How Long Do We Blame Bush For the War?

My short answer: not forever, but I'm not letting him off the hook just yet.

The White House blasted former Veep Dick Cheney for claiming that President Barack Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war.

"He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won't be at war," Cheney said in a statement. "He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won't be at war. He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won't be at war."

Obama knows we're at war. He's made public statements about the war. But of course that's not the issue, and Cheney knows it. He's playing to the right wing as usual, hoping to distract people from the fact---unavoidable---that he and his President started this war, and had no idea how to win it. Sadly, this bait-and-switch actually works. Witness the following comment on CNN.com's article about Cheney's comments:

to Gary in Portsmouth who said: "I just hope the rest of America get's it. I am glad we don't have a President with a fast food mentality. I love intelligent well thought out decisions. There safe and reduces the possibilities of undue, unnecessary harm."

Well, I doubt the families of the 114 American's who died in Afghanistan during the 93 days it took for Obama to announce his "well thought out decision" see it the way you and your liberal friends do - and then add the additional American's who will also die over there in the extra months it will take to add the troops requested because of that delay.

For those of us with family members fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama's "dithering" was extremely stressful.

Actually, 117 Americans died serving in Afghanistan while Obama considered McChrystal's request for more troops. And 634 U.S. troops died in Afghanistan during Bush and Cheney's tenure, along with 4228 in Iraq, for a total of 4862, while Bush and Cheney did---what? Did they ever deign to show us what their strategy actually was? Explain what milestones they were trying to reach? Describe what their oft-discussed "winning" would actually look like?

No. Because "winning" in Iraq and Afghanistan was never the Bush administration's aim. Their aim was to democratize the Mideast so they could start making good old-fashioned American money there. These aims go back to the rarely-discussed Project For a New American Century (google it---but prepare to be disturbed), at least.

As long as the authors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are walking this earth, they'll be playing the same old Neocon bait-and-switch...at the same time casually trivializing the lives of the very American services members they so often claim to champion.

American Idol Voters Get It Right: Anything Else Is Impossible

On Wednesday night, American Idol "dark horse" contestant Kris Allen seemed to come from out of nowhere to steal the crown from judges' darling Adam Lambert, and on Thursday a lot of people are asking questions. How did this happen? Is the show rigged? Did conservative groups reportedly rallying to vote for Kris---or against Adam---color the result? And why can't a gay singer win American Idol?

I called Kris Allen as the winner when they were at the top nine---the week he first covered "Ain't No Sunshine"---and his startlingly original cover of Donna Summer's "She Works Hard For the Money" during the top seven disco week only solidified my pick. It was a gut reaction based on one thing: I liked him best. I liked his acoustic guitar work. I liked his voice. I liked his arrangements. I liked his humbleness.

But none of these are the reason Kris won, or at least not the only reason. Kris won because winning American Idol (like so many reality show contests) comes down to numbers. Where did those numbers come from? Did extreme conservatives come out in droves for Kris? There's no way to know. But there's one thing we do know: if you have a favorite you vote for, and your favorite is eliminated, you have to pick a new favorite if you want to continue voting. It's the ultimate runoff election, this season culminating in "nearly" 100 million votes on Tuesday night, and the runoff went to Kris.

To be more particular, in my mind there are three major factors to who wins American Idol.

Factor #1: Who gets which eliminated contestants' votes? This becomes more pertinent as we draw closer to the end, so let's just consider the final four: Allison Iraheta, Danny Gokey, Kris Allen, and Adam Lambert, and pretend there were only 100 votes available.

Allison was routinely in the bottom three, and Danny never was until his elimination, so let's assume Allison had the smallest share of 100 votes, and Danny the highest. Let's give Danny 40 votes, Allison 10. Give Adam 30 votes (assuming voters generally preferred him over Kris, though we don't know that's the case) and Kris 20.

When Allison was eliminated, who did her fans start to vote for? Let's say it was Adam, just for yuks. Give Adam those 10 votes during the top three. That makes it Danny 40, Adam 40, Kris 20. Now Danny is eliminated. Anyone want to go out on a limb and say Danny's fans started voting for Adam? No? Okay, then during the finale it would be Adam 40, Kris 60.

And this disregards the nine previous weeks. When Matt Giraud was eliminated, who did his fans start voting for? Michael Sarver? Lil Rounds? Anoop Desai? Scott MacIntyre?

Factor #2: Who best handles the (usually) insipid and trite original song? This year we suffered through a composition co-written by new American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi. This song alone is a reason to fire Kara for next season, as if there weren't already plenty of reasons (and did it really take three people to write that crap?).

So who handled it best? Like everything Idol, it's subjective, and I've already admitted I'm a Kris fan...but I also know bad notes when I hear them, and Kris suffered through several during his rendition of "No Boundaries". But it was also one of Adam's weakest performances, sounding shrill and unintelligible. Also, who's more believable singing a (supposedly) inspiring, I'll lift you up-style song, Kris or Adam? I'm gonna go with Kris. And Kara all but apologized to Kris for the fact that the song was in a key too high for him.

Factor #3: People who tune in to see the finale who don't watch any other episodes. What would they have seen? Here's what I'm guessing. They saw Adam Lambert, who they've no doubt heard is the runaway favorite, doing his usual: a little screeching, some tongue protrusions, wearing eyeliner, doing one very solid number ("Mad World"), one hot mess ("A Change Is Gonna Come") and slipping on the original tune. And they saw Kris Allen, a kid-next-door, playing acoustic guitar and piano, nailing one song ("Ain't No Sunshine"), performing admirably if unremarkably on another ("What's Goin' On"), and struggling with the new song. And I'm guessing they might also have wondered if Kris (or Adam) was the best the show could come up with this year. And America being America...they most likely went for Kris.

But the "big" question remains: why can't a gay contestant win American Idol? (This assumes that Adam is gay, which he's never said...okay, never mind. He's gay.) A better question would be this: why didn't this particular gay contestant win American Idol?

Was he too flamboyant? Was it the eyeliner? The androgynous hair? The theatricality? I don't know, but I can tell you this...of the many friends I have who are Idol watchers and theatre people, a majority of them actually did not prefer Adam, perhaps for the same reason I didn't. Everything he did seemed so rehearsed, so calculated, so much a character or a mask, that I never really felt like I was seeing Adam himself. When he sang "Tracks of My Tears" I thought to myself: if he was wearing clown makeup, a la Pagliacci, it wouldn't be out of place. But if I want to watch acting, I'll watch a movie or tune in to a t.v. show or take in a play. When I watch a singer, I want to see the singer's real personality. Kris Allen delivered that every week, without fail, and with great consistency he also delivered more original arrangements than anyone else except, arguably, Adam.

There's also this: I can't hear an Adam Lambert album in my head. I don't know what kind of song he'd record, I don't know who he is or what he wants to say. On the other hand, I do hear a Kris Allen album. And I, apparently like many other Idol fans this season, am looking forward to buying one.

LA Times Writer Wants American Idol to Address Societal Issues

Ann Powers of the LA Times just wrote an intriguing and very curious story called "American Idol needs to open the closet door". Here's a link:


http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-american-idol10-2009mar10,0,5548765.story


Miss Powers thinks American Idol is in a unique position due to its incredibly large, voluntarily captive audience. It is her position that the show ought to use its twice-weekly forum to help break down society's barriers regarding homosexuality, race, and ethnicity.


American Idol, she says, being a "family show", has danced for too long around its gay contestants' sexuality. It has not done enough to advance the cause of minority contestants. Further, in focusing on predominantly white "soul" singers, it continues the pattern of white performers stealing black musical styles, and edging those black performers out.


These positions can all be refuted, to an extent. Only someone living, to pardon the expression, in a closet, would not have recognized season seven's Danny Noriega or this season's Nathaniel Marshall as gay. We don't need an interview package in which they declare their love for another man to get that. And did anyone see any evidence that Danny or Nathaniel had been asked to tune down the flamboyance so as not to tip off anybody in Middle America?


Without statistics in front of me I'm willing to agree that the majority of American Idol contestants, at least in the live-broadcast stage of the show, have been white. What I also don't have, and I don't imagine Miss Powers does either, is a statistic as to what percentage of overall applicants, at the open-city calls, are minorities. Nor do I expect they're asked to fill out a questionnaire detailing their complex racial background.


Regarding the transition of American popular music from its beginnings to the early 21st century, and the appropriation of black musical styles by white performers, I must seriously question the notion that the countless white kids who audition---no older than 28 and as young as 16---have a solid grasp on the issue, or an agenda to usurp anyone's racial and musical heritage. I bet the minority contestants don't either. In fact, I'd say that since the current contestants have only been in our world since 1981 at the earliest, they may not see musical styles as immutable and homogeneous, but liquid, dynamic, and "racially blind". And isn't that how it should be?


But ultimately I have to question the notion that American Idol can, or should be expected to, address complex societal issues like homophobia and racial bias. American Idol is escapist television, entertainment. It is, as Simon Cowell likes to say, a "singing contest". It's not an "out gay singer contest", or a "black singer contest", or an "only-sing-in-a-genre-consistent-with-your-racial-background contest". And television producers aren't in the business of altering society's mores. They're in the business of getting ratings and making money.


Miss Powers, consciously or not, recognizes that at this point in human civilization, only the major media and those who control it have the power to address the issues she's concerned about (or any societal issue) on a grand scale. And, perhaps rightfully, she decries the media's disinterest in doing something worthwhile with its significant power. But what exactly does it say about us as a society that we ask our commercial, revenue-driven popular entertainment to act as a public moral arbiter? Exactly how much personal responsibility should we, as individual citizens, families, and communities, cede to a necessarily amoral industry, namely the pop culture machine?


It's easy to imagine the future as Miss Powers (and I) would like it to be: a society in which every person, gay, straight, bisexual, black, white, what have you, can live as they wish, without fear of harm or recrimination. And in that future, I expect television---if it still exists as we know it---will accurately reflect that society. Until then, television, and American Idol, can only reflect the society we live in: in which homosexuality for the large part is politely tolerated, in which minorities are overshadowed by whites, and in which whites have so often, and rarely with apology, appropriated the intellectual and artistic property, not to mention the actual property, of other cultures.


For now, we have to be hopeful that some of American Idol's voters, perhaps even a majority of them, are not watching through the filter of some presumed sexual and racial bias. Perhaps they don't think of the contestants as gay singers, or white singers, or black singers, but just singers. Perhaps they simply want entertainment, and in the end, to help choose a winner whose music would fit in nicely on their iPod.

Where Is the Pope's Moral Leadership?

We have a problem here in the twenty-first century. We have no real leaders (although I have a lot of faith in Barack Obama).

Apparently even the Catholic pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, the moral leader of the world's estimated 1.1 billion Catholics, cannot be expected to do the right thing. In a decree issued this Saturday, the Pope reversed the excommunication of British Bishop Richard Williamson and three other clerics who count themselves as members of the Society of Saint Pius X.

Bishop Williamson and his associates are notable for their denial that millions of Jews died in Nazi gas chambers. A Swedish TV interview with Richardson aired just a few days earlier confirmed that the 68-year-old Bishop Williamson stands by his views.

"I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against -- is hugely against -- 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler," he said.
"I believe there were no gas chambers," he added, and, "I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them by gas chambers."

"Shameful" was Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee's reaction. By "welcoming an open holocaust denier into the Catholic Church without any recantation on his part, the Vatican has made a mockery of John Paul II's moving and impressive repudiation and condemnation of anti-Semitism," he said.

In a striking impression of typical DC double-speak, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi called Williamson's remarks "absolutely indefensible" but that the Vatican's decision was designed to normalize relations with the Society of Saint Pius X, and has nothing to do with the bishop's personal views.

The Pope is supposed to be highest moral authority of God on earth for all Catholic people. By tacitly endorsing a Holocaust denier, he doesn't simply risk alienating more liberal Catholics, Jews, and anyone with a sense of moral decency: anything short of a direct repudiation of bigots like Williamson can only be seen as a tacit encouragement for that bigotry. By reversing Williamson's excommunication, Pope Benedict XVI passes on an opportunity to step firmly into the 21st century: an era where those who live to oppress and eradicate others must finally be, themselves, eradicated.