Christopher Macintosh

The climate of corruption in the Bush administration and among Republicans on Capitol Hill continues with, apparently, no remorse, shame, or embarrassment in any form. Indeed, they seem almost proud of their venality and mendacity.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing report condemning the Bush Administration’s practice of buying news in which prominent reporters and journalists were paid tens of thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of taxpayer dollars to spread pro-Bush propaganda. The report focused on Armstrong Williams, an arch-conservative commentator, who was paid by the Department of Education to spread propaganda favorable to the “No Child Left Behind” program, which has left millions behind because it mandates certain standards, but provides no money to schools to meet those standards. In other cases, TV commercials were produced by various agencies that purport to show great progress being made by the Admnistration in a variety of areas. However, the commercials were made to resemble news reports and were sent to hundreds of TV stations, many of which showed them as news reports without proper identification as government PR creations. Bush’s people can’t do this anymore.

Scooter Libby, Vice-President Dick’s chief of staff, was revealed to be a source in the Valerie Plame case this week when he released New York Times reporter Judith Miller from her confidentiality pledge. The coward allowed a reporter who was protecting his identity to languish for nearly three months in jail before he finally released her. What was he hiding and if he had nothing to hide, why did he force her to sit in jail for more than eighty days to protect him? Both he and Karl Rove, the other source in the leak, which may have violated national security laws for mear political retribution against Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, should face jail time.

Tom DeLay has finally been indicted for something. For years, he has used every dirty trick in the book to claw his way to power and to cower and intimidate those under him in the House Republican Caucus to follow his demands. In 2002, he formed TRMPac, Texans for a Republican Majority, to raise money for a Republican campaign to take over the Texas Legislature so that they could, among many things, gerrymander Congressional district lines in Texas so that the Republicans could pick up five seats. It worked. However, corporate donations, which are illegal in Texas for legislative races, were funneled and laundered through the Republican National Committee and several have been indicted on this. DeLay has been indicted on charges of criminal conspiracy in the scam. It is blatant and he is defiant.

And, now BOTH Republican Congressional leaders are suspect. Senator Bill Frist is under investigation for insider trading. First, he sold stock held for him in a private trust which he isn’t supposed to have influence over. Secondly, the stock he sold is in HCA, Hospital Corporation of America, a company controlled by his family. His family was selling their stock just weeks before poor earnings reports were to come out that sent the stock plummetting. Trading by insiders on private information that outsiders are not privy to is illegal. Frist says it is just a coincidence that he sold his stock at the same time his family was dumping theirs, just weeks before the stock tanked. Just a coincidence. Yeah, right.

I know there are egregious cases of corruption among the Democrats, but these four examples of a myriad of Republican illegalities and unethical behaviors are just so blatant and so “in-your-face” that it is mind-boggling. And, the continued support of right-wing lemmings is amazing. They don’t care how many mistakes the President and his people make. They don’t care how many no-bid contracts to rebuild Iraq and the Gulf Coast go to the President’s contributors and friends. They don’t care how many laws are broken, how the Bill of Rights is ignored, how many lies are told, how many billions of dollars are built up in debt to China and the Saudis to bail-out the Administration’s wasteful and insane spending, how many young Americans die in an illegal war.

People get the politicians they deserve.

Quagmire was 0ften the term used by opponents to describe the American involvement in Vietnam; but no, this is not going to be another cliched comparison with Iraq. Rather, this is about New Orleans and the money pit that is now opening up.

President Bush has announced that we will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the Gulf coast, (New Orleans), at a time when we are already running hundreds of billlions of dollars in the red financing his War on Iraq. We must be very careful before we send politicians down there with barrels full of cash to make certain that this is not simply flushing money down the toilet or enriching a few at the expense of the many.

New Orleans is notorious as one of the most corrupt cities in the nation. The New Orleans police department has long been known to be rife with corruption. And, the incompetence of Mayor Ray Nagin is beyond dispute. Good Heavens! Last summer, Nagin announced to the city’s poor that if they were ever faced with evacuation, they were on their own as the city would not be able to evacuate them. Then, when the real thing hit, he sent bus drivers home the day of the hurricane to save money and told off-duty police not to show up until the day AFTER the hurricane! This is the kind of municipal administration to which we want to hand over billions of dollars?

Louisiana has a long and sordid history of corrupt politics. This is the state that continued to re-elect Edwin Edwards when he was under indictment, the man who said he would never lose an election unless he was found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. He was eventually convicted of corruption, but it took years to do so.

However, let’s not focus our fears of corruption and incompetence just on New Orleans and Louisiana. Friends of the Bush Administration are already lining up at the trough. Joe Allbaugh ran George W’s 2000 election campaign, for which experience it was deamed he was qualified to run FEMA. After leaving FEMA and suggesting a political crony from Oklahoma to be his successor, (the infamous and incompetent Mike Brown), he became a lobbyist and, guess what? After the first major disaster, two companies he represents, Shaw Group and Halliburton, (yes, the same Halliburton Dick Cheney ran and which received billions in no-bid contracts in Iraq), have received no-bid contracts for initial relief work. People connected to both companies were also significant contributors to the Bush campaigns.

The record defecits we are now running, after years of surpluses under President Clinton, are primarily being financed by Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Communist China. We are spending tens of billions of dollars in interest on those loans. Do the American people want to give away billions of dollars to China every year?

The rebuilding of the Gulf Coast is going to be a financial quagmire and if someone isn’t careful, it’s mostly going to be wasted.

It has become quite popular for many GLBT people to describe themselves, and to presume to refer to anyone GLBT, as “queer.” We have the gay minstrel show on Bravo now called Queer Eye. Universities and colleges across America have instituted “Queer Studies” programs. Queer seems to be the accepted term now for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered.

I’m sorry, but I detest the term.

I am not queer. I am gay, I am homosexual, and not straight. But, I am not queer and I don’t like anyone, “queer” or not, calling me “queer.”

I find the term offensive and a reminder of the descrimination and violence we have suffered for too long. I have written of my stepfather calling me queer when I was a boy. I was beaten almost every day during junior high school. A young man was murdered in my city when I was a teen and the word “queer” written with his blood on the wall beside him.

“Queer” is symbolic of all the pain and degradation we have endured. I find it as offensive as “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” or “wop.” No university would institute a “Nigger Studies” program or offer classes in “Kike-history.” Why should “queer” be acceptable to us?

For that matter, why should a program such as “Queer Eye,” regardless of the title, be acceptable? “Queer Eye” is nothing more than the gay 21st-Century equivalent of “Amos and Andy.”

I know that some say that by embracing “queer,” we take the pain and hate from the word. No we don’t. Ask any African-American if they would tolerate ‘nigger” or if they embraced “niggger, would it take away the pain of centuries of slavery, lynchings, and descrimination. Ask a Jew if they would embrace “kike” as a way of alleviating the pain of the Holocaust and the Dyaspora.

For some, it is an “in-your-face,” “fuck-you” way of declaring independence from the descrimination and hate and I can understand the anger behind such feelings. Like every other middle-aged gay man, I have my copy of La Cage aux Folles and know all the words to “I Am What I Am.” But, I think there is a bit of exhibitionism in it, as well; a bit of wanting to shock. It’s similar to the tacky and tasteless exhibitionism often seen in Pride parades that negate any positive image that may be created. Wagging your penis at shocked straight people along the parade route is not going to influence them to be more receptive to gay marraige. All it does is declare that you care not for their feeings. If that’s all you want, then fine. However, some of us want more.

I am who I am and I am comfortable with who I am. I don’t need to walk up to a complete stranger on the street, slap his face, and scream, “I’m a cocksucker!” And, it’s not internalized homophobia to say so.

When you allow one aspect of your character or life to be the definition of who you are, you are pathetically mono-dimensional. And, the use of the word “queer” is an insulting and demeaning way of defining a group and often embraced by those for whom being gay is the over-riding quality of their being.

I am not queer, but I am proud that I have loved men and I was proud to march around the White House in protest against anti-gay descrimination. I was proud to work in the HIV community. I was proud to volunteer with The Quilt. I am proud to drive a car with a rainbow flag sticker. I am proud to write gay love stories. I am proud to speak to legislators and politicians about gay issues. I am proud to write letters to the newspaper regarding gay issues. I am proud to march in the Pride parade and to publicly declare my homosexuality.

But, I am not queer and don’t presume to call me queer.

The next Presidential election in the US will not occur for more than three years, but speculation is already growing on whom the parties will choose for their nominees. Organization for all the prospective candidates is well underway and each has already been making the obligatory trips to Iowa and New Hampshire to guarantee consideration in the first of the caucuses and primaries. Pundits and bloggers are already wasting airtime and bandwidth on their ideas and theories and so, not to be left behind, am I.

I would like to throw out a name that is not getting the attention and thought I believe it deserves: Albert Gore, Jr.

Several months ago, I was watching a speech on C-SPAN that the former Vice-President delivered to Move-On. For over an hour and a half, Al Gore spoke eloquently and knowledgably on a myriad of subjects without once looking at notes. Can anyone, anyone imagine the current defiler of the Oval Office speaking eloquently and knowledgably about ANYTHING for more than a few seconds, even with notes and pictures before him?

Gore won the popular vote in 2000. I do not refer to Florida. Even giving Mr. Bush the vote count he claims in Florida, Gore STILL won the popular vote, with more than 51 million votes to just over 50 million for Bush. More Americans voted for Al Gore in 2000 than George Bush, a fact that even Republican defenders of Bush admit.

It is not unthinkable that a defeated candidate for President should come back eight years later and win the prize. In 1960, Vice-President Richard Nixon narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy, some would say because of vote-rigging in Chicago. He then lost the Governor’s race in California two years later. Yet, in the middle of a divisive and deeply unpopular war, he came back in 1968 to take the White House. Are the situations in this election, that different?

When we look at the alternatives, Al Gore stands head and shoulders above all others. Among the Democrats, the front-runner seems to be Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has masterfully moved herself to the center, as her husband did fourteen years ago. Yet, if there is anyone in the Democratic Party beside Ted Kennedy who could get Republican testosterone flowing more freely than Hillary Clinton, I can’t imagine who it might be. The Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks on John Kerry would be child’s play compared to the venom that would be spewed by Headrush Limbaugh and the GOP Chairman, “Larry Bud” Mehlman and their ilk. Kerry’s inept campaign in 2004 cannot be overcome and there are only dwarfs among the many others who covet the Democratic nomination.

Among the Republicans, neither John McCain nor Rudy Guilliani, the only candidates of gravitas that people in the center could consider, can realistic expect the theocratic right that controls the GOP to allow them the nomination. For one, Guilliani is pro-choice and pro-gay. McCain is one of the “Gang of 14” who have thrarted the venomous right’s plans for all-out war in the Senate over judicial nominations. No. The Republican nomination will go to Bill Frist, George Allen, Rick Santorum, Condi Rice, or, in the absence of an early consensus, Dick Cheney. Frist, Allen, and Santorum are fundamentalist theocrats. Rice is one of the architects of the failed wars on terror and Iraq, and Dick Cheney will have already had eight years as President, with the disastrous results we now see.

Let us look at Al Gore and see a man of vision and courage who could be a President we would actually be proud of. How often have you watched The West Wing and asked yourself, why can’t Josiah Bartlet be the real President? Wouldn’t it be nice to have an intelligent President for a change, one who has principles, one who has vision, one who has integrity?

Please consider Al Gore. He’s won once. He can win again.

In the early days following the chaos and devastation of Lousisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, I was disinclined to place any blame on President Bush or his administration, despite my utter contempt and loathing for the man and his underlings. My disgust and crisiticism were reserved for the local officials, the Governors who did not mobilize the National Guard BEFORE the storm hit, the local officials who did not anticipate that thousands would be unable to evacuate, and others whose incompetence and ineptitude are coming back to haunt them.

After Ted Koppel’s scathing interview with FEMA Director Mike Brown, however, I have come to see that the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina is just as incompetent and medacious as is it’s approach to the illusory War on Terror, the illegal War on Iraq, its loyalty to the energy industry, and it’s head-in-the-sand approach to Global Warming.

I do not come to these positions with the demogogic self-promotion of an opportunistic Jesse Jackson. Indeed, I am a recovering Republican. In 2000, George W. Bush was the first Republican for President for whom I did NOT vote, and I daily see reasons that justify my vote, first for Gore, and, then, for Kerry. Energy policy in the White House is written by former lobbyists for the oil industry. FDA drug approvals are decided by administrators who are former employees of the pharmaceutical companies which they now regulate. The President who once declared that man did not “evolute” now endorses teaching religious doctrine in Biology class. The Administration entered office in 2001, eight months before the 9/11 attacks, devising plans and strategy for a war in Iraq and only after 9/11 began to imply non-existent connections between the admittedly evil Saddam and the attackers. Paul Wolfowitz, then Assistant Secretary of Defense ADMITTED that WMD was the only excuse they could sell to the American people for going to war. Colin Powell was quoted by Newsweek as stating that the evidence of WMD he was asked by the President to present to the UN was, (his word), “bullshit.” A memo by the alleged felon and traitor Karl Rove, who is believed responsible for the leaking of Valery Plame’s identity to punish her husband, Joseph Wilson, for pointing out the errors in the Pesident’s speech declaring that Iraq had sought nuclear material from Niger, a memo by Rove in August 2002 discussed the political advantages to the Republican Party in the the 2002 and 2004 election campaigns. And, the President continues to lie to us as President Johnson did in 1968 about Vietnam, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that things are working out in Iraq, (tell that to the women of Iraq who will now be relagated to a status below farm animals under the rather strange and perverse form of Islamic law that is about to be imposed on them). I am not at all certain the parents of those brave and courageous American soldiers who have sacrificed their lives are proud that the result of their sacrifice is that a good portion of Iraq is about to become a suburb of Iran.

The current example of the Bush Administration’s incompetence is the evidence of Mike Brown, the FEMA Director whom the President declared, during one of his many “take-charge” photo-ops, was doing a “helluva” job.

The list of Mr. Brown’s mistakes are well documented by many news sources, with the notable exceptions of Fox News Channel and the Republican Washington Times, owned by the “Rev.” Sun-Myung Moon. What, however, should have been the tip-off that Brown had no business running the nation’s emergency response agency is that he was a crony of Joe Allbaugh, an Oklahoman who ran President Bush’s 2000 campaign. Brown was a friend of Allbaugh when he, Brown, was a minor city official in a small suburb of Oklahoma City. That seems to have been the his principal qualification for talking over the emergency operations of the entire United States of America, a minor official in a suburb of Oklahoma City; oh, and friendship with the President’s campaign manager.

Welcome to America in the 21st Century.

It may be unseemly and disrespectful less than forty-eight hours after his passing to begin speculation on a successor to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, but there are a number of issues which Senators and the public must consider in the weeks to come as the President chooses and the Senate confirms the new leader of the Supreme Court.

As Rehnquist was a conservative and his replacement will, most likely, reflect his conservative temperment, the Supreme Court is unlikely to change its balance due to his absence. However, as Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Conner was often a swing vote between the conservatives and the moderates and liberals, her replacement will matter a great deal. Judge John Roberts has been nominated to replace her and I believe that many liberal groups have rushed to judgment on him and prematurely announced opposition to his nomination. I don’t believe Roberts will be as dangerous to gay people and other minorities as some fear, primarily because of his strong respect for the concept of stare decisis, of legal precedent, (see this article on Stare Decisis in Wikipedia). Roberts strongly believes in upholding legal precedents and if the court has ruled, as it did in Lawrence v Texas that anti-sodomy laws are a violation of the right of privacy, he is unlikely to reverse that. He is unlikely to reverse Roe v Wade, either. Much as I dislike George W. Bush, and my dislike of the man is immense and intense, I believe the early opposition to the Roberts nomination is simply knee-jerk and opportunistic. It is my hope, actually, as some have suggested on the Sunday morning talk-shows, that Bush switches Roberts’ nomination to fill Rehnquist’s seat and chooses someone else for O’Connor’s.

All of this, however, must be viewed in the light of what I believe is the great issue facing America during the next few decades. Eloquently stated during an episode of The West Wing a few years ago, an aide to the character of President Bartlet states that the great issue facing America in the Twenty-first Century will be privacy. It is true. As surveillance of computers and communications becomes not only easier but more common, as legislation such as the “Patriot” Act becomes more acceptable, as the people of the United States become ever more compliant and less concerned about the growing encroachments on their civil liberties and place the illusion of security before the right of freedom, privacy will be the great issue before the Supreme Court during the upcoming decades. And, it is this issue on which Judge Roberts and any other Court nominees should be questioned in the most intense and direct of terms.

Privacy is a right and we should demand it.

It is hard to believe that the scenes of chaos, crime, and devastation emerging from what was once New Orleans are originating in the United States. How can something like this happen in America?

However, there are far more important questions to ask. For decades, indeed, for centuries, the authorities have known that, eventually, the Big Hurricane was going to hit New Orleans, just as the authorities in Los Angeles and San Francisco know that, eventually, the Big Earthquake is going to hit their cities, and the authorities of Washington and New York city know that, eventually, the Big Terrorist Attack is going to hit their cities. Everytime a hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico, there is talk of what might happen if New Orleans is hit, or sideswiped. What happens if the storm-surge flows over the dikes and levees? What happens if one or more of the levees should rupture? Every single time there is a hurricane in the Gulf, these questions are discussed in the media.

It was known when Katrina hit Miami as a Category One hurricane that it was going into the Gulf. This was a week before it hit New Orleans, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Mobile. It was known the Tuesday before it hit that New Orleans would be, at the very least, on the western side of the storm. It was suspected Wednesday and Thursday that New Orleans would receive a direct hit. It was understood Saturday night that IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.

Were there no contingency plans in place for this kind of disaster? Did the authorities know that a mandatory evacuation would not result in the entire city leaving? Was there no thought to the hundred thousand or so people who were simple too poor, too infirm, to leave? Was there no consideration given to the possibility that the levees might actually break?

When it became certain late last week that New Orleans WOULD suffer some kind of hit, why wasn’t the National Guard mobilized BEFORE the storm hit? Why wasn’t the Army mobilized to bring trucks, buses, supplies, food, and medicine in anticipation of the human misery that THEY KNEW was about to occur?

To this day, why hasn’t the Federal Government comandeered every Greyhound bus it can find and move these people out of the city? Why aren’t there fifty thousand troops patrolling the streets of New Orleans? Why is this happening in the greatest nation on earth?

Perhaps, the planning for this was left to those in the Pentagon who planned for Iraq AFTER the “end of major combat operations.”

It is telling that the Swiss newspaper Le Temps reports that funds had been appropriated to strengthen the levees around New Orleans, but the funds were deverted to help fund Bush’s War on Iraq. Why?

More questions:

Why is the primary port for oil tankers bringing petroleum into the United States located in the most hurricane prone port in America?

Why are refineries located in the most hurricane prone part of the country? Why is the unrefined petroleum not sent to more reliable areas of the nation?

And, finally…

If this is what we can expect after a hurricane hits New Orleans, what will happen when Al-Quaeda releases Ebola in Washington or explodes a dirty bomb in the port of Long Beach or sabotages a chemical plant outside Philadelphia or a nuclear plant in Illinois?

I certainly feel confident. I’m sure glad that the President decided to cut short his vacation two days AFTER the devastation.

Welcome to America in the Twenty-first Century.

The big political news this summer, I believe, is the passage of the USA Patriot Act extension in the US House of Representatives. Making fourteen of the act’s sixteen provisions permanent, the bill was originally passed in the emotional days following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. The renewal of the act comes in the aftermath of the twin attacks in London, first on July 7 and again on July 21.

The act is a gross over-reaction to the threat of terror and gives the terrorists exactly what they want, an over-reaction and a sense of fear among the people and their “leaders.” The restrictions on civil liberties are completely unnecessary. The report of the 9/11 Commission showed that the FBI and various other Federal and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies had all the information they needed to stop the 9/11 attacks. The only problem was a lack of communication between and within agencies and field offices; that and childish competition and turf-protection between agencies and field offices. Remedy that and the country has all the tools necessary to defeat terrorism with out running the Bill of Rights through the shredder.

We were promised in 2001 that the restrictions on privacy and personal freedom imposed by the mis-named Patriot Act would be temporary and would come up for periodic review. At the time, opponents of the act who warned that this was not true were attacked as disloyal and emotional. We now see they were correct. The bill will be permanent.

We can only hope the President’s new nominee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is the traditional kind of libertarian conservative who opposes government intrusion on personal freedom and not one of the new conservatives who seem to love expanding government power over the individual. We hope that he also understands that a society which values security more than freedom gets neither.

And, deserves neither.

One night, when I was fourteen, I was standing in the kitchen of our house as my mother cowered at the table and my step-father stood in the doorway from the dining room yelling, “I’m not gonna have any God-damned queers in my family.” It was the spring of 1972 and my “sin,” the catalyst for this incident, was my having watched an ABC Movie of the Week entitled That Certain Summer, in which a teenage boy played by Scott Jacoby learns that his father, played by Hal Holbrook, is gay and living with a partner played by Martin Sheen. The movie showed the pain the revelation causes the boy and his attempts to understand and deal with it. I was just coming to terms, that spring, with the fact that I was turned on by the boys in the showers in gym class and not by the naked women in the Playboys I had removed from the neighbors’ trash cans. In watching the movie, I saw that there were gay men out there who didn’t commit suicide, who didn’t lurk in alleys, and who didn’t go to prison. I saw that there might be hope for me.

Until my step-father’s outburst of loathing and disgust.

Two hours later, I was seated on the toilet in the bathroom holding my Boy Scout knife to my wrist, desperately trying to work up the courage to end the pain and the “perversion.” Were it not for the insistent knocking on the door by my younger brother, I might very well have done so.

This summer, a teenage boy in Tennessee named Zack Stark caused a great stir when he wrote in his blog of his homosexuality and his parents’ determination to “cure” it by sending him to a Christian “ex-gay” re-education camp called Refuge, run by a ministry called “Love in Action.” There was outrage at the techniques used by the group and protests both on the Internet and in front of the group’s headquarters. The State of Tennessee even invistigated the camp over allegations of abuse and practicing therapy without proper certification. Zack has now returned home from the re-education camp and his latest blog entry, as quoted by The Washington Blade, indicates that there has been some “progress” made by the re-programmers at Love in Action. It is understandable. The boy is sixteen and under great stress caused by parents who cannot accept a son who is not what they want.

I understand the feelings of shame, the sense of alienation at not being what your family wants. An older family-member had occasionally touched me inappropriately when I was young and later, seeing the turmoil and emotional violence in my family after my mother’s remarriage, had asked that I live with him and his wife. My mother refused and told me that, had she agreed to it, I would have been “ruined.” I wasn’t completely certain what she meant by the term “ruined,” but had a fairly good idea that it had something to do with being “queer,” which I knew I was. So, I endured the rest of my adolescence knowing that, in my mother’s eyes, I was ruined.

Larry Evans was the founder of “Love in Action” in 1973. However, after seeing the wreckage “reparative therapy” leaves in its wake, the destroyed lives, the self-hatred, the suicides, he has now denounced it and declared it to be dangerous and wrong.

More than a third of teenage suicides are by gay youth. Do they kill themselves because of their homosexuality or because of the alienation, the rejection, the abuse they endure at the hands of unaccepting families and closed-minded bigots? There is little evidence to suggest much of a success rate in programs such as “Love in Action,” which some of their organizers admit, even as they use fear of the “homosexual agenda” in their fund-raising; but there is voluminous evidence to show the harm such programs do in creating feelings of shame and failure in the victims they target.

I have only the greatest respect and sympathy for Zach, a beautiful young man, as you can see from the picture above, who deserves all the peace and joy life can give. I hope he finds love and self-acceptance, no matter what path he chooses once he is of age to make decisions for himself. And, I hope that advocates either for “reparative therapy” or against leave the boy alone and let him deal with his life. He’s been under terrible stress and deserves support and love.