|
Don't Believe the Dangerous Myths of the 'Drone Warrior' |
 |
|
Friday, 21 July 2017 14:09 |
|
Excerpt: "Drone pilots have been quitting the U.S. Air Force in record numbers in recent years - faster than new recruits can be selected and trained. They cite a combination of low-class status in the military, overwork and psychological trauma."
An unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, January 31, 2010. (photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP)
Don't Believe the Dangerous Myths of the 'Drone Warrior'
By Alex Edney-Browne and Lisa Ling, Los Angeles Times
21 July 17
 rone pilots have been quitting the U.S. Air Force in record numbers in recent years — faster than new recruits can be selected and trained. They cite a combination of low-class status in the military, overwork and psychological trauma.
But a widely publicized new memoir about America’s covert drone war fails to mention the “outflow increases,” as one internal Air Force memo calls it. “Drone Warrior: An Elite Soldier’s Inside Account of the Hunt for America’s Most Dangerous Enemies” chronicles the nearly 10 years that Brett Velicovich, a former special operations member, spent using drones to help special forces find and track terrorists. Conveniently, it also puts a hard sell on a program whose ranks the military is struggling to keep full.
Velicovich wrote the memoir — about his time “hunting and watching in the cesspools of the Middle East” — to show how drones “save lives and empower humanity, contrary to much of the persistent narrative that casts them in a negative light.” Instead, the book is, at best, a tale of hyper-masculine bravado and, at worst, a piece of military propaganda designed to ease doubts about the drone program and increase recruitment.
Velicovich and the book’s co-author, Christopher S. Stewart, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, reinforce the myth that drones are machines of omniscience and precision. Velicovich exaggerates the accuracy of the technology, neglecting to mention how often it fails or that such failures have killed an untold number of civilians. For instance, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults in its attempts to take out Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, who reportedly is still alive.
And yet, “I have no doubt that we could find anyone in the world,” Velicovich writes, “no matter how hidden they are.” One might ask Velicovich to explain the deaths of Warren Weinstein, an American citizen, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian citizen — both aid workers who were killed by an American drone strike that was targeting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.
“We believed that this was an Al Qaeda compound,” President Obama announced three months after the strike, “that no civilians were present.” Indeed, the Air Force had clocked hundreds of hours of drone surveillance of the building. It had used thermal-imaging cameras, which are supposed to identify a person’s presence by his or her body heat when the line of sight is obstructed. Nevertheless, the surveillance somehow failed to notice two additional bodies — Weinstein and La Porto — who were being held hostage in the basement.
Perhaps the aid workers went unnoticed because, according to a forthcoming report on the limitations of drone technology co-authored by Pratap Chatterjee, the executive director of the watchdog group CorpWatch, and Christian Stork, thermal-imaging cameras “cannot see through trees and a well-placed blanket that dissipates body heat can also throw them off,” nor can they “see into basements or underground bunkers.”
Even more insidious are the memoir’s attempts to co-opt the psychological torment of drone operators and intelligence analysts and turn it into a narrative of valor and stoicism. “I fought to keep my eyes open,” Velicovich writes of working while sleep-deprived. “Every hour wasted was another hour the enemy had to plan, another hour it had to kill.”
Compare that portrayal with the reality as described by Col. Jason Brown, commander of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing. “Our suicide and suicidal ideation rates were way higher than the Air Force average,” Brown told the Washington Post earlier this month, explaining why full-time psychiatrists and mental-health counselors have been introduced into the drone program. “They were even higher than for those who had deployed.” Suicide rates have fallen as a result of the mental-health teams, Brown said. The work itself hasn’t changed.
The film rights to “Drone Warrior” were bought over a year ago, with much fanfare, by Paramount Pictures. (The studio also optioned the life rights to Velicovich’s story.) In the acknowledgments section of the memoir, Velicovich mentions that the forthcoming movie will be directed and produced by Michael Bay, the filmmaker behind “Transformers,” “Pearl Harbor” and “Armageddon.”
This development is predictable. The U.S. military and Hollywood have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Filmmakers often gain access to locations, personnel, information and equipment that lend their productions “authenticity.” In return, the military often gets some measure of control over how it’s depicted.
Pentagon officials and CIA staff are known to have advised and shared classified documents with the filmmakers behind “Zero Dark Thirty,” the Oscar-nominated movie that misrepresented the CIA’s controversial torture and rendition program as having been instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden. The CIA also has been linked to the production of “Argo,” Ben Affleck’s Oscar-winning depiction of how that agency rescued American hostages in Iran.
But there is something particularly unseemly about Hollywood’s enthusiasm for bringing Velicovich’s version of drone warfare to the big screen. In “Drone Warrior,” the American military may have a powerful platform for portraying its program as effective and its operators as heroic — instead of overworked and distressed. We have to wonder if Velicovich was approached by the U.S. military to write his memoir. It certainly could help with their attrition problem.
 |
|
FOCUS: Trump's Psyche |
|
|
Friday, 21 July 2017 12:09 |
|
Bronner writes: "Whatever else one might say about President Donald Trump, he wants to present himself as larger-than-life. He thirsts for adulation and, undoubtedly, he also wants to justify his singular importance. Yet his arrogant contempt for criticism exhibits fears of inadequacy while his bullying, almost gangster-like style is not free of guilt."
Donald Trump. (photo: Mark Seliger)
Trump's Psyche
By Stephen Eric Bronner, Reader Supported News
21 July 17
 hatever else one might say about President Donald Trump, he wants to present himself as larger-than-life. He thirsts for adulation and, undoubtedly, he also wants to justify his singular importance. Yet his arrogant contempt for criticism exhibits fears of inadequacy while his bullying, almost gangster-like style is not free of guilt. No better way of dealing with these problems than by challenging enemies whose profound evil is his own creation. Projection makes that possible by inverting reality: the oppressor becomes the oppressed and the oppressed is turned into the oppressor. Fears thereby become justified and guilt is extinguished. As a consequence, all political means become legitimate – whether it’s the “big lie,” intimidation, corrupt practices, or violence.
It all sounds abstract, but the effects of projection are very real: Consider the film classic of 1915, Birth of a Nation, which justifies the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in part by depicting black men as congenitally obsessed with raping white women. In reality, of course, it was Southern white men who were raping black women. But then projection turns reality upside down: it eradicates the guilt of the powerful even as it justifies the lynching, segregation, and stereotyping of the powerless. Similar dynamics were at work during the 1920s as conspiratorial fascist groups charged Jews with arranging assassinations, manipulating the judicial system, subverting traditional education, and undermining the state. In fact, it was the fascists, not “the Jews,” who were employing these very tactics. Stalin also projected the existence of conspiracies among any number of nonexistent factions and groups while he and his clique actually conspired to produce the show trials and the “great terror” of the 1930s. Evidence to the contrary was condemned as what today might be termed “fake news.”
And so, we turn to Trump. Apparently, it was not he but Hillary Clinton who tried to fix the election, who betrayed state secrets, and who should be “locked up.” It only follows that the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA have been hatching plots against the president, not his advisors who were secretly negotiating with Russia while bypassing security protocols. Democrats are apparently obstructing Trump’s policy initiatives though, in fact, Republican majorities in the House and Senate cannot seem to agree on a single piece of important legislation let alone a vague, regressive, and secretly orchestrated healthcare bill. It was supposedly Obama whose incompetent and incoherent foreign policy weakened the United States, left it isolated, and compromised its moral standing. Yet, in fact, Trump has alienated most European leaders with one diplomatic blunder after another, crudely identified American interests with a host of noxious reactionary dictators, endorsed a Polish regime intent on abrogating the independence of its judiciary, and turned the United States into a laughingstock with his emotional brand of decision-making, racist travel bans, plans for a wall to stop Hispanic immigration (with Mexico bearing the cost), and rejection of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Trump’s had promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington D.C. and now he seemingly finds himself threatened by the “deep state.” Composed of career civil servants, agency experts, officials, liberal media, entrenched politicians, and whoever else, this “deep state” is the source of constant “leaks” and insidious “fake news.” Of course, it is actually Trump and his coterie who now constitute a kind of shadow government supposedly unaccountable to any institutions or commonly accepted standards of truth. But that doesn’t matter. In his view, his diverse enemies are united by undeserved hatred of his presidency; it is they who are irrationally attacking him, not he whose irrationality has alienated them. Trump feels he has no choice; he must “defend” himself and the nation. “Rigged” press conferences are unnecessary; Trump’s constant refrain – “Believe me!” – is sufficient. Private individuals incur nasty tweets because they have them coming. True supporters know that Trump’s policy failures (if any!) were orchestrated by his enemies. Outrageous statements and constant controversy are increasingly necessary to let the world know that Trump is the President.
Are his projections conscious or unconscious? If conscious, then the president is merely an incompetent opportunist; if unconscious, then he is a delusional egotist; and, if the line between them becomes blurry, he emerges as the paranoid authoritarian who will tell it like it is, and shift positions in the batting of an eye. The next “Reichstag Fire,” an event used by Hitler to justify cracking down on political opponents in 1933, might be around the corner; it could involve preemptively bombing Iran or North Korea, saber-rattling with Russia or China, or shutting down investigations that could lead to his impeachment. Many are the ways in which the President can protect our nation against his enemies. Hysterical exaggeration of the options only plays into his hands. The resistance had better remain sober, unified, and – above all – ready to protest.
Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. His most recent books are The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists and The Bitter Taste of Hope: Ideals, Ideologies, and Interests in the Age of Obama.
|
|
|
FOCUS: What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians? |
|
|
Friday, 21 July 2017 10:40 |
|
Taibbi writes: "For all the fears about Trump being a Manchurian Candidate bent on destroying America from within, the far more likely nightmare endgame involves our political establishment egging the moron Trump into a shooting war as a means of proving his not-puppetness."
Russian president Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. (photo: Russian Presidential Press and Information Office/Anadolu Agency/Getty)
What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 July 17
Russia isn't as strong as we think, but they do have nukes – which is why beating the war drum is a mistake
 ast Wednesday, former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton Paul Begala stepped out of his usual milquetoast centrist costume and made a chest-thumping pronouncement on CNN.
"We were and are under attack by a hostile foreign power," he said. "We should be debating how many sanctions we should place on Russia, or whether we should blow up the KGB." Begala's is the latest in a string of comments from prominent pols and pundits suggesting we are (or should be) in a state of war with nuclear-armed Russia. Former DNC chair Donna Brazile tweeting this week, "The Communists are dictating the terms of the debate" – and not bothering to delete the error – is another weird example of what feels like intense longing in the Beltway to reignite the Cold War. (Begala wanting to blow up the long-dead KGB is another.) James Clapper this spring saying Russians are "genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor" also recalled the Sovietology era, when Russians were cast as evil, emotionless manipulators, cold as their icy homeland. CNN reporter Michael Weiss casting suspicion on people with Russian spouses is another creepy recent example. For journalists like me who have backgrounds either working or living in Russia, the new Red Scare has been an ongoing freakout. A lot of veteran Russia reporters who may have disagreed with each other over other issues in the past now find themselves in like-minded bewilderment over the increasingly aggressive rhetoric.
Many of us were early Putin critics who now find ourselves in the awkward position of having to try to argue Americans off the ledge, or at least off the path to war, when it comes to dealing with the Putin regime. There's a lot of history that's being glossed over in the rush to restore Russia to an archenemy role. For one, long before the DNC hack, we meddled in their elections. This was especially annoying to Russians because we were ostensibly teaching them the virtues of democracy at the time. We even made a Hollywood movie on the topic (Spinning Boris, starring Jeff Goldblum and Anthony LaPaglia!). After Boris Yeltsin won re-election in 1996, Time magazine ran a gloating cover story – YANKS TO THE RESCUE! – about three American advisers sent to help the pickling autocrat Yeltsin devise campaign strategy. Picture Putin sending envoys to work out of the White House to help coordinate Trump's re-election campaign, and you can imagine how this played in Russia. Former Yeltsin administration chief Sergei Filatov denied that the three advisers did anything of value for Yeltsin. But even if Filatov is right, American interference throughout the Nineties was extensive. For one thing, the privatization effort under Yeltsin, much of which was coordinated by Americans, helped lead to a little-understood devil's bargain that sealed Yeltsin's electoral victory.
Essentially, Yeltsin agreed to privatize the jewels of Russian industry into the hands of a few insiders – we call them oligarchs now – in return for their overwhelming financial and media support in the '96 race against surging communist Gennady Zyuganov. The likes of Vladimir Potanin, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were gifted huge fortunes before bankrolling Yeltsin's re-election bid. How much of a hand we had in that infamous trade has never been explained. But Americans surely helped usher in the oligarch era by guiding Russia through its warped privatization process. In some expat circles back then, you found Americans who believed that by creating a cadre of super-wealthy Russians, we would create a social class that would be pre-motivated to beat back a communist revival. This may have prevented a backslide into communism, but a by-product was accelerating a descent into gangsterism and oligarchy. The West also aided Yeltsin during that election season by providing a $10.2 billion IMF loan that just happened to almost exactly match the cost of Yeltsin's vicious and idiotic invasion of Chechnya. (Yeltsin had been under fire for the cash crunch caused by the war.) Le Monde called the timely giganto-loan "an implicit vote in favor of candidate Yeltsin." What most Americans don't understand is that the Putin regime at least in part was a reaction to exactly this kind of Western meddling. The Yeltsin regime, which incidentally also saw wide-scale assassinations of journalists and other human rights abuses, was widely understood to be a pseudo-puppet state, beholden to the West. The conceit of the Putin regime, on the other hand, was that while Putin was a gangster, he was at least the Russians' own gangster. It's debatable how much success Putin really had at arresting the flight of Russian capital abroad that began in the Yeltsin years. But the legend that he would at least try to keep Russia's wealth in Russia was a key reason for his initial popularity. Russians also have an opposite take on their "aggression" in Ukraine and Crimea, one that is colored by a history few in America know or understand. When asked about the roots of the current Russian-American divide, former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman, the author of excellent books like Whistleblower in the CIA and Failure of Intelligence, points to a 1990 deal struck between Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. The two men brokered a quid pro quo: The Soviets wouldn't oppose a re-united Germany, if the Americans promised not to "leapfrog" East Germany into the Russians' former sphere of influence. Goodman later interviewed both men, who confirmed the key details. "They both used the word 'leapfrog,'" he says. "The Russians think we broke that deal." Russia believes the U.S. reneged on the "leapfrog" deal by seeking to add the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Georgia and even Ukraine to the NATO alliance. To Russia, American denunciations of Russian adventurism in Crimea and eastern Ukraine seem absurd, when all they see is NATO leapfrogging its way ever-closer to their borders. This is not to say that the Russians were right to move into Crimea or Eastern Ukraine. But it's easy to see why Russians would be frosty about America trying to put border states under the umbrella of NATO, or wigged out by Americans conducting war games in places like Latvia. Imagine, for instance, the response here in the States if the Russians conducted amphibious military exercises in the Baja Peninsula after promising to honor the Monroe doctrine.
As Goodman and others have pointed out, failing to predict the Soviet collapse was probably the biggest intelligence failure in our history. While Ronald Reagan and his cronies politicized intelligence and overhyped the Soviets as a mighty and monolithic force, the on-the-ground reality was that the Soviet Union was a crumbling third-world state besotted with crippling economic and infrastructural problems. We missed countless opportunities for easier, safer and cheaper relations with the Russians by consistently mistaking their disintegrating Potemkin Empire for an ascendant threat. It's not exactly the same story now, but it's close. Putin's Russia certainly has global ambitions, just as the Soviets did. But the game now is much more about connections and hot money than about geopolitics or territory. There's evidence that the Russians have tried to burrow their way into America's commercial and political establishment, but by most accounts the main route of entry has been financial. If indeed Trump was a target of Russian efforts, we'll likely discover that this was not something that was exclusive to Trump but rather just one data point amid a broad, holistic strategy to curry favor and make connections across the American political class. Still, these efforts are probably far more limited in scope than we've been led to imagine. DNC hack or no DNC hack, Russia is still a comparatively weak country with limited power to influence a nation like the U.S., especially since it's still dogged internally by those same massive economic and infrastructural problems it's always had. Putin's political grip on power at home is also far less sure than our pundits and politicians are letting on. The generalized plan to create chaos in other industrialized states by seeding/spreading corruption and political confusion – which many in the intelligence community believe is an aim of Russian intelligence efforts – is revealing in itself. It's the strategy of a weak and unstable third-world state looking for a cheap way to stay in the game (and bolster its profile) versus more powerful industrial rivals. Hyping Russia as an all-powerful menace actually plays into this strategy. But the Russians still have nukes, which is why we have to be very careful about letting rhetoric get too hot, especially with the president we now have. For all the fears about Trump being a Manchurian Candidate bent on destroying America from within, the far more likely nightmare endgame involves our political establishment egging the moron Trump into a shooting war as a means of proving his not-puppetness.
This already almost happened once, when Trump fired missiles into Syria with Russian troops on the ground, seemingly as a means of derailing a Russiagate furor that was really spiraling that particular week. That episode proved that the absolute worst time to bang the war drum under Trump is when he's feeling vulnerable on Russia – which he clearly is now.
Rising anti-Russian hysteria and a nuclear button-holder in the White House who acts before he thinks is a very bad combination. We should try to chill while we still can, especially since the Russians, once again, probably aren't as powerful as we think.
|
|
Trump's In-Your-Face Impeachable Offense |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 21 July 2017 08:46 |
|
Boardman writes: "The political will to impeach this deceitful, destructive President and his administration does not exist despite millions of people, even some in Congress and the media, knowing impeachment is abundantly justified."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Trump's In-Your-Face Impeachable Offense
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
21 July 17
“For seven years I’ve been hearing about health care, and I’ve been hearing about repeal and replace and Obamacare is a total disaster, some states had over a two hundred per cent increase, two hundred per cent increase in their premiums, and their deductibles are through the roof, it’s an absolute disaster. And I think you’ll also agree that I’ve been saying for a long time, let Obamacare fail and then everybody’s going to have to come together and fix it…. Let Obamacare fail, it’ll be a lot easier. And I think we’re probably in that position, where we’ll just let Obamacare fail. We’re not going to own it, I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans, they’re not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail and the Democrats are going to come to us and we’re going to say, “How do we fix it? How do we fix it? Or, how do we come up with a new plan?” … It would be nice to have Democrat support, but really they’re obstructionists, they have no ideas, they have no thought process, all they want to do is obstruct government, and obstruct – period…. ”
 esponding to a reporter’s question, the President’s four-minute lunch ramble [excerpted above] is remarkable in many ways, starting with its fundamental incoherence: expecting Democrat obstructionists with no thought process “to come to us” to fix it. The record is clear: when Republicans were in the minority they refused to work on Obamacare, and since the Republicans have been in the majority they’ve refused to ask Democrats to work on Obamacare. Republicans are not invested in health care, especially for poor people, Republicans are invested in tax cuts for the rich (to which Democrats are not necessarily opposed).
The President’s ramble is remarkable for its mischaracterization of reality when he says “Obamacare is a total disaster.” Yes it has problems, as he points out, without also pointing out that these are problems Democrats embraced rather than enact a single payer health care plan. But for all its problems, Obamacare is far from a total disaster in the real world. The majority of Americans still perceive it as a relative success, and the people who benefit directly from it mostly see it as a godsend.
The President’s ramble is remarkable for the oblique way he blames the present mess on Republicans, without naming them. “For seven years” he’s been hearing about health care, he says, without adding: and for seven years these ideological idiots haven’t been able to craft a single useful alternative. He also doesn’t say: believe it or not, some of them actually want to help poor people stay healthy and think it’s OK for really rich people to help pay for the common good. “I’m not going to own it,” he says frankly. (The same day his White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders pushed the same lie about Democrats being responsible for fixing the law even though they have no power to do so.) The reality, however unfair it may be, is always that responsibility lies with those in power. For Trump, health care is all his now, whatever happens.
The President’s ramble is remarkable for his expressed plan to abandon a duly-enacted law: “we’re probably in that position, where we’ll just let Obamacare fail.” This future course is apparently based on the false and contradictory assessment that Obamacare has already failed (“total disaster”). The President of the United States is blithely embracing a plan that will cause incalculable harm to millions of American citizens, and he seems either uncomprehending or uncaring about the consequential suffering his choice would cause to the country he imagines he’s making great again.
But now comes the most remarkable aspect of the President’s ramble, his naked embrace of a course of action that clearly comprises multiple violations of the Constitution, multiple impeachable offenses.
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
– Oath of office of the President of the United States,
US Constitution, Article II, Section 1
President Trump swore this oath on January 20, 2017, before what he seems to believe was the largest inaugural crowd ever. In case it’s not clear enough what it meant to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,” the Constitution offers some guidelines, including “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3). The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is a duly-enacted statute that has survived challenge before the Supreme Court. Obamacare is indisputably a law that the President has a constitutional duty to faithfully execute.
The way the Obamacare law is written gives the President considerable authority over the way the law operates, well or badly. Among the techniques of sabotage publicly discussed, the President could cut subsidies that lower the cost of insurance (House Republicans already have a lawsuit to force him to do that.). He could refuse to carry out the law’s mandate that most Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty enforced by the IRS. He could undermine enrollment in Obamacare by refusing to promote the open enrollment period in November. He can continue to lie about and exaggerate the flaws of Obamacare until he makes its failure a self-fulfilling prophecy. He could try any or all of these tactics, which would likely have a cascading effect, undermining insurance markets and consumer confidence and turning health care into chaos for millions of people.
Well, guess what? The Trump administration has been attacking the government since day one or thereabouts. Even though the attack is continuous and taking place in plain sight — starting with the appointment of agency heads who hate their agencies, almost all duly approved by collaborators in the Senate — little attention has been paid. Congress members with publicly funded staffs have paid little attention to the daily erosion of the public good across the government. Major media companies with ample staff and budget prefer sitting in video-free White House press-stonewalling sessions to digging into what is actually happening at agencies no longer fulfilling their lawful mandates. One exception to this inattention (no doubt there are some others) is a long piece by Sam Stein on July 17, detailing some of the ways the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under Secretary Tom Price is undermining America’s health and human services, Obamacare in particular, immorally and probably illegally. Near the end of his piece we lean that Democratic senators Patty Murray and Ron Wyden flagged this issue in February but have had no response yet from HHS. What’s up with that!?
One last remarkable aspect of the President’s ramble is that news coverage of it has stressed more concern for protecting insurance markets than acting lawfully in constitutional good faith. (A quick Google search found only one current exception, tarpley.net, plus myself in Reader Supported News four months ago on the same issue. Constitutionally, Trump has been impeachable since the moment he took office, but only a political process can impeach a President.)
The political will to impeach this deceitful, destructive President and his administration does not exist despite millions of people, even some in Congress and the media, knowing impeachment is abundantly justified. And it’s not just Obamacare, or Trumpian self-enrichment in violation of the emoluments clause, or even the Russian hooha (whatever it really is). Every day, with little attention, this administration violates the constitutional duty to faithfully execute the law to protect the environment, to defend the right to vote, to protect civil rights and civil liberties, to support public education, among its other travesties of governing, foreign and domestic.
Faced with the obscenity of Republican “health care,” Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said, “I did not come to Washington to hurt people.” That makes her an enemy of her party, for now at least. But it’s not as though there’s a host of Democrats expressing human decency with such simple, direct eloquence. Not hurting people, defending the Constitution, why is that too much to ask?
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
|
|
oshua Green is one of those rare journalists with a gift for excavating the ur-fckery through which dangerous political figures begin their journeys to become completely lethal. He did it with Karl Rove, 
