“It’s hard to imagine a candidate running for President prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of democracy.”
- George W. Bush, 9/20/04

Uh, reeeealllly?

Hypocritical moronic f***…

In case anyone doubts what a horrific situation there is in Iraq…

Read

Kerry on Iraq War

F*** my life, but there’s stuff that ought to be read, and when it moves me, I shall post it, so that it might be read…

E.L. Doctorow on Bush

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him; you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and father or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life… they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s aftermath has made of his “mission-accomplished” a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills — it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class. And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective war-making, the constitutionally insensitive law-giving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

— E.L. Doctorow

I think I’m done with LJ for awhile. I just wrote down a lengthy list of reasons, but to include them would be to contradict the those very reasons. So that’s it for now. I might resurface at some point or perhaps I won’t.

from , a clothing label from a small Washington State company that sells stuff in Canada

I was pulling out of the Kroger parking lot, and I saw coming into the lot Godot and Sarah in his black Corvette convertible. They had their sunglasses on, wind in their hair, and I waved, and Sarah saw me and waved back. And I thought, sheer materialism aside, I had just seen two people in the midst of the epitome of happiness. I had seen this last night, too, of course, at Sarah’s party. All is well is Hoffman-Riley land, as far as I can tell.

This week, I may arrive at a fork in the road. Happiness is likely still far in the distance for me. The Map is unclear as to whether either option can help lead me to Happiness. Some philosophers would say that the direction I choose is irrelevant to whether I find Happiness, that Happiness is attainable right Now, and that it actually exists right Now, if I choose to experience it. On one plane, perhaps this is an entirely accurately way of viewing things. But on most planes, this is pure poppycock, and I use the term poppycock because it just happened to come to my mind.

I shall do (at least half of) a load of laundry. And let the productivity swell from there…

Killing time. Did some walking around Southpoint, as I logged less than 1000 steps both Wednesday and Thursday and don’t wish to slip into complete suckitude. A woman from Workstream called to talk to me, but I missed her call, and perhaps I’ll talk to her later. It’s a non-Remedy job, but it may pay nothing, or it might be the perfect non-Remedy opporunity. Never heard from Diane. This weekend, I’ll probably try to get myself into Springfield, Illinois mindset. This is life. We must do things we don’t want to do, sometimes for over twenty years. Tim Robbins did it in Shawshenk Redemption, and he had to deal with and sewers, so I guess I can deal with Springfield, Illinois for awhile if that’s what’s in the cards.

Jason is free later, so I’ll tag along on whatever he and Jenn do tonight, which I’m grateful for, otherwise I’d be spinning my wheels tonight.

found posted in

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/16/tsurumi/

Great article about Bush’s behavior from his former Harvard professor. The best “must-read” I’ve come across in awhile. This is the kind of stuff that needs to spread beyond blogs and Kitty Kelley’s trashy book and into the mainstream media, although I hope this will have some effect on the swing-vote soccer moms in the midwest who read trashy Kitty Kelley books.

His former Harvard Business School professor recalls George W. Bush not just as a terrible student but as spoiled, loutish and a pathological liar.

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By Mary Jacoby

Sept. 16, 2004 | For 25 years, Yoshi Tsurumi, one of George W. Bush’s professors at Harvard Business School, was content with his green-card status as a permanently legal resident of the United States. But Bush’s ascension to the presidency in 2001 prompted the Japanese native to secure his American citizenship. The reason: to be able to speak out with the full authority of citizenship about why he believes Bush lacks the character and intellect to lead the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy.

“I don’t remember all the students in detail unless I’m prompted by something,” Tsurumi said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “But I always remember two types of students. One is the very excellent student, the type as a professor you feel honored to be working with. Someone with strong social values, compassion and intellect — the very rare person you never forget. And then you remember students like George Bush, those who are totally the opposite.”

The future president was one of 85 first-year MBA students in Tsurumi’s macroeconomic policies and international business class in the fall of 1973 and spring of 1974. Tsurumi was a visiting associate professor at Harvard Business School from January 1972 to August 1976; today, he is a professor of international business at Baruch College in New York.

Trading as usual on his father’s connections, Bush entered Harvard in 1973 for a two-year program. He’d just come off what George H.W. Bush had once called his eldest son’s “nomadic years” — partying, drifting from job to job, working on political campaigns in Florida and Alabama and, most famously, apparently not showing up for duty in the Alabama National Guard.

Harvard Business School’s rigorous teaching methods, in which the professor interacts aggressively with students, and students are encouraged to challenge each other sharply, offered important insights into Bush, Tsurumi said. In observing students’ in-class performances, “you develop pretty good ideas about what are their weaknesses and strengths in terms of thinking, analysis, their prejudices, their backgrounds and other things that students reveal,” he said.

One of Tsurumi’s standout students was Rep. Chris Cox, R-Calif., now the seventh-ranking member of the House Republican leadership. “I typed him as a conservative Republican with a conscience,” Tsurumi said. “He never confused his own ideology with economics, and he didn’t try to hide his ignorance of a subject in mumbo jumbo. He was what I call a principled conservative.” (Though clearly a partisan one. On Wednesday, Cox called for a congressional investigation of the validity of documents that CBS News obtained for a story questioning Bush’s attendance at Guard duty in Alabama.)

Bush, by contrast, “was totally the opposite of Chris Cox,” Tsurumi said. “He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.” When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, “‘Oh, I never said that.’” A White House spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking comment.

In 1973, as the oil and energy crisis raged, Tsurumi led a discussion on whether government should assist retirees and other people on fixed incomes with heating costs. Bush, he recalled, “made this ridiculous statement and when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘The government doesn’t have to help poor people — because they are lazy.’ I said, ‘Well, could you explain that assumption?’ Not only could he not explain it, he started backtracking on it, saying, ‘No, I didn’t say that.’”

If Cox had been in the same class, Tsurumi said, “I could have asked him to challenge that and he would have demolished it. Not personally or emotionally, but intellectually.”

Bush once sneered at Tsurumi for showing the film “The Grapes of Wrath,” based on John Steinbeck’s novel of the Depression. “We were in a discussion of the New Deal, and he called Franklin Roosevelt’s policies ’socialism.’ He denounced labor unions, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Medicare, Social Security, you name it. He denounced the civil rights movement as socialism. To him, socialism and communism were the same thing. And when challenged to explain his prejudice, he could not defend his argument, either ideologically, polemically or academically.”

Students who challenged and embarrassed Bush in class would then become the subject of a whispering campaign by him, Tsurumi said. “In class, he couldn’t challenge them. But after class, he sometimes came up to me in the hallway and started bad-mouthing those students who had challenged him. He would complain that someone was drinking too much. It was innuendo and lies. So that’s how I knew, behind his smile and his smirk, that he was a very insecure, cunning and vengeful guy.”

Many of Tsurumi’s students came from well-connected or wealthy families, but good manners prevented them from boasting about it, the professor said. But Bush seemed unabashed about the connections that had brought him to Harvard. “The other children of the rich and famous were at least well bred to the point of realizing universal values and standards of behavior,” Tsurumi said. But Bush sometimes came late to class and often sat in the back row of the theater-like classroom, wearing a bomber jacket from the Texas Air National Guard and spitting chewing tobacco into a cup.

“At first, I wondered, ‘Who is this George Bush?’ It’s a very common name and I didn’t know his background. And he was such a bad student that I asked him once how he got in. He said, ‘My dad has good friends.’” Bush scored in the lowest 10 percent of the class.

The Vietnam War was still roiling campuses and Harvard was no exception. Bush expressed strong support for the war but admitted to Tsurumi that he’d gotten a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard through his father’s connections.

“I used to chat up a number of students when we were walking back to class,” Tsurumi said. “Here was Bush, wearing a Texas Guard bomber jacket, and the draft was the No. 1 topic in those days. And I said, ‘George, what did you do with the draft?’ He said, ‘Well, I got into the Texas Air National Guard.’ And I said, ‘Lucky you. I understand there is a long waiting list for it. How’d you get in?’ When he told me, he didn’t seem ashamed or embarrassed. He thought he was entitled to all kinds of privileges and special deals. He was not the only one trying to twist all their connections to avoid Vietnam. But then, he was fanatically for the war.”

Tsurumi told Bush that someone who avoided a draft while supporting a war in which others were dying was a hypocrite. “He realized he was caught, showed his famous smirk and huffed off.”

Tsurumi’s conclusion: Bush is not as dumb as his detractors allege. “He was just badly brought up, with no discipline, and no compassion,” he said.

In recent days, Tsurumi has told his story to various print and television outlets and appears in Kitty Kelley’s exposé “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty.” He said other professors and students at the business school from that time share his recollections but are afraid to come forward, fearing ostracism or retribution. And why is Tsurumi speaking up now? Because with the ongoing bloodshed in Iraq and Osama bin Laden still on the loose — not to mention a federal deficit ballooning out of control — the stakes are too high to remain silent. “Obviously, I don’t think he is the best person” to be running the country, he said. “I wanted to explain why.”

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About the writer
Mary Jacoby is Salon’s Washington correspondent.

Latest job possibility that seems like it’s there for the taking…one year contract in Lansing, MI. That’s near Michigan State, but I haven’t heard of it having any reputation, unlike Ann Arbor, which is an hour away and is often cited as a “best place to live”. Does anyone know anything about Lansing?

Some internet research, searching city rankings:
“Best Cities for Women, 2002″ (Ladies Home Journal) (Hey, if it’s good enough for women, it’s good enough for me…besides, would “best cities for guys” mean they have NASCAR and lots of strip clubs?)
Small cities
(including cities of interest to me, particularly where I’ve lived near before or where current contract jobs I’m up for are)
1. Madison, WI
2. Alexandria, VA
3. Ann Arbor, MI
51. Springfield, IL
58. Salem, OR
62. Durham, NC
73. Lansing, MI
76. Raleigh, NC
88. Richmond, VA
108. Greensboro, NC
112. Winston-Salem, NC
113. Knoxville, TN
138. Montgomery, AL
143. Gary, IN (last)

* Okay, as I read farther, I see the categories include “child care”, and in “lifestyle”, they refer to single men:single women ratio…maybe I need to find another list…

Lansing is not particularly stressful, according to this list of Most Stressful Cities
(Mid-sized metro areas)
1. Galveston, TX
80. Lansing, MI
114. Provo-Urem, UT

In general, this is a fun site.

A full analysis of my zip code … lots of single and well-educated people, more women than men
One zip code in Lansing, MI … not too much different than my current zip code
Durham vs. Lansing  …  similar demographics; Lansing not as diverse, but not homogenous; Lansing more blue-collar; Lansing- lower cost of living; 10% cheaper to live in Lansing;
…7% more expensive to live in Ann Arbor (one option, even though it’s an hour away)

Ok, enough already…