I wish we had a president who could think, reason, and speak. It does not appear that this president has mastered any of those tricks.

As Maureen Dowd put it, "The president is on a continuous loop of sophistry: We have to push on in Iraq because Al Qaeda is there, even though Al Qaeda is there because we pushed into Iraq. Our troops have to keep dying there because our troops have been dying there. We have to stay so the enemy doesn’t know we’re leaving. Osama hasn’t been found because he’s hiding."

For all the president's ranting about staying the course and the catastrophe our leaving would be - Bush is planning on withdrawing half the troops within months. When the Democrats talk about leaving Bush calls it "defeat". I wonder what he'll call it when he talks about leaving.

Betcha it won't be "defeat".

Our culture

Barak Obama recently made an observation that I want to share with you. He pointed out that we are a country that prizes the inconsequential at the expense of the important.

He said: "We see . . . a media culture that sensationalizes the trivial and trivializes the profound, in a 24-hour news network bonanza that never fails to keep us posted on how many days Paris Hilton will spend in jail but often fails to update us on the continuing genocide in Darfur or the recovery effort in New Orleans or the poverty that plagues too many American streets,"

Bush encourages this trend. He glorifies being inarticulate and disdains books. His responses to serious questions are often trivial, if not downright silly. But the worst offender is TV news. Even the "serious" TV news shows skim across their time slot like a pebble of inquiry skimming across a pond of issues. Only C-Span and Public TV attempt to dive into an issue.

Magazine and newspaper circulation is down, but the print media do have serious content and a devoted readership. More and more, we are going to the Internet to get news. How many of us only read the side of a controversy that supports our own opinions. How much debate is there on the Internet?

Still, the Internet and print media offer the best alternative to TV and to the trend that Obama spoke of recently.

Xenophobia as public policy

Republicans have side stepped issues that would be divisive in their party while cleverly exploiting issues that are divisive in the Democratic party. Now, Bush has plucked the worse possible divisive issue for his party and shoved it forward.

Immigration is especially perilous for the GOP because it is what might be called a "double-edged" wedge issue. It not only pits the party's base against a large and quickly growing pool of potential new Republicans -- 41 million Hispanics -- but also pits two key parts of the existing base against each other. The Wall Street wing of the GOP, which finances the party, wants to keep open the spigot of pliant and cheap Spanish-speaking labor. It finds itself opposed by much of the Main Street wing, which provides millions of crucial primary and general election votes and would like to build a fence along the Mexican border as high as Lou Dobbs' ratings or the pitch of Pat Buchanan's voice. And it's simply impossible for any political party to win if it has to choose between money and votes.

The Hispanic population is growing at the rate of 3% a year. They are too important to the future to be ignored and the Republicans are doing even more: they are alienating them. Bush got an astonishing 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2000. By 2004 his Hispanic vote had shrunk to 28%. The Republicans plans for making inroads into the black vote drowned in Katrina. The future of the party is grim if it looses both groups for long.

My guess is that the Immigration Bill will never make it to Bush's desk. I think the Republican Party's xenophobic base will kill the bill and wound the Republican Party. The question is: how badly will the party hurt itself and for how long.

xen·o·pho·bi·a /ˌzɛnəˈfoʊbiə, ˌzinə-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[zen-uh-foh-bee-uh, zee-nuh-] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange.

At the beach

I remember going to Ponchatrain Beach as a child; the Zephyr and the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Penny Arcade and the free shows on the beach, learning to swim in the lake and walking and walking to get into deep enough water, and falling in love there almost all through high school.

I remember going to Canal Street to shop. We had lunch at D.H. Holmes and looked for records at Werleins. We took the bus everywhere and never felt in danger anywhere. I remember Ramblers, where we swam and rode horses and learned to dance. On some Friday nights we would cover the family dining table with newspaper and pile boiled crabs in the center. We'd eat crabs and drink beer and talk into the night. After church on Sunday we would go to a long lunch at the Friendship Inn on the Gulf Coast, or Brennan's in the quarter, or somewhere uptown.

Later, after high school, I wandered the streets of the French Quarter at night. I drank and walked and watched the nightlife. During the day I'd go to the beach to read and swim and nurse my hangover.

One summer my parents had gone to Europe and I was home alone. I met two guys from Chicago who were sunning themselves on a blanket at the beach. The three of us drove to Chicago that night and I spent a long weekend with them. My parents never found out.

Those were the New Orleans summers of my youth.

Lets talk about sex

One statistic seems to me to give the lie to all the rhetoric about abortion, and it’s this: one in three women under the age of 45 have an abortion during their lifetime. One in three. All politicians — Democrat and Republican — say they want to make abortion at least rare (as Giuliani did in Wednesday’s debate). On, this they could reach agreement. But it’s clear they haven’t been serious; the U.S. has 1.3 million abortions a year.

Reducing unintended pregnancy is the key — half of pregnancies are unintended, and 4 in 10 of them end in abortion. For a while now, we’ve had solid evidence about how to effectively do this. But it requires getting specific about two subjects that are perilous in politics: sex and contraception.

We don't have a national campaign to educate the public about contraception and we are not going to get one. Other countries do it and don't fall into moral decay. We, however, persist in living in ignorance.

Sex, for us, is still "dirty". How juvenile.

Bush's base

From the New York Times:

" What we need to realize is that the infamous “Bush bubble,” the administration’s no-reality zone, extends a long way beyond the White House. Millions of Americans believe that patriotic torturers are keeping us safe, that there’s a vast Islamic axis of evil, that victory in Iraq is just around the corner, that Bush appointees are doing a heckuva job — and that news reports contradicting these beliefs reflect liberal media bias.

And the Republican nomination will go either to someone who shares these beliefs, and would therefore run the country the same way Mr. Bush has, or to a very, very good liar."

What will it take to wake up this 27% or so who continue to support Mr. Bush? I suspect only Fox news can change their opinions. These are the people who don't know anything that they have not learned from Fox news. Their entire body of belief, information, and opinion is formed from one source: Fox news. They hear echo's on talk radio and from their right wing pulpits in their narrow conservative churches. They live in a echo chamber with no alternatives allowed.

Bush's pitiful base.

The disease of Hubris

The experience of Mr. Wolfowitz at The World Bank is a symptom of the disease called Hubris.

Like Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Bush’s approach to governing is to circle the wagons rather than build coalitions; they both antagonize fence-sitters by coming across as unilateralist, sanctimonious, arrogant and incompetent.

The disease of Hubris has spread across our government and poisoned our relations with others with whom we share the planet. Hubris has weakened us morally and economically. Those who have the disease of Hubris don't even know they have it.

The only cure is to rid the body politic of the disease - and its carriers must be avoided so the disease does not spread.