This is Jay Bookman's article in the Atlanta Journal today. Everyone should read it. Don't give up before the last few paragraphs. It is all important. In fact click on the links and read his other recent articles too. They are all revealing, and true.

Published on: 06/30/05

Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser and deputy chief of staff, had himself a little fun a week ago.

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war," Rove said in a New York speech. "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

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Bookman • E-mail: jbookman@ajc.com Recent columns Liberally use Rove's rules against Rove Reed lacks a conscience and the truth Reality, Bush Doctrine collide DA's excuse in Taser death unconvincing U.S. its own archenemy at Guantanamo Conservative tune changes with power Walk a mile in the shoes of Iraqi army

That's a harsh indictment of a substantial portion of the American people. It's also patently untrue.

The reality is that in the wake of Sept. 11, distinctions such as liberal and conservative meant nothing. We were all Americans and were almost unanimous in our anger and determination to punish those who had brought the towers down upon thousands of our fellow citizens.

That unity is history, of course, and we now face other challenges, such as trying to extricate ourselves from Iraq without leaving behind an absolute mess.

But since Rove is one of our nation's most influential leaders, and since he apparently believes it would be useful to review events in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, it would only be patriotic to indulge him.

As you recall, it became clear pretty quickly that the perpetrators had been members of the al-Qaida terror group, led by Osama bin Laden. The subsequent decision to invade bin Laden's refuge in Afghanistan was embraced by Americans of every political bent. Congress passed a war resolution with only one dissenting vote, reflecting polls that found only minuscule public opposition — 5 percent to 7 percent. Interestingly, more than 60 percent of Americans said they would consider the invasion a failure if it failed to kill or capture bin Laden.

Already, though, President Bush, Rove and others had secretly decided to betray that consensus by withholding troops and resources from the assault on bin Laden. Their intention, unknown at the time to the rest of us, was to reserve those troops for a later invasion of Iraq, a nation that had played no role in the attacks of Sept. 11 and little role in international terrorism.

We will never know for sure whether things would have turned out differently had we invaded Afghanistan in force as we should have, instead of leaving the bulk of the fighting to local warlords hired for the purpose. But we do know that almost four years after those towers tumbled, bin Laden remains at large. That gnawing failure would be easier to accept if we could tell ourselves that at least we gave it our best shot. We didn't because our leaders had other goals.

In his speech, Rove also pounced on the controversial remarks of Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois. After reading an FBI agent's description of illegal interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay, Durbin noted that they didn't sound like something Americans would do. It sounded more like something you'd find in the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

The wisdom of Durbin's remarks aside, the charge that he and others hope to get U.S. troops killed is an outrageous and remarkably ugly piece of business. Yet the White House defended Rove, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said the remarks weren't slander, they were the truth.

Fair enough, I say. Let's play Rove's game by Rove's rules.

If someone really did want to get U.S. troops killed, or if you didn't particularly care one way or the other, you would start by getting us involved in an unnecessary war that diverted us from our real purpose. Then you would ignore the advice of military officers and force our troops to fight that war with insufficient manpower and equipment, under incompetent civilian leadership that paid little or no attention to the aftermath. That way, you could ensure that withdrawal from that war would become impossible and that it would slog on month after bloody month.

Of course, nobody would ever be foolish enough to start such a war. But if they did, you could probably get at least 1,700 Americans killed, don't you think?

Now, is that analysis brutal, harsh and unfair? Yup. But it's no more harsh than Rove's crass attempt at bullying, and it has the added virtue of being accurate.

Because when you're savagely attacked out of the blue, you don't offer your attackers therapy. You fight back hard.

Right, Karl?

— Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Thursdays and Mondays.

We had a little dinner party last night, the first in the new house, to celebrate the retirement of a friend, Wayne, of Wayne and Karen. They are musicians also. We enjoyed the food and fellowship. Although he is retiring today, he will continue, "part-time" in his job and actually make just a bit more with his retirement pay and part-time pay than he was making before for working half as much. So that is good. Maybe I can do that in 10 years or so and find a way to keep conducting a bit while retired.

The house performed wonderfully as a party house, just as we had hoped it would, and we found ourselves at midnight without realizing how it got to be so late. Music and laughter and stories will just take you there. I played Varsity Glee Club's spring concert for them and they were amazed. I think we really have something with that group.

Our government is picking people up off the street in foreign countries, hand cuffing them, blindfolding them, and shipping out of their own country to Guantanamo, where it holds them without trial, without charges, without a lawyer, and treats them however it wants to. It is not club med. They may not be coming home, ever. Some of them are innocent.

Remember when you have heard of other governments who "disappeared" people? Wasn't that one of Saddam's crimes? His enemies "disappeared" without charges, without trial? What's happening to our country? Don't we all share responsibility for this behavior? Who is the architect of this behavior? How can we say it is okay? Skip over extradition and foreign governments. How long till American citizens disappear and are charged as terrorists?

For details, check out http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/ and read his June 26th blog. Shouldn't this be on the front page of the newspaper?

I'm starting to get panicky about the nearly open corruption of the current Republican Party which is ruling our country at nearly every level. It reminds me of totalitarian dictatorships that I have read about in the past in foreign countries. Laws are meaningless. Criminals are not even prosecuted. Crimes are simply denied. No investigations are ongoing. Newspapers report the exact opposite of the truth. Allegations and bad news is buried on page 13 in small print or simply omitted. Members of the Democratic Party are blamed as the "real" problem makers. The senario that is playing out, the doublespeak, is the same as what I remember coming out of the news agencies in the Soviet Union in the 60's and the 70's, Tass and Pravda. We'd read their stories and laugh at their audacity because they were the exact opposite of the truth. Now it is happening in the United States. And you can forget the liberal media crap. Any liberals are shut up, shut out, or missing in action. (Twenty-eight members of congress called a press conference the other day on capitol hill. When the time for the conference arrived, not a single member of the press had shown up to cover their conference. Not a single member of the press. If anyone says the words "liberal media" you know that they belong to the enemy.)

The GOP is so firmly entrenched, ruling most statehouses, controlling both houses of congress, the whitehouse, and now, clearly, the judiciary as well. They have the money, they are shifting the voting districts to box in the Democrats, they are controlling who votes and how the votes are counted. There is only one point of view on everything and it is coming from an oligarchy on the top.

The oligarchy has ceased to avoid the appearance of evil. They are evil and just deny it. The war is wrapping up. The air and water are cleaner. The treaties we want will be good for you. The treaties we fail to ratify, which are already ratified by the rest of the civilized world, are bad for us. The treaties we have already signed but now ignore don't apply to us right now. These judges have the best records in the country (They always rule as we tell them). Amnesty international was great when they were citing the Soviet Union or other countries. Now that they are citing us they are a pariah. I'm surprised they aren't calling them commies. Oh thats right, "commies" is out of style, it's "terrorists" that our enemies are today. If they find my blog, I'll be called a terrorist. Or you'll tune into Chorusline one day and find only a blank page. I'll be gone.

We have become an empire and are ruled by caesar. FDR is being characterized in the legitimate press as an evil or foolish leader. Social Security is on the way out. Is democracy a thing of the past for the United States? Certainly no one thinks elections are free and honest do they? I think I can see the precipace from here. We are close. Too close. Does anyone else see it too?

I guess you can hear the book closing. The last page has been read of our story in Sharpsburg. Our house there was a nice home for us and we are a little bit sad that it belongs to someone else now. Yet there is relief because we had one more house than we wished to pay for. The new owners are excited about the space and they have two small children, ages 3 and 5, who will doubtless find is a joyous place to grow and play. And next fall a big ole yellow school bus will be stopping at the end of the drive to pick up their kindergartener.

We've bought a few pieces of furniture to make our new place homier and are really settling in. Every room is a delight to the eye, foyer, living room, kitchen, the bridge, family room, dining room, sun room (which shall henceforth be called the "beach house" for reasons obvious to all those who gaze upon it), the master bedroom and sitting room, the patio, and front porch, the garden. Sarah would be delighted to ride in the golf cart now for it has a bright yellow "enclosure" which looks like a yellow bonnet when not in use, and like a yellow raincoat when we need it. It is wild looking now for certain.

We are going to be happy here. I feel like this place has been waiting for us to arrive and settle.

In talking about critters in Waycross, I failed to mention the most interesting ones that we saw constantly around the house. Frogs, lizards and dragon flies. The frogs are lime green, not too large. They can walk right up the wall with their sticky feet and they bark about as loud as Dad's dog. An amazing amount of sound comes out of them. In the night they create a huge symphony of sound. They pay no attention to people and are not afraid.

The lizards come in the ordinary varieties you have seen around, about 6 inches and sorta greenish. Some of them change colors, the chameleons everyone talks about, and some that don't seem to change (skinks? I don't know because I am not a lizard authority). But there is also the extraordinary lizard on the car port. Very fast and very skiddish, he startles us with his quick flights to hiding places when we surprise him. This fellow is BIG. I'd say 12 to 14 inches, and big around, not slender. He's black. I wonder what the heck he is.

Finally and most amazingly there are the "skeeter hawks" or dragon flies." Surely Leonardo da Vinci had seen them prior to his drawings of helicopter like machines, way back when. They hover, they dart left and right. They pause unafraid next to you on a branch or stem of grass or even in mid-air. If there are two alike, I cannot tell it. There seem to be infinite variety of colors, yellow, green, blue, black, and other shimmering combinations. They have great "bug" eyes that we would ascribe to interplanetary visitors, and four legs to go with their four amazing gossamer wings. The wings are wonderful when in a blur of motion or when still, a transparent wonder in themselves.

There are impediments to doing what you want to do outdoors in south Georgia. Gnats by the bou coup (boo coo?) trying to fly into your ears and nose, mosquitos whining, yellow flies, green flies, horse flies, all biting if you give them a chance, hornets in several varieties, dive bombing, bumblebees protecting their turf aggressively. I hate those buggers. Although I've found the noise of the hedge trimmer and the sight of the orange monster it must look like to them does cause them to flee. The heat is bad enough to make you come inside most of the day, 95 on carport in the shade all week during the day. It is easily 115 in the sunshine. There are snakes around as well and so far I have avoided them. There are spiders in abundance and I have no patience for them if they cross my path. The fire ants are ubiquitous and must be avoided for they have no equal as an annoyance.

There is more to do in Dad's yard than can be listed. But at least with three of us working about 4 to 5 hours a day for the week we have made a dent. The lawn mower is finally up and running and so that is having an impact on everything visually. We have trimmed the azaleas all around the house. The were head high but now knee high and we've burned two tremendous piles of brush this morning. There is much left to do that will linger after I leave. Perhaps Dad can get a handle back on it since we have jump started him this week. We must get the truck running today and finish cutting the oaks that have invaded the blueberries by the hundreds. There are easily 100,000 pine cones on the ground that need to be picked up so mowing can continue.

Well I've cooled off enough to go back.

The sunshine is noticeable in Waycross, Georgia. I've come down to help bury my uncle, but have stayed to help Dad do some yardwork for a few days. You just can't venture out for long into this sun. It's 95 degrees with 95 percent humidity, when it isn't raining down fat drops from a thunderstorm. This creates a steam room effect. There are lots of critters around, but during the middle of the day it is pretty quiet. Not even the dog stirred off the porch when we went over to my cousin's place to eat lunch. John is 94 and my mother's double first cousin. If you aren't familiar with double cousins, that's when two members of a family marry two members of another family. In this case it was three sisters marrying three brothers. That can generate a bunch of double first cousins. Any way John has converted the old icehouse in Blackshear into an antique store and he has a lunch time buffet with a variety of entrees including BBQ pork. Southern cooked vegetables. I had green beans, rice and stewed tomatos, all the pork I could pile on my platter sized plate, the sweetest rolls I've had in awhile, a piece of poundcake, topped off with icecream. All that for $4.99. And everything was wonderful to the taste. Carter would have liked this meal. Too bad he is working in Alpharetta instead of here with us. There was fried okra, other beans, corn, potatoes, greens, chicken, baked and fried, lots of different desserts, and other stuff I can't remember. I'm stuffed.

Billy said there were 240 at the funeral home on Monday night. There were others at the funeral, but I didn't see some of those reported to be there whom I had hoped to see. I did see Wade and Aunt Sybil though and I haven't seen them in a long time and many, many other cousins. Almost 40 years since I've seen Wade I guess.

My daughter gave me a signed copy of Rocket Boys, the boyhood adventure of Homer Hickam as a rocket scientist (the movie was October Sky). Since I identify so strongly with their science fair experience and the difficulty of communicating with my father, I think that many of the elements in the story are my story. Many of my contemporaries at Terry Parker High School were winning International Science Fair trophies. Had I stayed there, I'm pretty sure they had hopes for me to make my way there too. I did win a national award for my 8th grade project. That got my teachers' attention. But we moved and the new school didn't require science projects. And that was that.

The music is enough for me though.

The second issue I was talking about the other day in my June 7 blog is the issue of education versus ignorance.

The masses are suspicious of education. Governments are suspicious of education. The media is suspicious of education. Does it seem like to you that everyone is getting a college education these days? Actually that is not the case. Three fourths of Americans who are of the age to have obtained a college degree, do not have one. The uneducated are certain that they are doing just fine, thank you very much and they are pretty sure that more education may be what some need, but it is not necessary and not for them. They know enough to navigate life.

Many of the constituents of the Republican Party come from a culture of ignorance. For example, consider the following. The fundamentalist Christians (a culture that I grew up in and with which I am very familiar), do everything possible to keep themselves isolated and uneducated (pure and untainted by the world in their minds). Even when they go to school, they try to do it in such a way that they are not exposed to a broad based education and they never even encounter any "liberal ideas." The preachers rail against public education, higher education controlled by liberal professors, ivy league think tanks and liberal seminaries. If you must go to college it should be a church controlled college, and you must stay away from those state universities at all cost. I went to one of those liberal seminaries, the old (pre-fundamentalist take over) Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. (It was considered a conservative seminary by the whole world except the right wing fundamentalists, who considered it "liberal.") I heard the hue and cry of the fundies about our professors. I sat in the professors' classes. I read their books. I heard them speak in chapel four or five mornings a week for 2 and 1/2 years. I could not figure out the "liberal apostate" charges against these teachers. Rather, I found that they were brilliant men and women, who had spent their lives in the liberal (almost criminal) activity of searching without blinders for the truth about God's word and man's relationship with God in the past. For searching without being guided by dogmatism, they were ridiculed by the right, harrassed at school by implanted rebel rousing students, libeled in the press, slandered from the pulpit, and many lost their jobs. None, however, I imagine, lost their faith. Their sin was being able to ask any question, even the questions that challenged the dogma.

Why the cry that all American institutions of higher learning are "liberal?" (Why do all those scientists believe in that evolution nonsense?) I find there is a direct correlation between education and liberal thinking. Open minded education points out to the learner how little he or she knows about that particular subject and indeed about anything. When I have studied a subject area, I find it is usually infinitely more complicated than I anticipated. With this perspective on life, I find that my answers to life's questions may not be significant to everyone. Religious leaders do not want complicated answers to questions. They want simple answers, short sentences, easy to understand words.

Think about the last presidential election. Mr. Bush could answer questions in cowboy language with downhome simplicity. His answers were not accurate and I think he has some awareness of that, but he kept it simple and he could stay on message. No hint of indecision, no possiblity of question. Mr. Kerry would hear the question and begin to roll the permutations around in his head. The answers were "Yes, but" or "No, except when". He took longer to answer and didn't necessarily come to a conclusion. Sometime his answer was that he didn't know. And he was supposed to be so smart!

When the fundies get in charge, they throw out the intelligencia. Take the communist chinese. University professors who were not slaughtered were sent to "re-education camps" for up to a decade. Those who survived never uttered another liberal thought the rest of their lives. Their voices were muted. In the current government take over in the United States, the educated are being slandered, ignored, demoted, used, and muted. It doesn't matter what those crazy scientists come up with about the environment. Pollute more air, more water, clear cut more trees, fish more oceans, these are the political answers of this administration. Twist science to say what we want it to say.

Twist intelligence to say what we want. Who cares what those CIA agents think they know? Fire the agents who say the facts disagree. Disembowel public television for daring to ask questions that challenge our dogma. Do you remember what public television was called when I was growing up? We never called it public television. It was called "educational" TV. The house of representatives has voted draconian cuts in funding for educational TV. Many rural areas will lose access to the voice of public television if the legislation passes. And that of course is the point. Where is the strength of the Republican party. In the rural, undereducated areas of the country. Cutting off the voice of public television to those areas is a no brainer. It strengthens their political base.

Remember all the Republican campaign workers in Florida during the election debacale, in their white shirts and ties. Their bosses had flown them straight from work without a change of clothes to get to Florida and harrass precint workers, to appear to the media as a crowd of angry locals, protesting the recounts. They truly believe that shouting down the truth (no recount, no recount, no recount), makes the truth go away. You can mute education. You can strangle it. For an hour, or a day, or perhaps for an age. But people will ask their questions eventually. And if they find out the truth of this generation of politicos, they will come and hang them.

Four U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq yesterday. It was reported in the Atlanta Journal on p. A 15.

Georgia has created a system for its citizens to identify "failing" schools. An extra week of standardized testing has been implemented in addition to other tests that were already being done (read less time to teach the curriculum). There are a lot of rules and regulations about how these exams will be evaluated in order to determine which schools are failing schools. If a school is judged to be failing two years in succession, parents may move their students to a different school. The current results show so many failing schools that you would hardly know what to do with your student. The Republicans are now saying in editorials in the paper, "The public school system is a failure. Vouchers are the only answer. Let the child go to school where ever they want and let the money follow the child."

I didn't see that line coming. I had wondered why the system for evaluation was so screwed up. Our local middle school had been ranked 38th best in the state several years back, and the same kids come through to me at the high school where the senior class average on the SAT has been consistently over 1100. We are usually considered in the top 5 schools in the state, public or private, regular or magnet. We don't care who we are up against. We can hold our own. Our kids routinely go to Harvard, Cornell, Emory, Tech, MIT, etc., etc. So how could our local middle school wind up on the Georgia's failing schools list? Well I'll tell you. It's about paperwork. If everything gets done just so, and that just may not be possible, then you will be a passing school. In our case, two special education students who listed our school as "home" but actually attend special programs at other nearby schools, failed to take the standardized tests. They were absent from school and did not make them up when they returned. Our school wasn't aware of it because they didn't attend there anyway. No matter. The T's were not crossed, the I's were undotted, and our school is a failing school.

The whole thing, I said, THE WHOLE THING, is a scam, cooked up by the legislature to make as many schools as possible look bad, in order to urge school vouchers upon us.

Let's face it. Someone should call a spade a spade and stop waltzing around the issue. School vouchers are just a way to ask to get your tax money back because you don't want your children in integrated schools. There is not an education issue here. It's a race issue. I want my Michael or Kaitlyn in parochial school with children of families who look just like us and that is expensive. It's breaking the family budget. So can't we find a way to get our tax money back from public education to pay for my desire to be segregated?

Are the private schools better? They charge some big bucks and some have fine facilities. But they have teachers making extremely low pay. How are they drawing the best teachers for the lowest pay scale? They have teachers teaching "out of field." In other words, teaching subjects they did not study in college. Dr. G we want you to teach a civics class or 9th grade English this year. You understand politics and can read a book so you are quailfied don't you think? (Well sure if that's what it takes to keep my job). They have teachers teaching who have not had any courses in the education area. They've never studied about how children learn. They don't have to have certification to teach in private schools. There is no professional standards commission looking over their shoulder. There are no requirements for continuing education. This does not sound like a recipe for high achievement. For 8 thousand a year you cannot get a better education than you will get at our school. But you can get a more segregated one. And you can say the Lord's prayer over the intercom every morning. I just don't think your desire to destroy quality public integrated education is a good reason to give you a tax break. Develop some coping skills. Learn to deal with other cultures and ethnicities. Or if you must be a racist, go ahead and be responsible for yourself. Support the system that is available to educate all students and choose to pull your student out and pay the freight.

There is a second issue here and I'll put it in the next blog.

Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day.

The rain has been more or less constant since Saturday. The flowers are drooping. School is finally out. Teachers are free for a few weeks. Not that there isn't plenty to do, but we just don't get paid for doing anything the next 9 weeks. Even before we could get out the door the demolition teams swarmed in to finish the renovation in our cafeteria area. Next year there should be enough cafeteria space for the first time in my memory.

I'm dreaming about a book for vocal technique, complete with DVD. Never happen in all likelihood, but you never know. Something to think about in the summer. Time to look for repertoire for next year. Time to plan events. Time to line up clinicians.

Conferences are coming. Some vacation time.

Now if it will stop raining we can get on with summer.