In my hometown newspaper this morning, a letter writer debunked the myth that President Clinton’s staff “vandalized” the executive offices and the White House, before Bush staffers moved in, including the allegation that many computer keyboards were missing the W key—as in President Bush’s middle initial. It turned out that the “vandalism” reports were false or grossly exaggerated.
In May 2001, it was revealed, and reported in Salon and other media, that a formal review by the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative agency, “had found no damage to the offices of the White House’s East or West Wings or Executive Office Building” and that Bush’s own representatives had reported “there is no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by the employees of the Clinton administration.”
The question now arises whether the Bush crowd will play pranks similar to those that were wrongly attributed to the Clinton staff, on the incoming Obama team.
Now, as “W” himself prepares to leave, his staff has been told: no pranks and no damaging of equipment before Obama’s people take over. Which means, I suppose, that the letter “O” will remain safe and secure on White House keyboards.
That may very well be so.
No O’s may be missing from White House keyboards on January 21, 2009.
But, when Obama and his team move into the White House and the Executive Buildings, they are likely to find that various other “O’s” are missing, and have gone missing for the entire eight years of the Bush administration.
Some of the missing “O’s” are, for example, the “O” in Open-mindedness and Objectivism; the “O” for the Oversight that went missing when executive agencies, staffs and individuals rode roughshod over other branches of government and over ordinary Americans; and, certainly, the “O” in the Outrage that has been missing when Americans’ constitutional rights, trust, and values were so frequently violated or ignored.
And, if you allow me to consider the “silent h,” perhaps the most important “O” that has been missing in the Bush administration is the “O” in hOnesty.
It will, no doubt, take a long time to reinstate these missing O’s, but the incoming “O” administration, I know, will work very hard at it.
November 16th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES and SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnists
In September of this year, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to prohibit its members from participating in interrogations or acting in an advisory capacity at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere after revelations that some psychologists have been involved in so-called intensive interrogation sessions. The ban belatedly brings the APA into line with the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association.
In a recent New York Timesop-ed piece, Stanley Fish asks a provocative question: Why did psychology, generally considered to be one of the most liberal of disciplines, lag behind its sister professions regarding one of the most troubling consequences of the so-called War on Terror — the Bush administration’s approval of the use of torture and enlisting health-care professionals in and out of uniform into helping extract information from terrorists and other so-called enemy combatants?
Joining Shaun Mullen in discussing this issue is Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a The Moderate Voice associate editor, fellow columnist and friend. Dr. E is a psychoanalyst who has been in clinical practice for 38 years and specializes in post-trauma recovery, often including veterans, as well as being a poet and author whose books have been published in 32 languages. Mullen is a veteran and career journalist who has covered Vietnam and other wars, and has written extensively on what he calls the Bush Torture Regime.
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SM: Is Fish onto something in saying that your fellow psychologists have lagged behind doctors of medicine and psychiatry in addressing torture? And that by implication those are exclusively healing professions but yours is not?
Dr. E: The charge is an important one. Why did it take so long — well over a year after the issue was brought before its national convention — before the APA finally banned members from participating in not only interrogations, but advising the CIA and military on the effects of torture, including literally advising how much assault a person’s body, mind and spirit might be able to sustain before they became entirely undone.
For myself, coming from a refugee and deportee immigrant family, all of this stank of another time and place – Adolph Hitler, who long before the death and torture camps for murdering Jews ordered the extermination of German children if they were lame, developmentally retarded or had other disabilities. He tried to enlist German physicians and pediatricians to write the orders for the death or use in experiments of children confined to institutions.
Even though a majority of German doctors — and the clergy – loudly refused to participate in so-called “mercy killing” programs led by Philipp Bouhler (photo, left), some doctors complied and well over 40,000 young innocents were sent to their deaths at Brandenburg, Hadamar Institute, Grafeneck and elsewhere. Thousands were kept alive for experimentation who had Down Syndrome, what we would now recognize as autism, lead poisoning, and brain damage from accidents and beatings.
I am not one to use the Hitlerian trope to condemn people. But at Guantánamo and elsewhere, psychologists were enlisted to participate in torture and the slowness of the APA to ban such activities is stunning to people of conscience.
I wrote about how the APA was lagging in a December 2007 The Moderate Voicepost. At that time and long before, the voices of many others in my profession were being raised vociferously, yet the APA did not insist on an end to these practices that are so egregiously antithetical to the principles of protecting, helping and healing human life. Ours is supposed to be a healing profession — psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, all. We are not separated by institutional memberships, but rather held together as brothers and sisters who are called upon to mediate and help the suffering of this world.
November 12th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
I said from the moment it became obvious that Barack Obama would prevail that winning would be the easy part, and I have felt distinctly uncomfortable observing his first interactions as president-elect with George Bush and the Washington establishment.
Part of that unease falls into the category of This Is Too Good To Be True, and it will be a while before I don’t wake up in the morning wondering if it is all a dream.
The larger part of my unease is the reality that governing — you know, stuff like uniting, leading and legislating — presents challenges for any incoming president, even one with a mandate that is as broad as Obama’s. (Chris Rock hilariously notes that Obama of course has been given the most difficult job in the world because he’s black)
But this guy is being handed the reins of power in the midst of a multi-alarm fire, and while Democrats control both houses of Congress, the potential to screw up is high even if there were the makings of a bipartisan consensus on some seriously big issues like the economy, health-care reform and Iraq. Which there are not.
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Here’s a scary thought: Conservative pundit William Kristol has been wrong — often wildly wrong — about virtually everything that he has commentated on at the Weekly Standard and The New York Times this election cycle.
So it is with horror that I note that he is predicting that it will be a tough four years for conservatives because Obama will preside over an economic recovery that will be in full flower when it comes time to for him to run for re-election.
Shaun Mullen has started the wake for The Politically Departed (below), so in sadness and hope, another take on the generation that tried so hard and accomplished so little:
Another first in Barack Obama’s presidency is change from the generation born when millions came back from World War II and began to beget–Baby Boomers, the first of whom are now eligible for early Social Security benefits.
For a noisy cohort, the Boomers produced only two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. This year, they and the rest of us ended up with a choice of two men whose times of birth bracketed their own. For the best-educated, wealthiest generation in American history, this is a meager presidential output.
How so? The conventional wisdom about Boomer self-absorption doesn’t explain everything. This is, after all, the generation of the 1960s’ college idealists acting out passionate new ideas about sex, gender, race, war and politics.
They held the media spotlight briefly but never cohered into a political force. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama disdains “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation–a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”
Did, after all that turmoil, Boomers terrify the Silent Majority into the Reagan Revolution and then retreat to fuel the “greed is good” decades that led to Wall Street bubbles and today’s crippled economy?
Readers of the Moderate Voice will recognize his name, since this is the tenth article the people of WORLDMEETS.US have translated by this author. In today’s article, Taahar warns his compatriots that they had better sign the long-term security agreement with the United States before President Bush leaves office or, ‘Iraq will be wiped off the map, torn apart and destroyed forever …’
It was just fine with Barack Obama and John McCain that they could pretty much avoid talking about the Bush administration’s kangaroo court military tribunals and its embrace of torture during the presidential campaign.
While these aspects of the U.S.’s so-called War on Terror were not a priority for voters who are beleaguered by a collapsed economy and wondering how to pay for their Uncle Leo’s thousand-dollar medications, the candidates also knew that there are no easy answers about how to deal with Guantánamo Bay, but one tentacle of the legacy of a cowardly president who is dumping an extraordinary amount of self-created effluvia in his successor’s lap before he tucks his tail between his legs and scurries back to Texas.
George Bush said he would shutter Guantánamo after a third Supreme Court ruling that the tribunals made a mockery of the Constitution. Obama and McCain also said they would close the detention camp, and Obama will now have to make good on that pledge because Bush, of course, has reneged while pretty much thumbing his nose at the ruling as he did the first two.
Compounding the problem is that while a majority of the so-called enemy combatants were never threats, some of them were and remain so. These include dozens of the 255 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo, including some with connections to Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders, who have moldered at the Navy base in Cuba without being brought to trial as the tribunal system continues to unravel.
The presidential campaign peaked on prime-time TV with Barack Obama’s 30-minute, $5 million valentine to the American middle class, followed by John McCain on Larry King, free of charge, expressing pride and confidence in Sarah Palin, while admitting their maverickosity leads to an occasional difference of opinion.
Later, Obama upstaged himself on the Daily Show by simultaneously appearing live in Florida to embrace and be embraced by Bill Clinton. In contrast, George W. Bush seemed to be in a presidential protection program as far as McCain was concerned.
Lordy be! In only six days the angry mantra of the John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign will be silenced. You know the one I’m talking about: That some of us are not true Americans because of where we live, what we do for a living, where we went to school and, horror or horrors, because we support a Muslim terrorist for president.
But you can bet your dangling chad that while we will be filling this welcome void by beginning the arduous task of pulling America from the smoldering ashes of the Age of Bush, the angry flagellation that has recently broken out among the holiest of the Republican right-wing holy will intensify.
This writ large is their own version of the McCain-Palin mantra, only here it’s real Republicans vs. elitist Republicans.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan is among those already being lashed for having the temerity to not only part ways with President Bush, but with his wannabe successor, as well. Same for former Bush speechwriter David Frum and the lengthening list of GOP bigs who have endorsed Barack Obama, most prominently the tribally traitorous Colin Powell.
“We won’t tolerate those sorts of people on our sinking ship, and it is our sinking ship. Leave us to drown in peace!” is how conservative pundit Daniel Larison mockingly puts it.
This whips-and-chains vaudeville show reminds us that the Republican Party is precariously close to toppling into the abyss where reside Rush Limbaugh and the twentysomething percent of Americans who still believe that Bush is doing a heck of a job.
In my first encounter with General Colin Powell at the Pentagon, I could not take my eyes off of the ribbons cascading down the left breast of his dress greens. In my second encounter with Powell following a press briefing that he had given as President Reagan’s national security adviser, there was the unmistakable sense that beneath his calm exterior burned a fire of great intensity that he banked with the same care that he measured his words.
It has been over 20 years since those encounters, but they and one other memorable Powell moment were on my mind on Sunday morning when this American idol became the latest and most prominent Republican to throw in his lot with Barack Obama.
As I wrote yesterday, I don’t think that Powell’s catharsis will move many voters at this late date. Nor was that his intention. But the endorsement, delivered in a soliloquy on “Meet the Press” that was stunning for its breadth and depth in these sound-bite times, is in a sense a road map of the tortuous route of dismay and disillusionment that I and many other Americans have traveled since that other memorable occasion: When Secretary of State Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council in February 2002 and, in journalist-author Bob Woodward’s words, became “the closer” for President Bush’s case for going to war with Iraq.
Thank you, General Powell, for finally rendering a decisive vote on the Bush-McCain administration.
Back on June 28, 2007, I wrote the following short Letter to the Editor in Time Magazine:
Colin Powell said he “would close Guantánamo not tomorrow but this afternoon.” How about four or five years ago, Mr. Powell, when you should have stood against the prison and the Iraq war prevarication?
Dorian de Wind
Today, I thank the General for giving his powerful and persuasive support to Barack Obama, but most of all for endorsing the ideals, proposed policies, and character of Senator Obama.
In doing so, General Powell has rendered his final and irrevocable repudiation of the Bush-McCain disastrous policies of the past eight years.
He has also irreversibly broken with the Republican Party, a Party which will now politely but soundly reject and condemn the previous Republican icon’s judgment and beliefs.
My father and mother were the blackest white people whom I have ever known. What I mean by that is that not only were some of their best friends Negroes, to use the painfully archaic cliche of their day, they talked the talk and they walked the walk as civil-rights activists. But despite being optimistic about most things they were unable to imagine the day that a black person could become president of the United States.
Joe and Jane Mullen were never denied a hotel room or turned away at a lunch counter, but both had been the victims of prejudice and that made their commitment to social justice and deep feelings for the disenfranchised all the more real.
My father’s parents were immigrants. He grew up in grinding poverty and was taunted for his ratty clothes, Irish lineage and Catholicism.
My mother’s father was a German Jew who arrived in America with 12 cents in his pocket and her mother an Anglican from an old Philadelphia family.
She felt the prejudice that her father experienced, and in a coup de grâce administered by a Catholic Church steeped in its own special brand of prejudice, she and my father had to be married in a sub assistant priest’s vestry office and not a church because . . . well, you know, that Jewish problem.
I will never forget my father, by then very much a lapsed Catholic, telling me after returning home from Dr. Martin L
Even though a majority of German doctors — and the clergy – loudly refused to participate in so-called “mercy killing” programs led by 
Part of that unease falls into the category of This Is Too Good To Be True, and it will be a while before I don’t wake up in the morning wondering if it is all a dream.
Joe and Jane Mullen were never denied a hotel room or turned away at a lunch counter, but both had been the victims of prejudice and that made their commitment to social justice and deep feelings for the disenfranchised all the more real.