Issues

For the one and only true benchmark by which to judge the faithfulness of the Pope's new encyclical, Deus caritas est, released this morning to much fanfare in Rome, to the phenomenon of being human, recall, first, the Italian sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini's depiction of the "ecstasy" of Saint Teresa (Bernini's greatest), and then Teresa's own account of the "great impetuosities of Love" as she wrote about them in her Autobiography:

When last we left the U.S. Attorney General, he and the Deputy Director for National Intelligence were leisurely explaining to the piss-poor American press corps the "legal underpinnings" for the Executive Branch&undefined;s warrantless searches of the electronic communications of its subjects---phone calls and email messages, largely. (Though if, as alleged, Dan Rather really had been using hand- and/or facial-signals while delivering the CBS Nightly News in the summer and fall of 2004 to communicate directly with Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants in a bid to overthrow the Bush regime, presumably the National Security Agency would have intercepted and decoded these signals, too.)

"The most important things in life---like life itself---are priceless," Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz acknowledge in The Economic Costs of the Iraq War, a paper they drafted for the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Boston the first weekend of this new year. Aside from these eleven words, however, these are "cost - benefit" tacticians through and through. And it is their conclusion that the Americans' March, 2003 war over Iraq is a classic instance of the "penny wise - pound foolish" proverb. By this, strange as it sounds, Bilmes and Stiglitz mean to say that the Washington regime "tried to fight the war on the cheap...." Although I believe that the opposite is true, and that the warmaking institutions maximize costs while channeling the benefits to as few people as possible---the gist of the late Seymour Melman's critique of the "permanent war economy," let us not forget---still, permit me to quote three paragraphs from the Bilmes - Stiglitz paper, where they state their case quite clearly (pp. 33-34):

For the record: I happen to agree with the President of Iran that a country "which has culture, logic and civilization does not need nuclear weapons," here quoting the gentleman's news conference in Tehran this past Saturday, the 14th. (More or less agree with him, that is. And not letting ourselves get hung up on the definition of 'civilization', 'logic', and 'culture'. All the while deferring to Gandhi's celebrated quip with respect to the conventional usage of terms such as these. Of course.)

Today, I think we should all invite the American President to post his own personal blog to ZNet:

"President Addresses Veterans of Foreign Wars on the War on Terror," White House Office of the Press Secretary, January 10, 2006

Isn't there something fishy about being the "most distinguished historian of postwar geopolitics," to quote the kind of epithet currently in vogue when reviewers of the recently published book, The Cold War, refer to its author, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History and Political Science at Yale University, John Lewis Gaddis?

According to the President of the United States, whenever he signs into law a particular piece of legislation---the Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act of 2006, let us say---though given the advanced state of the American Tyranny, the same point holds across the board---either he, as Commander in Chief, or the Executive Branch in general, will construe the resulting law "in a manner consistent with the President&undefined;s constitutional authority as Commander in Chief." Or words to this effect. Depending on exactly what the bill adopted by the Legislative Branch covers. Whether it prescribes certain Presidential actions. Proscribes them. And the like.

"President Meets with Current & Former Secretaries of State and Defense"

The results of polls such as this one, by Zogby International, which reported that as of December 20-21, one out of every two "likely voters" in the United States believed that the Bush regime has the legitimate authority under the U.S. Constitution and American laws to engage in the surveillance of American citizens, frighten me to no end. And ought to frighten the peoples of this world.

To quote the editorial voice of this morning&undefined;s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ("Big Brother Bush," Dec. 18):

The idea that all of this is being done to us in the name of national security doesn&undefined;t wash; that is the language of a police state. Those are the unacceptable actions of a police state.