First Door on the Left

I thought George W. Bush had lost touch with reality, but it seems that Condoleezza Rice is determined to give him a run for his money…

Bush will rank high, Rice says

WASHINGTON — As President Bush begins a week of foreign diplomacy, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insists that he will one day rank alongside such towering pillars of 20th century statecraft as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

“Statesmanship has to be judged first and foremost by whether you recognize historic opportunities and seize them,” Rice said in an interview with Cox Newspapers.

“When you think of statesmen, you think of people who seized historic opportunities to change the world for the better, people like Roosevelt, people like Churchill, and people like Truman, who understood the challenges of communism. And this president has been an agent of change for the better — historic change for the better.”

Delusion: A false belief, specifically one that persists psychotically.

Wow…

Employers added 248,000 jobs in May across a wide variety of industries, and the department raised its previous estimates for March and April by a combined 74,000, for an average gain of more than 315,000 jobs in each of the past three months — a booming pace after six months of weaker job growth.

I sure wish I could find one of those jobs! I’ve been trying, really. I guess I’m either a) too old or b) too stupid.

Democrats responded by noting that 8.2 million Americans remained unemployed last month, and more than one-fifth of them have been jobless more than six months.

“Any step forward in the job market is good news for workers, but America is still in the worst job recovery since the Great Depression,” Allison Dobson, a spokeswoman for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), said in a statement.

The economy had 1.3 million fewer jobs in May than it did when the recession began in March 2001 — a gap that would be made up if employers added an average of 200,000 jobs a month for the rest of the year.

Count me among those who have been jobless for more than six months. My savings are now exhausted and my unemployment benefits have expired. The next step is the cashing out of my 401(k), which has lost more than half its value since Bush took office and of which the government will take 30% (20% for taxes and 10% for the early withdrawal penalty).

If you’re enjoying this “economic recovery” I’m happy for you. Really, I am. Count yourself among the lucky.

The Republicans are attacking John Kerry for being rich.

“Most Americans can’t afford yachts, private planes, thousand dollar haircuts or homes in Nantucket,” Republican National Committee spokesman Jim Dyke said in a news release announcing a new video game on the RNC Web site. The game is called Kerryopoly. It’s similar to Monopoly, but the properties belong to the Kerry family.

Of course, they don’t mention this…

It’s a curious line of attack. The logic of Dyke’s statement would seem to suggest that most Americans can afford mansions on hundreds of acres in Texas and are fortunate enough to receive retirement or severance packages worth tens of millions of dollars, as Vice President Cheney and some members of the Bush cabinet did when they left private industry to join the government.

The response of the Kerry campaign to this hypocrisy…

Kerry campaign spokesman David Wade responded: “Boneheaded attacks from this bunch are as insulting as they are ironic. It’s downright hypocritical coming from the campaign of a president whose connections got him into a ‘Champagne Unit’ of the National Guard during Vietnam and whose path was paved with privilege from Andover to Arbusto oil to the Texas Rangers…This guy who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple is going to engage in a sad game of class warfare? . . . I don’t think a lot of Americans remember Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy because of where they came from, they remember them for what they did to make America stronger. Good luck finding Americans who think that way about George Bush.”

It’s all kind of silly, really. Most politicians are rich. That’s simply a matter of life in America. But to have Bush’s people attacking Kerry for being rich is ludicrous. To hear them say that Kerry is engaging in class warfare is beyond ridiculous.

George W. Bush has been pandering to the rich since the day he took office. From his huge tax cuts for the wealthy, to his environmental and regulatory policies favoring large corporations and to his Medicare prescription bill that hands billions of dollars to the insurance and drug companies, everything he has done has been for the rich. He even started a war so his friends in the military industry could rake in huge profits from it.

The Bush administration could care less about the middle and lower classes in this country. If you earn less than $200,000 a year and you plan on voting for George W. Bush, you are (to put it bluntly) an idiot.

If the Republicans want to talk about class warfare, I say let’s have it!

Chased from the city

ON THE North Beach end of Powell Street, the air clean and quiet, a shiny, unlocked bicycle sits unattended in front of a quaint dress shop. It’s classic San Francisco, as in the movies, a picturesque street of tranquility.

Sadly, it’s also a facade, belying an undercurrent of intolerance that has caused Lori Haigh to close her Capobianco art gallery, scoop up her two children and flee for their safety.

Unbelievably — in a city long considered by the world as a safe harbor for tortured and misunderstood souls, a haven for art lovers and counterculturists, and the bastion of spirited speech and free thinkers — an uncomfortable truth is emerging: This city of St. Francis has its share of ugly small-mindedness toward strong political expression.

The problems began about two weeks ago when Haigh displayed a black-and- white painting of three U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. One of the soldiers is holding wires connected to three naked inmates while another soldier in sunglasses guards a blindfolded woman. Only the blood-stained American flag on a soldier’s uniform is in vivid color.

Two days later, eggs and trash were dumped at Haigh’s door and then about 200 messages threatened death and harm to her children if she or the painting remained in the gallery. A “customer” spat in her face and another man knocked her unconscious, breaking her nose, when she opened her gallery door.

While there has been a weekend rally largely staged by community outsiders to urge Haigh to stay, unbelievably, there’s been no official outcry from our typically vocal leaders at City Hall.

Meanwhile, her neighbors largely seemed to be too afraid of reprisals or too embarrassed to say much about it. “You could see it coming,” said Grant McKinnon. “This is San Francisco and all — but a lot of people around here aren’t all that liberal.”

So, Haigh’s gallery is closed and, disturbingly in this mecca of political expression, the only evidence of any is a hand-written “We support free speech” sign taped to her window.

“A lot of people around here aren’t all that liberal.”

Whether you are liberal, conservative or something in between has nothing to do with what happened to this lady and her art gallery. As George W. Bush himself would say: “This is not the America that I know.”

Sadly, however, it is what America is becoming under its current leadership.

Small-minded people (of which there are many in this country) tend to follow the examples of their leaders, no matter how wrong or misguided those examples may be. Remember “if you’re not with us, you’re against us?”

Fanatics, such as those currently in control of our government, are not well known for tolerance. Anybody who thinks or believes differently than they think or believe is wrong. Think about the Hate Amendment (banning gay marriage) that Mr. Bush and his fellow fanatics are trying to have written into our constitution. There is definitely no tolerance there — gay people are not like us, therefore they are not entitled to the same rights and privileges that we enjoy.

Here are just a few suggestions for all you fanatics out there:

• If there is a painting you do not want to see, don’t look at it.
• If there is a book you do not want to read, don’t read it.
• If there is a television show or a movie you do not want to see, don’t watch it.
• If there is a song you don’t want to hear, don’t listen to it.
• If somebody is not like you, does not believe, think or act like you do — get over it.

I am sure you could add a few things to that list.

John Kerry is testing a new theme for his campaign — “Let America be America Again.”

Please.

This is not the America that I know. The things that happened to the lady who owned that art gallery in San Francisco would not have happened in the America that I know. The Hate Amendment would never see the light of day in the America that I know.