2002-07-15T11:18:00.000-04:00

Bee in my bonnet this morning. Below are the names and authors of ten books that everyone must read. I am including snippets from these books that I have chosen and typed out here by hand. If anyone here has not read these books, do so. But more importantly, if you know anyone who could benefit from reading these books, print this out and give it to them.

The Utne Reader had an article recently that described all activism and social change as beginning with conversations and the exchange of information. Hopefully, this is a decent place to start.

These books are listed in no particular order of importance. I have also included one by Ralph Nader, because it is an awesomely important piece of work about corporate law and its effect on our society. For those who cannot abide Ralph, be aware that the book was written in 1996, before the Troubles began.

- - - - -

Way Out There in the Blue, by Frances Fitzgerald. This is about the Reagan Era and the Star Wars initiative as allegory for the principles of that administration. (592 pages)

"Reagan was well known for being a man of firm principles, and in office he had gained a helpful reputation for pragmatism, but in some sense, as Sears explained it, neither reputation was deserved. Reagan's detatchment gave his staff enormous powers. 'You could do almost anything you wanted,' Sears said, 'and you didn't have to check with anybody....Reagan wasn't involved...He let everybody - as long as they stayed within a little bit of framework - do anything they wanted.'

This was not because Reagan was unsure of himself. In Sears' view, Reagan was very secure as a person. It was just that he had a certain view of the division of labor which came from his days as an actor and a spokesman for GE: he gave the speeches and made the appearances - and the rest was the work of his staff. There was no reason to ask Reagan about policy implementation or to persuade him of the ins and outs of a position the staff had worked out for him, Sears said. 'He'd say, "That's your business. I'm out here selling it. You tell me." He used to say sometimes that he was a salesman, and he was.'" - p. 103

The Natural - The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, by Joe Klein, author of 'Primary Colors.' (230 pages)

"Of course, few politicians manage to stay ideologically pure for very long, even when the 'ideology' in question is opportunistic pragmatism. The most basic rule of politics is: you have to pacify your party's fanatics ('securing the base' is the term of art). Clinton could not have won the nomination in 1992, or survived his first term (or impeachment, for that matter), if he hadn't kept the most devoted Democrats happy. And the most devoted Democrats not only remained liberal, but pompously so, vestigially convinced of the righteousness of European-style social democracy: The New Democrat philosophy was seen - and is still seen by die-hard, old-style lefties - as a cynical corruption of the true faith, an electoral strategy gussied up as a political philosophy." - p. 33

Fuzzy Math, by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. (128 pages)

"For conservatives, no pedestal is high enough for Ronald Reagan. I've recently encountered several references to Reagan as one of our 'three greatest presidents,' which leaves me wondering whom we're supposed to demote: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt? Of course, this is entirely understandable. The right in the United States hadn't really had a president it could call its own since 1932.

Republicans had often occupied the White House, but they had not tried to roll back the expansion of government under the New Deal and the Great Society. Richard Nixon, in particular, was a raving liberal by current standards, someone under whom federal spending on civilian programs expanded rapidly, under whom environmental and safety regulation became notably more stringent" - p. 16

**Note: This book is a short yet brutally effective deconstruction of each and every argument foisted by Bush & Co. that favors his tax cut and economic plans. Each part is built upon the part before, so snipping a segment of the central argument would have floated here without context.

The Hunting of the President - The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. (413 pages)

"On June 15, Ruddy weighed in with his own version of the Arkansas troopers' new story in the Scaife-owned Pittsburg Tribune-Review. Already the Internet was abuzz with fanciful conspiracy scenarios. Letters and faxes began to pour into the offices of Senators on the Whitewater committee. By August, columnist John Crudele of the New York Post took it upon himself to offer D'Amato some advice on how to revive the flagging Whitewater hearings by bringing the troopers to Washington: 'Perry telling his story, followed by (Arkansas First Lady) Betty Tucker confirming it, followed by Helen Dickey explaining the call, would make a great closing act to an otherwise tedious melodrama.' Next, the Wall Street Journal, stung by the Fiske Report's endorsement of the lament in Foster's suicide note that 'WSJ editors lie without consequence,' siezed upon the trooper tale." - p. 193

Blinded by the Right - The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, by David Brock. (336 pages)

"Perhaps most significantly, I told Sidney (Blumenthal) that one of Peter Smith's advisers on the trooper project was former Bush administration lawyer Richard Porter, who worked in the Chicago office of Ken Starr's law firm. At Smith's suggestion, Porter, who later was forced to identify himself as the 'switchboard operator' of the entire Lewinski scandal, had worked in the shadows to recruit key members of the covert Jones legal team and then tipped off those lawyers to Lewinski.

I revealed the identities of the so-called elves - lawyers George Conway, Jerome Marcus and Ann Coulter - whose existence was unknown outside the Jones camp. I identified Paul Rosenzweig, a lawyer I knew who worked on Starr's staff, as a likely point of contact, and possible collusion, between the Jones elves and Starr. According to a later account in the New York Times, Marcus and Conway did tell Rosenzweig about Lewinski at a secret dinner in Philadelphia, a fact that Starr would fail to disclose in his later report to Congress on Lewinski.

I knew that James Moody, the lawyer for Linda Tripp, was a close friend of Conway and Coulter. Coulter had told me that the Tripp tapes had been played at her Washington apartment over the holidays, before Clinton's Jones deposition. I also knew that Moody had done work for the Scaife-funded Landmark Legal Foundation, which played a role in orchestrating the Jones litigation. In addition, I noted, most of the lawyers involved on the anti-Clinton side of the Lewinski scandal, including Ken Starr, were members of the Scaife-funded Federalist Society, the vast legal network of the Reagan and Bush administrations." - p. 317

Bad News - Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President, by Robert Shogan, a thirty-year journalist for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. (308 pages)

"What the networks should have done is simply report what they knew, not what they expected to happen - that Bush appeared to have a 51,000 vote lead with 97 percent of the vote in, but that the election was still too close to call. Had the networks done that, the public would have known as much as was knowable. And when the correct returns from Volusia County came in, the networks would have been spared their humiliation. More important, Gore would never have conceded to Bush, and the public would not have gained the belief, which would persist for the next five weeks and help shape history, that Bush had really won the election and that Gore was a sore loser." - p. 265

**Note: This book covers the media's handling of every Presidential election since 1960 in detail.

The Betrayal of America - How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose our President, by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. (164 pages)

"On the issue upon which the United States Supreme Court handed the election to Bush, a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Gore's lawyers simply could not have been any worse. In David Boise's oral argument, I pointed out that absent the extra two minutes he received, he was apparently willing to sit down without making one good equal protection argument. And in the fifty-one page brief by Gore's lawyers on December 10th, their final brief to the Supreme Court, instead of coming up with five, six, seven equal protection arguments, separately laid out and powerfully articulated, they came up with just one page (I repeat, one page) of pabulum and mishmash that couldn't convince one's own mother. Not only didn't they make one convincing equal protection argument but, remarkably, they never cited one single case to support what they did say, a cardinal sin among appellate lawyers." - p. 68

Shrub - The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. (179 pages)

"In 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, Harken didn't strike oil, but it did strike a big deal: an exclusive thirty-five year exploration contract with the Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain. The deal made no sense to anyone in the oil business. Harken was a small Texas company with no international or offshore drilling experience and, until the billionare Bass family of Fort Worth was brought into the deal, resources nowhere near sufficient to undertake a major exploration-and-drilling program off the coast of Bahrain. 'It was a surprise,' a senior analyst for Petroconsultants told Time. 'Harken is traditionally not a copmpany that explores for oil internationally.' Forbes got the same word from an oil-business analyst in Houston, who called the deal 'hard to imagine. A tiny company with no international experience drilling in the Middle East.'

When reporters asked W. Bush if his financial interest in the region might have influenced his father's foreign policy, he found the idea inconcievable." - p. 28

No Contest - Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Hustice in America, by Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith. (425 pages)

"The justice system is a public institution funded by taxpayers, and secrecy inhibits its proper working. The judicial branch of government is responsible for facilitating the peaceful redress of grievances, but secrecy prevents the public from adequately judging whether the judicial branch is performing effectively and efficiently. Moreover, because of court-endorsed confidentiality, people who have been injured due to circumstances similar to those being kept secret may remain unaware that they have a right to make a claim or that there is favorable legal precedent on their side. - p. 61

War in a Time of Peace - Bush, Clinton and the Generals, by David Halberstam (543 pages)

"The one thing about Cheney that the Democrats had quickly learned was that for all his bland exterior, he played very, very tough inside politics. He had been the leader in the movement that had ousted Jim Wright from his job as Speaker because of some violations over the House honorarium rule. Wright did not lightly forgive or forget and when a reporter later caught up with him back in Texas after he had left Washington to ask what happened, Wright answered, 'What happened was that goddamn son of a bitch Cheney - he's as mean as a snake. No wonder he's had three heart attacks.'

When George H. W. Bush was elected President in 1988, a number of his close assistants had pushed Cheney for a top job, but Bush was hesitant. Cheney had been a protege of Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld and Bush, ambitious young men working the same political sector, both with Presidential ambitions, had always been suspicious of each other, and Rumsfeld had often spoken with open contempt of Bush. To Bush the word Cheney meant Rumsfeld. But at the beginning of his Presidency, when John Tower's nomination failed, Cheney, still a Wyoming congressman, was Bush's fallback choice, largely regarded as a good one. Cheney moved over to the Pentagon and made it clear that he was going to run it. Anyone who crossed him on an issue of policy might pay dearly for it." - p. 68

2002-07-11T23:17:00.000-04:00

I sit on my back porch to smoke cigarettes and drink my coffee. Behind my apartment is this building where a dot.com firm used to be. The place is like a haunted house. On top of the roof is a big American flag on a pole. I look at it every single day.

I looked at it on 9/11 and knew that it would never mean the same thing again, that a whole raft of madness was coming and that flag was about to earn a whole new definition. I had already felt that way when Bush raised his hand on january 20, 2001. But 9/11 kind of sealed the deal.

I used to be proud of that flag. The intellectual in me knew that was pretty ignorant - the slaughter of the Native Americans, slavery, and the mob of other rotten crap that flag has flown over makes it a fearful symbol. But I was proud of it.

I was proud of it not because of the terrible things it had seen, and the terrible things that had been done in its name. I was proud of it because of the idea it represented. America, as an idea, represents some of the highest and most noble thoughts ever imagined by humans. That flag is supposed to stand for that idea.

We the people. That is what the flag is supposed to mean.

I don't feel that way anymore. I sit on my porch and smoke my butts and look at that flag, and I find myself searching the walls of the building looking for a way up on to the roof. I want to take that flag, turn it upside down, and fly it in reverse for all to see.

We talk about Democratic victory, or Green victory, or even the victory of democracy over the forces that seem hell bent on shredding it. We get deep into the details, and many of us here have mastered them. But for me, this whole fight is for one purpose alone.

I want to look at that flag and think 'We the People' without feeling a sick sense of loss. I want to feel like that flag represents something to me again. That's what I'm fighting for.

Someday I'm going to be out on that porch, and I am going to look up and feel good about that flag again. At the end of the day, that's my dog in this hunt.

2002-07-11T18:19:00.000-04:00

Howdy, folks. You might have noticed that WillPitt.com has been down for a while, if you're a reader of mine. I took it down because I have a book coming out, entitled 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.' Most of that will be in the book, so...

I don't have much today; I just got back from a long week with my family, and I'm bushed. I will say this,n though - George W. Bush is an amazing fool. How he thinks he can lecture the Market on corporate responsiblility after Harken and Halliburton and all the rest is astounding. I think the midterm elections will be a nasty surprise for him, and I hope that helps correct things on the Street. Anyone with a 401K, say 'Hellejulia!'

Check in here every other day. I should have something new. Take care, all.

- WRP

Pitt Stop - William Rivers Pitt