Why Did He Do That?

I have a hard time understanding just what Scott McClellan means when he says “I allowed myself to be deceived”.  What exactly does he mean by that statement?  It’s important because McClellan, in his capacity as White House press secretary stood before US and foreign television cameras and the world press corps and told what he honestly believed was the truth.  And for that he blames himself.

The conundrum presents itself because in his book What Happened, he starts off by saying how he still likes President Bush; thinks he’s “fundamentally decent”; doesn’t think that the president “deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people”.  But it turns out that not only the president, but several of his cronies lied to Mr. McClellan without Mr. McClellan knowing about it.  That’s the crux of the book.

So how can McClellan blame himself? 

What bothers me is why he bothered talking about Bush as if the president were some brilliantly glowing example of American leadership and then go about trashing him for the next several hundred pages.

Look, I haven’t read the book; last time I heard, it was yet to be published.  But of course there are plenty of copies floating around and almost all of Washington — officials and media personnel — seem to have found a copy somewhere and the latter, especially, are having a heyday with both contents and the premise.

And it appears to me — well, I used the word conundrum meaning — I’m puzzled.

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To understand what led to this book, one has to go back to the Valerie Plame affair in 2003.  A mess which received a lot of coverage but only a fraction of that apportioned to Bill Clinton’s zipper.  And yet it was potentially … and eventually became, far more important.  It was another case of a sitting president lying.   

Speaking of lying, both Clinton and Bush have caused millions to raise their eyebrows when questioned as to their past exposure to drugs.  Clinton said he smoked marijuana but didn’t inhale, Bush said he just plain couldn’t remember whether he’d done cocaine or not.  Rubbish.  And everyone knows it.  It simply doesn’t work that way.  As far as I’m concerned they both got stoned and were afraid to admit it.  I’d like somebody to ask John McCain if he ever smoked a joint. He could say “Yeah, sure, but it was legal then”.

As to the premise of Mr. McClellan’s book and the Valerie Plame business: you may recall that Robert Novak the right-wing writer for the Washington Post as well as other pursuits, blew Plames CIA cover when her husband, Joseph Wilson, a member of former President Clinton’s team and involved in Iraq and Africa told the US people that the Bush administration was ‘full of it’.  That Saddam Hussein never bought yellow-cake (used for making nukes) from Niger.  So Bush and Co. presumably leaked Wilson’s CIA informant (his wife) to Novak and the cat was out of the bag. 

McClellan blames himself for telling the news media that Karl Rove and Vice-president Dick Cheney’s right-hand man, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, had no part in leaking anything to anybody.  But Rove, Libby, & Cheney — and George W. Bush all told him Rove and Libby had nothing to do with any leaks.   

Well he discovered he’d been lied to when, to make a long story short, Libby was tried, convicted, sentenced and then exonerated by President Bush – a kind of package deal.  My goodness, as Scott McClellan says, he felt just awful.  So awful he blamed himself.  Again: Why?

Does the guy own a crystal ball, is he a psychic, does he have a lantern with a genie inside.  No.  We can only assume he felt that this bunch of cut-throat politicians, some of the cut-throatiest since the Nixon crowd, were all honest upstanding saints so he blamed himself for not seeing what most of the rest of the country was aware of by 2005 following the Valerie Plame incident: that they were an “administration in which deceit and prevarication were commonplace”, to quote Jonathon Yardley from the Washington Post.  

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McClellan can’t be held responsible for what was being discussed behind closed door in the oval office.  He didn’t have a pass.  His ilk never has had passes.  They are given the company line and told to go out there and face those heathen SOB’s who spread ‘the word’, what ‘the word’ is.  As it turned out, ‘the word’ was a bunch of horse-pucky.

Scott McClellan was duped.  “It was one of the most painful experiences of my life to have realized that two years earlier” he had told the nation that Rove & Libby weren’t guilty of leaking information.  The lid came off, a special prosecutor was appointed and McClellan was the mouthpiece at the center of a national scandal.

So to put things straight he writes this book What Happened .  Not, as he puts it “to settle scores or enhance his own role but to record what I know”.  Well we can stop right there because Mr. McClellan, if you have done nothing else, you have settled a score.  Oh yes.  Big Time.  Smack in the middle of an election campaign.

So I repeat, not only do I not understand you blaming yourself, I can’t understand why you couch the thrashing you deliver to President Bush with this “I still like him” poop.

How, in the name of all that is mighty can you still like and admire a man who has lied to you and charged you with the task of perpetrating the lie to the entire world.  It’s not as if someone said “It wasn’t me who stole your Mars bar” when all the time the chocolate was melting in his back pocket.  This was world class BS.

By using a theme of self condemnation coupled with your continued admiration and your apparent conviction that the president had not “consciously sought to deceive the American people” you have succeeded in making yourself look rather foolish.  Or at the worst, implemented a bit of doubt as to whether people can really believe you. 

Rest easy, those who wish to, will.  However don’t expect an invitation to John McCain’s inauguration should things turn out that way.

Beyond

 

We have been a bit muddled on Earth these past weeks what with Nature’s torments in Asia, and in the US; the cost of food, gas prices,  and of course the ongoing Democratic nominating process twixt Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton;  jibes coming with more regularity from Senator John McCain.  

All this has served well to take our interest away from a particularly good piece of news served up by the scientific minds at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: the landing of the Phoenix Space Craft on the polar region of Mars.   Quite a feat.  We’ve had the usual “put it in context” examples … kicking a field goal from Chicago through the uprights in Rio de Janeiro. 

We take for granted that NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) can do these things with the finesse of a mastermind when in reality there are enough failures by both agencies to put paid to the fact that it just plain ain’t that easy.  They’ve just had problems with the toilets on the Space Station, several Mars Landers have conked out and far worse problems have caught our attention over the years.   But that’s not what I want to get at.

We are a species of exploration; of new frontiers; of what, why, and even who.  There once was a time, not so long ago when Alaska was the Last Frontier.  Neil Armstrong changed all that on July 20^th, 1969 with “one small step”.  And the Last Frontier was 385,000 kilometers away.   I can recall in High School discussing with a friend how a scientific experiment had succeeded in bouncing a radar beam off the moon.  I remember saying words to the effect that the Moon had been sitting there for billions of years with no contact from its neighbor and suddenly “ping”.  I posed the question: just how long is it going to take for mankind to reach old Luna in person?   

Not long, only about another 30 years or so.

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It is hard to see how any country, or the world at large can afford to start building space stations on the Moon to be used for kick-off points to the rest of the Solar System as was the case with Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It is a time of need here on Earth and until we get our problems sorted out we simply can’t get there from here.  By ‘we’ I mean people and by ‘there’, I mean Mars and beyond.

But let’s be impractical.  Let’s forecast a time when we can afford such extremism.  

I read a book about terra-forming – the transformation from an inhabitable climate into one that would support our own species.  The book I read said it would take a long time but it was written a long time ago and there is speculation that converting a nearby planet to a place where we could live in comfort has been greatly reduced thanks to the discovery of oxygen and other building blocks of atmospheric compatibility on Mars. 

It is of no great interest to these folks who dream of transforming the atmosphere of Mars if the Phoenix Lander finds some form of bacterial life — as long as it is long dead and long un-dangerous.   Such a discovery will make screaming headlines today but have little impact on the future.

A couple of scientists, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee at the University of Washington wrote a book this century entitled Rare Earth in which they speculated that bacterial life was likely to be found on many planets in the Universe.  However Complex life was entirely uncommon.  The book made the case that complex life — intelligent life — took so many conditions that our world is indeed rare.  So although finding micro-life on Mars may be something of a scientific bunker-buster at this phase of space exploration, it has little to do with us travelling into space and living — beyond.

On Moons.  Moons have surfaces whereas only four of the eight planets (Pluto’s been downgraded to a minor planet) can support an object such as an astronaut.  The terrestrial planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.  Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are great balls of gas, mostly hydrogen and they have no surfaces.  But as I say, their moons do.

Indeed the moons of Jupiter – dubbed the Galilean moons; Galileo discovered them — are planet sized, one of them, Ganymede, is larger than Mercury.  Other than Io — which orbits next to the Colossus — is so affected by the Jovian gravitational pull that it is blanketed with Volcanoes spewing sulfur which enshrouds the immediate neighborhood with nastiness – but the other three: Calisto; the aforementioned Ganymede and Europa all pose living space for the post-Martian generation.

There are a few other Moons in our Solar System that orbit a long way from Earth but are planet-sized as well.  One is at Saturn — Titan.  This celestial body is twice as large as our moon and also larger than Mercury, although nowhere nearly as dense as either.  It is shrouded in a dense Nitrogen atmosphere which left astronomers no way to glimpse it’s surface until in 2004 we sent a probe – Huygens, named after the moon’s discoverer — to touch down and look around.

Low Mountains, chemical lakes, shorelines, rain, wind, and a distinct, thick atmosphere prone to weather patterns much like Earth: that’s Titan.  A cold inhospitable place — as is most of the material Solar System except our planet – but terra-forming could change all that.  

And finally there is Triton which travels around Neptune.  The wrong way it so happens, it is retrograde as compared to most of the other moons in the Solar system.  It is the seventh largest moon and the last one to approximate the size of our own moon.  All in all, it’s just too far away to fiddle with unless one wanted to use it as a storage area.  And yet the day may arrive when Triton could come into its own, as a starting place for extra-solar exploration.   A story for another day.

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My purpose in bringing these moons into focus, as it were, is to inform you that there are other big places in the Solar System – not just Earth.  Conditions on their surfaces are distinctly hostile.  But they are places.  And better to travel outwards than inwards when discussing hostile environment in the same sentence with terra-forming. 

Our nearest neighbor, Venus, is just too darn hot.  When it comes to taming atmosphere’s, warming up is preferable to cooling down especially when the Sun is so very close that one would need eye shields just to take a walk amongst the Venusian rockeries.  

As for Mercury; too small, too hot, too bright, twice as close to the sun as we are and sunburn is not just a hazard it’s a death sentence. 

One day all this is not going to sound as it does today.  Today, Buck Rogers is a has-been. Tomorrow is wide open to exploration which will most likely comprise the eventual expansion of mankind from a crowded planet where he has not performed as well as he might considering the benefits of which Nature provides.

If you wish, you may see some of these places.  All you need is binoculars.  Hold them steady on a clear night, point them at Jupiter and you will see up to four tiny star-like images.  The Galilean moons.  They changed how life was thought of upon Earth 400 years ago, tomorrow they may change how we live when we get to, well … Beyond.

 

 

 

Strange Days……

….  was the name of the second LP by the rock group The Doors, released in September of 1967.  Those were indeed strange days what with the “hippy” movement in full swing.  But they were hardly more strange than the present, with its frightful natural disasters, it’s soaring crude oil costs and it’s quirky American election campaign, all claiming headlines world-wide.

We won’t know the outcome of what the discussion Sunday in Burma until United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon makes it public. However we do know that the meeting, which is ostensibly being held to arrange how aid will be distributed to the millions of homeless Burmese people, is a front.  The real discussion will center on how aid workers will be allowed to operate within the country’s borders.  There is rumored to be a clash of concept regarding the latter.

What puzzles me is why on Earth, General Than Shwe and his goon squad are not charged in the World Court with Crimes against Humanity.  The man has allowed God knows how many millions of the 135 million dead and missing to die because he was scared out of his skin someone may question his devastating and illegal leadership.  Even as the horror of the Irawaddy Delta continues, Than is going ahead with the second phase of his phony, forced referendum on leadership – something akin to holding a birthday festival when a large number of the guests have just died.

Whatever the outcome, the general is likely to put up a fight for continued control of his country — upon which he has turned his back.  He’s a damnable liar.  The UN estimates the amount of money needed to put things back in shape is 187 billion while General Than says there was less than 12 billion in damages.  Maybe he has forgotten that the number of dead account for an inestimable monetary loss to the nation’s human social structure.

Meanwhile not far to the north lies a second disaster equal in scope only with differing circumstances.  2008 will likely go down as China’s most memorable year for many decades to come.  And for several distinct reasons: the bloody dust-up over Tibet and the media fall-out  over reaction on the route of the Olympic Flame; the Sichuan Earthquake and this year’s Summer Olympic Games.  With Hope, and on behalf of the people of China, nothing further will add to their teeter-totter ride of the past few months so as to allow the last event to be a success.

Only a month ago demonstrations and boycotts were being discussed over the Games.  However the Tibetan clash has been pushed so far into the background following the May 8^th ‘quake, it’s leapfrogged the old “pushed back to page six” metaphor and TV equates it with last year’s American Idol winners.  Whatever, it would be the height of Political Incorrectness to hash it over now.  It’s history. 

Chinese people and foreigners alike have, all over the world, collected millions to assist the homeless and the reconstruction.  There has been a vast outpouring of sympathy mainly because, unlike Burma and its secrecy, China has shown as much as possible to the outside world about what is happening in the quake zone.

The opposing perspective to each country’s disaster tells much about the pitiful backwardness of Burma in contrast to the acceptance of China in its attempt to reconcile a new world order.  That the two calamities should happen within a week of each other — and so close geographically — they are linked in one’s mind as if to present some kind of awful lesson in contrast.

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The events in Asia, catastrophic as they may be, have had to share air-time and press space with the ongoing rise in oil prices.  Living in a third world country as I do, it becomes all too evident that people here in the Philippines and several other South East Asian nations are a bit more concerned about the cost of fuel than Americans deciding whether or not to visit Aunt Maud in the Berkshires over the Memorial Day Weekend.

In the Philippines for example, not only have gasoline prices skyrocketed, the government is allowing food costs and price-gouging to reach new limits – a fearful test of people’s endurance.  Infrastructure such as electrical power operations are dysfunctional – breaking down twice or three times per day in many provinces.  Parts are not available to repair these decrepit old contraptions, many of which appear to have been purchased third hand in somewhere like Gambia from a back-alley fleece merchant named Slick.

Small businesses needing refrigeration are just plain out of luck; few can afford a generator let alone the fuel to run one.  The government adds to the problem by mounting unimaginable tariffs for travelling on the only quick route to most heavily populated areas.  And of course it filters down to a staggering cost to the people..  We paid; a few years ago nearly five times less for fuel and several times less for almost everything else than we do today.  That is not uncommon in 2008 however it is harder for the poor countries of the world to manage.

Ask a Filipino or an Indonesian about the rise in gas prices and he probably doesn’t have a clue as to whether or not reserves are plentiful or scarce, he only knows he has to grow his own food or his family will starve.  People here are dying — a combination of weather-ruined rice crops, corruption in government, exorbitant tax increases and sky high delivery costs pushing the price of food up, up and away … far above what the average Filipino can afford.

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All this makes the silliness in the American election campaign just that: silliness.  The foo-fah in which Hillary Clinton has embroiled herself was, I’m sure,  not meant as a harsh slap at Barack Obama and his need for protection or a stab at the Kennedy family because Senator Ted Kennedy has thrown his support to her rival. 

What she said was stupid.  Why is it, that back in March when she first made the remark about Bobby Kennedy being killed in June, some member of her camp didn’t warn her not to use the statement again?  It was not effective and it would play out badly in the media.  Little was she to know that Ted Kennedy would be stricken with a cancerous brain tumor back then but she sure knew this time.  So she brings it up again in an interview whilst trying to make a case for her staying in the race.  

How much it will hurt her remains to be seen.  It was borderline callous and showed appalling judgment and some will hold it against her.

Meanwhile, John McCain has lost his chance to blast his likely opposition in the presidential race.  A few weeks ago he said he would bring the Reverend Jeremiah Wright up when campaigning against Senator Obama.  Well, not any more he won’t.  Not unless he wants to get the Reverend John Hagee, he of the “Hitler was doing the Jews a favor for getting them out of Europe and back to Palestine” statement — or the anti-Muslim comments of Reverend Rod Parsley tossed back at him like an Andy Pettitte fastball.

Speaking of Sport, it appears the only good news these days comes from Moscow — but don’t credit the Russians, it’s all because of the current giants of football, the Red Devils from Old Trafford — Manchester United.  Your 350 million fans from across the globe gained a respite from the devastation and political slug-fests with your win over Chelsea.   Sorry Yerpal, you owe me ten quid.