As I’ve said before here, I’m completely baffled by homophobia. You’re a guy who wants to marry another guy, or a woman who wants to marry another woman, hey, be my guest. I just don’t understand what all the hubub is about, and I never will.

Another thing that confuses me, though, are people like Senator Larry Craig. I’m not confused by him being in the closet; I understand that. There are times when, as a Jew, I find it mighty uncomfortable to tell people that I’m Jewish (e.g., around Christmas). I get that. If a gay man or woman wants to remain in the closet, I’m content to let them.

But when a gay or lesbian gets married to a member of the opposite sex, then I start getting a little confused. I definitely understand the impulse to have children. And for men and women of Sen. Craig’s generation, it was definitely much harder to be in a committed same-sex relationship. I get that. (Although I have a lot of problems with gays and lesbians who marry, have kids, and then leave their partners because–sorry, wife (or husband) and kids!–I have to follow my same-sex bliss now! Hey, after the kids are raised and gone, knock yourself out. But up until then, the partner and kids should pay the price for your confusion? That just seems wrong to me, not to mention selfish.)

But Sen. Craig didn’t just marry, he then became a Republican politician who not only voted for, but actively supported, anti-gay legislation. And that’s most assuredly not okay. It’s not even hypocritical; it’s actively wrong. Quisling, back-stabbing; apply whatever epithet here you want, it’s just plain wrong, bordering on evil. “I–a rich, powerful man protected by my position–will outlaw this behavior, knowing full well I can engage in it in secret because of my wealth and position.” (It reminds me of wealthy, vehemently”pro life” Republicans who–I have no doubt whatsoever–would secretly take their daughters to a doctor for an abortion should they become pregnant at the age of 15 even if it meant they had to fly her from Tupelo to Boston. But I digress.)

Aside from being plain wrong, it confuses me. Why is he doing it? I can understand him voting for these positions–he’s a Republican from a deeply Red state. But to actively support them? Is it some kind of weird denial thing? Does he make his fiery anti-gay floor speeches immediately after one of his bathroom trites in a fit of remorse? Is he like an adulterer who immediately goes to the confession booth seeking absolution from a priest, or an alcoholic who, severely hung-over the next morning, begs the lord for forgiveness and swears to never, ever drink again? I don’t know, but it baffles me.

Yesterday–in a stunning display of audacity for a man who used the National Guard to hide from his own service in the Vietnam War, and then skipped out on even that–President Bush said, among other profoundly unbelievable things:

Our troops are seeing this progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they’re gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq? Here’s my answer is clear: We’ll support our troops, we’ll support our commanders, and we will give them everything they need to succeed.

Somehow, I sincerely doubt that the first question on the minds of “the troops,” many of whom are on their third or fourth deployment, is “Will my elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under me?” No, I’m guessing that the question at the forefront of most troopers minds is, “When the hell can I go home from this insane war?“

And frankly, I wonder why the Democrats don’t pound on exactly that point more often. (Ans.: they’re cowards.) I mean, who supports the troops more? President Bush and his war-mongering compatriots, who want to continue throwing them into the middle of this endless civil war indefinitely with no clear plan for “victory,” or even an end? Or the folks who want to bring them home?

If I was on the ground in Iraq, I know how I’d feel.

So don’t listen to all this hoo-ha about how trying to wind down the war through cutting the funding means that you “don’t support the troops.” It’s garbage. The only way the Congress can bring the troops home is through the “power of the purse.” That’s their only option. Bush, like it or not, is the Commander in Chief. Congress controls the money; Bush controls the command structure. So when they try to cut off his funding, it’s not because they “don’t support the troops,” it’s because they want to bring them home.

So ask yourself who is more supportive of the troops: the folks who keep voting to endless fund this boneheaded war, or the folks who are trying–through the only means available to them–to bring the troops home. And then call ol’ Rush Limbaugh and tell him.

I apologize for the rant, but it infuriates me when folks on the right insist that if you don’t give Bush all the money he wants with no conditions, it means you “don’t support the troops.” I wouldn’t trust this group to run a game of Clue correctly, let alone prosecute a war; why on Earth should we give them a blank check with the lives of our sons and daughters? Good grief.

Two months ago, the craven Democrats completely caved and gave George W. Bush–Mr. 30% Approval Rating–yet another blank check for the war. The commentariat at the time said that Gen. Petraeus promised September report on “the surge” would be the make-or-break point, when–if “progress” wasn’t shown in Iraq–Republicans would start peeling away from Bush.

I, on the other hand, was a lot more cynical.

And now we see that everyone is maneuvering for the September game. First of all, we find that the good General isn’t even writing the report himself, the White House is. (Of course, they say that they were always planning on writing it, and anything you believed otherwise was your own misinterpretation!) Second, the report is going to be delivered on . . . wait for it . . . September 11! Yes sir! Just a coincidence, though! Nothing nefarious about that, sirree! And of course, Bush has already started giving speeches decrying anyone who doesn’t write him another blank check as “pulling the rug out from under the troops.”

And of course the cowardly, craven Democrats are buying it. Senators Levin and Warner, after a two-day trip to Iraq where they were given what Sen. Jim Webb so accurately termed the “Dog and Pony show,” are talking about “progress” in Iraq. Let us bear in mind two things:

1. Levin and Warner were Iraq two days. Two days isn’t long enough to tour the Smithsonian Museum, let alone get even the remotest idea as to how the situation is in a war zone. Hell, you can’t even get through more than a couple of wings of the Smithsonian in that time.
2. Levin and Warner got all their information from military sources. What are military sources going to say? “Yes, Senator; we’re getting our asses kicked over here.”

Make no mistake, this trip was about one thing only: political tail-covering for when Warner, Levin, and other Democratic Senators make their next craven vote in support of Bush’s disastrous war. “Well, we went to Iraq and saw enough progress to justify continuing to try!”

And Republicans, of course (as I again suspected quite a while ago) are most assuredly not peeling away from Bush.

The lack of political courage on the left simply sickens me. While these politicians bicker and squabble and refuse to stand up to an incredibly unpopular president prosecuting an unbelievably unpopular war in which American soldiers are dying to prop up a government that a lot of Iraqis don’t want (and a lot of Iraqis would like us to leave, I might add), Osama bin Laden is rebuilding his organization over in a completely different country.

The insanity of this absolutely boggles my mind.

I know I’m probably alone in this, but I have a simple solution to what the blovacracy calls the “accelerated primary season” (that is, the attempt by other, more populous and diverse states to have some actual, honest-to-God say in the Presidential primaries, rather than just leaving it all up to Iowa and New Hampshire).

Lately, a lot of states have been moving their primaries up to February and even January, in an attempt to give their states some relevance, rather than having so much influence being held by the predominantly-white, small population states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Which seems reasonable to me; as I carped in an earlier post, I got tired of living in California and having no say in picking my party’s Presidential candidate. Iowa and New Hampshire are responding to this effrontery by moving their primaries and caucuses even earlier, to the point where Iowa may end up having their caucus in December of 2007 (believe it if you can). I get the impression that Iowa would move their caucus to the first Wednesday in November the day after the election if that’s what it took to keep their “first caucus” status.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’ve got nothing against Iowa or New Hampshire. Nothing. I just think it’s absurd that these two highly-unrepresentative states have so much say over who gets to be President. We can see where this has gotten us the last several times around (Dukakis! Mondale! Bush! Kerry!), and I think it’s high time we made some changes. And given that Iowa has a law that requires they have the first caucus in the nation, there only one obvious way to do it:

Pass a law.

Yup. Time for those Congressmen and women and Senators who spend time grubbing for money for bridges to nowhere, who hide bricks of money in their fridge, who pass resolutions to rename french fries “freedom fries” and try to pass idiotic amendments to the constitution to outlaw flag burning (yeah, that’s a huge issue that keeps me up at night) to get off their duffs and tell the good folks from Iowa and New Hampshire that enough’s enough, and that it’s someone else’s turn now. I don’t care who; make it a rotation, or something. Start in Minnesota or New Mexico for all I care. But Iowa and New Hampshire have had it long enough, and someone else should have a turn.

I’m not holding my breath, though. And my Uncle John (resident of Derry) is going to kill me.

I’ve been holding this one in for a while, because I keep waiting for someone else to write about it–mainstream media (Dan Froomkin of the Post, Dan Savage of the Boston Globe; somebody), bloggers (Glenn Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan both seemed like good candidates), but no one has. Neither have I heard Keith Olbermann address it, either.

Not this issue of torture and the U.S. policy towards it. We’ve all heard and read plenty about that. No; I’m talking about the absolutely Orwellian approach to defining and talking about torture that the Bush Administration has taken. And I don’t know about y’all, but it absolutely outrages me. (And while I don’t know about anyone else, it is clear as crystal to me that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and a lot of other members of this Administration–Yoo, Gonzales, and others–are clearly guilty of war crimes.)

Let me ‘splain.

I’ve been wondering when the mainstream media (MSM) was going to call Bush and Cheney on their obvious B.S. when they stand up there and say, flat-out, “We do not torture.” Bush does it any time he is asked about it, and Cheney just did it a couple of week ago on Larry King. How on God’s green Earth can they do this when we know that the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has been using waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other techniques that were used by (for example) Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, the Gestapo, and others?

It’s simple, folks: through the assistance of spineless lawyers like John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Steven Hadley, the Administration has redefined torture to not include those actions. Torture, for these folks, only includes activities up to and including death and organ failure. Other than that, all bets are off (or as Cheney says, we went to “the dark side”). So when they say, “We don’t torture,” or “We abide by all legal obligations,” make sure to add in your mind, “and of course, we don’t consider waterboarding, stress positions, forced hypothermia, or sleep deprevation ‘torture’.”

How do we know this is true? Because any time one of these folks is asked about a specific (let’s not mince words here) torture like waterboarding, they always dodge the question. “We don’t reveal specific methods,” Cheney likes to say. This is a huge pile of hooey. They know that if they “reveal specific methods,” they will be admitting that they do torture, and won’t be able to lie in front of the American people any more. So they duck and weave and dodge, and don’t admit to the obvious, which is that they’ve redefined these horrible acts so that they don’t consider them legal torture, even though any civilized human being would.

I know that I am out there by the lights of some folks, but I truly believe that these folks are war criminals. They have approved–and continue to approve–the torture of human beings. They secretly violated the fourth Amendment to the Constitution (illegal search and seizure), and once caught, insisted that they have a right to violate it. They violated and continue to violate the FISA law. They are criminals, pure and simple, and they are getting away with it. They have broken their sacred oaths of office (“preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” remember?). And they are torturing our fellow human beings, who have been convicted of no crimes, and in most case not even accused of any crimes.

These are the people in charge of our country today. I can’t decide what boggles my mind more; that we live under the rule of such people, or that there are actually people out there (Steven Hayes of the Wall Street Journal, for example) who continue to defend their behavior. I am constantly torn between sadness and overwhelming rage.

Last night the Democratic candidates for President had a talk about their stances on gay marriage, civil unions, and related issues. It almost goes without saying–these days, anyway–that they danced around the issue, talked a lot about “civil unions,” and basically did everything they could to not say they were in favor of gay marriage while implying that they were, so as to cover all the bases without opening themselves up to “traditional values” attacks later in the campaign.

I understand their fear, but I think they’re cowardly. Of course, as they demonstrated last weekend when they caved to President Bush, Democrats are pretty consistently cowardly these days, so I shouldn’t be all that surprised.

(It almost goes without saying that this is not the kind of forum the Republicans will have any time soon. The Republicans have made a pact with their social-conservative wing to oppose things like stem cell research, abortion, gay marriage, and things of that nature, and so bloviate endlessly on those topics. Which is incredibly ironic, because almost any individual Republican–of a certain monetary class–is completely open about any social issue. If an upper-class Republican teenage daughter got pregnant, there would be an abortion. If an upper-class Republican son or daughter were gay, they would be accepted (witness Cheney’s daughter). If an upper-class Republican needed the research and treatment that can only be provided by stem cells, they would want it. And so on. But they’ve made their Faustian bargain, and so publicly they maintain their absurd hypocritical stances.)

In any event, I find this whole business to be a lot of hooey, honestly. It breaks down into two pieces:

Religion: If you are gay and want to get married in your religious tradition, that’s something you have to work out with your priest/pastor/rabbi/imam/whatever. Not an issue for the state.

State: Here’s the rub, eh? A married couple has rights that a non-married couple does not. My wife can inherit, can take responsibility for our children, our finances if I am incapacitated, and a whole host of other things. If I’m sick and in the hospital, she can visit me. We can file federal income taxes jointly. And on and on.

Some folks say let’s create a “civil partnership” law, that marriage is “sacred,” that we don’t want to “dilute” marriage by “allowing” gays to marry, that having gays marry would be a “threat” to “traditional marriage,” and other such nonsense. What a crock.

Let me take this one piece at a time:

Civil partnerships: Can you say “separate but equal?” Didn’t we try this before and have it not work? It’s just a cop-out. Either go whole-hog and let folks get legally married, or admit the truth: you don’t want gays happy and committed to each other.

Marriage is “sacred”: That’s not for the state to decide, it’s for religious leaders. Go talk to them. Otherwise, shut up.

Threat to “traditional marriage”: This is the silliest of all. First of all, there’s no such thing as “traditional marriage.” How many wives did Solomon have? Was that “traditional?” Second, how on Earth is two guys getting married a threat to my marriage? Or anyone’s marriage? If your marriage is so shaky that reading about Bruce and Steve getting hitched down at Zilker park this Sunday causes your wife to leave you, pal, your have a lot more problems than outlawing gay marriage is going to cure.

I have been around gays and lesbians my whole life. Literally. When my parents went on a second honeymoon to the Virgin Islands when I was 10, they left my siblings and I in the care of a gay man. We’ve all had gay and lesbian friends since we were children. And here’s the thing, homophobes: all three of us are married with children, and none of us have been divorced. I’ve been involved with the same women in a monogamous relationship for 14 years now. There were gay and lesbian couples at our wedding. I’ve been to gay and lesbian weddings myself. And wow, gee, my marriage is spectacularly unthreatened! Imagine!

Look: some folks find homosexuality “yucky.” I get it. You don’t like it. You don’t want to admit it out loud, so you hunt for reasons–religious, legal, what-have-you–to support your feelings of discomfort. But they’re all rationalizations. All I’m saying is, keep your yuck feelings to yourself; stop trying to legislate them and force the world to abide by your prejudices. These folks just want to get married, be happy, and have the same rights as everyone else. That’s all. They don’t want to rape your sons and daughters. They don’t want to steal your wives and husbands. They just want to settle down, live their lives, and have the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that you enjoy. Why should you let your feelings of yuck stop them? That’s just wrong.

Took a few days off with the wife–didn’t leave town, but left the kids behind with Granny and got some peace and quiet. Which included no blogging. Not that anyone noticed.

But it’s also hard to blog from a place of howling, incipient rage. I’m still so angry about the Democrat’s craven cave-in to Bush on domestic spying that I can barely think about it.

But, you know, there have been other things going on.

Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record for Major League Baseball and, like a lot of folks I suspect, I don’t have the slightest idea how to feel about that. Yeah, yeah; he’s innocent until proven guilty, I know. But anyone with half a brain knows the guy has been shooting up performance-enhancing drugs of some kind or other. I mean, your head doesn’t grow 2-3 sizes after you turn 35 for no reason, you know?

On the other hand, he’s not exactly operating in a drug-free vacuum, either. How many of the pitchers that he has been facing are shooting up? How many of the other players who are making circus catches in the field are shooting up? How is that effecting his numbers? Who the hell can say?

One thing for sure: the guy is an incredible player. Would he have broken the record without the drugs? I dunno. Probably not. But we’ll never know. Would Babe Ruth have created the record if he had had to face Negro League pitchers, sliders, and modern bullpens? Would Ted Williams have broken it if he hadn’t had his career interrupted by two wars? Who the hell knows? Textbook definition of “mixed feelings,” anyway. No wonder Obama didn’t know how to answer Keith Olbermann in the debate; I didn’t know how I’d answer.

Speaking of which, yeah, Obama looked silly saying that Canada has a President. Of course, if that’s the worst he can do, he still looks 1000 times better than the Current Occupant. And Joe Biden, for all his sniping, doesn’t have the slightest friggin’ chance of winning the nomination, so he can just fold up his smirk and go home, as far as I’m concerned.

The thing that scares me was on display over on the Republican side. I mean, it was scary enough who they chose as moderator (“Now, live on stage, boy wonder and callow youth Geoooooorge Stephanopolas!”), but that rogues gallery they have running . . . what if one of them actually, you know, wins? President Authoritarian Guiliana? President Stay-the-Course-in-Iraq McCain? Or “I don’t have any convictions whatsoever except that I really really want to be President,” Mr. Mitt Romney? (Am I the only one who thinks he looks like Herman Munster?) I understand that the Republicans are unhappy with this crew–I know I would be–but what if one them actually wins? It’s a scary thought; enough to make me run for the Klonapin at night.

Words can barely convey my disgust for how, once again, our civil liberties, the Constitutional guarantees this country was founded on, have been sold down the river under pressure from a President whose approval ratings stand at 28% so that Congress wouldn’t be accused of being “weak.”

I cannot state this too strongly: no, I don’t want to die in a terrorist attack. I don’t want my family to die in a terrorist attack. I don’t want anyone to die in a terrorist attack. But I would rather die at the hands of terrorist than to have all the principles that our country is founded on chipped away by fear-mongering, small-minded, short-sighted men and women whose goal is the unlimited expansion of executive power.

Our founding fathers fought against this kind of tyranny–against warrantless surveillance, against being held without being charged, against secret courts, against all the things Congress is handing this bunch of criminals currently running the Executive branch–and enshrined those principles in one of the best-written documents in recorded history. And now, our elected representatives are selling it all out for the chimera of “safety.” Such is the foundation that every tyranny is built upon throughout history.

Our founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the principles that we are giving away to Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and McConnell. We should all be ashamed.

Dick Cheney–not the guy I would want to be giving me a character reference, given his in-the-teens favorability ratings–came out on CBS news giving his vote of confidence to “Al” Gonzales today. According to CBS news correspondent Mark Knoller, Cheney tells us “I think Al has done a good job under difficult circumstances.” And then adds, as everyone who works for the White House seems compelled to when talking about ol “Al:” “The key,” he said, is whether Gonzales has “the confidence of the president, and he clearly does.”

To which I cry “Bullshit.” Gonzales is the Attorney General of the United States, and the head of the United States Department of Justice. He took an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States of America, and he serves us, the people of the United States. He has lied, committed perjury, and done any number of things that protect Bush, the Bush Administration, and his own precious ass. He is not doing his job, which is overseeing the Department of Justice. Rather, he is protecting George W. Bush.

Cheney is wrong, Bush is wrong, the Bush Administration is wrong, their pathetic mouthpiece Tony Snow is wrong: The key is not that Gonzales has “the confidence of the President.” The key is whether Gonzales has the confidence of the American people whom he serves, and he clearly does not. If the government was not run by a gang of–let’s face it–criminals who think that everything they do is above the law, Gonzales would have resigned months ago, after his first disastrous appearance before Congress. But because Bush and his cronies know that if Gonzales were to resign, their rampant law-breaking would come to light before they could leave office, they are hanging on to him like grim death, even though to do so means they are doing severe damage to the Department of Justice, and to Americans’ confidence in the justice system. Quite simply, they don’t care. So long as they can leave office without being impeached or sent to jail, they simply don’t care.

So in response to Dick Cheney I say: on this issue, like on so many others (e.g., the WMDs in Iraq, the insurgency being in its “last throes,” etc.), you are dead wrong. But of course, like on so many other issues, you will never admit it.

Something Andrew Sullivan said in one of his posts really struck me about the current Iraq mess, and started those ol’ neurons a’firin’:

Whatever David Petraeus says next month – and we know it’s going to be a glowing report of massive success – the reality of Iraq endures. That reality is that there is no Iraq. The “government” is paralyzed between sectarian factions none of which wants a national, political settlement any time soon.

I didn’t have any new ideas about Iraq–I’m not a brilliant international diplomat, I’m just a technical writer with a big mouth and lots of opinions who reads a lot–but I started to put some things together in my head. Consider these facts:

• Kurdistan, i.e. northern Iraq, is currently the most peaceful portion of Iraq by far. Further, the Kurds are the only ones who actually want the United States there.
• The current “head” of the “national government,” al Maliki, let slip a few weeks ago that the American military could leave any time, so far as he was concerned. He quickly recanted (presumably after a good talking-to in one of his daily video conferences with Bush), but that doesn’t change the fact that it slipped out.
• The Sunnis and the Shiites have been fighting each other, no kidding, for centuries. They have been holding grudges about things that have happened hundreds of years ago. Imagine, if you can, Notherners still being mad about the Battle of the Crater and Southerners still holding a grudge about Antietam 600 years from now, and people from Atlanta wanting to shoot people from Boston about it. In Baltimore. And doing so. That’s Iraq right now. Do we really believe that these people are going to paper over their differences and form a unified democratic government in a few months? Who are we fooling?
• Despite diplomatic pressure, the Iraqi government went on vacation anyway.

So the Doug theory, for what it’s worth, is that the Iraqi “unity government” doesn’t give a damn about actually doing anything. They know that Bush is leaving office in January, 2009. They know the American people have had it with this idiotic war. They know that the next Administration, no matter who it is run by, will start to withdraw American troops.

Until that time, they are marking time. They are accumulating weapons and training. They are killing as many of the “enemy” (Shia or Sunni) as they can get away with. They are engaging in low-level ethnic cleansing. And once we’re out of the way–which is bound to happen sooner or later–Iraq will break up into Kurdistan, a Shiite state, and a Sunni state. The Shiite state may align with or be completely taken over by Iran; I have no idea. There will probably be some pretty ugly ethnic cleansing in various cities. A huge battle for Baghdad.

I could be wrong, obviously; like I say, I’m a technical writer, not a diplomat. But why on Earth should we expect tribes that have been fighting for hundreds of years to get together and create a “national government” in a country that was created by colonialists out of nothing in particular, just for our convenience? It’s insane, not to mention delusional and stupid.

I think the sooner we recognize the real situation and deal with it, the better off we’ll be. (Hey, the Kurds want us there! Isn’t one of our goals to have an ally in the Middle East? How tough is this? Duh!) But unfortunately, we’re stuck dealing with the boneheads in the Bush Administration for the next 17 months. God help us all.