Nuts & Mutton

… by the steam coming from your ears as you watch this:

Why do I torment myself with this bloody woman? She offends me in every fibre of my being, but I still click on posts like this one from HuffPo. And then I sit in front of the monitor, pounding my desk and screaming OH SHUT UP YOU STUPID BITCH!

Unfortunately, she’s not stupid. As Earl Ofari Hutchison points out she’s a marketing genius when it comes to peddling herself and her noxious views.

How about this for a New Year’s resolution? I shall never mention That Bloody Woman again on this blog. Not now … Not ever … NEVER!!

… for finally electing Al Franken. Maybe.

While we’re all distracted, retching at the official White House Christmas Video, this is what the Bush administration is up to.

Cecile Richards writes in HuffPo:

… despite the written opposition from more than 200,000 Americans, 150 members of Congress, a bipartisan coalition of governors and attorneys general, the American Medical Association, and women’s health organizations like Planned Parenthood — the Department of Health and Human Services issued a last minute regulation that will undermine health care access at nearly 600,000 pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals across the country.

This sort of “take the drapes on your way out” approach is the final chapter of an administration that has prized political ideology over health care for their entire eight years — and the rule issued yesterday, with little more than 30 days left in office, is the ultimate holiday gift to the extreme right.

Under this new rule, doctors and health care workers of all kinds can deny patients vital health care information and services, without the patient even knowing. No patient is exempt from the reach of this rule: sexual assault victims could be denied information about emergency contraception that could prevent unintended pregnancy, moms hoping to time their pregnancies can be denied contraception at their local pharmacy, young adults hoping to be tested for sexually transmitted infections could be denied treatment by health care employees who oppose premarital sex.

In short, this rule is likely to create total chaos in an already stressed health care system, and for low-income women and families, this rule may spell the end of the few available health care options. Essentially, any patient that utilizes health care at a provider that receives any federal funds will be subject to the luck of the draw in terms of what kinds of reproductive health care they are offered. This might seem far-fetched, until you realize that groups like Pharmacists for Life have campaigned nationally to have pharmacies refuse to provide women birth control prescribed by their physician.

If you had any doubt that this rule is about politics, not health care, just watch the high-fives among the far right. “This is a huge victory for religious freedom and the First Amendment,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council.

On the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2003, the Bush White House decreed that there would be no coverage of flag-covered coffins returning from Baghdad. It appeared their war would not pass the so-called “Dover test,” named for the Air Force Base into which soldiers’ bodies are flown. A ban on photographs from Dover, or any other armed forces base was imposed, and, to this day, caskets and injured soldiers are generally flown in under cover of darkness.

When Stephen Harper, our own Canadian Bush-lite, as wisewebwoman so shrewdly named him, became Prime Minister, he attempted to enforce the same kind of ban on Canadian casualties returning through CFB Trenton. An outcry by Canadians, led by the families of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan, led to a partial climb-down, and the media are allowed to cover repatriation ceremonies from outside the fence around the base, so long as the bereaved families do not object. To the Armed Forces’ credit, the bodies are always brought home during daylight hours.

As further proof that no tin-pot little dictator is going to tell Canadians what to do, hundreds of people from the town of Trenton also gather around the gates every time casualties are brought home, that they might pay their respects as the hearses pass through the gates.

The First Husband and I sailed into Trenton, during the summer of 2007, on the day a dead soldier was brought home. An escort of F18s flew over the town, followed shortly by the plane carrying his casket. Every single person in the marina, and the majority of people in the town, stopped what they were doing and stood in silence, gazing upwards, many of them holding a salute as the planes flew overhead. It was an incredibly moving experience.

But the real story lies in the spontaneous movement that began after people realized that all the bodies brought home are transported by road from Trenton to Toronto, where they undergo postmortems at the Coroner’s Office. Every time the news breaks that a soldier or soldiers are coming home and are on their way to Toronto, people begin moving out to Highway 401 and the Don Valley Parkway, the highways the funeral corteges must traverse between Trenton and Toronto. Where they can, they stand by the edge of the road, or they line the overpasses and bridges. Some carry the Canadian flag, others throw petals down onto the hearses as they pass under the bridges. Off-duty firefighters and police officers also come out, usually dressed in uniform, as well as veterans, but the majority of those present are just ordinary Canadians, with no connection to the military.

Yesterday, the bodies of three Canadians killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar were brought home to Trenton and, despite the freezing weather – a wind-chill of minus 20 degrees Celsius was recorded on the 401 – thousands of people turned out to mark their passage to Toronto. Traffic going in both directions was stopped or diverted by police as the cortege passed, and the people who had been waiting, for hours in some cases, stood in utter silence as it went by. I wept buckets as I watched it unfold on television last night. If it weren’t 50 miles away from here, I’d be out there, too.

Like many Canadians, I’m ambivalent on our involvement in this horrific war. On the one hand, as an army brat, I love to see pride in Canada’s military being rekindled among civilians and military alike. Liberal governments have always treated the armed forces miserably, forcing them to get by on crumbs from the budget table. While popular international opinion has it that Canada is the most boring place on the planet, we have an extraordinary tradition of military accomplishment, dating back as far as the Boer War and reaching its apotheosis in the trenches of World War I, when Canadians troops fought so fiercely that they captured and held positions that the other Allies had failed miserably to capture, despite many attempts. It was said the Canadians were the troops most feared by the German soldiers, because they just didn’t know how to give up trying.

After the Canadian forces – army, navy, and air force – were amalgamated in 1968, Canadians lost sight of the fact that the Royal Canadian Air Force had been the fourth largest air force in the world after WW2, and that its exploits matched or exceeded those of any other air force, with a roster of “gongs” that included the Victoria Cross, the Military Cross, the Croix de Guerre, the Legion d’Honneur, the Star of Valour, and a veritable alphabet soup of DFCs, DSOs, DSCs, DFMs – to name but a few.

But, and it’s a very big BUT, none of this makes the waste of lives in Afghanistan any more palatable. That benighted land has been the cockpit of Central Asia since time immemorial and no foreign invader has ever managed to subdue its savage tribes. When we were in Ireland last May, I noticed this plaque in the church in which my niece was married:

“He died at Candahar on the 10th October 1880″ it reads.

As of today, 100 Canadians have lost their lives in Kandahar region, while the Taliban continue to cement their hold on the population. And that does not take account of 128 British and 556 American casualties, as well as those of 19 other Coalition forces in other parts of the country – making a total of 955 killed to date in this most frustrating of wars.

Today’s Huffington Post has an interview with Deepak Chopra by Michelle Haimoff. I’m not much of a Chopra fan, but he has some interesting insights into the self-censorship by the media during the eight years Bush has been in the White House, especially since the USA Patriot Act was introduced and the Orwellian Dept of Homeland Security started poking into citizens’ private lives. (Bet you didn’t know that USA Patriot is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. Nice to know someone in Homeland Security had the time to sit around thinking up that one!)

Chopra also speaks about the Iraq war and the appalling loss of Iraqi lives since it began. And then he says:

FOX News actually produced the Shock and Awe campaign as a theatrical production. They hired a musical director. They had symphonic music. And when you saw it on TV it was a glorious, glorious attempt to liberate the people of Iraq. It’s easy for a person sitting in a plane 32,000 feet above sea level to press a button. When he looks at the map he presses a button. And you know, we’re seeing it on screens. We’re calling it ‘Shock and Awe’ and we hear this beautiful music – sounds almost like Mozart – while this is happening, while on the ground there are grizzly scenes which we don’t see in the media, of people being mutilated. People in the throes of death. Bodies all over the place. And gruesome scenes the American public is totally unaware of, but people in the Muslim world are very aware of… We are very self-absorbed.

It brought rushing back to me the events of one January night, way back when the first Gulf War began — what did they call it? “Operation Desert Storm?” I was working with a potato chip company at the time, in the marketing department, and I was responsible for the introduction of some hot shit new packaging. I got a call one afternoon to say the first print run would be on the presses at the printing company that night, and I had better get my ass down there to meet up with the design team and carry out the final proof before millions of packages were printed. I raced out to #1 Son’s babysitter (he was about 7 years old) and picked him up, promising him he was going to have a great time (yeah right) watching this process. (Come to think of it, maybe he did — he’s an industrial designer now, after all, able to design and proof packages in his sleep!)

To cut a long story short, we finished up around midnight, and I set off on the 75 km journey home with one mighty sleepy kid curled up under a rug in the back seat of the car. At that hour, the roads, which had already been cleared of snow and salted, were fairly quiet, and I drove steadily towards home, listening to all-news radio as I went. The airwaves were ablaze with the news that Operation Desert Storm was under way, and some five hours earlier, while we were holed up in the printing room, US-led coalition forces had begun bombing Baghdad. Excited reporters on the ground were yelling over satellite phones about bombs lighting up the early morning sky, and they were all just as happy as clams, as reporters usually are in situations like this.

I was still listening to the reports as we drove past Toronto Airport, and I looked up, startled, as a plane flew low over the car on its way down to the runway. I checked the rearview mirror to see how #1 Son was doing, and he was still sleeping, his blonde hair tousled and cheeks flushed. Out of the blue, a rush of emotion forced me to pull over to the side of the road, where I clutched the wheel, waiting for it to subside. To this day, I still remember it — a visceral realization of exactly how an Iraqi mother was feeling at that same moment, fleeing with her child as the planes rained death all around them. I was so shaken that I could not drive on for a half-hour or more.

Twelve years later, when “Shock and Awe” — such a puerile name — began, I turned the television off and went for a walk.

For my American friends, a piece from Anne Lamott, a Christian even a disgruntled old atheist like myself can love.

If you’re an aspiring writer – I’m looking at you Smart Mouth Broad! – I recommend Lamott’s book, Bird by Bird, which IMHO, is second only to Stephen King’s On Writing, for making you feel good about your chances of making it as a writer.

. . . and we ain’t there yet!