If You Like Medical Bills, You’ll Love These

Activists in the blogosphere are studying well over 500 amendments to Sen. Max Baucus’ Senate Finance Committee health care reform bill, including three “public option” amendments. All sides will hotly debate, soundly trash, and amend the hell out of the Baucus bill, H.R.3200 (on the House side) and any others that come out of the woodwork by October.

But those aren’t the only kind of bills Americans should be worrying about.

My sister died at 37 from a metastatic sarcoma (the same cancer that took Ted Kennedy, Jr.’s leg). I watched her die, went to her funeral, and then went back to her apartment to sift through stacks of medical bills.

In exhaustion and grief, we couldn’t tell which bills were paid, which were not, which were rejected, which were under review, and which were still in the pipeline and wouldn’t arrive for weeks or months. This doesn’t happen in most industrialized countries and shouldn’t happen here. It's a disgrace, a disgrace that none of the bills pending in Congress will cure. A disgrace that health insurance conglomerates and their allies in Congress are fighting hard (and spending hard) to preserve, along with the profits the billing process helps generate.

Over 60 percent of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are from medical bills. Over three-quarters of those are in families who had health insurance, were probably satisfied with it, and thought their coverage was adequate until a serious illness proved otherwise. But it's the burdensome billing process itself that the health care reform debate has not addressed.

At the America’s Future Now! conference in June, Dr. Salomeh Keyhani of Mt. Sinai Hospital detailed the number of weeks doctors, nurses and their staffs spend each year dealing with insurance paperwork and procedures. Insurers make it as difficult as possible for customers to collect. Bottom line: if patients and doctors get frustrated and go away, the insurer won’t have to pay. Keyhani described the labyrinthine claims process as “passive aggressive” by design.

Keyhani's name came up again last week in connection with a nationwide poll published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Keyhani helped conduct the survey funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of 5,000 physicians representing a spectrum of specialties and regions, including American Medical Association members. The survey, Keyhani told NPR, found that "nearly three-quarters of physicians supported some form of a public option, either alone or in combination with private insurance options." That included AMA members, whose organization opposes a public option.

Yet only a single-payer-style plan promises to eliminate the mountains of bureaucratic paperwork that make our patchwork system cost nearly twice what other advanced countries pay. But since a nationwide single-payer system is off the table, even if a strong public option gets to the president's desk, most Americans will be sifting through confusing stacks of insurance paperwork for years to come. Some reform.

The anti-reform forces had their Tea Party in Washington on September 12. They offered no alternatives and screamed loudly about not being heard, but not loudly enough to drown out a majority that decides to speak with one voice.

President Obama must know that he has only to say the word and a sea of pro-reform supporters will travel to Washington in support of real reform and a robust public option. If summoned, supporters should bring their collections of medical bills, rejection letters and appeal forms and wave them overhead.

Talk about “Don’t Tread On Me.” Medical insurance paperwork is universally recognized and universally loathed. It could serve as a potent symbol of everything wrong with America’s dysfunctional, for-profit health insurance system.

Reform supporters might, en masse, flood congressional fax machines with their medical bills. Or stage media events with fax machines set up in public spaces for patients to fax their medical bills to Congress -- just to put an exclamation point on demands for meaningful reform.

There's something viscerally satisfying about feeding documents into a fax machine and knowing they're spitting out onto the floor of your congresscritter’s office. It's the next best thing to being there.

(Cross-posted from OurFuture.org)

Half now, half later

(This piece first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on July 15, 2007.)

No party hats. No confetti. Mostly relief among neoconservatives, their pundits and Republicans presidential candidates after President Bush commuted “Scooter” Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice sentence in the CIA leak case. Former federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani echoed Libby supporters who complained that “ultimately, there was no underlying crime involved.”

Martha Stewart served her time. Washington’s clubbish elite, however, couldn’t stomach seeing Libby in prison after conviction by a jury of commoners.

The former White House aide was sentenced to 30 months — 30 being roughly the number of friends who raised $5 million for his legal defense before the commutation on July 2. Libby drafted a check for his $250,400 fine that afternoon.

It was just 1998 when Republicans warned that not holding President Bill Clinton accountable for alleged perjury and obstruction of justice threatened our very republic. In impeachment proceedings, chief prosecutor Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., spoke passionately of bedrock principles, invoking Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. GOP lawmakers stampeded the podium to proclaim that no man is above the law.

Clinton was acquitted by the Senate.

By January 2001, conservative insiders looked forward to George W. Bush appointing like-minded Supreme Court judges and restoring the rule of law, as they understand it. At a mock funeral eulogizing the Clinton years, columnist Cal Thomas toasted to “the end of moral corruption … and the return of a controlling moral authority in the White House.” Former Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork chimed in: “In a sound country, Clinton would long ago have been hung upside down in a dungeon.”

Moral authority

Their moral authority installed dungeons at Guantanamo Bay and other exotic locations, adding modern amenities like “enhanced interrogation techniques” and tribunals featuring coerced testimony. Besides a handful of terrorists, the authorities imprisoned hundreds of others for years before releasing them from Guantanamo without charge or apology — thousands more from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most common underlying crime was being in the wrong faith at the wrong time.

Libby’s impending imprisonment, however, drew swift action. Displaying uncharacteristic leniency, the president declared Libby’s punishment “excessive,” drawing on sentencing complaints which were “routinely and strenuously opposed by his own Justice Department,” the New York Times reported.

In a nearly identical case decided weeks earlier, the Justice Department argued for upholding the sentence of Victor A. Rita’s 33-month sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice. His two decades of service in the armed services, commendations, awards and medals should have no bearing, they said, calling Rita’s sentence reasonable. In an 8-to-1 decision the Supreme Court agreed.

In Libby’s case, however, the president intervened even as the White House promoted a bill to reinstate mandatory sentencing rules struck down by a 2005 Supreme Court decision. Judges should have little discretion in sentencing, the administration argues, saying that leads to disparities in punishments for similar crimes.

“This is opening up a can of worms about federal sentencing” said Ellen S. Podgor of Stetson University.

“I anticipate that we’re going to get a new motion called ‘the Libby motion,’” the law professor told the New York Times. “It will basically say, ‘My client should have got what Libby got, and here’s why.’ ”

The political heat over the decision had to be anticipated. Commutations are rare, and generally not granted until a prisoner has begun serving his sentence, or while the conviction or sentence is under appeal. Why the rush?

Was it because the administration’s fall guy might reveal incriminating details of the CIA leak once behind bars? (Commutation leaves Libby’s conviction intact for now, along with his right to invoke the 5th Amendment under oath.) Like something out of film noir, commutation could be seen as an inducement to remain silent until the president leaves office, when a full pardon will be issued. Half now, and the other half when the job is done.

Before leaving office, President George H.W. Bush pardoned six former Reagan administration officials — including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, still facing trial. It effectively quashed further inquiry into the Iran-Contra cover-up and any role Bush pere played in it.

For Washington’s elite, it’s often not what you know, but who you know. But for senior officials like Libby, it helps if what you know might be incriminating.

Blue in print this a.m.

Be careful what you ask for.

Desperate White House flails for an Iraq strategy - Asheville Citizen-Times

Peckerwood

Borrowed from myself and the Asheville Citizen-Times:

Take the full-page developer’s ad opposite the Saturday, March 24 editorial page and the letter, “Asheville not really as progressive as it seems.” Add rolling development and Asheville becomes Greenville, S.C. without the economy. Even Republicans there complain about the proliferation of traffic, subdivisions and strip malls. Development may be free enterprise but, like consumption, it’s also an addiction.

And they keep coming, smugly self-confident couples with all the most heavily-marketed accessories, and you ask them where they live and they tell you “Peckerwood,” and you ask where that is and they’re mildly indignant you fail to recognize they live in one of the most exclusive new subdivisions in town, another of those Disneyesque “communities,” the next one farther out from last year’s hot new development, on what was until recently old man what’s-his-name’s apple orchard now awash in cheaply-built million-dollar homes with matching mailboxes and an architectural theme carried throughout the bacterium-like maze of cul-de-sacs, with a sculpted greenway beside the channelized stream that wends along past the stone foundation of the old grist mill fondly remembered in the name of the gated community adjoining Peckerwood on the other side of the 10-foot high perimeter fence.

Bad faith

(This piece first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on October 22, 2006.)

If they had voted away the right to bear arms, we’d have had a revolution. When they gutted habeas corpus, we hardly noticed.

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” – U.S. Constitution, Article I

America confronts a serious threat from terrorism, but faces neither rebellion nor invasion.

No matter. With little debate 65 U.S. Senators voted September 28 to deny habeas corpus review for alien detainees in U.S. custody. Every Republican but two approved the “Military Commissions Act of 2006,” a broadly written bill concerned primarily with tribunals for terror suspects detained since September 11. Twelve Senate Democrats joined the Republican majority.

Thirty-two Democrats and 218 Republicans (all but seven) approved the final bill in the House. And so Congress repudiated a fundamental principle of liberty that predates the Magna Carta.

Ironically, the 14 Guantanamo suspects facing charges receive limited due process under this bill. Hundreds of others face legal limbo, barred from contesting their indefinite imprisonment.

Habeas corpus (“you have the body”) is not a right many Americans use daily. Still, the “Great Writ,” the prisoner’s right to challenge the king’s reasons for jailing him, has been a cornerstone freedom for centuries. Until now.

"What the bill seeks to do is set back basic rights by some 900 years," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA). He then voted for the bill he called "patently unconstitutional on its face."

His colleagues also knew that the Supreme Court will likely overturn the habeas provision. But a party rocked by scandals and an unpopular war in Iraq needed a divisive vote with which to paint Democrats soft on terrorism.

All who voted yea proved they were soft on the Constitution.

To recap, 65 Senators and 250 congressmen approved a bill that undermines the Constitution they swore a solemn oath to uphold. President Bush will sign it.

Consider that when asked, “Who do you trust?” But there are more skeletons in this closet.

The War Crimes Act that enforces the Geneva Conventions makes cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners a federal crime. When the Supreme Court ruled this summer that Geneva’s Common Article 3 applies to all detainees, CIA interrogators scrambled to buy legal-defense insurance. Bush administration lawyers had led them to believe that Geneva did not apply to “enemy combatants,” and that waterboarding and other abuses were legal.

Thus the hurry to pass the Military Commissions Act before Republicans lose control of Congress this November.

The act parses the meaning of cruelty and grants legal immunity retroactive to 1997 for both interrogators and senior officials involved in all but “grave” prisoner abuses.

The president decides what is “grave.” The act bars courts from reviewing his decisions.

A recent estimate says that America holds 14,000 prisoners in camps from Bagram (Afghanistan) to Guantanamo. Retired Army Major General John Batiste testified recently that of 13,000-plus once held in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, “probably 99 percent … were guilty of absolutely nothing,” but “the way we abused them turned them against the effort in Iraq forever.”

Stay this course? No.

Raise questions about prisoner treatment and hardliners suggest you “don’t get it,” and invariably change the subject to al Qaeda’s barbarity. “The terrorists” deserve no rights.

Assuming that’s true, then presumably the innocent do. Justice, honor and decency demand that. What percentage of those 14,000 prisoners are guilty of nothing? Which are “the terrorists” deserving military justice?

The administration won’t say and thinks patriots wouldn’t ask. Americans who do are soft on terrorism.

The detainee treatment question is not about the blackness of terrorists’ hearts.

It is about our own hearts. About our standards of behavior, not theirs. Neitzsche cautioned, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster."

Fighting terrorism requires tough measures. Tough, but smart. And effective.

Promoting democracy requires living by our principles, not retreating from them.

America aspires to set a standard for the world, a moral high bar so high that sometimes she fails in reaching it. In our post-9/11 zeal we allowed our enemies to re-set that bar for us – ankle-high. Stay one step above those who cut off prisoners' heads on videotape and we can still claim moral superiority. Not that the world will pay attention any longer.

Osama bin Laden wants to destroy America? He needn’t bother. We just might do it for him.

Threatened Birthright

(This piece first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on September 8, 2006.)


The America I grew up in was a superpower, not because of her military might, but because of her ideals. People everywhere thirsting for freedom looked to us. That felt good.

I’d like that feeling again. I want back the America that led by example. She condemned countries that locked people away without charge and that attacked other nations without just cause. America was slow to anger, fierce in battle, humble in victory, generous in peace, a defender of the weak who didn’t despise the poor. She strove, however imperfectly, to better herself and to achieve her highest ideals.

That birthright is threatened, not by Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, but by our own “leaders.”

In damage done to America’s reputation, Abu Ghraib was the worst foreign policy disaster of my lifetime, save for the Iraq occupation.

Add to those the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan, secret prisons in Europe and warrantless domestic surveillance. To typically moderate Americans our present course looks disturbingly immoderate.

“Leaders” flush with moral clarity saw an opportunity to remake the Middle East, starting by replacing the Iraqi dictatorship with democracy.

A noble-sounding goal, but having nothing to do with Sept. 11, President Bush admitted recently. Instead of inviting debate before testing this democratic domino theory, they sold a war of choice as a war to eliminate an urgent WMD “threat.” The Washington Post’s George Will ridicules the policy as “unrealism.”

“Foreign policy ‘realists’ considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists’ critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem.” With the widespread escalation in Middle East violence, Will scoffs, “That problem has been solved.”

American troops face a strengthening Iraqi insurgency amidst civil war. In Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and their Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice is back. In Pakistan, Osama makes videos.

The Iraq occupation has weakened our military, destabilized the Middle East, strengthened Iran politically, allowed North Korea to build its nuclear arsenal, undermined our credibility and we have lost the moral high ground we held on September 11. On ABC’s “This Week,” (Aug. 13) Fareed Zakaria observed, “We have united our enemies and divided our friends.”

The majority party’s plan of action? “Victory.”

They invaded Iraq for the same reason they impeached the last president: not because circumstances warranted, but because they could.

They justified their actions in 1998 with impassioned rhetoric: no man, not even a president, is above the law; America sets the example; the world is watching.

Today they call the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and fight to preserve the option to torture detainees held indefinitely without charge. Even administration apologists struggle, as one editorial suggested, “to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him.” The world is still watching.

“Leaders” flew tons of cash into Iraq on pallets, disbursing some from pickup trucks. The Coalition Provisional Authority played football with “bricks” of $100 bills. $9 billion has gone missing.

Louisiana homeowners displaced by Hurricane Katrina are just now seeing $9 billion in rebuilding funds.

“Leaders” rewarded corporations for moving jobs and hiding profits offshore with a tax holiday, the American Jobs Creation Act.

Goldman Sachs dubbed it “no lobbyist left behind.” Bush’s former chief of staff for the Council of Economic Advisers observed, “you might as well have taken a helicopter over 90210 (Beverly Hills) and pushed the money out the door.”

Preaching “free trade” in one breath, with the next they insist that Americans pay the world’s highest prescription drug prices and fight to keep out lower-priced medications from Canada. They cite “safety” concerns.

Congressional earmarks have exploded in number.

Our “leaders” hope to privatize Social Security, putting the retirement safety net into the hands of Wall Street. They pay for tax cuts for wealthy contributors with record debt for our children.

They smear their critics as out of touch.

For working families each year the treadmill gets faster … and steeper. The treadmill is winning.

These “leaders” have forgotten for whom they work. Too many have forgotten how to lead, if they ever knew. And if they won’t, it’s up to non-politicians with passions larger than their ambitions.

It’s time to reclaim our birthright. It’s time to hold our “leaders” accountable to a higher power: the American voter.

Warhorses

(This piece appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on July 11, 2006.)

It’s time again for the GOP’s sales team to re-shoe its warhorses, as it does roughly every other year. They’ll lead them down to the U.S. House and Senate and trot them around the ring for their dwindling base.

Yes, the flag burning and gay marriage amendments to the United States Constitution are back, and just in time for the mid-term elections. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn) recently told Fox News Sunday that America needs them. Like River City needs a boys’ band.

Healthcare, deficits, gas prices, port security, the bleeding in Iraq, and (heaven forbid) congressional reform can wait. Instead, the GOP thinks the House, the Senate, and fifty state legislatures should be debating a constitutional response to flag-burning jerks (rarer than small-government conservatives lately). And to prevent one of the “Queer Eye” Fab Five and his partner from filing a joint tax return.

You’ve seen this rerun. Frist and pals bring the amendments to the floor for their biennial defeat. (The Senate voted down the Marriage Protection Amendment on June 7.) Then all summer they try giving wedgies to Democrats who vote “no” because they dared to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Then after the first Tuesday in November, Republican leaders put their warhorses out to pasture for another two years.

It’s respect for such cherished traditions that keeps us from seeing politicians as cynical and manipulative.

And later this summer, because the “survival of civilization” will be at stake, they will ask whom you trust to protect you. You can trust those who overestimated the Iraqi threat and underestimated the occupation’s cost in blood, treasure and moral authority. Or, as Vice-President Dick Cheney has hinted, you can make the wrong choice, vote for Democrats, and die in the next attack.

Your choice. Take your time.

In fact, America once fought a civil war to decide whether or not this union would survive. There were over half a million casualties.

We’re still here.

In World War II, we fought a fascist threat that murdered millions and threatened to enslave the world. There were over one million American casualties.

We’re still here.

For most of my life, through the Cuban missile crisis and until the Berlin Wall came down, we lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation on 30 minutes warning from a fleet of Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Real missiles. Real nuclear warheads. Real weapons of mass destruction.

And we’re still here.

Bird flu was recently the threat du jour. In press reports about a potential pandemic, the lack of vaccine and hospital beds, and the possibility of millions dead, there was no suggestion that it was a threat to America’s survival. A faceless virus, bird flu wasn’t marketable as the latest, greatest foreign menace.

For all the horrors they’ve inflicted, terrorists will never threaten America’s survival. Deadly foes, certainly. Yet of the threats we’ve faced, terrorism wouldn’t even make the top ten. But fear of it, like gay marriage and flag burning, makes a dandy campaign issue when your record on everything else stinks up the place. (Where is Osama bin Laden anyway?)

Even the fearmongers admit another attack is almost a certainty (that is, they can’t stop it). But anyone faint-hearted enough to believe civilization itself is on the line should be home hiding under the bed, not leading this country or the men and women who defend the ideals bound up in her flag.

Speaking of which, on the way out of town late on Memorial Day, I realized I’d left the house without my work shirts. I stopped at Westgate Mall in Spartanburg, S.C., to buy a couple. Along the curb, in the grass strip around the perimeter of the mall, stuck into the ground every ten feet was a small American flag on a stick. Hundreds of them. Some were knocked over. Others already lay in the gutter.

If we successfully peel away part of our First Amendment with the proposed flag bill, flag desecration (blasphemy, in essence) will become a federal crime. Proponents will, true to form, enlist lobbyists to help write a retailer-friendly definition of desecration into the U.S. Code.

The “curbs and gutters” exemption will demonstrate how unserious the amendment’s sponsors always were.

New Life Forms

[It's been nearly a sixty hour week and little time for blogging, so an entry from the archives.]

Column first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times July 30, 2005:

“The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.”

— Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

How many movies start with some clever guy inventing/discovering something extraordinary? So many that you don’t have to be Michael Crichton (“Jurassic Park”) or Mary Shelley (“Frankenstein”) to know where this is heading. Halfway through the film that something is threatening the hero, his girlfriend and the world. And a pair of cute kids.

In real life these out-of-control somethings are neither biological nor technological, but legal. They are corporations.

Public corporations are systematically corrupting democracy, spending vast sums exercising their rights as “persons” to remake America a nation of, by and for the corporation. They write the laws governing them — the recent bankruptcy bill, for one — secure federal handouts, and with the recent United Airlines bankruptcy ruling, are positioning to cheat employees out of billions of dollars in underfunded pensions by erasing their obligations in court. Stockholder risk is being socialized, subsidized by employees and taxpayers.

Conceived in law and born on paper, corporations grow, consume resources and generate waste — even mate and spawn offspring. They need not die. Ever. They are intelligent (some more than others) and have personalities (some nicer than others). Corporate behavior is, well, businesslike. Not unlike another cold-blooded beast.

In “Jaws,” Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) explained the shark to the town’s mayor as “a perfect engine … an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks. And that’s all.”

The corporation is not so well rounded. All this machine does is generate profits for shareholders. And that’s all. Team building, recycling, and charitable donations give corporations a human face, but are ultimately window dressing. Employees who start hearing “shareholder value” had better update their resumes.

Thousands have done so lately. True, some factories had outlived their time. Yet many corporations simply desert America to evade taxes and to seek “greater efficiency” (cheap labor) overseas. The newly unemployed shrug, shed tears, pack their belongings, and go looking for their next opportunity to be treated as chattel. That’s just the way things are, right?

Well, something is wrong with the way things are. You might not be able to put a name to it, but you sense it. You feel it. And you know it when you experience it firsthand.

We easily spot the really bad apples: Enron, WorldCom, Tyco. But daily we tolerate common indecency and rule bending as acceptable — even desirable — as long as it feeds our portfolios (and campaign coffers). We learn to view the world through a corporate lens. Competition. Risk and reward. The bottom line. The big fish eat the little ones. What could be more natural?

Except there’s nothing natural about the corporation. It’s an artificial life form engineered to relentlessly pursue profit. As actor Michael Biehn said of “The Terminator,” that’s what it does. That’s all it does.

There’s the rub. Incorporation grants privileges and immunities unavailable to flesh-and-blood citizens. In return for special treatment — save for paying taxes when it’s unavoidable — corporate persons owe employees, communities and their country nothing. Especially loyalty. Loyalty is a one-way street.

Decisions that void workers’ American Dreams typically have little to do with unethical corporate boards (most are honest, to be sure) or dire economic necessity, but arise from the statutory requirement that corporations maximize profits. Period.

Everyone and everything else, including democracy, becomes fodder. What kind of “persons” have we created? The problem is the corporation was badly designed … by us.

Privileges are not without obligations, and these artificial persons have conveniently forgotten theirs. The growth in offshore tax shelters and the disappearance of America’s strategic manufacturing base reveal corporate patriotism as simply more window dressing.

President Calvin Coolidge said, “The chief business of the American people is business.”

But for corporate persons, the business of business is not America. The Bush administration dreams of reinventing the tort system, the tax system, and Social Security. But if the president truly puts America’s security and her working families ahead of political contributions, he should support reinventing the corporation. All it lacks is a soul.

Three-card Monte

Paul Krugman's column today in the Times points up how challenging it is to deal with adveraries when "the other side doesn't play by any known rules."

Dr. James Hansen, a climate scientist at the center of the global warming debate, appears in "An Inconvenient Truth," the new film on that subject by former Vice-President Al Gore. Krugman notes that Hansen presented scientific evidence for global warming before the Senate in 1988, and his predictions have held up since. Still, the energy industry funded a "smear campaign" to distort his research conclusions and portray them as unreliable. Krugman says plainly, "He was Swift-boated."

Sen. John Kerry knows that technique too well. A Times piece on Sunday detailed his post-campaign research to refute charges against his military record raised in the Swift Boat Veterans' $30 million smear effort. The Times reports that "naval records and accounts from other sailors contradicted almost every claim they made." Not that the "Swifties" cared.

"The mantra was just 'We want to set the record straight,' " Mr. Hayes [an early member of the group] said this month. "It became clear to me that it was morphing from an organization to set the record straight into a highly political vendetta. They knew it was not the truth."

I once wrote a column submitted with the working title, "Heads, I win. Tails, you lose." The headline writer went with, "Soldiers are straightforward about Iraq, while White House deals us a Catch-22." Whatever.

The column observed how slyly GOP operatives rig the debate in their favor:

Earlier in January, Vice President Cheney dismissed those who suggest that overthrowing Saddam Hussein simply “stirred up” terrorists, saying, “They overlook a fundamental fact: We were not in Iraq on Sept. 11, 2001, and the terrorists hit us anyway.” (In case you missed the connection Cheney repeatedly denies making, Saddam = Osama = Sept. 11.)

The president weighed in too, admonishing critics to “debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas.” Debating a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq might “embolden” terrorists (read, put troops at risk).

Let’s review: a) Those concerned about emboldening terrorists lack the resolve to put troops at risk against already emboldened terrorists; and b) Those hoping to minimize the risk to troops irresponsibly put troops at risk by emboldening already emboldened terrorists.

It’s like watching close-up magicians at the Magic Castle. This trick is called: “Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.” Wanna see it again?

This verbal Three-card Monte has become standard operating procedure on the right, something Glenn Greenwald highlighted in a similar way last week in the context of what the Wall Street Journal's editorial page claims is the "the peculiar rage that now animates so many on the political left" and threatens their success at the polls. (And we didn't think they cared!)

National Review's Rich Lowry (like the Journal) decried the "rank incivility" in evidence when war hero Sen. John McCain's commencement address at the New School was "heckled by left-wingers."

Greenwald responded:

Lowry said nothing about the continuous mockery by the Bush campaign of war hero John Kerry's war wounds and military service, including the waiving of purple band-aids at the Republican National Convention, nor did Lowry condemn the ongoing attacks on the patriotism and courage of war hero Jack Murtha. And Lowry specifically defended the invocation of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in commercials against wounded combat veteran Max Cleland, dismissing complaints about such attacks on Cleland's commitment to the nation's defense as mere "whining."

... it's a completely perverse "civility" standard which holds that it's fine to attack a war hero's patriotism, impugn their allegiance to the country, question their courage, and mock their war wounds -- as Bush supporters routinely do -- but that it is somehow intolerable to heckle them while giving a political speech.

When Democrat Rep. Lacy Clay of Missouri spoke at UM St. Louis' commencement, he included comments against the war and the president. As conservative blogger Gateway Pundit put it:

Representative Lacy Clay Jr. gave such a hate-filled speech last Saturday morning at the University of Missouri St. Louis campus that he had to stop three times during his talk because the boos from the crowd had drowned him out! But unlike Murtha, Lacy Clay needed security to escort him from the building after he was through with his Bush-bash!

In essence, the UMSL students behaved as any normal, God-fearing, patriotic real Americans would. "Hate-filled," of course, being in the eyes of the partisan (read the speech for yourself). Greenwald observes:

So pro-Bush students heckled Rep. Clay's speech and were so disruptive that the Congressman actually needed security to escort him out of the building for fear that his physical safety would be endangered. Does that show that the Angry Right is deranged and is jeopardizing their chances to win elections? No, it shows the opposite. This incident also shows how deranged the Angry Left is.

...

So, to re-cap the rules: (1) When a pro-war politician gives a pro-war speech as part of a graduation ceremony, and students in the audience heckle and boo him, that shows how Deranged the Angry Left is -- because they heckled a pro-war speech. (2) When an anti-war politician gives an anti-war speech as part of a graduation ceremony, and students in the audience heckle, walk out and even riot, that also shows how Angry the Left is -- because they "provoked a near riot" by pro-war students.

If there is any rule extant at all among the Macchiavellis of the right, it's "Heads, I win. Tails, you lose." Is it any wonder Americans have come to distrust the confidence men responsible for Iraq, Katrina relief, Social Security privatization, the budget, domestic spying, etc.?