John F. Kennedy

Politicians, Kids and an Audacious Hope

dlindorff — Sun, 18 May 2008 12:39:02 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

I remember back in 1970, when I was a student and anti-war activist in Connecticut, watching an ad on TV for Lowell Weicker, who was running for US Senate. The ad was very powerful: It showed Weicker playing in the yard with his son, who looked like he was maybe 10 or 12. Weicker was saying that when his son was a tot, the US was fighting in Vietnam, and he didn’t want us to be fighting there when his son reached draft age.

I voted for Weicker, a Republican who went on to win a Senate seat where he played a key role in helping to bring an end to the Nixon presidency.

As it happens, the Vietnam War ended five years later, when Weicker’s son was probably 17. He didn’t get drafted, but I remain struck by the fact that we could, back then, even contemplate the idea of being at war for so long.

Today, I have a son, Jed, who is 15. America doesn’t have a draft, but we do have a war in Iraq which has been going since Jed was 9, with no end in sight. John McCain, the prospective presidential candidate for the Republican Party, says America can win that war by 2013. 2013? That’s five more years! At that point Jed will be 20 years old! We will have been at war in Iraq for more than half of a young adult’s life! And worse yet, if McCain has his way—or if President Bush beats him to it and even before the next president is inaugurated on Jan. 19, 2009 decides to, as McCain so light-heartedly put it, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran”--we will be at war with the entire Arab world. And believe me, we would have a draft then, and my son would be near the top of the list.

That’s the future we look forward to with a President John McCain: permanent war.

Now I know Barack Obama has made some remarks about not allowing Iran to “get the bomb,” and about “not taking any options off the table,” but I think it’s highly unlikely that if he were president we’d go to war with Iran. First off, Obama has called for “unconditional” talks with Iran, as well as with other countries with which the US has disagreements. That’s the antithesis of belligerence, and certainly is the antithesis of the approach of the Bush administration, which equates talking with surrender. Second, where Bush’s whole approach to government has been to create fear and chaos and then to rule as a tyrant while accusing critics of being traitors or cowards, Obama’s whole approach has been to challenge that campaign of fear, and to call for calm and reason. I take some heart from his full-throated challenge to Bush’s and McCain’s charge that his willingness to talk with Iran is akin to Neville Chamberlain’s “appeasement” of Hitler—something neither Al Gore nor John Kerry, as candidates, would have had the guts to do.

Obama has also talked about the US possibly having troops in Iraq for years, but I don’t think that’s what would happen, either.

Think about it. For McCain, war is a good thing. He sees nothing wrong with it. He likes it. He has no idea how to run the country (he admits he doesn’t even understand economics!). So he’s going to end up doing what Bush did—ramp up the wars, and keep the people scared. It’s the only way the Republicans know how to govern anymore.

But whatever one may think of Obama—and certainly he’s taken some lame and politically timid positions over the years as a senator—he doesn’t like war, and moreover, wants to do things domestically as president that endless war would prevent him from doing. Furthermore, this Iraq a war he had nothing to do with starting. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he opposed it from the outset. So what advantage is there for him politically in allowing it to fester through his first term as president? Better to be shed of it right away, take any political heat that might come from calling it off, and then move on to better things.

I think it’s a safe bet that an Obama presidency will see an end to the Iraq war, a rapprochement with Iran.

For my son’s sake, and all our sons’ sakes, I’m voting for Obama this year. I’m doing it not thinking that he will usher in a golden age of progressive politics, but because I’m sick of living through endless war.

McCain promises endless war.

Obama offers at least the hope of peace.

The human race is heading off a cliff. The ice caps are melting, the seas are rising, one-third of the life on the planet has vanished, and species of plants and animals are vanishing with a rapidity not seen since the late Cretaceous Period. Unless we want to go the way of the dinosaur or the mastodon, we don’t have time for wars of imperial conquest, or for petty squabbling anymore. We need to focus on fixing the big things. And until Americans can be talked out from under the table so we can focus our attention on something other than “terrorists,” nothing is going to be done.

Obama hasn’t talked much about these big things, but again, I believe that once he’s in office, and the reality hits him, he will.

Why? The man has two young kids, and unlike our current president (who at best reads a one-page news summary written and delivered by a team of cowering yes-men afraid of crossing him, and who claims to think God works through him), he is actually smart and reads his own newspapers. He also has a smart wife who speaks her own mind.

John F. Kennedy, for all his faults, had the good sense to look out the Oval Office window at the falling rain, consider that it was dumping radioactive Strontium 90 and other dangerous fallout across the land, and call a halt to open-air nuclear testing.

I’m pretty sure Obama will have the good sense to listen to his scientific advisors, including the Goddard Center’s James Hansen, and that he will initiate dramatic action to try and actually do something to combat climate change.

I know expecting anything good from a politician is a fool’s errand, but I’ve looked at the alternatives. Let’s call it an audacious hope.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Invasion of the Pumpheads!

dlindorff — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:08:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Is America at the mercy of an invasion of the pumpheads?

The bizarre behavior of Bill Clinton during this campaign season, which has seen this once smooth-talking and politically uber-sophisticated campaigner repeatedly stick a foot in his mouth and undermine his wife’s struggling campaign, raises the issue of whether he is suffering from postperfusion syndrome—a now recognized cognitive impairment common in patients who have undergone heart bypass surgery.

Referred to in hospital jargon as “pumphead syndrome,” the condition, thought to be caused by debris and bubbles that are created and released into the bloodstream by artificial pumps used to circulate blood while hearts are being operated on—material that can block blood flow in smaller vessels in the brain, causing neurological damage--this recognized condition has been demonstrated in some studies to lead to significant cognitive impairment that can show up in as many as 42 percent of heart surgery patients even as long as five years after surgery.

Clinton underwent quadruple bypass surgery on Sept. 6, 2006, and accordiing to his doctors, instead of keeping his heart going during the procedure, they chose the method that involved shutting down his heart temporarily, and putting him temporarily on a heart pump--the method that can cause posperfusion syndrome.

At least in Clinton’s case, if he is a “pumphead,” the only damage he can do is to his wife’s campaign. He is no longer president or commander in chief. (Well, let me take that back. If she were elected, he could create havoc as First Spouse and chief pillow talker, but let’s not even go there!)

But what about Cheney, a man who has had five, count ‘em, five heart surgeries, each of which offered a 42% chance of causing permanent cognitive impairment? No wonder there are reports that this bizarre, eternally snarling, heavy drinking friend shooter is said to hum to himself loudly and tunelessly in the stall of the White House men’s room!

If we consider the likelihood that the man widely seen as the power in this administration is a pumphead, and that Bush himself, who spent a long time as a drunk and a cokehead (talk about the potential for, not to mention the clear evidence of mental impairment!), we are left with the almost inevitable conclusion that we have been led for the past two terms by a pair brain-damaged men—and that’s not even counting the members of the cabinet and National Security Council, the medical histories of whom we know nothing. Given the advanced age of most of the team, it’s a fair bet that a number of them have had heart surgery too.

Call it “Invasion of the Pumpheads!”

Certainly not everyone who undergoes heart surgery and gets put temporarily on a pump ends up mentally deficient, but the prevalence of the problem sounds to me like a pretty good reason to demand full medical disclosure from all candidates for higher office, and not just for president and vice president, but for cabinet posts too—and judgeships.

For starters, Republican presidential presumptive nominee John McCain, 71 and a known cancer survivor, has not released his medical records. That suspicious failure of candor in a man who has already run for president once, should tell us something right away. His behavior places him squarely in the pumphead suspicion category, especially given that the guy repeatedly fails to recognize the difference between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, and thinks that the Iranians—nearly all Shia—are backing Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group that is so anti-Iran that they are publicly calling on the US to attack that country! Even if he hasn’t had heart surgery, if he were elected and took office at age 72, he’d be the oldest president in history, and his prognosis for making it through one, much less two terms in one of the world’s most stressful jobs without having a heart attack seem slim.

Not that seemingly intelligent presidents haven’t been disastrous or haven’t made terrible decisions (think Nixon, Kennedy, Hoover and Wilson). But we’ve just endured two terms of a president with some kind of mental impairment with catastrophic results, and we had one in the 1980s with Alzheimer-afflicted Ronald Reagan, which set the nation on its course to bankruptcy. We certainly don’t need yet a third president of limited mental ability. It’s almost like we’re institutionalizing the concept.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is an investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Video Game Simulates (?) JFK Assassination; Awards/Deducts Points for Following/Diverging from Warren Commission Report

Ted Kahl — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 19:50:53 -0500

From Reuters:

A new video game to be released Monday allows players to simulate[?] the assassination of President Kennedy.

The release of "JFK Reloaded" [cute title, eh?] is timed to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy's murder in Dallas and was designed to demonstrate a lone gunman was able to kill the president.

"It is despicable," said David Smith, a spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, the late president's brother. He was informed of the game on Friday but declined further comment.

Kirk Ewing, managing director of the Scottish firm Traffic Games, which developed the game, said he understood some people would be horrified at the concept, but he insisted he and his team had nothing but respect for Kennedy and for history.

"We believe that the only thing we're exploiting is new technology," [oh please stop!] said Ewing, a former documentary filmmaker and senior executive with Scottish developer VIS, responsible for games like "State of Emergency." He said he sent Edward Kennedy a letter before the game's release.

Ewing said the game was designed to undermine the theory there was some shadowy plot behind the assassination. "We believe passionately there was no conspiracy," he said.

Traffic Games said the objective was for a player to fire three shots at Kennedy's motorcade from assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's digitally recreated sixth-floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository.

Points are awarded or subtracted based on how accurately the shots match the official [as opposed to a scientifically-sound?] version of events as documented in by the Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy's assassination.

Submitted for your consideration...