Reckless Disregard for the Truth

From the git-go, the supporters of the Bush regime and its optional war have engaged in a special form of lying called "reckless disregard for the truth." It's a beautiful thing, because it lends itself to a complete lack of accountability and an intellectual laziness that appeals to Bush and his ilk.

The most famous example, of course, was the infamous WMD. Personally, I doubt that Bush actually knew there were no WMDs. So, when we claim that "Bush lied, people died,", we're dancing close to the edge of falsehood, though we are saved by the guardrail of incontrovertible fact - we were assured they were there, and they weren't.

The point isn't that Bush actually was certain that there were no WMDs. How could he have such certainty? That's why the good people who argued against the war were hamstrung by the truth - they could make no assertions. Hans Blix was not in a position to prove the negative - he was only in a position to tell us that no weapons had been found yet, that no evidence existed that weapons would be found, and that he wanted to continue his search for the truth.

Bush, on the other hand, never really cared about the truth about WMDs. He wanted to invade Iraq from the beginning. When he couldn't get enough people to fall for the lie that Iraq was tied to 9-11, the WMD canard sufficed. He never cared whether they were actually there or not - it would be better if we found some, but victors get to write the history books, and he knew that intellectually corrupt right-wing apologists would rally to his defense even if they were not. And he was right about that.

Such mealy-mouthed truth cannot withstand an assault by confident misinformation. Intellectually honest good faith melts in the heat of intellectually dishonest swagger. Public opinion tends favor the cockiness of a lie over the uncertain truth. That's why umpires are taught to make their most uncertain calls at their highest volume.

What provokes this meditation on mendacity? Watch Joe Lieberman tell us that he is " confident that the situation is improving enough on the ground that by the end of this year we will being to draw down significant numbers of American troops and by the end of next year more than half of the troops who are there now will be home."

Technically, Joe might not have been lying. Who knows? He may have been confident of that result when he said it. He may have been honest, or he may have been intelligent.

We can only be certain that he wasn't both.

People like Tom Friedman and Joe Lieberman and their echo machine of bloggers like Media Lies and other pro-war cheerleaders have been assuring us for months and months that the turn-around is just ahead, and that things are actually just fine in Iraq, and that it's just the corporate media (they, laughably, call it the "liberal media") that convinces us that the death of six soldiers today, and four soldiers tomorrow, and 5 soldiers the day after that, continued on into infinity, is not a great, glittering success. They offer us such a bright, shining lie, and when time proves them wrong, they offer us a fresh lie - the turn-around is always just ahead.

Their statements aren't technically lies, and, if we had the good sense to ignore them or treat them with the complete disdain they have earned by being so consistently wrong, there would be no harm to their ill-informed rantings. If I were to sincerely tell you that I am sure the Royals are going to win the World Series in 2007, I would not be dishonest, but I would be showing stupidity and a reckless disregard for the truth. Damage would only result if you somehow thought I had superior knowledge - if I worked in the headquarters of MLB, or made my living as a student of baseball.

It is time to acknowledge that the President has lost all credibility. It is time to greet the next pronouncement by the right-wing pundits with derision. It is time to stop falling for the glittering falsehoods offered by those who are constantly wrong.

Fervere and Funkhouser

Yesterday, I dropped by Mark Funkhouser's Campaign Headquarters to make a campaign contribution before the year end reporting deadline. I gave enough that it hurt a little - past the unofficial, never-articulated line where I had to call my wife and seek her support. One of the odd and unjust facts of life is that you have to appear to have money in order to make money. So, for Mark to bring in more money, it helps a lot for him to get money in. Because the end of the year marks a campaign reporting deadline, it helps more to make a donation on 12/29 than it does on 1/3, so his official campaign reports will show a tiny bit more money and one more person who believes in his candidacy to actually transfer funds rather than simply words.

I will also be making contributions to Mark Forsythe and Beth Gottstein - they're good people who will improve our city council. Sorry for missing the deadline!

Funkhouser's campaign headquarters is at 18th and Summit, in a modest doublewide (is there such a thing as an immodest doublewide?), a block away from that weird-looking house shaped like an upside-down "L" overlooking the city just west of I-35.

When you're in that neighborhood in the middle of the day, you ought to be thinking of bread. Just up Summit is Fervere, the best bread shop in the Midwest. Located in a tiny little white brick building snuggled up to the Bluebird Cafe, the shop features a homemade brick oven produciing artisinal breads that make even the decent "Farm to Market" loaves you get at the grocery store seem like cheap cardboard.


(Thank you to Heartland Mill for the photos.)
Fervere is a gem, with quirky hours and bread to be celebrated. They claim to be open Thursday and Friday from 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM and Saturday from 9:30 AM - 7:00 PM, but they sell out far before closing time. If you go there after mid-afternoon, you'll find a "Sold Out" sign in the window and a locked door.

Yesterday, I bought the Holiday bread, which has cranberries, almonds and orange zest to liven up a hearty organic wheat bread, Polenta bread, which adds coarse corn meal and sesame seeds to the basic organic loaf to make the best toast in the world, and a decadent "cheese slipper", which is a rich ciabatta weighed down into concavity by yummy smokey cheddar and garlic.

There are cheaper places to buy bread. The four loaves (2 of the Cranberry Almond bread, so I could share one with my new office) totalled over $20, with tax.

But buying good bread is like investing a little money in the election process. You don't need to do it, and most people never will, but, if you really care what you're getting, it is money well spent. Very well spent.

"This should make you laugh," I said, putting on my shades . . .

I don't even watch CSI: Miami, but this 7+ minute collection of David Caruso one-liners made me laugh out loud.

I Blew My Chance at Being a Child Prodigy . . .

I'm 46. When I was young, I thought I'd crank out a great novel before I was 20. One of those novels that everyone finds enlightening, and some find life-changing. Kind of a Catcher in the Rye meets On the Road with just enough Great Shark Hunt mixed in to make it subversively brilliant.

Didn't happen.

Today is Norman MacLean's birthday - he wrote A River Runs Through It, and didn't start publishing until he was 70. It ain't over till it's over.

Goode, Ellison, and Who Gets to Decide What is American

Normally, I try not to cherry-pick an instance of Republican lunacy and use it to bash other Republicans over the head. That is one of the favorite techniques of right-wing punditry, and achieves its most refined form when the protagonist then goes on to demand that others criticize or condemn the offending party.

For example, some Democratic city council person in some tiny little town says that we ought to require the Bush twins to participate in the front lines of their father's optional war, and suddenly you hear the vast right wing noise machine, backed with the full weight of the corporate media, howling in protest, and demanding that every clear-thinking, upstanding Democrat must disavow and condemn this outrageous assault on the Bush twins. And the Senator of Sanctimony, Joe Lieberman, leaps across the aisle to hug and kiss his Republican friends, and comforts them in the face of this outrage, and calls upon his fellow Democrats to do the same.

That's the way it works. And the debate shifts from whatever serious topic was being discussed to whether all Democrats have sufficiently distanced themselves from someone nobody had ever heard of a week ago.

Well, I'm not going to use Republican Congressman Goode's racist nonsense like that. I'm going to assume that most of the Republicans out there are as disgusted as I am by this idiot's suggestion that Muslims can't be real Americans, and that we need to close our borders to LEGAL immigration of those whose religion we do not share.

Instead, I'm going to ask all of us - Republicans and Democrats - to think about exactly what "values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America" we really wish to preserve. Honestly. Stop reading. Close your eyes. Think about it for a few minutes. What values and beliefs traditional to our country do we want to preserve? Racism? Xenophobia? Manifest Destiny? Tolerance? Democracy? Freedom from an inquisitive and intrusive goverment?

After you spend a few minutes thinking about who we are, feel free to condemn Goode if you want. But only if you mean it.

The New Job

Friday was my last day at my prior job, and Monday was the start of a new one. It was difficult to leave the nicest group of people I've ever worked with, but the new crowd seems very kind, and I don't miss the threat of large cuts in personnel.

I conducted my search by contacting a few friends and keeping an eye on the Job Source at KCPhilnet.org. If you're in the market for a job in the nonprofit sector, KCPhilnet is the place to go. Ultimately, though, the job came through a guy I practiced law with in 1990. Moral of the story: Don't burn bridges, and stay in touch with old friends.

Choosing Local Candidates

Kansas City's byzantine, overpopulated election season, coupled with the hundreds of holiday parties we all attend in December*, means that 'tis the season to talk local politics. This year, I have three candidates that I feel strongly about, and I've been talking up Mark Funkhouser for Mayor, Beth Gottstein for Fourth District at-large, and Mark Forsythe for Fourth District in-district.

The question raised at these parties is inevitably "why". What makes these three candidates superior?

My responses are that Mark Funkhouser is the guy who can make this city work. Mark knows the city's ins and outs, he's the smartest of the bunch, and his integrity is absolutely rock-solid dependable. And, if you get to know him even just a little, he's funny and warm in a way that gives him his own brand of nontraditional charisma.

I support Beth Gottstein because she is a bleeding heart, in the proudest tradition of the word. She is the sort of person who notices when there are no minorities in the room, and she knows the entire city. Too many politicoes know the Ward Parkway corridor, because that is where the votes come out, but Beth knows the Northland issues, the Eastside issues, and on and on. She is a smart, committed, involved do-gooder, and, while we all like to be cynical and call people names, Beth is not like that. She won my admiration forever by backing a candidate I sharply opposed in a recent election. When I would take potshots at the guy, she would write me sincere, factual emails addressing my charges in a calm, friendly fashion. Our exchanges convinced me that her sincerity and integrity distinguish her from almost any politician I've met.

Mark Forsythe - heck, I'm not going to even bother describing why I support him, after the love letter I wrote last night. The guy is the real deal - eager to serve his constituents, and clearly the best fresh face Kansas City has seen in way too long.

But, all that said, those are the reasons I want you to vote for those candidates. If I'm honest with myself, they are not truly why I am supporting those candidates.

Choosing local candidates is different from choosing national candidates because the huge issues don't matter nearly as much. I don't know any of these candidates' positions on the sort of issues we look at as the big, divisive issues of the day. Where do they stand on the war in Iraq, or abortion, or capital punishment, or whatever hot-button issue you name? I don't really know in most cases, and I don't really care.

Most of us are way too ignorant to come up with a similar list of local issues. Where do they stand on downtown baseball? Come on, that issue died a long time ago. Where do they stand on downtown development - well, everyone is in favor of downtown development, but the issue for informed people becomes one of how much of your money they want to invest in it, as opposed to parks, roads and sewers. There aren't that many clear issues - the devil lies in the details.

Truth be told, I couldn't lay out a complete summation of my favorite candidates' positions on the local issues, either.

What motivates me in choosing local candidates is more of a sense of who they are rather than what they say on a particular issue. Kansas City is small enough that it is possible to meet a decent percentage of the candidates if you are alert and if you care to get involved. Even if you don't know them, you almost certainly know people who do.

Character quickly becomes the issue, when the races are small enough and the players are close enough that you can assess it by watching how they behave. It's vastly different from sitting down with an issues checklist and seeing who matches most closely your own views.

*This is a sidetrack, but I hate it when people do what I just did. "Oh, I can't possibly squeeze in another thing until January. I have 3 parties every night from now until the end of the year, and 12 parties every weekend." Oh. Let's see, I guess that means I am the least popular person in the city, because I get around four invitations per year, counting the two office parties for my wife and me and, of course, the Kansas City Young Republicans, which I'm not really invited to but I'd love to crash some day.

It's Not the Meat, it's the Curry?

"A 2- year study carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research concludes that condoms designed with the international male in mind is too big for the Indian man."

Mark Forsythe - Not Just a Great Future Councilman - a Great Guy

Many of Kansas City's best bloggers have endorsed Mark Forsythe's candidacy for the Kansas City Council rep for the Fourth District. Mark is running an exciting campaign based on grassroots support and straight talking. He's not going after big campaign dollars - instead, he's identifying the likely voters, showing up on their doorsteps, and talking to them.

It would be fair to assume that Mark will be a responsive, caring councilperson if he is elected.

For me, that's no longer just an assumption, though. I have personal proof.

Mark noticed my unexplained blog silence, and emailed me to see if everything was okay. As noted below, everything wasn't okay - I was trapped in a hell of technical blog confusion.

Mark Forsythe, a busy candidate for public office, took time out of his schedule to email me with the helpful advice that started me back toward blogging again. He not only wrote me a technical and understandable email, but he offered to meet me at a coffee shop near my place of work and work through the problem in person.

I've met Mark three times in my life. Once was for a cup of coffee, once was when he showed up on my doorstep to talk to a regular voter, and once was in line at the grocery store. He's not a close friend or relative, and he knows he already has my support, but he still took the time and effort to help someone who needed him.

Mark Forsythe is a good person. He's exactly the sort of person I want to represent me on the Council.

Back to Blogging - Silence was Golden

Some of you may have noticed my blog silence over the past week and a half and thought that I was off on some glorious vacation, sunning myself and drinking cocktails with umbrellas. Some may have thought I had achieved some zen-like state of one-ness with the universe, content to let the news cycle run without my commentary. Some may have imagined that I went on the binge to end all binges, running through the remaining 96 bottles of my nascent "99 Bottles of Beer on the Blog" series.

Alas, none of those speculations is accurate. Instead, I have been pounding my head on the impenetrable wall of Blogger software kinks and ftp mysteries. I have spent hours frustrated by error reports and opaque FAQs. This blog usually serves as a place where I get to voice my opinions and feel like my words might have some small influence, but, for the past week and a half, this blog has been a maddening reminder of my technical incomprehension.

Oddly, my silence has bolstered my popularity. The blogosphere voices its opinion through traffic, and my visitors have increased during the week of my silence. I suppose that means that I'm more attractive with my mouth shut - I do better as the strong, silent type . . .



If you're reading this, my silence has ended, and I'm damned glad to be back.

Solved?

Let's see.

Great Tits

A recent study by Dutch avian researchers reveals that birds in urban areas sing more rapidly and more creatively than their rural cousins. The researchers speculate that the birds use shorter songs with higher notes in noisy urban areas so that they can be heard better. The specific bird species they studies happens to be the Great Tit.

Surprisingly, if you google "great tits", all but the first site are about the bird species. That sure caught me by surprise . . .

Bobby and the Ambassador

Back in the early 90s, I traveled regularly to Los Angeles, and usually stayed at a Hyatt on Wilshire Boulevard. Just down the block was a massive old building, closed and surrounded by chain link fence. I didn't know what the building was, but it fascinated me. I'm not a new-age person who believes in auras or similar psychic phenomena, but something about the strange building seemed to emanate an historic energy. If I believed in ghosts, that would have been where I would search for one.

After a few times staying across from the building, I asked about it in the Hyatt's cocktail lounge.

"That's the Ambassador."

"Where Kennedy got shot?"

"Yeah, and where the Cocoanut Grove rocked."

I walked around it one night, though the neighborhood was seedy and the walk was long. The thought that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated in the big, glorious, abandoned building was mind-boggling.

My first political awareness was cheering for Bobby Kennedy in his march toward the White House. Growing up Catholic in St. Louis, attending a Catholic grade school, from a union family - Bobby was the second coming of his martyred brother. He was attractive, charismatic, and, to an 8 year-old boy, he personified destiny. As our school began to "change", in the euphemism of white flight, Bobbie Kennedy offered hope of peaceful, positive change, and a better future.

And then he was dead. Shot down by a crazy man. And we were robbed of our high hopes of a truly good man in the White House, making our way more righteous.

Instead we got Nixon, and all that entailed.

A few years later I met Rosie Grier, the man who grabbed Sirhan Sirhan and protected him from the crowd that would have torn him into pieces of hate. He jammed his thumb behind the trigger to prevent further shots from being fired. I shook that hand.

Yesterday, I saw the movie "Bobby". Don't trust my review - it has no critical distance. I was enthralled. The Ambassador Hotel was the focal point of the film, and it is presented unflinchingly as a grand relic beginning its downward spiral - as is American culture, as we see marriages and manners beginning their slow crumble.

In the end, when Bobby is shot and the characters onscreen are dealing with the aftermath and their reaction, we see the action, but hear the inspiring and still-relevant words of Bobby Kennedy's speech, "On The Mindless Menace of Violence", delivered at the City Club of Cleveland on the day after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated:

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Don't go see this movie if you are going to be unable to embrace it. Don't see it if you read the above speech and believe that Bobby Kennedy would have made an exception for "Islamofascists" or whatever boogeyman hides underneath your fears.

"Bobby" is a movie about what was lost on the floor of that faded, grand, alluring hotel I walked around one evening in LA. If it doesn't haunt you, the movie will mean nothing.

Chick-fil-a: 5 Days Away

According to the sign out front, the Chick-fil-A at Ward Parkway will be open in 5 days. I doubt it will fill the void left by the demise of Chile's, but a good chicken sandwich is a darned good thing.

Kickin' it Off with Funkhouser

We dropped by the campaign kick-off party for Mark Funkhouser last night. Usually, such affairs are stuffy and awkward, with lousy speeches, false adulation and people struggling to see and be seen with the "right" people.

Mark's kickoff was simply a good party. There was a basket for donations, but nobody applying pressure. A good blues band rocked the stage, and the crowd was a diverse group of people having a good time. He had fraternity brothers in from college days, from cities all over the country. It takes a pretty good guy to attract that kind of loyalty. There were people from different neighborhood groups, and lawyers from the largest firms. The food was good, the beer was cold, and crowd was enthusiastic.

With so many candidates, it's hard to predict how the race will go. Funkhouser has great name recognition, and widespread support. A lot of that support is spread throughout the community in places you might not expect to find it - nonprofits managed by MPA grads who studied under him, people who appreciate the solid work he did as city auditor, and business people who share his concern that the city have a fiscally sound approach toward development. I think he stands a solid chance of emerging from the primary with a plurality victory, and then the general will depend on who he's facing.

Whatever happens, Mark has started his campaign off with a fresh perspective and a good party. So far, so good.