Hippie Alert

The purpose of the title of this effort, Born-Again Hippies, is to encourage those who once held youthful ideals and lost them along the way, to re-energize that commitment to speak out against the injustices of the present day. And for those young or old enough who attempt to romanticise the 60s, you should know that it was not all free love and sunshine. Everyone from Wavy Gravy, to Jerry Garcia, to Bill and Hillary Clinton considered themselves as hippies at one point. But over time, people of conscience allowed the very word "hippie" to be smeared along with other words like "liberal," and "intellectual," until it became a caricature for a glassy-eyed, radical environmentalist dressed in hemp and soaked in patchouli oil. Very simply, "hippies" stood for those who were aware of the desperate need for changes in society and attempted, in Gandhi's words, to "become the change" they sought in the world.

Before "hippie" became a fashion and just another life style, it was a philosophy and a movement. It was born in the rejection of an arrogant American government, and the militaristic society that supported them, who led this nation to war under false pretenses. The hippie movement was formed as an alternative to intransigent government officials and a general public that not only refused to listen to the voice of dissent, but vilified the dissenters and polarized the nation as a result. Turning their backs on the Vietnam War, the disenfranchised hippies were cut adrift by the "Greatest Generation" to fend for themselves, without role models or peers of distinction, to learn by trial and error a more peaceful way to live life without the constant strife from the government, the stifling workplace, and the military.

Noble attempts were made in the name of fairness, community service, and non-exclusivity. The belief was nurtured that every person had something to offer and had intrinsic values to be respected. Opposition to the Vietnam war was the focus of the movement, but it included civil and human rights, feminism, environmentalism, and a new awakening to spirituality that could not be corralled by any one religion. The excesses were real as well. The reckless use of psychedelic drugs caused lasting psychic damage to many. At the same time, a short-sighted government began their war on drugs by putting pot smokers in jail while heroin ran freely in the streets of every major city. The sexual excesses cost some their marriages and relationships in the name of sexual freedom while causing a coarseness in the culture relating to sex that can be felt to this day. Simultaneously, people no longer felt locked in marriage by the puritanical views of society and began to find other forms of defining "family."

The high point was in the early Spring of 1968, after the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the presidential race. It seemed as if the hippies' anti-war activities had finally worked. Johnson was out, it appeared as if Robert Kennedy would be elected President and ending the Vietnam War was his priority. Then, in rapid succession, King and Kennedy were murdered, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago became a gruesome bloodletting, Nixon was elected, and there were five more years of war. It never occurred to the generation that despised the hippies and cheered on the Chicago police as they split the skulls of anything with long hair in their paths, that these were their children being brutalized and beaten.

Without the hippie movement, Nixon might have pursued his initial strategy to win the war on the ground and bomb the enemy even further back into the stone age. But because of massive popular dissent, the Democratic Congress, not Nixon, found the will to end funding for the war. The Democratic Senate, led into war by Johnson's lies, forced Nixon and Henry Kissinger to find a way out of Vietnam sooner, rather than later, and they ended up settling for almost the same terms in 1973 that were on the table in 1968. This is why the war over the Vietnam War has never ended. The troops returned without fanfare and faded back into society and a nation polarized just one year earlier between the protesters and the "silent majority" came to a tacit agreement not to discuss it anymore. The war was better left in the past.
The hippie movement was dead. But every contemporary candidate for public office has had to explain himself on this matter. It will not go away. The issues of right or wrong concerning the Vietnam War were never settled, despite the mea culpas of Robert MacNamara and Lyndon Johnson.

The time has come once more, for the second time in the lives of the generation who protested against the war and the administration's abuse of power of the 60s, to speak aloud again, to march again, and to stand against an immoral and illegal war begun by the lies of a different administration. Now is the time to talk, to organize, and to convince the electorate that peace is better than war, that generosity is better than greed, that truth is better than lies, and that love is stronger than hate. We must also rededicate our nation to caring for "the least of these" instead of taking from the poor to further enrich the wealthiest among us. We must recapture the mantle of beacon to the world concerning human rights, and reverse the Bling-Humvee notion that individual consumeristic gluttony is somehow good for our society. Most of all, the American people must never allow their government to take this country to war again over deceptions, distortions, and lies. A dark night awaits us all if we do not succeed.

Jimi Hendrix sang in "If 6 was 9" 1968;

White collar conservative flashing down the street

Pointing their plastic finger at me.

They hope that soon my kind will drop and die

But I'm gonna' wave my freak flag high.

David Crosby sang in "Long Time Comin'" 1969;

You've got to speak out against the madness

You've got to speak your mind if you dare.

But no, don't try and get yourself elected

If you do you had better cut your hair.

Everything old has become new again. Now, up against the wall!

Profit and Loss

Every administration wants to make its mark in the world but the Bush regime has left an ugly scar instead, on the Earth as well as on the body politic. From the endangered Alaska Wildlife Refuge to old growth forests in Oregon being harvested under the "Healthy Forests Initiative;" From strip mining and mountain capping in the Eastern coal states to the rubble that is Iraq, the Bush group has inflicted a wound on the planet that will be a long time healing.
Add to the physical destruction the long term effects of the "Clear Skies Initiative," which allows more toxins into the atmosphere, or the refusal of this government to consider any agreement on climate control and greenhouse gases, be it international or interstate.
This is because the governing philosophy of this brand of Conservative is not lead by "values and morals," or religion, or even national security. This government is ruled by one thing only, bare knuckle capitalism. That's the agenda behind all the deregulation of environmental safeguards and the arrogant non-cooperation with other nations. The Bush message is "don't stand between an American capitalist and his God given right to maximize his profits."
The corporatization of everything commercial in this country would be bad enough if they were good corporate citizens. But aside but plastering their names on sports arenas, many of the largest corporations keep shell offices in the Cayman Islands and other administration approved tax sanctuaries to legally bypass something so troubling as income tax. Bush wants to end the estate tax too, so another Yaley legacy can inherit a family fortune without having to pay the government. And the current tax cuts to the most wealthy come to $70 billion dollars. Kanye West was wrong when he said that Bush doesn't care about black people. Bush doesn't care about poor people. And his government is utterly shameless about it.
In the teeth of scandal and criminal investigation, the Republican led House Agricultural Committee voted along strict party lines to approve budget cuts that will take food stamps away from 300,000 people and cut off school lunches and breakfasts for 400,000 children. A government report says that in the five years of the Bush presidency, the number of people who are hungry because they can't afford to buy enough food has risen by seven million and affects 12% of U.S. households. And it was the White House that proposed the restrictions on food stamp recipients while simultaneously making it more difficult to declare bankruptcy.
The grim reality is that there are a full three years of Bush economics facing this country unless someone in power, preferably on the Republican side, screams "enough!" Because it is in the Republican Party's self interest not to self-destruct with the Bush administration, some brave soul may yet exclaim that these policies are killing the average American and it must stop. The best a caring citizen can do is to prepare ourselves to come out in sufficient numbers to return one of the legislative bodies to the Democrats in 2006. At least this will break the Bush government's immunity from accountability, and will allow legitimate inquiries to begin into the plunder of both natural and human resources used by this regime to accomplish their political goals. It's a good thing the President is a "compassionate conservative." I'd hate to see the extent of the damage done by someone who didn't care as much.

2000

It seems like an eternity ago that there were only 2000 soldiers killed in Vietnam. I use the word "only" knowing it is an emotionally charged word. But that is the word I am hearing from my more bellicose and heartless acquaintances. Some assume that 2000 American lives is not too large of a sacrifice to achieve the goals of the government's foreign policy. The President said as much yesterday when he said more sacrifice would be needed in the war on terror.
The number 2000 certainly pales beside the number killed in the Pakistani quake, or the total number of hurricane victims in this deadly year. But those killed in natural disasters were simply in harm's way. There is a great deal of difference in dying by the hand of God than by dying by the hands of those who would intentionally put you in danger. There is no longer any denying that the Iraq war was a war of choice planned by men who intended to topple Saddam Hussein from power, even before they took power themselves.
There is irony in the fact that Saddam now stands trial for murders committed in his name in 1982. Is the United States not complicent in these murders because the Reagan administration financed and armed Saddam at that time? If there were executions, there is a good chance that they were carried out with American weapons. Saddam was fighting Iran then and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Plots hatched by the Bush41 CIA to assassinate Saddam resulted in a botched attempt and more purges of the Iraqi regimes' enemies and the attempted assassination of Bush Sr. on a visit to Kuwait.
Had the current President only come before the American people and said, "aside from the
fact that he is also my father, Saddam Hussein planned and attempted the murder a former President of the United States. This government considers that an act of war and we mean to retaliate against the Iraqi dictator." That would have been a war they could have sold without the snake oil and most people would have supported it. Instead, this administration manufactured evidence to go to war, an act both immoral and illegal. They might have borrowed a play from Poppy's playbook and tried to surgically remove Saddam like Bush Sr. did with Manuel Noriega. Anything would have been better than the current atrocity being waged in our names. Like anyone, I would like to see a favorable outcome in Iraq for this country and the world's sake. But I don't believe it will happen while the Bush government is in power. There is too much blood on their hands for the Iraqi people to ever forgive them. And the 2000 dead, like the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, will have to wait for other election cycles to discover if their sacrifice was worth the lies that killed them.

President Hastert

"Mister Speaker, the forty forth chief executive of the United States, President J. Dennis Hastert."

This administration, which never learns the lessons of history, still should have learned this one. After all, Karl Rove was a disciple of Donald Segretti and a peer of Lee Atwater in the field of political character assassination. Any examples needed can be found in the defeats of John McCain in the 2000 political primaries in South Carolina and the Swift Boat Vet Ads of the last election. The "boy genius" overreached this time, however. And even if he was unaware that exposing a CIA covert operative was a crime, the lesson of history is that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. That's why the news footage of the President sitting with his cabinet promising to get to the bottom of this mess, while the grinning conspirators sat to his left and right, stands out as the chief image of this deceit. They were reminiscent of a sixties' image of a Mississippi lynch mob about to be acquitted by an all white jury.

The President seemed aware of what was said and done in his name, and since the initial leak came from the Vice President's office, there's a good chance Mister Cheney knew as well. If that is the case, we will soon be hearing once again, "what did the President know, and when did he know it?" History's like that.
I don't know anything more about special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald than what I have readand heard in the mainstream media, but I do know that no Grand Jury sits this long, and no journalist goes to jail for three months for nothing. If the Bush White House thought this Prosecutor was going to roll over, they should have known that every thirty years or so, a man comes along with the integrity of Archibald Cox, and when he doesn't do the administrations' bidding, there is hell to pay.

In this case, the hell comes in the form of perjury and obstruction of justice, and Karl Rove's arrogant political destruction of Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife will pale in comparison to the damage he has inflicted on his own government. The cover-up of Rove's involvement by the President, and the cover-up of Lewis Libby's involvement by the Vice President, are impeachable offenses. After 2000 American and countless civilian lives have been lost in Iraq, the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, accompanied by the disaster of the President nominating his personal attorney to the Supreme Court, the political climate, on both sides of the spectrum, is ripe for a recall of the 2004 election.

I believe that Prosecutor Fitzgerald is about to hand down some serious indictments along with the indictments of unnamed co-conspirators. If that is the case, it spells the end for the criminal conspiracy that has seized this government. If Rove and Libby go down, so will the President and Vice President and in the direct line of succession stands the current Speaker of the House and the next President of the United States, J. Dennis Hastert, as destiny bound as Gerald R. Ford.

3 Point Plan for Citizen Action

Now that the hurricanes have revealed the rotten core of this administration, I would like to recommend a 3 Point Plan for Citizen Action for the remainder of the Bush term.

1. Resist all further attempts by this administration to "gut" government, both in services and in regulations for business and industry.
2. Send George Bush, cowboy hat in hand if necessary, to the Egyptians, the Pakistanis, our new best friends the Libyans, and especially the Saudis, to send an Islamic peacekeeping force to restore order in Iraq and allow our soldiers, who are walking jihadists targets, to return home to take care of their own.
3. Stop pretending that it is Dubya who makes the decisions for this government or this nation. Allow him to go on permanent vacation in order to do no further harm. Let him mountain bike at Camp David in case they need him to read something, but the shadow presidency of Cheney-Rumsfeld-and Rove should come into the light and be accountable for their policies.

In this administration, the buck never stops. In fact the almighty buck overrules all other restraints on governance. These shameless profiteers, raking in chips with both arms like a Las Vegas Poker champion, will not stop until the people stop them. 2006 is a long way away. Better to stand up and raise your voice now against the chaos that this administration has caused. Soon there will be no place left to hide.