Col. David. H. Hackworth, 1930-2005
Legendary U.S. Army Guerrilla Fighter,
Champion of the Ordinary Soldier
Washington, D.C., May 5, 2005 Col. David H. Hackworth, the United States Army's legendary, highly decorated guerrilla fighter and lifelong champion of the doughboy and dogface, ground-pounder and grunt, died Wednesday in Mexico. He was 74 years old. The cause of death was a form of cancer now appearing with increasing frequency among Vietnam veterans exposed to the defoliants called Agents Orange and Blue.
Col. Hackworth spent more than half a century on the country's hottest battlefields, first as a soldier, then as a writer, war correspondent and sharp-eyed critic of the Military-Industrial Complex and ticket-punching generals he dismissed as "Perfumed Princes."
He preferred the combat style of World War II and Korean War heroes like James Gavin and Matthew Ridgeway and, during Vietnam, of Hank "The Gunfighter" Emerson and Hal Moore. General Moore, the co-author of We Were Soldiers Once and Young , called him "the Patton of Vietnam," and Gen. Creighton Abrams, the last American commander in that disastrous war, described him as "the best battalion commander I ever saw in the United States Army."
Col. Hackworth's battlefield exploits put him on the line of American military heroes squarely next to Sgt. Alvin York and Audie Murphy. The novelist Ward Just, who knew him for forty years, described him as "the genuine article, a soldier's soldier, a connoisseur of combat." At 14, as World War II was sputtering out, he lied about his age to join the Merchant Marine, and at 15 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Over the next 26 years he spent fully seven in combat. He was put in for the Medal of Honor three times; the last application is currently under review at the Pentagon. He was twice awarded the Army's second highest honor for valor, the Distinguished Service Cross, along with 10 Silver Stars and eight Bronze Stars. When asked about his many awards, he always said he was proudest of his eight Purple Hearts and his Combat Infantryman's Badge.
A reputation won on the battlefield made it impossible to dismiss him when he went on the attack later as a critic of careerism and incompetence in the military high command. In 1971, he appeared in the field on ABC's "Issue and Answers" to say Vietnam "is a bad war … it can't be won. We need to get out." He also predicted that Saigon would fall to the North Vietnamese within four years, a prediction that turned out to be far more accurate than anything the Joint Chiefs of Staff were telling President Nixon or that the President was telling the American people.
With almost five years in-country, Col. Hackworth was the only senior officer to sound off about the Vietnam War. After the interview, he retired from the Army and moved to Australia.
"He was perhaps the finest soldier of his generation," observed the novelist and war correspondent Nicholas Proffit, who described Col. Hackworth's combat autobiography, About Face , a national best-seller, as "a passionate cry from the heart of a man who never stopped loving the Army, even when it stopped loving him back."
Having risen from private by way of a battlefield commission in Korea, where he became the Army's youngest captain, to Vietnam, where he served as its youngest bird colonel, he never stood on rank.
From the beginning his life was a soldier's story. He was born on Armistice Day, now Veteran's Day, in 1930. His parents both died before he was a year old and the Army ultimately stood in for the family he never had. His grandmother, who rescued him from an orphanage, raised him on tales of the American Revolution and the Old West and the ethos of the Great Depression. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he got his first military training shining shoes at a base in Santa Monica, where the soldiers, adopting him as mascot, had a tailor cut him a pint-sized uniform. "At age 10 I knew my destiny," he said. "Nothing would be better than to be a soldier."
He always credited his success in battle to the training he received from the tough school of non-coms who won World War II, hard-bitten, hard-drinking, hard-fighting sergeants who drilled into him the basics of an infantryman's life: sweat in training cut down on blood shed in battle; there was nothing wrong with being out all night so long as you were present for roll call at 5 a.m., on your feet and in shape to run five miles before breakfast in combat boots.
In Korea, where he won his first Silver Star and Purple Heart before he was old enough to vote, he started his combat career in what he later called a "kill a commie for mommie" frame of mind. He was among the first volunteers for Korea and later for Vietnam, where he perfected his skill. "He understood the atmosphere of violence," Ward Just observed. "That meant he knew how to keep his head, to think in danger's midst. In battle the worst thing is paralysis. He mastered his own fear and learned how to kill. He led by example, and his men followed."
Just met him in the ruins of a base camp in the Central Highlands in 1966, where he was a major commanding a battalion of the 101st Airborne. "He was compact, with forearms the size of hams. His uniform was filthy and his use of obscenity was truly inventive." What struck the journalist most forcefully was "his enthusiasm, his magnetism, his exuberance, his invincible cheerfulness."
To young officers in Vietnam and long afterwards, he presented an unforgettable profile in courage. ""Everyone called him Hack," recalled Dennis Foley, a military historian and novelist who first saw him in action with the 1st Battalion of the 327th Infantry in 1965. "He was referred to by his radio call sign of 'Steel Six.' He was tough, demanding and boyish all at the same time, stocky with a slightly leathered complexion. His light hair and deep tan made it hard for us to tell how old he was. He wore jungle fatigue trousers, shower shoes, a green T-shirt and a Rolex watch. In the corner of his mouth was a large and foul smelling cigar. As we entered the tent, he was bent over a field table looking at a map overlay and drinking a bottle of San Miguel beer."
With Gen. S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall, he surveyed the war's early mayhem and compiled the Army's experience into The Vietnam Primer , a bible on a style of unconventional counter-guerrilla tactics he called "out gee-ing the G." His finest moment came when he applied these tactics, taking the hopeless 4/39 Infantry Battalion in the Mekong Delta, turning it into the legendary Hardcore Battalion. The men of the demoralized outfit saw him at first as a crazy "lifer" out to get them killed. For a time they even put a price on his head and waited for the first grunt to frag him.
Within 10 weeks, the fiery young combat leader had so transformed the 4/39 that it was routing main force enemy units. He led from the front, at one point getting out on the strut of a helicopter, landing on top of an enemy position and hauling to safety the point elements of a company pinned down and facing certain death. Thirty years later, the grateful enlisted men and young officers of the 4/39, now grown old, are still urging the Pentagon to award him the Medal of Honor for this action. So far, the Army has refused.
On leaving the Army, Col. Hackworth retired to a farm on the Australian Gold Coast near Brisbane. He became a business entrepreneur, making a small fortune in real estate, then expanding a highly popular restaurant called Scaramouche. As a leading spokesman for Australia's anti-nuclear movement he was presented the United Nations Medal for Peace.
As About Face was becoming a best seller, he returned to the United States to marry Eilhys England, his one great love, who became his business and writing partner. He became a powerful voice for military reform. From 1990 to 1996, as Newsweek magazine's Contributing editor for defense, he covered the first Gulf War as well as peacekeeping battles in Somalia, the Balkans, Korea and Haiti. He captured this experience in Hazardous Duty , a volume of war dispatches. Among his many awards as a journalist was the George Washington Honor Medal for excellence in communications. He also wrote a novel, Price of Honor, about the snares of Vietnam, Somalia and the Military-Industrial Complex. His last book, Steel My Soldiers' Hearts , was a tribute to the men of the Hardcore Battalion.
He was a regular guest on national radio and TV shows and a regular contributor to magazines including People, Parade, Men's Journal, Self, Playboy, Maxim and Modern Maturity. His column, "Defending America," has appeared weekly in newspapers across the country and on the website of Soldiers For The Truth , a rallying point for military reform. He and Ms. England have been the driving force behind the organization, which defends the interests of ordinary soldiers while upholding Hack's conviction that "nuke-the-pukes" solutions no longer work in an age of terror that demands "a streamlined, hard-hitting force for the twenty-first century."
"Hack never lost his focus," said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth. "That focus was on the young kids that our country sends to bleed and die on our behalf. Everything he did in his retirement was to try to give them a better chance to win and to come home. That's one hell of a legacy."
Over the final years of Col. Hackworth's life, his wife Eilhys fought beside him during his gallant battle against bladder cancer, which now appears with sinister regularity among Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Blue. At one point he considered dropping their syndicated column, only to make an abrupt about face, saying, "Writing with you is the only thing that keeps me alive." The last words he said to his doctor were, "If I die, tell Eilhys I was grateful for every moment she bought me, every extra moment I got to spend with her. Tell her my greatest achievement is the love the two of us shared."
Col. Hackworth is survived by Ms. England, one step-daughter and two step-grandchildren, and four children and four grandchildren from two earlier marriages. At a date to be announced, he will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Soldiers For The Truth is now working on legal action to compel the Pentagon to recognize Agent Blue alongside the better known Agent Orange as a killer and to help veterans exposed to it during the Vietnam War. Memorial contributions can be sent to Soldiers For The Truth either by internet or by mail to, P.O. Box 54365, Irvine, California, 92619-4365.
SIGN GUESTBOOK FOR COL. HACKWORTH
Friday, May 06, 2005
Starbucks Bans the Boss
One thing you know about Bruce Springsteen is that he's got integrity. And talent. Starbucks is refusing to offer his new CD and I believe they have caved into to the new conservative restrictive atmosphere (plus the guy didn't support Bush in the last election and had the guts to say so).
Here's their email page for telling your thoughts at their website. I'm letting them know I can buy coffee in other places if they can't find a way to play and sell Springsteen music in their stores.
Sam
CLICK TO CONTACT STARBUCKS FEEDBACK PAGE
My email via their site (feel free to use).
I feel your reasons for rejecting Springsteen's new CD shows a loss of integrity on your part. If you can't find a way to sell Springsteen's music, one of the most honest, honorable and talented artists creating today, then I can buy coffee somewhere else. While I'm drinking your competitor's coffee I'm also creating a mass-email campaign and website to let others know how they can do the same.
Starbucks Bans the Boss
By Charlie Amter 1 hour, 19 minutes ago
The Boss is paying the cost for some racy lyrics and anti-corporate politics.
Starbucks says it will not stock Bruce Springsteen's just-released Devils & Dust, in part because of one track's graphic imagery.
The song in question, "Reno," depicts an encounter at a Nevada brothel, including a reference to oral sex and the line: "Two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty in the a--."
But that alone didn't trigger the barrista's Boss ban.
"There were a number of factors involved...[Lyrics] was one of the factors, but not the only reason," Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment, tells Reuters.
According to Newsweek, Starbucks decided to dust Devils after a deal fell through for a cobranded disc and promotional deal that prominently featured the Starbucks name. Springsteen's label, Columbia Records, balked when the idea was floated, citing the blue-collar champion's well-known opposition to merchandising his music.
Although Springsteen is doing just fine without Starbucks' help--Dust debuted atop Billboard's Hot 200 last week, selling more than 222,000 copies--the loss of a vital retail outlet could dent long-term sales.
The latte-slinging megachain has become an increasingly important part of the music business in the past two years. Caffeine junkies can now by a variety of adult-alternative CDs--from Norah Jones to Elvis Costello to Joni Mitchell to Michael Bubl--and even make customized discs at some outlets. It was Starbucks that was credited with the massive success of Ray Charles' Genius Loves Company, accounting for a full 25 percent of the Grammy-winning disc's nearly 4 million copies.
Starbucks even bought music chain Hear Music, which now produces its own line of CDs for the java-sipping set and an XM satellite radio station based on its music.
Springsteen, meanwhile, is currently in the middle of a solo acoustic tour, stopping in Denver Saturday before hitting St. Paul's Xcel Energy center Tuesday night.
Here's their email page for telling your thoughts at their website. I'm letting them know I can buy coffee in other places if they can't find a way to play and sell Springsteen music in their stores.
Sam
CLICK TO CONTACT STARBUCKS FEEDBACK PAGE
My email via their site (feel free to use).
I feel your reasons for rejecting Springsteen's new CD shows a loss of integrity on your part. If you can't find a way to sell Springsteen's music, one of the most honest, honorable and talented artists creating today, then I can buy coffee somewhere else. While I'm drinking your competitor's coffee I'm also creating a mass-email campaign and website to let others know how they can do the same.
Starbucks Bans the Boss
By Charlie Amter 1 hour, 19 minutes ago
The Boss is paying the cost for some racy lyrics and anti-corporate politics.
Starbucks says it will not stock Bruce Springsteen's just-released Devils & Dust, in part because of one track's graphic imagery.
The song in question, "Reno," depicts an encounter at a Nevada brothel, including a reference to oral sex and the line: "Two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty in the a--."
But that alone didn't trigger the barrista's Boss ban.
"There were a number of factors involved...[Lyrics] was one of the factors, but not the only reason," Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment, tells Reuters.
According to Newsweek, Starbucks decided to dust Devils after a deal fell through for a cobranded disc and promotional deal that prominently featured the Starbucks name. Springsteen's label, Columbia Records, balked when the idea was floated, citing the blue-collar champion's well-known opposition to merchandising his music.
Although Springsteen is doing just fine without Starbucks' help--Dust debuted atop Billboard's Hot 200 last week, selling more than 222,000 copies--the loss of a vital retail outlet could dent long-term sales.
The latte-slinging megachain has become an increasingly important part of the music business in the past two years. Caffeine junkies can now by a variety of adult-alternative CDs--from Norah Jones to Elvis Costello to Joni Mitchell to Michael Bubl--and even make customized discs at some outlets. It was Starbucks that was credited with the massive success of Ray Charles' Genius Loves Company, accounting for a full 25 percent of the Grammy-winning disc's nearly 4 million copies.
Starbucks even bought music chain Hear Music, which now produces its own line of CDs for the java-sipping set and an XM satellite radio station based on its music.
Springsteen, meanwhile, is currently in the middle of a solo acoustic tour, stopping in Denver Saturday before hitting St. Paul's Xcel Energy center Tuesday night.
Monday, May 02, 2005
The Desperation Of Wanting To Feel "Hip" By The Right
Comedy is not pretty.
May 1, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST NYT
Conservatives ♥ 'South Park'
By FRANK RICH
Conservatives can't stop whining about Hollywood, but the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too. It's not easy. In the showbiz wrangling sweepstakes of 2004, liberals had Leonardo DiCaprio, the Dixie Chicks and the Boss. The right had Bo Derek, Pat Boone and Jessica Simpson, who, upon meeting the secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, congratulated her for doing "a nice job decorating the White House." Ms. Simpson may be the last performer in America who can make Whoopi Goldberg seem like the soul of wit.
What to do? Now that Arnold Schwarzenegger's poll numbers have sunk, the right's latest effort to grab a piece of the showbiz action is a new and fast-selling book published by Regnery, home to the Swift Boat Veterans, and promoted in lock step by the right-wing media elite of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and The New York Post. "South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias," by Brian C. Anderson of the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, gives a wet kiss to one of the funniest and most foul-mouthed series on television. The book has even been endorsed by the grim theologian Michael Novak, who presumably forgot to TiVo the "South Park" episode that holds the record for the largest number of bleeped-out repetitions (162) of a single four-letter expletive in a single television half-hour. Then again, The Weekly Standard has informed us that William Bennett, egged on by his children, has given the show a tentative thumbs up.
Cynics might say that conservatives, flummoxed by the popularity of Jon Stewart, are eager to endorse any bigger hit on Comedy Central: The animated adventures of four obstreperous fourth graders in the mythical town of South Park, Colo., outdraws "The Daily Show" by a million or so viewers. But Mr. Anderson has another case to make. He quotes "South Park" profanity without apology and cheers the "scathing genius" with which it mocks "hate-crime laws and sexual harassment policies, liberal celebrities, abortion-rights extremists."
In one episode he praises, "Butt Out," a caricatured Rob Reiner journeys from Hollywood to South Park to mount a fascistic antismoking campaign that "perfectly captures the Olympian arrogance and illiberalism of liberal elites." Mr. Anderson also applauds last fall's "South Park" adjunct, "Team America: World Police," the feature film in which the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, portray Michael Moore as a suicide bomber and ridicule the antiwar activism of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Janeane Garofalo by presenting them as dim-witted, terrorist-appeasing puppets (literally so, with strings) who are ultimately blown to bits at a "world peace conference" convened by Kim Jong Il. (The film is out on DVD, with an expanded marionette sex scene featuring coprophilia, on May 17.)
So far, so right. Among their other anarchic comic skills, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone have a perfect pitch for lampooning what many Americans find most irritating about liberals, especially Hollywood liberals: a self-righteous propensity for knowing better than anyone else and for meddling in everyone's business, whether by enforcing P.C. speech codes or plotting to curb S.U.V.'s and guns.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the publication of "South Park Conservatives": Emboldened by the supposed "moral values" landslide on Election Day, the faith-based right became the new left. Just as Mr. Anderson's book reached stores in early April, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone, true to their butt-out libertarianism, aimed their fire at self-righteous, big-government conservatives who have become every bit as high-handed and meddlesome as any Prius-pushing movie star. Such is this role reversal that the same TV show celebrated by Mr. Anderson and his cohort as the leading edge of a potential conservative victory in the culture wars now looks like a harbinger of an anti-conservative backlash instead.
In the March 30 episode, Kenny, a kid whose periodic death is a "South Park" ritual, lands in a hospital in a "persistent vegetative state" and is fed through a tube. The last page of his living will is missing. Demonstrators and media hordes descend. Though heavenly angels decree that "God intended Kenny to die" rather than be "kept alive artificially," they are thwarted by Satan, whose demonic aide advises him to "do what we always do - use the Republicans." Soon demagogic Republican politicians are spewing sound bites ("Removing the feeding tube is murder") scripted in Hell. But as in the Schiavo case, they don't prevail. Kenny is allowed to die in peace once his missing final wish is found: "If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please for the love of God don't ever show me in that condition on national television."
This remarkably prescient scenario, first broadcast on the eve of Terri Schiavo's death, anticipated just how far the zeitgeist would swing in the month after the right's overreach in her case. A USA Today poll a week later found that Americans by 55 to 40 percent believe that "Republicans, traditionally the party of limited government, are 'trying to use the federal government to interfere with the private lives of most Americans' on moral values." In other words, what Hillary Clinton's overreaching big-government health care plan did to the Democrats a decade ago is the whammy the Schiavo case has inflicted on the G.O.P. today. And like the Democrats back then, the Republican elites have been so besotted with their election victory and so out of touch with the mainstream they didn't see their comeuppance coming. At the height of the feeding-tube frenzy, Peggy Noonan told her Wall Street Journal troops that federal intervention in the Schiavo family brawl was a political slam dunk: "Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive." (Italics hers.)
Oops. But what's given the Schiavo case resonance beyond the Schiavo story itself is that it crystallized the bigger picture of Olympian arrogance and illiberalism on the right. The impulse that led conservatives to intervene in a family's bitter debate over a feeding tube is the same one that makes them turn a debate over a Senate rule on filibusters into a litmus test of spiritual correctness. Surely no holier-than-thou Hollywood pontificator could be harder to take than the sanctimonious Bill Frist, who, unlike Barbra Streisand, can't even sing.
The same arrogance that sent Republicans into Terri Schiavo's hospice room has also led them to try to police the culture of sex more rabidly than the left did the culture of sexism. No wonder another recent poll, from the Pew Research Center, finds that for all the real American displeasure with coarse entertainment, a plurality of 48 percent believes that "the government's imposing undue restrictions" on pop culture is "a greater danger" to the country than the entertainment industry itself. Who could have imagined that the public would fear Focus on the Family's James Dobson more than 50 Cent?
But in this crusade, too, few on the right seem to recognize that they're overplaying their hand; they keep upping the ante. One powerful senator, Ted Stevens of Alaska, has proposed that cable and satellite be policed by the federal government along with broadcast television - a death knell for even the Sirius incarnation of Howard Stern, not to mention much of Comedy Central. A powerful House committee chairman, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, topped that by calling for offenders to be pursued through a "criminal process." Last week President Bush signed a Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that allows "family-friendly" companies to sell filter technology that cleans up DVD's of Hollywood movies without permission or input from the films' own authors and copyright holders. That sounds innocuous enough until you learn that even "Schindler's List" isn't immune from the right's rigid P.C. code. As the owner of CleanFlicks, the American Fork, Utah, company that goes further and sells pre-sanitized DVD's, once explained to The New York Times: "Every teenager in America should see that film. But I don't think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles." And so Big Brother can intervene to protect our kids from all that geriatric Holocaust porn.
On the first page of "South Park Conservatives," its author declares that "CBS's cancellation in late 2003 of its planned four-hour miniseries 'The Reagans' marked a watershed in America's culture wars." It did, in the sense that the right's successful effort to stifle what it regarded as an un-P.C. (i.e., somewhat critical) treatment of Ronald Reagan sped the censorious jihad that's now threatening everything from "The Sopranos" on HBO to lesbian moms on PBS. Of course "South Park" is also on this hit list: the Parents Television Council, the take-no-prisoners e-mail mill leading the anti-indecency charge, has condemned the show on its Web site as a "curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit." Should such theocratic conservatives prevail, "South Park" conservatives will be hipper than they ever could have imagined - terminally hip, you might say.
May 1, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST NYT
Conservatives ♥ 'South Park'
By FRANK RICH
Conservatives can't stop whining about Hollywood, but the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too. It's not easy. In the showbiz wrangling sweepstakes of 2004, liberals had Leonardo DiCaprio, the Dixie Chicks and the Boss. The right had Bo Derek, Pat Boone and Jessica Simpson, who, upon meeting the secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, congratulated her for doing "a nice job decorating the White House." Ms. Simpson may be the last performer in America who can make Whoopi Goldberg seem like the soul of wit.
What to do? Now that Arnold Schwarzenegger's poll numbers have sunk, the right's latest effort to grab a piece of the showbiz action is a new and fast-selling book published by Regnery, home to the Swift Boat Veterans, and promoted in lock step by the right-wing media elite of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal's editorial page and The New York Post. "South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias," by Brian C. Anderson of the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, gives a wet kiss to one of the funniest and most foul-mouthed series on television. The book has even been endorsed by the grim theologian Michael Novak, who presumably forgot to TiVo the "South Park" episode that holds the record for the largest number of bleeped-out repetitions (162) of a single four-letter expletive in a single television half-hour. Then again, The Weekly Standard has informed us that William Bennett, egged on by his children, has given the show a tentative thumbs up.
Cynics might say that conservatives, flummoxed by the popularity of Jon Stewart, are eager to endorse any bigger hit on Comedy Central: The animated adventures of four obstreperous fourth graders in the mythical town of South Park, Colo., outdraws "The Daily Show" by a million or so viewers. But Mr. Anderson has another case to make. He quotes "South Park" profanity without apology and cheers the "scathing genius" with which it mocks "hate-crime laws and sexual harassment policies, liberal celebrities, abortion-rights extremists."
In one episode he praises, "Butt Out," a caricatured Rob Reiner journeys from Hollywood to South Park to mount a fascistic antismoking campaign that "perfectly captures the Olympian arrogance and illiberalism of liberal elites." Mr. Anderson also applauds last fall's "South Park" adjunct, "Team America: World Police," the feature film in which the show's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, portray Michael Moore as a suicide bomber and ridicule the antiwar activism of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Janeane Garofalo by presenting them as dim-witted, terrorist-appeasing puppets (literally so, with strings) who are ultimately blown to bits at a "world peace conference" convened by Kim Jong Il. (The film is out on DVD, with an expanded marionette sex scene featuring coprophilia, on May 17.)
So far, so right. Among their other anarchic comic skills, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone have a perfect pitch for lampooning what many Americans find most irritating about liberals, especially Hollywood liberals: a self-righteous propensity for knowing better than anyone else and for meddling in everyone's business, whether by enforcing P.C. speech codes or plotting to curb S.U.V.'s and guns.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the publication of "South Park Conservatives": Emboldened by the supposed "moral values" landslide on Election Day, the faith-based right became the new left. Just as Mr. Anderson's book reached stores in early April, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone, true to their butt-out libertarianism, aimed their fire at self-righteous, big-government conservatives who have become every bit as high-handed and meddlesome as any Prius-pushing movie star. Such is this role reversal that the same TV show celebrated by Mr. Anderson and his cohort as the leading edge of a potential conservative victory in the culture wars now looks like a harbinger of an anti-conservative backlash instead.
In the March 30 episode, Kenny, a kid whose periodic death is a "South Park" ritual, lands in a hospital in a "persistent vegetative state" and is fed through a tube. The last page of his living will is missing. Demonstrators and media hordes descend. Though heavenly angels decree that "God intended Kenny to die" rather than be "kept alive artificially," they are thwarted by Satan, whose demonic aide advises him to "do what we always do - use the Republicans." Soon demagogic Republican politicians are spewing sound bites ("Removing the feeding tube is murder") scripted in Hell. But as in the Schiavo case, they don't prevail. Kenny is allowed to die in peace once his missing final wish is found: "If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please for the love of God don't ever show me in that condition on national television."
This remarkably prescient scenario, first broadcast on the eve of Terri Schiavo's death, anticipated just how far the zeitgeist would swing in the month after the right's overreach in her case. A USA Today poll a week later found that Americans by 55 to 40 percent believe that "Republicans, traditionally the party of limited government, are 'trying to use the federal government to interfere with the private lives of most Americans' on moral values." In other words, what Hillary Clinton's overreaching big-government health care plan did to the Democrats a decade ago is the whammy the Schiavo case has inflicted on the G.O.P. today. And like the Democrats back then, the Republican elites have been so besotted with their election victory and so out of touch with the mainstream they didn't see their comeuppance coming. At the height of the feeding-tube frenzy, Peggy Noonan told her Wall Street Journal troops that federal intervention in the Schiavo family brawl was a political slam dunk: "Politicians, please, think of yourselves! Move to help Terri Schiavo, and no one will be mad at you, and you'll keep a human being alive." (Italics hers.)
Oops. But what's given the Schiavo case resonance beyond the Schiavo story itself is that it crystallized the bigger picture of Olympian arrogance and illiberalism on the right. The impulse that led conservatives to intervene in a family's bitter debate over a feeding tube is the same one that makes them turn a debate over a Senate rule on filibusters into a litmus test of spiritual correctness. Surely no holier-than-thou Hollywood pontificator could be harder to take than the sanctimonious Bill Frist, who, unlike Barbra Streisand, can't even sing.
The same arrogance that sent Republicans into Terri Schiavo's hospice room has also led them to try to police the culture of sex more rabidly than the left did the culture of sexism. No wonder another recent poll, from the Pew Research Center, finds that for all the real American displeasure with coarse entertainment, a plurality of 48 percent believes that "the government's imposing undue restrictions" on pop culture is "a greater danger" to the country than the entertainment industry itself. Who could have imagined that the public would fear Focus on the Family's James Dobson more than 50 Cent?
But in this crusade, too, few on the right seem to recognize that they're overplaying their hand; they keep upping the ante. One powerful senator, Ted Stevens of Alaska, has proposed that cable and satellite be policed by the federal government along with broadcast television - a death knell for even the Sirius incarnation of Howard Stern, not to mention much of Comedy Central. A powerful House committee chairman, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, topped that by calling for offenders to be pursued through a "criminal process." Last week President Bush signed a Family Entertainment and Copyright Act that allows "family-friendly" companies to sell filter technology that cleans up DVD's of Hollywood movies without permission or input from the films' own authors and copyright holders. That sounds innocuous enough until you learn that even "Schindler's List" isn't immune from the right's rigid P.C. code. As the owner of CleanFlicks, the American Fork, Utah, company that goes further and sells pre-sanitized DVD's, once explained to The New York Times: "Every teenager in America should see that film. But I don't think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles." And so Big Brother can intervene to protect our kids from all that geriatric Holocaust porn.
On the first page of "South Park Conservatives," its author declares that "CBS's cancellation in late 2003 of its planned four-hour miniseries 'The Reagans' marked a watershed in America's culture wars." It did, in the sense that the right's successful effort to stifle what it regarded as an un-P.C. (i.e., somewhat critical) treatment of Ronald Reagan sped the censorious jihad that's now threatening everything from "The Sopranos" on HBO to lesbian moms on PBS. Of course "South Park" is also on this hit list: the Parents Television Council, the take-no-prisoners e-mail mill leading the anti-indecency charge, has condemned the show on its Web site as a "curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit." Should such theocratic conservatives prevail, "South Park" conservatives will be hipper than they ever could have imagined - terminally hip, you might say.
Just Like In Viet Nam The War In Iraq Grows More Inhuman & Cheap
The Pentagon reported to the Senate that terrorism and the Islamic fundamentalist movement is growing. Wonder why?
May 2, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST NYT
From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'
By BOB HERBERT
I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr. Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St. Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.
Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.
"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."
The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."
He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "
"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.
Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.
He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most G.I.'s, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence.
Mr. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my job as a mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector.' "
He stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism. "People would say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuff you would expect."
In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.
Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.
Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' "
May 2, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST NYT
From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'
By BOB HERBERT
I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr. Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St. Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.
Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.
"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."
The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."
He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "
"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.
Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.
He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most G.I.'s, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence.
Mr. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my job as a mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector.' "
He stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism. "People would say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuff you would expect."
In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.
Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.
Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' "
THE OAF STUMBLES
The lesson behind the success in bringing Ah-nold down is to apply it to the next GOP leader running for president.
May 2, 2005
Schwarzenegger's Star Dipping as Californians Feel Its Singe
By DEAN E. MURPHY
SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a prediction in January in a speech proposing changes to the way public pensions are managed in California, the state budget is balanced, legislative districts are drawn and teachers are paid.
"The special interests will run TV ads calling me cruel and heartless," Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, told lawmakers. "They will organize protests out in front of the Capitol. They will try to say I don't understand the consequences of these decisions."
Mr. Schwarzenegger's prediction about his detractors has come true in every respect, but so has something that he did not foresee four months ago: the larger-than-life governor has been brought down to size. His popularity has plummeted, and he has retreated on some proposals, like the ones on public employees' pensions and redistricting.
Now his Democratic opponents "see blood in the water," as one Democrat characterized the situation, and they are taking on Mr. Schwarzenegger with new determination.
On Friday, they seized upon statements he made praising the so-called Minutemen volunteers in Arizona who patrol the Mexican border for illegal immigrants. President Bush has described the volunteers as vigilantes, but Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would welcome them in California because "our government cannot secure the borders and keep our country protected."
Art Torres, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, accused Mr. Schwarzenegger of exploiting fears about illegal immigration, a historically divisive subject in California, to divert attention from his problems as governor and to appeal to his conservative supporters.
"We don't need an Austrian Minuteman," Mr. Torres said in a reference to Mr. Schwarzenegger's native country.
Two opinion polls released this week showed that the governor's approval rating had dropped below 50 percent for the first time since he took office in November 2003. The surveys reflected months of protests against Mr. Schwarzenegger by nurses, teachers, police officers and other public employees.
"The mainstream has turned on him," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, whose members have hounded Mr. Schwarzenegger because of his opposition to a state law that requires more nurses in hospitals.
The governor has publicly brushed aside the slide in the polls, saying Thursday on Sean Hannity's radio show that his critics "have not been successful at all with their mission because taking the poll numbers down didn't make me more vulnerable." Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would continue to collect signatures to qualify several of his proposals for a vote in November, no matter the political toll, and he did so on Saturday at a diner in Lancaster.
"They're lying to the people," Mr. Schwarzenegger said in the radio interview. "And they're trying to convince the people that my reforms are no good because they feel that that will be destructive to them because they want to keep the power, and they want to keep spending money."
Mr. Schwarzenegger's famed charisma continues to play well with many Californians. But even with the benefits of his Hollywood celebrity, which also gives him a friendly platform on talk radio and other news media, the new polls reveal that Mr. Schwarzenegger is not immune to the fallout of a sustained public beating.
Some of his Republican allies acknowledge as much, though they insist there is no sense of panic.
"Sometimes you go through turbulent air, and sometimes smooth air," said State Senator Abel Maldonado, a Republican, who is pushing some of the governor's education proposals in the Legislature. "Right now, it's no secret there's some turbulent air."
Several weeks ago, Mr. Schwarzenegger suspended his plan to place before the voters a measure that would have converted the state pension system to private accounts. His decision came after law enforcement groups mobilized against the proposal because it would have deprived public employees of death and disability benefits, something Mr. Schwarzenegger said he never intended.
This week, the governor backed off an important demand in his redistricting proposal, telling a town hall meeting that its timing "can be worked out." Previously he had insisted that the new districts, which he wants drawn by retired judges, be in place for next year's elections.
While each of the protesting groups has a different gripe with Mr. Schwarzenegger, they have united in depicting him as an uncaring, partisan Republican doing the bidding of big business. According to the polls, the message seems to have resonated with Democrats and independents, who together accounted for the sharp decline in Mr. Schwarzenegger's standing.
"Voters are concerned and frustrated that the governor may becoming another one of the Sacramento politicians, rather than the reformer that they were hoping that he would be," said Douglas Johnson, consulting fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, which conducted one of the polls.
In a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan group in San Francisco, there was a 20 percentage point drop in Mr. Schwarzenegger's approval rating among registered voters, to 40 percent in April from 60 percent in January. By comparison, Gov. Gray Davis, who was removed from office in a recall election, had a 62 percent approval rating in a poll taken two years into his first term.
One practical effect of Mr. Schwarzenegger's slump has been to renew the intense partisanship in Sacramento that he had managed to subdue in his first year in office, in large part on the strength of his stardom and efforts by both parties to put the recall of Governor Davis behind them.
After working last year with the Democratic-led Legislature to pass several proposals, relations went into a deep freeze upon the unveiling of his "Year of Reform" in the January speech.
Many Democrats saw the proposals, which included merit-based pay for teachers, as an assault on organized labor. His decision not to restore $2 billion in education financing from last year further infuriated the California Teachers Association, which with other groups has been broadcasting television and radio advertisements featuring PTA members accusing Mr. Schwarzenegger of retreating on promises to schools.
In one advertisement, several parents are featured talking about their disappointment.
"That's money our schools need to reduce class sizes and keep quality teachers," one parent says.
"The governor's always running around talking about reform," another parent says.
The first parent replies, "But to me, it sounds a lot more like breaking his word on education."
Roger Salazar, a spokesman for the California Education Coalition, which includes the teachers' union and other school groups opposed to Mr. Schwarzenegger's spending on education, said the coalition has spent about $4 million or $5 million on the commercials. Mr. Schwarzenegger's aides estimate the total is closer to $15 million, far more, they say, than the advertisements some of Mr. Schwarzenegger's supporters have begun broadcasting in response.
The depth of organized labor's rage has startled some Democratic lawmakers. The Assembly speaker, Fabian Núñez, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said some union leaders, whom he would not identify, have insisted that he refuse to meet with the governor because they want to "take him on and go all the way to elect a Democratic governor" in 2006.
"The state is in political disarray," Mr. Núñez said. "There is a great divide between Democrats and Republicans. I don't think it is good for California that we continue on this war path."
Mr. Núñez said the governor could go a long way toward building bridges by dropping his threat to call a special election in November that would place his remaining proposals on redistricting, a state spending cap and teachers' pay before the voters. Mr. Schwarzenegger is expected to submit the signatures on at least two of the measures to the secretary of state next week.
Mr. Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, Pat Clarey, said the threat of a special election had been instrumental in getting the Democrats to the negotiating table. "The deadline is coming up quickly, and I think everybody is trying to see if we can have some honest discussions," Ms. Clarey said.
Leon E. Panetta, a former congressman from California and White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, said Democrats would be unwise to underestimate Mr. Schwarzenegger's ability to rebound from his current troubles.
Mr. Panetta, a Democrat, described the governor as "part of the gridlock" but suggested that state lawmakers were likely to lose any public blame game with him.
"While there is blood in the water, he's still the predominant political figure in California," said Mr. Panetta, who is co-chairman of a committee created by Mr. Schwarzenegger to retain military bases in the state. "I don't think the Democrats can forget one thing: If the Legislature had been on the recall ballot with Gray Davis, they would have all been thrown out."
May 2, 2005
Schwarzenegger's Star Dipping as Californians Feel Its Singe
By DEAN E. MURPHY
SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a prediction in January in a speech proposing changes to the way public pensions are managed in California, the state budget is balanced, legislative districts are drawn and teachers are paid.
"The special interests will run TV ads calling me cruel and heartless," Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, told lawmakers. "They will organize protests out in front of the Capitol. They will try to say I don't understand the consequences of these decisions."
Mr. Schwarzenegger's prediction about his detractors has come true in every respect, but so has something that he did not foresee four months ago: the larger-than-life governor has been brought down to size. His popularity has plummeted, and he has retreated on some proposals, like the ones on public employees' pensions and redistricting.
Now his Democratic opponents "see blood in the water," as one Democrat characterized the situation, and they are taking on Mr. Schwarzenegger with new determination.
On Friday, they seized upon statements he made praising the so-called Minutemen volunteers in Arizona who patrol the Mexican border for illegal immigrants. President Bush has described the volunteers as vigilantes, but Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would welcome them in California because "our government cannot secure the borders and keep our country protected."
Art Torres, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, accused Mr. Schwarzenegger of exploiting fears about illegal immigration, a historically divisive subject in California, to divert attention from his problems as governor and to appeal to his conservative supporters.
"We don't need an Austrian Minuteman," Mr. Torres said in a reference to Mr. Schwarzenegger's native country.
Two opinion polls released this week showed that the governor's approval rating had dropped below 50 percent for the first time since he took office in November 2003. The surveys reflected months of protests against Mr. Schwarzenegger by nurses, teachers, police officers and other public employees.
"The mainstream has turned on him," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, whose members have hounded Mr. Schwarzenegger because of his opposition to a state law that requires more nurses in hospitals.
The governor has publicly brushed aside the slide in the polls, saying Thursday on Sean Hannity's radio show that his critics "have not been successful at all with their mission because taking the poll numbers down didn't make me more vulnerable." Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would continue to collect signatures to qualify several of his proposals for a vote in November, no matter the political toll, and he did so on Saturday at a diner in Lancaster.
"They're lying to the people," Mr. Schwarzenegger said in the radio interview. "And they're trying to convince the people that my reforms are no good because they feel that that will be destructive to them because they want to keep the power, and they want to keep spending money."
Mr. Schwarzenegger's famed charisma continues to play well with many Californians. But even with the benefits of his Hollywood celebrity, which also gives him a friendly platform on talk radio and other news media, the new polls reveal that Mr. Schwarzenegger is not immune to the fallout of a sustained public beating.
Some of his Republican allies acknowledge as much, though they insist there is no sense of panic.
"Sometimes you go through turbulent air, and sometimes smooth air," said State Senator Abel Maldonado, a Republican, who is pushing some of the governor's education proposals in the Legislature. "Right now, it's no secret there's some turbulent air."
Several weeks ago, Mr. Schwarzenegger suspended his plan to place before the voters a measure that would have converted the state pension system to private accounts. His decision came after law enforcement groups mobilized against the proposal because it would have deprived public employees of death and disability benefits, something Mr. Schwarzenegger said he never intended.
This week, the governor backed off an important demand in his redistricting proposal, telling a town hall meeting that its timing "can be worked out." Previously he had insisted that the new districts, which he wants drawn by retired judges, be in place for next year's elections.
While each of the protesting groups has a different gripe with Mr. Schwarzenegger, they have united in depicting him as an uncaring, partisan Republican doing the bidding of big business. According to the polls, the message seems to have resonated with Democrats and independents, who together accounted for the sharp decline in Mr. Schwarzenegger's standing.
"Voters are concerned and frustrated that the governor may becoming another one of the Sacramento politicians, rather than the reformer that they were hoping that he would be," said Douglas Johnson, consulting fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, which conducted one of the polls.
In a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan group in San Francisco, there was a 20 percentage point drop in Mr. Schwarzenegger's approval rating among registered voters, to 40 percent in April from 60 percent in January. By comparison, Gov. Gray Davis, who was removed from office in a recall election, had a 62 percent approval rating in a poll taken two years into his first term.
One practical effect of Mr. Schwarzenegger's slump has been to renew the intense partisanship in Sacramento that he had managed to subdue in his first year in office, in large part on the strength of his stardom and efforts by both parties to put the recall of Governor Davis behind them.
After working last year with the Democratic-led Legislature to pass several proposals, relations went into a deep freeze upon the unveiling of his "Year of Reform" in the January speech.
Many Democrats saw the proposals, which included merit-based pay for teachers, as an assault on organized labor. His decision not to restore $2 billion in education financing from last year further infuriated the California Teachers Association, which with other groups has been broadcasting television and radio advertisements featuring PTA members accusing Mr. Schwarzenegger of retreating on promises to schools.
In one advertisement, several parents are featured talking about their disappointment.
"That's money our schools need to reduce class sizes and keep quality teachers," one parent says.
"The governor's always running around talking about reform," another parent says.
The first parent replies, "But to me, it sounds a lot more like breaking his word on education."
Roger Salazar, a spokesman for the California Education Coalition, which includes the teachers' union and other school groups opposed to Mr. Schwarzenegger's spending on education, said the coalition has spent about $4 million or $5 million on the commercials. Mr. Schwarzenegger's aides estimate the total is closer to $15 million, far more, they say, than the advertisements some of Mr. Schwarzenegger's supporters have begun broadcasting in response.
The depth of organized labor's rage has startled some Democratic lawmakers. The Assembly speaker, Fabian Núñez, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said some union leaders, whom he would not identify, have insisted that he refuse to meet with the governor because they want to "take him on and go all the way to elect a Democratic governor" in 2006.
"The state is in political disarray," Mr. Núñez said. "There is a great divide between Democrats and Republicans. I don't think it is good for California that we continue on this war path."
Mr. Núñez said the governor could go a long way toward building bridges by dropping his threat to call a special election in November that would place his remaining proposals on redistricting, a state spending cap and teachers' pay before the voters. Mr. Schwarzenegger is expected to submit the signatures on at least two of the measures to the secretary of state next week.
Mr. Schwarzenegger's chief of staff, Pat Clarey, said the threat of a special election had been instrumental in getting the Democrats to the negotiating table. "The deadline is coming up quickly, and I think everybody is trying to see if we can have some honest discussions," Ms. Clarey said.
Leon E. Panetta, a former congressman from California and White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, said Democrats would be unwise to underestimate Mr. Schwarzenegger's ability to rebound from his current troubles.
Mr. Panetta, a Democrat, described the governor as "part of the gridlock" but suggested that state lawmakers were likely to lose any public blame game with him.
"While there is blood in the water, he's still the predominant political figure in California," said Mr. Panetta, who is co-chairman of a committee created by Mr. Schwarzenegger to retain military bases in the state. "I don't think the Democrats can forget one thing: If the Legislature had been on the recall ballot with Gray Davis, they would have all been thrown out."
BILLONS FOR ILLEGAL WAR BUT NONE FOR EDUCATION
April 29, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
'What, Me Worry?'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
ne of America's most important entrepreneurs recently gave a remarkable speech at a summit meeting of our nation's governors. Bill Gates minced no words. "American high schools are obsolete," he told the governors. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded. ... By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they are working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.
"Training the work force of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. ... Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year."
Let me translate Mr. Gates's words: "If we don't fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids." I consider that, well, kind of important. Alas, the media squeezed a few mentions of it between breaks in the Michael Jackson trial. But neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress - or even a daytime one - to discuss what Mr. Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don't even believe in evolution.
And the president stayed fixated on privatizing Social Security. It's no wonder that the second Bush term is shaping up as "The Great Waste of Time."
On foreign policy, President Bush has offered a big idea: the expansion of freedom, particularly in the Arab-Muslim world, where its absence was one of the forces propelling 9/11. That is a big, bold and compelling idea - worthy of a presidency and America's long-term interests.
But on the home front, this team has no big idea - certainly none that relates to the biggest challenge and opportunity facing us today: the flattening of the global economic playing field in a way that is allowing more people from more places to compete and collaborate with your kids and mine than ever before.
"For the first time in our history, we are going to face competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China and Asia," President Lawrence Summers of Harvard told me. In order to thrive, "it will not be enough for us to just leave no child behind. We also have to make sure that many more young Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them. How we meet this challenge is what will define our nation's political economy for the next several decades."
Indeed, we can't rely on importing the talent we need anymore - not in a flat world where people can now innovate without having to emigrate. In Silicon Valley today, "B to B" and "B to C" stand for "back to Bangalore" and "back to China," which is where a lot of our foreign talent is moving.
Meeting this challenge requires a set of big ideas. If you want to grasp some of what is required, check out a smart new book by the strategists John Hagel III and John Seely Brown entitled "The Only Sustainable Edge." They argue that comparative advantage today is moving faster than ever from structural factors, like natural resources, to how quickly a country builds its distinctive talents for innovation and entrepreneurship - the only sustainable edge.
Economics is not like war. It can always be win-win. "But some win more than others," Mr. Hagel said, and today it will be those countries that are best and fastest at building, attracting and holding talent.
There is a real sense of urgency in India and China about "catching up" in talent-building. America, by contrast, has become rather complacent. "People go to Shanghai or Bangalore and they look around and say, 'They're still way behind us,' " Mr. Hagel said. "But it's not just about current capabilities. It's about the relative pace and trajectories of capability-building.
"You have to look at where Shanghai was just three years ago, see where it is today and then extrapolate forward. Compare the pace and trajectory of talent-building within their population and businesses and the pace and trajectory here."
India and China know they can't just depend on low wages, so they are racing us to the top, not the bottom. Producing a comprehensive U.S. response - encompassing immigration, intellectual property law and educational policy - to focus on developing our talent in a flat world is a big idea worthy of a presidency. But it would also require Mr. Bush to do something he has never done: ask Americans to do something hard.
OP-ED COLUMNIST
'What, Me Worry?'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
ne of America's most important entrepreneurs recently gave a remarkable speech at a summit meeting of our nation's governors. Bill Gates minced no words. "American high schools are obsolete," he told the governors. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded. ... By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they are working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.
"Training the work force of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. ... Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year."
Let me translate Mr. Gates's words: "If we don't fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids." I consider that, well, kind of important. Alas, the media squeezed a few mentions of it between breaks in the Michael Jackson trial. But neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress - or even a daytime one - to discuss what Mr. Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don't even believe in evolution.
And the president stayed fixated on privatizing Social Security. It's no wonder that the second Bush term is shaping up as "The Great Waste of Time."
On foreign policy, President Bush has offered a big idea: the expansion of freedom, particularly in the Arab-Muslim world, where its absence was one of the forces propelling 9/11. That is a big, bold and compelling idea - worthy of a presidency and America's long-term interests.
But on the home front, this team has no big idea - certainly none that relates to the biggest challenge and opportunity facing us today: the flattening of the global economic playing field in a way that is allowing more people from more places to compete and collaborate with your kids and mine than ever before.
"For the first time in our history, we are going to face competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China and Asia," President Lawrence Summers of Harvard told me. In order to thrive, "it will not be enough for us to just leave no child behind. We also have to make sure that many more young Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them. How we meet this challenge is what will define our nation's political economy for the next several decades."
Indeed, we can't rely on importing the talent we need anymore - not in a flat world where people can now innovate without having to emigrate. In Silicon Valley today, "B to B" and "B to C" stand for "back to Bangalore" and "back to China," which is where a lot of our foreign talent is moving.
Meeting this challenge requires a set of big ideas. If you want to grasp some of what is required, check out a smart new book by the strategists John Hagel III and John Seely Brown entitled "The Only Sustainable Edge." They argue that comparative advantage today is moving faster than ever from structural factors, like natural resources, to how quickly a country builds its distinctive talents for innovation and entrepreneurship - the only sustainable edge.
Economics is not like war. It can always be win-win. "But some win more than others," Mr. Hagel said, and today it will be those countries that are best and fastest at building, attracting and holding talent.
There is a real sense of urgency in India and China about "catching up" in talent-building. America, by contrast, has become rather complacent. "People go to Shanghai or Bangalore and they look around and say, 'They're still way behind us,' " Mr. Hagel said. "But it's not just about current capabilities. It's about the relative pace and trajectories of capability-building.
"You have to look at where Shanghai was just three years ago, see where it is today and then extrapolate forward. Compare the pace and trajectory of talent-building within their population and businesses and the pace and trajectory here."
India and China know they can't just depend on low wages, so they are racing us to the top, not the bottom. Producing a comprehensive U.S. response - encompassing immigration, intellectual property law and educational policy - to focus on developing our talent in a flat world is a big idea worthy of a presidency. But it would also require Mr. Bush to do something he has never done: ask Americans to do something hard.
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