"W"

Josh Brolin as George W. Bush & director Oliver Stone. Photo: latimes.com

Tomorrow is the Election!! It looks very good for Obama and the Democratic Party as a whole; but I’m still apprehensive. I can’t wait until tomorrow night for the results. (Though in 2000, I ended up watching CNN at my friend Umur’s condo in Istanbul every night I was there, and, of course, didn’t find out the results until December!)

To get in the mood for tomorrow, I went to see “W” at AMC 1000 Van Ness on Saturday afternoon. On the whole it was pretty good. It was a typical Oliver Stone format with flashbacks and time juggling throughout. Josh Brolin did an amazing job as ‘Jr.’ (The ads for coming attractions showed him as Dan White in “Milk,” and it looks as though he really got that character down too. More about Harvey Milk, Mayor Moscone, and Dan White later in the month.) Back to “W”…. I thought the scenes at Yale were somewhat exaggerated, and as I wrote in an earlier posting, nobody I knew in New Haven would ever sing the Whiffenpoof Song (reserved for the Whiffs); but then most of my friends were in undergraduate a cappella groups and may have been more sensitive about the issue than Fraternity jocks.

George W. Bush and I overlapped one year in New Haven, 1967/68 (along with Garry Trudeau). I think I recall seeing George in April 1968 on Whiff Tap Night. I know I saw Don Schollander and think that somebody pointed out George as a friend of Don’s, and as the son of the new Congressman from Texas, though my memory may be somewhat blurry on that point. (On the whole, my recollection of people and details of past events is fairly good. If only my short term memory would improve; but I’m afraid it’s only getting worse!)

I know I did sing at Bush’s baccalaureate service at Woolsey Hall just before his graduation. Among other things we sang a TTBB version of Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus. I was back in New Haven rehearsing with the Glee Club before departing on a six week tour of Latin America.

Hillary Clinton was criticized a few months ago re: her comments about late primaries for her reference to RFK’s assassination. But I can empathize with her. I think her point was that even in June the Democratic candidate had not yet been selected. And even after the assassination of President Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., my initial reaction – as I sat eating breakfast at the Yankee Doodle on Elm Street – when I heard that Kennedy had been shot, was to think that he had been shot down…. that is, had lost the California primary. I didn’t want to imagine the truth… and didn’t learn the facts for another ten minutes or so. Again, I don’t think Hillary was suggesting that Senator Obama might not survive the campaign season, but that historically candidates were frequently selected late in the process. Heck, I remember when they weren’t selected until the actual convention! Isn’t that what they were for?

The rest of this past weekend was fairly cultural with two standing room tickets to the San Francisco Opera and the opening of the Afghanistan Exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. More about these in a later posting.

October 2, 2002 Iraq Resolution

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AFP: File Photo

The third and final Presidential Debate starts in about half an hour. Although current major concerns of this presidential election year deal primarily with economic issues because of the credit and stock market meltdown (the market lost more than 700 points again today) — from the beginning of the campaign several years ago, there has been disagreement over the war in Iraq and whether it was correct or wise to start the war in the first place. Republicans by in large contend that how we got in isn’t important now— the question is where do we go from here. The problem is: if we don’t examine how we got involved in the first place, we may find ourselves making the same mistakes in the future.

 

It’s unfortunate that Jim Jones adopted as his motto George Santayana’s pithy remark:

 

 Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

                  George Santayana, 

The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

 

Just because Santayana’s quotation was used inappropriately, with spiked cool-aid at Jones-town, doesn’t diminish its validity.

 

Conventional Wisdom holds that every member of Congress and the Senate who voted for the October 2, 2002 authorization, in fact voted “for the war” against Iraq. So Senators Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have been labeled as originally supporting the war. But it’s much more complex and nuanced.

 

An important question to ask is: What did President Bush say the authorization meant—before the vote?

 

On September 19, 2002, on CNN, President George W. Bush stated:

 

“I am sending a suggested language for a resolution, that I've asked for Congress to support, to enable the administration to keep the peace, and we look forward to a good constructive debate in Congress………

 

That'll be part of the resolution – authorization to use force. If you want to keep the peace, you've got to have the authorization to use force. This will be –it's a chance for Congress to indicate support. It's a chance for Congress to say, ‘We support the administration's ability to keep the peace.’ That's what this is all about.” (My italics)

 

Reports and memoirs of several members of Bush’s cabinet reveal that President George W. Bush stated his intent to overthrow Saddam Hussein at the very first cabinet meeting in January 2001. 9/11 had nothing to do with it— nor even did weapons of mass destruction.

 

If you read the wording of the resolution, it is clear that it was not a declaration of war. It was an intermediate step subject to further review. And remember that the war actually began almost half a year after the resolution.

 

So who was it who changed his position –or misrepresented it in the first place? Now I’ll admit, that anybody who took President Bush at his word was a fool – but isn’t that a sad state of affairs!