cars fast enough to meet demand.

Last year researchers at the University of Chicago took the Prius down a peg when they turned their attention to another gas guzzling consumer purchase. They noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we’d need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels–and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide–as does a calorie of plant protein. The researchers found that, when it’s all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.

According to the UN report, it gets even worse when we include the vast quantities of land needed to give us our steak and pork chops. Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the total land surface of the planet. As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning the world’s forests. Today, 70% of former Amazon rainforest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as “sinks,” absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, and burning these forests releases all the stored carbon dioxide, quantities that exceed by far the fossil fuel emission of animal agriculture.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the real kicker comes when looking at gases besides carbon dioxide–gases like methane and nitrous oxide, enormously effective greenhouse gases with 23 and 296 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, respectively. If carbon dioxide is responsible for about one-half of human-related greenhouse gas warming since the industrial revolution, methane and nitrous oxide are responsible for another one-third. These super-strong gases come primarily from farmed animals’ digestive processes, and from their manure. In fact, while animal agriculture accounts for 9% of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37% of our methane, and a whopping 65% of our nitrous oxide.

It’s a little hard to take in when thinking of a small chick hatching from her fragile egg. How can an animal, so seemingly insignificant against the vastness of the earth, give off so much greenhouse gas as to change the global climate? The answer is in their sheer numbers. The United States alone slaughters more than 10 billion land animals every year, all to sustain a meat-ravenous culture that can barely conceive of a time not long ago when “a chicken in every pot” was considered a luxury. Land animals raised for food make up a staggering 20% of the entire land animal biomass of the earth. We are eating our planet to death.

What we’re seeing is just the beginning, too. Meat consumption has increased five-fold in the past fifty years, and is expected to double again in the next fifty.

It sounds like a lot of bad news, but in fact it’s quite the opposite. It means we have a powerful new weapon to use in addressing the most serious environmental crisis ever to face humanity. The Prius was an important step forward, but how often are people in the market for a new car? Now that we know a greener diet is even more effective than a greener car, we can make a difference at every single meal, simply by leaving the animals off of our plates. Who would have thought: what’s good for our health is also good for the health of the planet!

Going veg provides more bang for your buck than driving a Prius. Plus, that bang comes a lot faster. The Prius cuts emissions of carbon dioxide, which spreads its warming effect slowly over a century. A big chunk of the problem with farmed animals, on the other hand, is methane, a gas which cycles out of the atmosphere in just a decade. That means less meat consumption quickly translates into a cooler planet.

Not just a cooler planet, also a cleaner one. Animal agriculture accounts for most of the water consumed in this country, emits two-thirds of the world’s acid-rain-causing ammonia, and it the world’s largest source of water pollution–killing entire river and marine ecosystems, destroying coral reefs, and of course, making people sick. Try to imagine the prodigious volumes of manure churned out by modern American farms: 5 million tons a day, more than a hundred times that of the human population, and far more than our land can possibly absorb. The acres and acres of cesspools stretching over much of our countryside, polluting the air and contaminating our water, make the Exxon Valdez oil spill look minor in comparison. All of which we can fix surprisingly easily, just by putting down our chicken wings and reaching for a veggie burger.

Doing so has never been easier. Recent years have seen an explosion of environmentally-friendly vegetarian foods. Even chains like Ruby Tuesday, Johnny Rockets, and Burger King offer delicious veggie burgers and supermarket refrigerators are lined with heart-healthy creamy soymilk and tasty veggie deli slices. Vegetarian foods have become staples at environmental gatherings, and garnered celebrity advocates like Bill Maher, Alec Baldwin, Paul McCartney, and of course Leonardo DiCaprio. Just as the Prius showed us that we each have in our hands the power to make a difference against a problem that endangers the future of humanity, going vegetarian gives us a new way to dramatically reduce our dangerous emissions that is even more effective, easier to do, more accessible to everyone and certainly goes better with french fries.

Ever-rising temperatures, melting ice caps, spreading tropical diseases, stronger hurricanes… So, what are you do doing for dinner tonight? Check out www.VegCooking.com for great ideas, free recipes, meal plans, and more! Check out the environmental section of www.GoVeg.com for a lot more information about the harmful effect of meat-eating on the environment.

[I wasn’t a huge fan of Janis’ but this well written article does say a lot about what we have lost lately on TV talk shows. Or maybe it shows how much of an old fart I’m becoming.]by Danny Miller

Had she lived, today would’ve been Janet Joplin’s 64th birthday. Joplin died in 1970, three weeks after Jimi Hendrix and nine months before Jim Morrison. All three of these rock icons were 27 when they left the planet. What a waste.

I’ve recently been watching some of the old “Dick Cavett Shows” that are now available on DVD.

Cavett’s show ran on ABC from 1969 to 1975. He was known back then as the erudite alternative to Johnny Carson. Sure, he was a bit of a snob, but as a pre-teen snob myself back then, I enjoyed his intellectual banter. My friends and I used to count the number of times he worked German or French words into conversation, or how many times he mentioned his “close, personal friends” Woody Allen and Groucho Marx. Cavett always had an amazing assortment of guests, and he’d often convince people who never gave interviews to come on his show.

Among the guests he attracted were many of the major rock stars of the day. “I don’t know who said, ‘Dick would be great with rock people,’” Cavett remarked in a recent interview. “I would have asked ‘Why?’ if I had been there. The fact that I had all these people on still surprises me. For some reason, I was accepted by the rock folk. Maybe they understood that they and I were on the same side of the Richard Nixon question.”

The network censors were frequently on Cavett’s case, knowing his outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam, and they probably had fits every time a rock star appeared on the show. One classic moment that the censors missed was taped on August 19, 1969, just hours after the Woodstock music festival had ended. Cavett’s studio audience was made up of mostly young people who were on their way home from Woodstock and the show featured several acts from the festival who hadn’t even had time to clean themselves up. Joni Mitchell was there too. The woman who would write the song “Woodstock” had not attended the music festival even though she’d been invited to perform. The reason? Her manager thought it would be better for her career if she appeared on “The Dick Cavett Show.” Great manager. Following Mitchell, the Jefferson Airplane, still covered in Woodstock mud, performed an intense version of “We Can Be Together” and kept in the now famous line, “Up against the wall, motherfuckers!” The censors missed it but the audience went nuts. It was the first time the F word had ever been uttered on television. If that happened today, ABC and Dick Cavett would probably be fined several million dollars each.

One unlikely repeat guest on Cavett’s show was Janis Joplin. Three of her appearances are on DVD: one from the summer of 1969 and two from 1970, the last one taped shortly before her death from a heroin overdose. In addition to six electrifying live performances, including renditions of “Try (Just a Little Bit Harder)” and “Get It While You Can,” the DVD of her appearances includes the complete unedited shows. Looking at the bizarre combination of guests in each program, you might think that the person who booked the shows was on heroin himself.

Joplin’s 1969 appearance had something of a counterculture theme. In addition to Janis, the show featured the improv group “The Committee” featuring a very young Howard Hesseman. Many of the skits performed by this group would never be allowed on television today, such as a bit in which an African-American man teaches Hesseman how to “act black.” The other guest was English rock critic Michael Thomas, all of 25 years old and taking himself very seriously. Sparks fly when Janis challenges his work and the function of rock critics in general. At the end of the show, “The Committee” asks Cavett, Joplin, and Thomas to join them in an improvised “emotional symphony.” Each person is assigned an emotion which they must express on cue. Janis, quite in touch with her emotions, performs gamely with the group while Cavett looks painfully uncomfortable.

My favorite Janis Joplin appearance is from June 25, 1970. Joining her on stage are Raquel Welch, fresh from the premiere of “Myra Breckenridge” and at the dizzying height of her fame as an international sex symbol; actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the former Mr. Joan Crawford, looking quite handsome and debonair at age 61; and Chet Huntley, who was about to leave his partner David Brinkley after 14 years of delivering the nightly news together. Huntley spends his time on the show openly lusting after Raquel Welch. Watching contemporaries Joplin and Welch interact provides a fascinating glimpse into the polarities that beset America at that time. Welch represents everything that Janis is not. She appears in a micro-mini dress and is gorgeous, refined plastic from head to toe. Janis is decked out in her vintage rock duds but wears not a stitch of makeup. Her wild hair would have made Raquel’s hairstylist weep and unlike Welch’s careful poise and affected speech, Janis sits slumped in her chair and blurts out anything that comes into her head.

But here’s the thing. Although it would have been quite easy for Janis to mop the floor with Raquel, the two women treat each other with great respect even though they clearly have wildly different opinions about most things. Joplin freely admits that she didn’t care for “Myra Breckenridge” and Raquel doesn’t seem to take offense. The women seem to accept the different roles they have in American society and though Cavett sometimes seems to clench up at what he calls their “arguing,” Janis is always quick to point out that she is enjoying the free-spirited discussion and doesn’t consider it an argument at all. Raquel tries a little too hard to shake her bimbo image, but through her convoluted ravings about world events you can see that she was no fool. Douglas Fairbanks just enjoys the ride, and it’s sweet to see how excited Janis gets when he talks about meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald as a child. Joplin says she is a Fitzgerald fanatic and after one of Raquel’s diatribes she encourages the actress to read a new biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, making a comparison between the two that flies straight over Welch’s head.

What is most remarkable about watching these shows, apart from seeing what an utterly authentic person Janis Joplin was, is the difference between the REAL conversations they contain, for better and for worse, and the manufactured, artificial sound bites that pass for conversation on talk shows today. Nowadays every TV conversation is forced into a few brief moments with the overriding objective of plugging some commercial entity. Hosts and guests are prepared in advance so they can simulate talk that shows everyone to the best possible advantage. No warts, no disagreements, no truth.

Janis’s final appearance on Cavett’s show occurred on August 3, 1970. The eclectic guests that night included actress Gloria Swanson, who at 73 could have passed for 50; a very young Margot Kidder, years before “Superman,” who walked onto the stage in her bare feet wearing a floor length granny dress and gigantic glasses; and former pro-football star Dave Meggyesy, whose ground-breaking book “Our of Their League,” was about to be published to great controversy. Meggyesy was an anti-war activist who wrote about how sports in the United States dehumanized athletes. He resented the jingoistic use of football to sell the war in Vietnam and today is the president of Athletes United for Peace.

Joplin seems genuinely curious about what it was like for Gloria Swanson to make films in the early days of the film industry. The waif-like Margot Kidder sits curled up in her chair and breathlessly blurts out her recent discovery about how the old-time actresses always made their nipples stand out underneath their thin silk gowns. “They used ice cubes!” she giggles, embarrassing Dick Cavett who continues to squirm as Gloria gets up and demonstrates how she used to deal with the underwear lines under her costumes. The mood changes dramatically when a very serious Dave Meggyesy, wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt and jeans, presents his leftist views about sports in America. Despite his earnestness, you can feel the sexual tension between him and Janis Joplin rising by the second.

How lucky we are that Janis Joplin’s personality is captured on tape in these interviews. She tries to explain the difference between getting underneath the music, as she does, and coming at it from the top down. “If I hold back, I’m no good. I’d rather be good sometimes than hold back all of the time.” She gets flustered whenever Cavett calls her a “lady rock star” and asks him to just call her a singer. When asked who her favorite “lady singer” is, she says Tina Turner and then has to explain who that is to Cavett who has never heard of her. There is a poignant moment when she tells Dick about her plans to attend her 10th high school reunion in her home town of Port Arthur, Texas. She playfully asks Cavett if he’d like to be her date.

Dick Cavett: Well, I don’t remember having any friends in your high school class.
Janis Joplin: I don’t either. I don’t either, believe me.
Dick Cavett: Do you think you’ll have a lot to say to your old high-school classmates?
Janis Joplin: I don’t have a lot, man.
Dick Cavett: You were not surrounded by friends in high school?
Janis Joplin: They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state, man. So I’m goin’ home.

She did go to the reunion and by all reports it was a painful trip for her. Janis Joplin proved that being the most authentic person you can be does not necessarily protect you from your demons. Weeks after her trip back to Texas, she was found dead of a drug overdose. The last recordings she completed, just three days before her death, were “Mercedes-Benz ” (later used in an actual Mercedes-Benz commercial, a move that I’m guessing would have made Joplin’s stomach turn) and a birthday greeting for John Lennon. Lennon later told Cavett that Joplin’s taped greeting arrived at his New York home the day after she died.

I think that Janis Joplin would have remained a dynamic voice in the music industry and a significant figure in the cultural landscape of this country. “Don’t compromise yourself,” she once said, “you are all you’ve got.” What a tragedy for all of us that her refreshingly honest voice was stilled so soon. I wonder how her music would have developed over the years and I’d be curious to hear her takes on the current state of the world.

Janis Joplin’s last album “Pearl” was released posthumously. Her definitive version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” zoomed to the top of the charts with her impassioned delivery of such great lines as “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” One song on the album, “Buried Alive in the Blues,” was released as an instrumental because Janis died the night before she was scheduled to record the vocal track:

It’s real hard you know, it’s real hard being buried alive
It’s real hard being buried alive
When you’re buried alive they walk right on by you
When you’re buried alive they never care about you
When you’re buried alive, oh, you reach out for somebody
And when you’re buried alive you can’t seem to press on through.

By James Carroll | January 8, 2007THE HANGING of Saddam Hussein Dec. 30 offered a view into the grotesque reality of what America has sponsored in Iraq, and what Americans saw should inform their response to President Bush’s escalation of the war.

The deposed tyrant was mercilessly taunted. As he stood on the threshold of the afterlife and was told to go to hell, the world witnessed a chilling elevation of the ancient curse, making an absolute villain an object of pity.

And then, in chanting the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose family had been a particular target of Hussein’s his executioners made clear that the execution was an act of tribal revenge, not of national restoration, much less justice. It was a lynching. This Shi’ite brutality is guaranteed to spawn Sunni savagery. Iraq itself is hell.

Officials of the United States, from military commanders in Baghdad to members of the Bush administration in Washington, sought to distance themselves from the bedlam, but they are essential to what happened at the last moments of Saddam’s life. Decorum would have been the main note of his death if Americans had managed it, but the execution would have been no less an act of false justice.

The harsh fact is that the Shi’ite dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki, in its contemptible treatment of a man about to die, laid bare the dark truth of Bush’s war. This is what revenge looks like, and revenge (not weapons of mass destruction, not democracy) drove the initial US attack on Saddam Hussein every bit as much as it snuffed out his life at the end. The hooded executioners took their cue from George W. Bush.

And why should they not have? Let’s remember who this man is. As governor of Texas, he presided over the executions of 152 people, including the first woman put to death in Texas in a century. Her name was Karla Faye Tucker. Bush’s response to the world-wide plea raised in her behalf was an astounding display of cruelty, a mocking imitation of the woman begging not to be killed.

Bush rejected appeals for clemency in every death penalty case that came before him. The Texas death chamber, with its lethal injection gurney, is a place of decorum. And savagery. That executions defined the main public distinction that Bush brought to the US presidency sums up the national disgrace, while suggesting also how little surprise there should be that America is presided over now by an executioner-in-chief.

Capital punishment is to individuals what aggressive war is to nations. The 20th century, for all its brutality (or because of it), marked the watershed era when world opinion shifted against both. Once, princes exercised life-and-death power over subjects with unchallenged authority. Once, the only check on a state’s freedom to attack another state was its power to do so.

These two absolutes of realpolitik have changed. From the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 to principles laid down at the Nuremberg tribunals to the United Nations itself, wars of aggression stand condemned. The force of state violence is to be exercised only in self-defense or in defense of a victim people, in circumstances defined by international agreement. Similarly, nation after nation has abolished the death penalty, understanding the absurdity of defending human life by destroying human life. If killing can ever be justified, individually or communally, it is only as an absolute last resort. In sum, an international moral consensus has taken shape against unnecessary violence, whether targeting a criminal or a rogue state.

George W. Bush is the impresario of unnecessary violence. America has followed him into the death chamber of this war, and now he wants us to believe that the way out is through more death.

Iraqi loss of life remains mostly unimagined, but every evening on the television news, Americans see the sweet faces of young soldiers who have died in Bush’s war. They were heroes, not criminals, yet Bush dragged each one of them up onto a gallows. He positioned them on the trap door, hardly wincing as they then fell through. And now, in perhaps the greatest outrage of all, Bush claims that the way to justify the unnecessary deaths he has caused is to add to them. Escalation is his way of saying, go to hell.

With his lies at the beginning of this war, and his fantasy now that an honorable outcome remains possible, the president is a taunting killer, caught in the act. He lacks nothing but the black hood. Stop this man.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.