Where's the money going?

To date "America has … 'spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.' (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)," as Frank Rich of The Times points out. Rich comes by his figures from the Vanity Fair article, "Billions over Baghdad," in this month's issue by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

A hundred years from now, Georgie Boy, historians will mark your administration as the most corrupt in history.

Tempest in Teapot:

Trying to brew something up as his numbers slip behind the front runner in the bid to become the Democratic party's presidential candidate, Barack Obama has called for the resignation of John Tanner, the chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division. According to The New York Times,

In a speech to a Latino group earlier this month in Los Angeles, Mr. Tanner said that a disproportionate share of elderly minority voters did not have identification, but added that it was not a widespread problem because of their life expectancy.

“Creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance,” Mr. Tanner told the National Latino Congreso, according to a video posted on YouTube. “Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.”

It's reasonably clear that Tanner was being a bit insensitive in his language, but not completely off the mark. Senator Obama should focus his attention on the more relevant issue: call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Unfortunately, only one Democratic candidate has the guts to do that.

A Rose by Any Other Name:

Okay, New York Times, you got me today. So I'm looking at the headlines and this one grabs me: "Not All Are Pleased at Plan to Offer Birth Control at Maine Middle School." Middle school! What's up with this? Where I'm from—in fact everywhere I've been from—"middle school" means grades 4 - 6. Girls in middle school are between the ages of 8 and 12 or 13 at the most. What's going on in Maine? Has pedophilia been legalized?

It turns out that "middle school" in Maine is actually junior high. The girls there who have become sexually active are still too young, but somehow 13 to 15-year-olds seems a bit less preposterous to contemplate as sexually active than the aforementioned group. After all, it's not unheard of for fourteen-year-old girls to marry, although certainly not the recommended mode of behavior in the twenty-first century. There are plenty of health issues to consider.

Nevertheless, the use of the term "middle school" in this instant amounted to cheap journalism. I certainly wouldn't have placed as much importance on the story if the school level had been properly labeled. Knowing how many people only half hear the issues being discussed, I'd guess the right wing is eating this one up. I can just see the pictures on Fox News.

On Public Speech and the inequities thereof:

Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a few days ago, and in today's New York Times she addresses the issue of "political correctness" after having been criticized by the Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom of having received the award because granting it to her was "the politically correct thing to do."

Lessing has some interesting things to say on the subject, while avoiding Bloom's usual bombast. (Was there ever a more pompous ass in literature?) One cannot help but consider the current state of racial affairs her in the States in light of the recent less than politically correct behavior of many of our young people and the recent arrests, charges, and so forth concerning nooses and abusive language.

Being politically correct, of course, means that one ought not to say hurtful things about one's neighbors, but it has come to be both a bullying tactic and perhaps even worse a mask, a thin veneer under which a strong undertow of bigotry is allowed to continue.

For many of our young people, being politically correct has come to mean nothing more than to live with one's head buried in the sand, if not in some region of our anatomy too nefarious to mention here.