I find it interesting that the President who dealt with the aftermath of Vietnam, Gerald R. Ford, felt that the Bush invasion of Iraq was a “big mistake.” That he would not let Bob Woodward use the remarks or publish them except posthumously is a testament to the character of Ford, the man who considered George Bush and Dick Cheney to be friends.

The eulogies delivered by Dennis Hastert, and Dick Cheney after President Ford arrived at the capitol Rotunda last evening were fine testaments to this “common” man who had achieved such greatness without “guile” and calculation. Never the less, all was calculated in the ceremony to accentuate the common touch, even the music selected, “The Fanfare for the Common Man” by Aaron Copland played by brass and echoing through the Rotunda at the end of the ceremony. However, I couldn’t help but think that there are strong similarities between the position the nation finds itself in today and the one we give ex-President Ford credit for diffusing when he took office. First, the nation finds itself in a destructive war that has killed and wounded tens of thousands, both foreign and American. Second, scandals in high political places rock the nation, including the fact that the Bush administration purposefully misled us into believing that it was necessary to invade Iraq, and I believe there is more yet to be discovered in that area.

Putting that aside, I do believe that then President Ford showed remarkable strength of character when he pardoned Richard Nixon, knowing full well that it would probably lose him the next presidential election. I am reminded of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, proclaiming that retribution must not be sought against those who had jailed him for so many years. I place in tandem the achievement of these two marvelous leaders in stark relief, two images of greatness highlighted and contrasted to the horrific video released yesterday of Saddam Hussain’s hanging in Iraq. What a lesson that contrast provides for all of mankind. In actuality, I see Gerald R. Ford as an uncommon man, because there are so few of us in possession of such intelligence, common sense, talent for leadership, and strength of character.

I just got in from the airport, turned on TV and saw that he is to die within the hour. How foolish!

We should be fighting with every diplomatic tool available to stay this execution. It must not take place, lest every Sunni in the world blame us! If Saddam Hussein is to be executed it must take place long after we have left Iraq, and if Iraq is not able to bring itself to do so, so be it!

Damn, I’m frustrated with this entire mess!

Enough said.

If one didn’t know better, the headline above might receive a “ho-hum, so what” acknowledgement by the reader. This daughter, however, Mary, is a lesbian living with her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe. Her father is the second major player in the presidential administration that is singly responsible for the greatest setback in the lives of LGBT people in the contemporary history of our country.

Vice President Cheney — or Grandfather Cheney in this context — has been second-in-command. Vice President Cheney has been complicit in the largest full-scale attack on the LGBT community in modern history. He, his president, and his political party, have repeatedly targeted the LGBT community and LGBT families for scapegoating as part of their calculated political strategy and have attacked at all levels the rights and protections his own daughter will need to ensure a strong, healthy, legally protected family.

*1

Of course, the furor over Mary’s pregnancy has already died down. Never the less, The strangeness of this family’s response to a gay daughter’s life goes beyond the destruction of LGBT hopes for equality in the early Twenty-first Century. Their attitude, including Mary’s own of acceptance within the family, but non-acceptance of equality for LGBT people in the larger American society is unconscionable. It is as though they place themselves above all other people with lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgendered children in our society. It is necessary for them to accept Mary's lesbianism within their wonderful upper-class family, but the rest of us are not good enough.

And yes, I’m playing the “class card.” The various strata within our culture are still there, and becoming more pronounced day by day as the middle class is slowly dissolved by this administration’s expensive war costs, high gas prices, out-sourcing of jobs, and purposeful ignorance of ecological concerns that play into an escalating cost of living. This Republican administration is engineering a two-class nation, a kind of super-power / third world nation in which there are only the extremely rich and the poor. It is a nation in which this administration scapegoats an entire group of citizens, LGBT people. Why? In the hope that no one will notice as it and the various evangelical Christian churches whittle away at one of the supporting pillars of our great nation, the separation of church and state.

I don’t understand a great deal about the Cheney family special privilege. I don’t understand why it wasn’t possible for Senator Kerry to compliment the Cheney family on their acceptance of a lesbian daughter during the 2004 election campaign. I don’t understand why even LGBT people sided with the Cheney family on that one. I don’t understand why this family doesn’t have to be like the rest of us, open to disclosure, a fact of life for everyone else in Twenty-first Century America. And, most of all, I don’t understand how the Cheney family is able to live with the fact that Mary Cheney’s child will never be allowed to have a legal relationship with her mother’s partner, Heather Poe.
----------------------

*1 “Gay Rights Group Slams Cheney After Announcement of Daughter’s Pregnancy, Family Pride: VP Has Done 'Irreparable Harm' to Gay Community. Statement by Jennifer Chissler of Family Values, on ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2704853&page=1. December 6, 2005. Viewed on Monday, December 18, 2006, 10:00 AM EST.

Fear of Conversion, Judith Butler, and the Palm Beach County “Social Disease.”

I’ve continued my discussion of police entrapment of gay and straight individuals in Palm Beach County in Isaac Stolzfuts’ Journal with a written monologue about Judith Butler’s feminist work, Bodies That Matter, 1993, and Gender Trouble, 1990. These two books deal with the creation of acceptable norms for human sexuality and identity within culture, and how these are constructed in the individual through “performance.” Please click on the link above to go to that discussion.

I will publish this piece in both my Political Journal, and Isaac Stolzfuts' Journal for two reasons. First, I am relating part of my daily existence here in Florida. . Second, the situation I describe below reflects an administrative system that has distorted the purpose (to aid and protect citizens) of at least two major municipal institutions in Palm Beach County.


I always think that the police are here to help and protect me. I forget that the constabulary was created as an arm of local municipal government to control and regulate human behavior, and that the beginning of any honest police history must be filled with many a clash between ordinary citizenry and the police. Originally, the early American colonial British based watch system was fashioned in part with the responsibility to prevent public drunkenness. Later, in large cities the police forces were composed of hundreds of volunteers. Often convicts themselves, and or dull witted, they were called “leather heads” by ordinary American workers. The first paid police force was created in New York City in 1845 and other large cities were soon to follow. These police forces, recruited from the working class, were trained to think of themselves as better than their peers and during the late nineteenth century were used to control mobs, race riots, and strikes. The city bosses who were friendly to business concerns used the newly armed professional police to round up striking intoxicated (Irish) workers -thus the term “paddy wagon.” The confrontations often large in scale resulted in armed conflict. Thus, these police forces were used in service to big business, the rich, and the city bosses. They did not help the ordinary citizenry, rather they can best be understood as a militia used against the worker in class warfare.

I give this preamble concerning police history by way of explanation. You see, I just found out that one of my neighbors, a heterosexual male, was arrested last week for soliciting in a men’s room in a nearby county park. I will not divulge his identity because I have learned from past experience that doing so can hurt friends and family members. My neighbor, I’ll call him “Ted,” is not going to fight the arrest because the county police have sworn that Ted will not be prosecuted if he follows their directions explicitly. It seems there is an entire complex program here in Palm Beach County based on a profile of the “gay tearoom queen” (my term). Ted was told that over twelve hundred men in Palm Beach County have been “detained” under the program and that it is designed to help control a “social disease.” Ted has had to appear in court, and he will attend a “class” in which “experts” will teach him about the evils of tearoom solicitation including vandalism, blackmail, robbery, prostitution, and HIV AIDS. Ted must also have an HIV test. If he does these things, and stays out of all county public parks and other various particular locations throughout the county for 90 days, he will not be prosecuted. His name will not go on lists, including that of known sex offenders.

Now, do I believe the police are being honest and forthright with Ted? No, I don’t. Ted has been required to fill out many forms including one on which he had to admit to guilt that he can’t possibly have. The police have placed his car’s license plate number on file, and he has been given a list of all the places he may not go. These police requirements have forced him to tell his wife and child about the arrest so that neither should mistakenly drive the car into one of the forbidden areas.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this situation is that my neighbor was framed in a bizarre performance created by a trained undercover policeman, a very handsome and well endowed individual I am told, who stepped up to the urinal next to my neighbor, exposed himself and asked my neighbor what he wanted to do with the exposed tumescent part. My neighbor, shocked speechless, was then confronted by a second plain-clothes policeman who placed him under arrest. A third, uniformed policement stood outside the men's room. I’m appalled because such a program requires a huge expenditure. It is designed to profile a small population, but has mistakenly pulled in a person who does not fit the stereotyped profile, and I wonder how many times that has happened. Additionally, many persons must participate in such a program, from the top echelon of county administration, including trained professionals in several fields, the uniformed policeman, and the undercover agent. Each is receiving a salary. There are literally hundreds of county parks in this huge Palm Beach County. Do the police patrol all of them with handsome well endowed undercover agents whose purpose is to trap unsuspecting gay men? How many “experts” are paid on a regular basis to teach the special “classes” designed to mistakenly rid us of a “social disease?” How many court personnel are tied up with this ridiculous charade?”

I am appalled! Are we pursuing drug dealers with such gusto? Do we plan to hound organized car thieves with even a fraction of the energy, time and money required to fund this mammoth program designed to harass gay men? Is there a program anywhere to help the gay child thrown onto the street by his/her family to find housing, schooling, and a thoroughly supportive environment? I don’t thinks so, and I suppose there isn’t anything to do about it. Some angry and brave gay or straight man must confront the system by refusing to participate in this travesty, and so be prosecuted, dragged through the courts and the mud by a program with the intent to publicly display him as a deviant and incarcerate him. Who would be willing to do such a thing to himself?

Sadly, this is the state of liberty in Twenty-first century United States of America, home of the free and the brave!


You can send E-mail comments to

ZacSfuts@Comcast.net

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Though I will listen to his statement at 11:45 AM EST this morning, and follow up by paying close attention to any statements made before Christmas, I suspect that it will be difficult to find much of the Bipartisan Iraq Study Group ideas there. Yes, he is meeting with everyone he can in the attempt to show that he is looking at all options, but is he really considering any other than those which can only lead to escalation in Iraq and the Middle East? I know one of the options on his table is an increase in troop levels - and, all this amid a possible change in the Iraqi government itself. I’m afraid I am a total pessimist where this president is concerned, and I will be only too happy to admit error, should he prove me wrong.

At least the report of the Bipartisan Iraq Study Group has led to an actual conversation about the future of the Iraq war. The November election made it obvious that the voters of this nation do not want Mr. Bush to have a mandate concerning Iraq.

“Bush State Department to Consult on Iraq Options,” Associated Press on CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/12/11/bush.iraq.ap/index.html. Posted Tuesday, 9:33 AM EST. Viewed Tuesday, 10 :23 AM EST.

“Iraqi PM may face revolt from within the government,” Associated Press on CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/12/11/iraq.politics.ap/index.html. Posted Tuesday, 9:28 AM EST. Viewed Tuesday, 10:32 AM EST.

“Iraq Study Group Report,” United States Institute of Peace, http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_group_report/report/1206/index.html. Viewed Tuesday, 10:47 AM EST.

Yes, it recommends an altered approach to a failed war.
Will Mr. Bush take any of the advice?

I’m keeping my last entry for another day, since it’s appropriate!

I Pray for Peace

It looks like too little too late - too late for “Rummy,” too late for George W. Bush, too late for the Neocons - too late for The President’s “War on Terror,” to be fixed so that it actually is a strategic policy aimed at protecting the world from terror instead of creating a USA sponsored War of Terror.

I’m so sickened by the entire mess that I have difficulty thinking logically about it. I know that Iraq is in a state of civil war, a divided sectarian state that sponsors murder. I know that we as a nation caused that civil war. I know that it is our responsibility to fix it. I also know that we are unable to do so. God forgive us, and our over-reaching evangelical arrogance. As George W. Bush said immediately before invading Iraq, “I pray for peace.”

I Pray for Peace

It looks like too little, too late for “Rummy - too late for George W. Bush, too late for the Neocons - too late for The President’s “War on Terror" to be fixed so that it actually is a strategic policy aimed at protecting the world from terror instead of creating a USA sponsored War of Terror.

I’m so sickened by the entire mess that I have difficulty thinking logically about it. I know that Iraq is in a state of civil war, a divided sectarian state that sponsors murder. I know that we as a nation caused that civil war. I know that it is our responsibility to fix it. I also know that we are unable to do so. God forgive us, and our over-reaching evangelical arrogance. As George W. Bush said immediately before invading Iraq, “I pray for peace.”

I’m curious to see the bipartisan commission on Iraq recommendations next week because I think there will be two ideas they recommend that neither leader will like, each for his own reasons. Of course, after al-Maliki’s meeting with Bush, he announced that he wants his people to start taking over from us by next June. Was that Bush and al-Maliki’s plan or al-Maliki’s I wonder. And, who really thinks the Iraqi’s will be ready to take over next June? Is the Baker Commission going to suggest anything like partial withdrawal by June? In any event, Iraq is in a state of civil war, and we never should have invaded in the first place.

Thanks George!

Denial of Server Attack

H-m-m-m-m-m, is this for real? One Website warning and we go bonkers. On 9/11/01 there was months of warnings and even knowledge of the future attackers, and nothing was done.