The Flaming Wreckage of Rome

Dear Friends,

Many of you know that I am a supporter of Howard Dean's campaign to be President. Like many of you, I watched with some amount of concern when Howard Dean addressed his supporters in Iowa; his performance was, to put it charitably, a bit enthusiastic. On Tuesday, I was discouraged by the news coverage, but figured that his performance was a one-day story at best.

On Tuesday night, I watched the State of the Union address, and listened incredulously as President Bush ignored fundamental issues -- no mention of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Congress's plofligate spending, the increased threat level in the U.S. lately, or myriad other national problems, while practically breaking his arm to pat himself and his administration on the back, and proposing nothing of substance. But incredibly, on Wednesday, no one seemed to be saying what seems obvious -- this President is hopelessly and frighteningly out of touch with what our country needs right now.

By today, I was disgusted because the front page story is still a stupid speech to a group of people in Iowa.

Look, I don't how to state it any more bluntly:

Rome is burning.

30+ million Americans, including a lot of children, don't have healthcare. We say that we can't afford to pay for them to have healthcare, but the fact is that we already do -- since emergency rooms are the only place to get healthcare for many people who can't pay and don't have insurance, that's where they go. But it costs, on average, more than twice as much to treat someone in an emergency room than elsewhere, and guess who's paying for that -- you and I, in the form of higher insurance premium and reduced coverage. And what healthcare they do get in emergency rooms is sporadic and inferior to regular care.

Millions of kids go to schools that don't have art programs, and don't have music and don't have much of anything but curricula designed to help them beat the standardized tests. Most of all, they don't have money, because even though the federal government mandated a whole lot of new standards in the "No Child Left Behind" Act, it left out any money for schools to pay to meet these standards.

Our environmental policies are a mess. Our national forests are being sold to the highest bidder for clear cutting and logging, under a program that is cynically called the "Healthy Forests" initiative. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's oil connections are lobbying hard to drill in, and likely despoil, the last untouched wilderness in the U.S. -- the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge -- in order to eventually produce, over an entire a year, the amount of oil we consume in this country every day. At the same time, gas mileage standards have been eroded, smog standards have been loosened and so many environmental laws have been under attack that the administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency resigned in disgust.

Despite the capture of Saddam Hussein, American soldiers continue to die at least every other day in Iraq, and thousands more have been injured. Flight schedules bringing home the caskets of dead soldiers have been dishonorably arranged so that they arrive in the middle of the night; that way, there are no pesky news cameras to broadcast the return. Terrorist threats continue to plague us -- during Christmas, after Saddam was captured, we went to the second highest alert status nationwide, some flights were cancelled and others were escorted, over American soil, by fighter jets. Yet cities and states have received virtually no assistance in paying for the increased costs of keeping so-called first-responders (that's police, fire and rescue to you and me) on heightened alert, and there has been virtually no attention paid to policing the millions of shipping containers that daily enter ports in some of the most populated cities in the country.

2.3 million jobs disappeared between 2001 and now. Yes, the economy appears to be expanding recently, but there have been very few new jobs created, and the jobs that have been created have tended to be low-wage, low skill jobs that don't come close to replacing the higher-skill, higher wage jobs that we have lost. Meanwhile, the federal government cynically refused to extend unemployment benefits that were set to expire just before Christmas, so that people who have had trouble finding jobs would be able get by just a little longer.

Right now, two American citizens -- American citizens! -- are locked up in jail, and have been locked up for almost two years, without ANY charges being filed and without any opportunity to challenge their confinement. They have been locked up because the President and Attorney General determined, without any review, that the prisoners were "enemy combatants". Meanwhile, we are holding hundreds more in illegal detention around the world, in violation of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, and in contravention of hundreds of years of well-recognized international law. Some of the detained prisoners are as young as 13 years old.

The President of the United States stood before the country last year, and lied about weapons of mass destruction. He told us that if we didn't stop Saddam Hussein, we might be facing a nuclear strike at any moment. No, there was no "the only thing to fear is fear itself" for this President -- he practically shouted "Look out, here they come!" to justify attacking Iraq. And yet, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, when he had the prime-time ear of four broadcast networks and at least five cable networks, he chose not to call for a moment of silence to remember the 500 dead so far, didn't thank the husbands and wives and children and parents and friends of 500 heroes who died because of his lies for their sacrifices, and didn't apologize for lying in the first place. Instead, he chose to devote some of the most valuable verbal real estate ever given to a single human being to calling on a ban on performance-enhancing drugs by a handful of professional athletes.

The President and the Republican leadership have played viscious and callous politics with people's lives just because they had the temerity to disagree with the Republican position. The list is embarrasingly long, but includes Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, a Republican congressional staffer and former aide to Gen. Clark who was fired for saying hello to his old boss when he visited Capital Hill, and the former Treasury Secretary who, within hours of criticizing the Bush administration, became the target of an investigation into how a "confidential" document was shown on national television.

And I haven't even touched on President Bush's illogical push to "privatize Social Security" or the call to make tax cuts permanent or to renew the Patriot Act, or the marginalization of the United Nations in the name of "defending" it or the cutting of veterans' benefits, or any one of subjects where we're on the wrong track.

Friends, Rome is burning. Please tell me it's not true that the most important story we can muster indignation over is an overly exuberant speech to a group of supporters in Iowa. I'm disgusted.

I have often said, you get the government that you deserve. Well, I deserve better, and I still think, screaming exuberance or not, that Howard Dean is the best candidate to help us get there. The fact is, he's gotten healthcare for every child in Vermont. He brought high-value white-collar businesses to Vermont that didn't destroy the environment, he preserved wetlands, he implemented an early-childhood intervention program that helps kids who are born into poverty to get a leg up on getting out of poverty, and he balanced the budget (despite no legal obligation to do so) so well that when times got bad and lots of state budgets went into the red, Vermont continued to operate in the black. Will somebody please tell me how this guy is less qualified to be President than President Bush, or anyone else who's running for the Democratic nomination?

Anyway, that's my pitch. In the end, whoever gets the Democratic nomination will get my vote. But it's not true that they'll get my heart.