First published in Huffington Post

Sen. Phil Gramm, economic adviser to John McCain's Presidential campaign, got it only half wrong when he called us a nation of whiners. He would have nailed it if he'd hurled the charge with more accuracy -- at his own party and its supporters.

At this moment in our history, when we ought to be thinking strategically, critically, and holistically about a litany of problems, and applying to them possible solutions that are visionary, entrepreneurial, and bold, Republicans have perfected their shrill and tuneless whining into an art form. In place of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," we now have the GOP's "Book of Lamentations."

President Obama’s bid to bring the Olympics to my hometown, Chicago, if successful, would have brought thousands of jobs and tourism dollars, transformed Southside neighborhoods in the vicinity of the games for the better, and allowed Chicago to show the world community its special qualities as a Great American City.

The President’s involvement showed, most of all, his love for Chicago -- the place where he integrated all the fragments of his life as a globalist, to become the rooted Midwesterner and pragmatic, optimistic American that he is today. I have written elsewhere about the specificity of the President's relationship with Chicago. It is in Chicago that he reconciled the disparate, various elements of his geography, history, and biography to become whole and actualized. We like to believe that we took him for granted long before legions around the world considered him exceptional. Before he inspired 64 million voters of every hue across the country, he first impressed out-of-luck white farmers in downstate Illinois with his empathy. That is why the President went to Copenhagen, John Boehner and William “Twiggy” Bennett.

Mr. Obama’s pitch to the IOC showed his willingness to put an important local issue that would affect the lives of many, before his own national poll numbers. It highlighted his inclination to take risks and give things his best shot, in order to create the desired outcome. These are aspects of the meta-narrative Americans have always believed about themselves: that we’re gutsy, take risks, think big, fail, and live another day for a new challenge. These are things we teach our children: “Try your best. Give it all you’ve got, so you won’t be ashamed even if you fail.” It’s part of the reason so many, born in other places, gravitate to America. It’s where, more than anywhere else, one can try to launch a tech startup, create a super-biodegradable water bottle, write code for a new software, build a Kindle or a Kiva. It’s where you came if you wanted to make something brighter, bolder, better.

You’d never know that America stands for any of these things if you listen to the GOP and its acolytes and sycophants these days. Whine, Whine, Whine, No, No, No. Critic in Chief, Richard Steele, a latter day Jeremiah, ripped President Obama for going to Copenhagen. A group of Republicans, “Republicans for Prosperity,” -- patriots all -- applauded with glee when they heard that Chicago was out of the running. The preternaturally humble Rush Limbaugh showed he had his finger on the pulse of nothing but his own over-sized rump, when he called the Chicago loss, “the worst day of Obama’s presidency and a testament to his Mars-size ego.” Where was the trenchant Republican analysis on failed presidencies when Mr. Bush got a shoe upside his head? Where was the GOP hubris indicator when Mr. Bush swore he'd end tyranny in the world?

Fiscal responsibility, extinct as a Dodo Bird during the Bush years when deficits didn't matter, is suddenly all the rage among Republicans. A party that promised an Iraq War with no money down -- the real cost will be $694 billion by the end of the year -- now has the unmitigated gall to complain about the cost of the President's trip to Copenhagen.

Chicago loses its Olympics bid and Conservatives rejoice. Bill Kristol who applies meticulous stupidity to willful ignorance and calls it a career, declared his amusement at Chicago's failure to secure the Olympics. "Our economy doesn't need the boost of the Olympics," he said, revealing the breadth of his knowledge of Illinois state revenues. Brilliant. Why try for the Olympics when there's a perfectly good Plan B to install gaming machines in restaurants and bars? That's the way to erase a state deficit, a quarter at a time from a new class of addicts.

Is it smart politics to obstruct and criticize everything that a President -- elected by the majority -- proposes and does? Should Republicans hate the President more than they love their country? Whining is not the cure for losing the last election, or winning the next one.

First published in Huffington Post

In a recent interview with Newsweek, President Obama mentioned seeing the latest Star Trek movie and that everybody was saying he was Spock. In another interview a while ago, the First Lady said, "The President is a very rational man."

This explains a lot. The President's refusal to investigate the Bush Administration's policies and actions relating to the Iraq War is the embodiment of Vulcan logic, free from messy human emotions and moral obligation.

The President has said he wishes the country to move forward instead of looking back--a nice mantra for our collective denial. Let's nail that to the wall, next to Bush Labor secretary, Elaine Chao's call to Iraqi women after their lives had been reduced to rubble by 'Shock and Awe': "In a democracy, the most important factor is energy." Taxidriver husband in Abu Ghraib? Daughter raped in US custody? Teenage son sodomized with a truncheon? Never mind all that. The cure for your blue funk, citizen of Iraq -- whom we saved from Saddam, (ignore that pesky photograph of your Lion with our Fox, Donald Rumsfeld) - is to move forward, without looking back ... with energy.

Other countries have seen the necessity for truth and reconciliation. In Congo and elsewhere, where perpetrators and victims of human rights violations and atrocities are often known to each other--frequently they're neighbors--truth and reconciliation forums are seen as a necessary instrument, one that allows perpetrators and victims to continue living in the same community.

"Taking into account collective memory and the inadequacies of the justice system, one must set up a mechanism which will help people to express themselves, giving truth its proper place. It would help people to freely discuss, as though in a family, those events in which they were the perpetrators or the victims, thus creating an atmosphere for reconciliation," said Gilberta Tandia, a human rights activist in Congo.

There are those who wish President Obama to release the remaining photographs that show, according to General Antonio Taguba, "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency." I am not one of them. I have lived and traveled in Muslim countries long enough to know that strong notions of modesty, shame, communal and familial judgement, and the fear of honor killings of women believed to have been raped in US custody, would prevent most Muslim men and women from supporting the release of these photographs.

But the Pentagon's recent denial that photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse do not include images of rape and sexual abuse is a confabulation. Following Donald Rumsfeld's testimony on the Abu Ghraib hearings in 2004, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R. South Carolina) said, "The American public needs to understand we're talking about rape and murder here." Press Secretary Robert Gibbs can thrash the British media and disavow information all he wants, but this isn't 1990 and this isn't Myanmar. There's this hardly worth mentioning, insignificant little archivist and global memory keeper that can call you a liar in less than a New York minute.

Accounts of these atrocities have already been reported in news outlets around the world including Guardian UK and Australia Age, and the images of rape have already been published in various online news outlets such as La Voz de Aztlan and Jihad Unspun, and posted on porn sites including the Norwegian based Sex and War. According to a 2004 article in La Voz de Aztlan, which was accompanied by photographs of the rape of a young girl in US custody, "It is now known that hundreds of these photographs had been in circulation among the troops in Iraq. The graphic photos were being swapped between the soldiers like baseball cards ... Speaking on condition of anonymity, one Mexican-American soldier told La Voz de Aztlan, 'Maybe the officers didn't know what was going on, but everybody else did. I have seen literally hundreds of these types of pictures.' 'Many of the pictures was destroyed last September when the luggage of soldiers was searched as they left Iraq,' he said."

Vice-President Dick 'We have nothing to apologize for' Cheney, and in the last few days, President George 'I will yield when my gut does' Bush, have made their case, with passion free from logic and legality, about the rightness of the Iraq War and US sponsored torture. We may continue to tolerate their justifications for the biggest American foreign policy blunder of all time, with the bewilderment we reserve for incoherent, delusional people. And we can keep lulling ourselves into a stupor with objective American journalism: "President Bush and VP Cheney say sun rises in the west, others disagree," and unquestioning American patriotism that makes no distinction between the honorable men and women who serve in the military, and the thugs and criminals among them.

But, the longer we wait to investigate how and why our government went to war on false premises, and why our military suspended fundamental American rules of war and violated international laws in the process, the more our national security will be compromised by those who are enraged by our actions and conduct.

The American people may not have the stomach for a lengthy war crimes tribunal to assign guilt and mete out punishment in these precarious times, but we should care enough to at least demand the truth. We ought to support a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the Iraq War that includes Americans and Iraqis. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) has made such a proposal.

The model for truth and reconciliation work and its success is the commission that was established in South Africa to address the horrors of apartheid. According to South Africa's Justice Minister then, "it was a necessary exercise to enable South Africans to come to terms with their past on a morally accepted basis and to advance the cause of reconciliation."

President Obama promised transparency as the bedrock of his administration. He would do well to consider Captain Picard's words in Star Trek: "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." President Obama's failure to address Bush policies and actions in Iraq makes his administration complicit in the Iraq War, and keeps us from doing repair with each other, with Iraqis, and with the wider world.

First published in Huffington Post

The Obama administration's decision to reverse the 18-year Pentagon ban on photography of soldiers' caskets returning to Dover Air Force Base is an important one for the public. Leaving the decision to military families to accept, or reject, public recognition of the service of their deceased is a respectful, Solomon-esque decision by Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Anyone who was not on Mars during Captain Sully's recent heroic aqua landing on the Hudson knows how exemplary acts of courage, altruism, and heroism touch us all. In 2005, I wrote an article for Intervention Magazine comparing the way Italy honored its returning war dead from Iraq to the way America treated its own fallen military.

I cited the case of Nicola Calipari -- the Italian intelligence officer who rescued a kidnapped journalist from Iraqi captors, only to be gunned down by jittery American soldiers at a checkpoint in Baghdad.

I wrote then: "Calipari's return to Rome was a national event that united all Italians, merging their raw sorrow with the singular grief of his widow and children. It was the second time Italy pulled out all the stops for its Iraq War dead. In November of 2003, it staged an elaborate state funeral for nineteen of its citizens, killed in a suicide truck bombing in Nasiriyah.

In both instances, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his ministers, President Carlo Ciampi, and an honor guard in full-dress uniform stood with grieving families on the tarmac of Rome's Ciampino military airport to receive their dead. There were national days of mourning and public visitation hours to the reposed, and at night, the Coliseum's lights were dimmed in a mark of respect.

All Italy watched, on television, as officers from Italy's civil services carried the flag-draped coffins past honor guards representing every branch of the military. The Carabinieri (paramilitary corps), in their regal uniforms and blue-and-red plume hats, stood guard while lone buglers played the Last Post and other laments. Stricken Italians lined the routes of the funeral cortege to pay their respects, before the bodies were entombed in Rome's war memorial.

I suggested that the participation in these last rites, "symbolized a shared sacrifice between those who prosecute wars, those who must fight them, and those who grieve and honor them-not just the dead and their families, but the entire nation. The pageantry on display was no more excessive than the heroism of the fallen, for surely there can be no greater excess than surrendering one's life for one's country."

At the time I wrote those words, it had been one year since ABC's Ted Koppel had presented, The Fallen, his Nightline tribute to the soldiers who had died in Iraq. Mr. Koppel read the names off camera while the photographs of the dead men and women were projected on the screen. It was an elegy, remarkable for its quiet, sobering grace. Supporters of the war and George Bush naturally cried foul; any story that didn't fall into the Jessica Lynch mold of heroism (later learned to be void of key features of heroism, such as oh, heroism) was viewed as unpatriotic by the Pentagon's media machinery. Several broadcasting companies, including those owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, accused Mr. Koppel, a distinguished newsman who was/is no one's tool, for disseminating political propaganda.

There were 70,000 hits to my story on Intervention Magazine. Most readers agreed that we ought to honor our fallen soldiers, if not with the full pageantry, as seen in Italy, at least through media coverage, so that all American citizens would understand the cost of war. "The trouble is, I support the war as long as it doesn't cause me grief," wrote one poster.

The rest of my readers, Iraq War supporters all, spewing Mr. Bush's straight-jacket, postlogical logic -- we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here; so there were no WMD, so?; since Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11, we must bring them freedom and democracy so they don't perpetrate another 9/11 -- let me know that the Italians were excessive. They were adamant that we didn't need to show our war dead, and that the ban on photography at Dover Air Force Base did not need to be lifted.

They offer the same argument today, as they criticize Secretary Gates decision. Perhaps they're right. Instead of giving military families the choice to accept or reject public awareness of the return of their loved ones, similar to protocols for funerals already in place at Arlington National Cemetary, let's keep things the way they are. Yes, let's all pat ourselves on the back for being American patriots: let's fire up the grill, get plastered on booze, eat ourselves into a stupor, watch television, go shopping and call it Memorial Day.

First Published in Huffington Post

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag's meditation on images depicting the atrocities of wartime, she cites Virginia Woolf's lacerating indictment of war, written in 1936 as the Spanish Civil War was unfolding. Woolf's polemic was a response to a lawyer who had engaged her on the issue of war.

She opened her argument by declaring that the lawyer as a man and she as a woman could not possibly see war in the same way. Woolf proposed reconciling the disparity by looking at some images of war together. "Let's see whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things," she wrote, for she believed, according to Sontag, "that the shock of the images could not fail but unite people of good will".

Many people around the world, looking at the same photographs together--of bloodied, broken, mangled bodies of civilians and children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since December 27th--have felt the same things. And they have united in compassion for the Palestinian people.

No matter which side of the Israeli-Palestinian issue we stand on, we ought to feel empathy, and pain, and sorrow for the people killed in Gaza--not because we're pacifists, or weak, or pro-Palestine, or anti-Israel, or pro-terrorist, or anti-Semitic, but because they were unarmed civilians in a blockaded war zone, who had nowhere to run and no place to hide.

"One body can hold all the suffering the world can feel," wrote Graham Greene in The Quiet American, another polemic about war. Upon seeing the photographs from Gaza-- of babies with war wounds and third degree burns, children with missing body parts, screaming toddlers with blood pouring from their sides, tiny corpses turned blue in death, silent and still as no child ever ought to be--should the proper response from our government and leaders be the morally feeble talking point: "Hamas is to blame"?

According to the latest reports, more than 149 children have died in Gaza since Israel began its attacks on December 27th.

In Zeitoun, one of the poorest sections of Gaza, Masouda al-Samouni, 20, was preparing food for her baby when Israeli warplanes launched missiles in her neighborhood; one of them struck her house killing her baby, her husband, and her mother-in-law. "He died hungry," she said of her infant.

In Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza, a missile killed three Palestinian children, aged 8-12, as they played on a street. One boy was decapitated; another had both his legs blown off. Madth Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor working in a Gaza hospital said, "These injuries are not survivable injuries."

Protection for civilians in wartime is a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law set in the Geneva Conventions of 1949--ironically, established as a response to the Holocaust--and in the treaty's Additional Protocols of 1977. Unarmed civilians not engaged in war must be spared and protected, and may not be attacked. In situations not covered by the specific laws of the Geneva Convention, civilians are protected by the fundamental principles of humanitarian law and human rights law.

In the face of international outrage over the killing of unarmed civilians, Israel defends itself by saying that Hamas is using children and civilians as human shields and hiding among civilians. If this is true, Israel and its military need do only one thing to inoculate itself from charges of wanton disregard for human life and war crimes: hold their fire until civilians have been cleared from the area.

There are lies we tell ourselves, delusions we adopt, just to get through each day with our political convictions intact. But our leaders unleash something close to immoral into the geopolitical incubator, when they and our allies embrace norms that they deem barbaric or monstrous--in other circumstances and when practiced by others.

If the killing of unarmed civilians by terrorist groups is wrong, Israel's killing of unarmed Palestinian civilians and our defense of Israel's conduct cannot be right. Hamas may be guilty but Israel is not innocent, and neither are we when our leaders defend the slaughter of innocents. The situational ethics our government chooses to practice in this matter can only come back to haunt us.

"Sooner or later one must choose a side if one is to remain human," Greene wrote in The Quiet American. Since December 27th, people of good will everywhere have stood in solidarity with the Palestinian people because they believe intuitively, emotionally, and intellectually in the preeminent rights of unarmed civilians and children in wartime. The Geneva Convention treaties, humanitarian law, and human rights laws are in place to remind governments of the same.

(c) Gail Vida Hamburg

First published on Huffington Post

Three weeks before the election -- as John McCain was flailing about for a message to connect with voters to resurrect his comatose campaign, and settled on Nobel Laureate in Economics and also Bad Plumbing, Joe Wurzelbacher, to inspire us all -- Ed Rollins, GOP strategist and CNN commentator, tried to give McCain a clue about what was on people's minds.

"What McCain and his campaign need to understand is that whatever happened in the past is no longer relevant. James Carville's famous slogan in Bill Clinton's 1992 victory over the first Bush: "It's the economy stupid!" can now be replaced with "You morons, what have you done with my money, my life and my kids' future?" Though lacking grace and lyricism, the question begs asking now.

I don't have a Harvard MBA like Henry Paulson, so I was willing (under protest) to set aside my skepticism about the bailout. When he began his Prophet Jeremiah-like fear-offensive, informing us that the only way to prevent a financial tsunami, was to close our eyes and think of America -- while he picked our pockets for $700 billion -- I took him at his word, but with a caveat.

Since there was radio silence from the President, I counted on Congress to ask Paulson basic questions, such as: How will the money we give you help the economy in real terms, rather than in the sunny Mediterranean scenario inside your bald head? What are you going to do with it and why, and what's in it for the taxpayer? Why should we give you and your deputy, Neel Kashkari, an engineer eight years out of B-School, the password to an account holding $700 billion?

I expected Congress to hold Paulson's feet to the fire and spell out in no uncertain terms that this was not business as usual -- that this was not an entitlement program to reward shareholders, or capital for solvent companies to make new business acquisitions. I hoped Congress would remind Paulson that there's nothing that would make American taxpayers more angry -- after Bush's illegal and expensive war -- than hearing about bailout funds spent on million dollar bonuses for TARP company executives and beachfront corporate retreats.

Was it too much to ask Congress to examine this unprecedented government intervention in the free market critically, microscopically, quantitatively, and numerically, before authorizing the Paulson-Kashkari/Goldman Sachs alum transfer of US taxpayer dollars to benefit, surprise, surprise, the finance and banking sector, including solvent companies?

It has been proven repeatedly that when government officials get their hands on taxpayer money, they can't help but spend it like very young children. In his book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports on the squander of American taxpayer dollars by Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority at the start of the American occupation in Iraq. Chandrasekaran writes about a young American contractor without any experience in construction, who won a $16 million bid for yes, construction. Unprepared to begin the work he was contracted to perform, he told the CPA that he had no money for start-up. "Bring a duffel bag," the CPA told the entrepreneur with big dreams, little experience, and no capital except the dirt on his neck. When he arrived at the CPA, Chandrasekaran writes, "Two million dollars in shrink-wrapped bricks of brand new hundred dollar notes, flown in from the Federal Reserve of New York, lay on the desk... he packed the bricks into a four-foot-long duffel bag ... a few hours later, he boarded a plane for Beirut to deposit the funds in a Lebanese bank."

The American people set a very low bar for the President and Congress on the bailout -- close the loopholes so we're not robbed by public servants who don't know the meaning or the value of a dollar. President Bush, who evidently won't be satisfied until he has fully plundered our national treasure for the benefit of a few, sneaked in a last-minute insertion to the original bailout bill, a one-sentence loophole, that effectively erases basic restrictions on executive compensation put in place by Congress. In this economic freefall, when churches and synagogues in financial districts are filled at lunchtime with finance and banking workers worried about keeping their jobs, bailout company heads using taxpayer dollars to pay six figure bonuses "to retain talented employees," should be given their last cigars, flogged, and put out to pasture.

How has the bailout helped anyone other than banks, their shareholders, and their six-figure-bonus-earning employees? Like a zen koan which holds that two plus two equals a rhinoceros, the answer is, a slippery eel -- maybe it will, in the fullness of time or when the stars and planets align or on the 12th of Never.

I am intoxicated by the exuberance of Paulson's platitudes. He wants the money "to shore up the economy," "to support financial market stability," "to put the companies on a path to the significant restructuring necessary to achieve long-term viability." He walks between rain drops.

Elizabeth Warren, Chairperson of the Bailout Oversight Panel, appears to be the rare voice making any sense on this issue, cutting through the jargon, deconstructing its complexities, telling us what Paulson and Kashkari are up to, and looking out for the public's interest. There is no consolation in what Warren says. "These are not Masters of the Universe here, they're not omniscient, they're people who are fallible like the rest of us... Throwing billions of dollars at a problem is only going to work if you know what the problem is." And laurel wreaths to Frank Bass, Rita Beamish and Associated Press for their study and report on bailed out banks and their profligate spending: $1.6 billion reward to 600 executives.

Our elected representatives have also been busy -- blogging on the issue and railing against the failures of the bailout. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services committee was appalled by the AP report. "Most of us sign on to do jobs and we do them best we can," he said. Actually, you didn't do enough. His colleague, Rep. Brad Sherman added, "The tougher we are on the executives that come to Washington, the fewer will come for a bailout." Bravo, Mr. Sherman, that's the sound of one hand clapping. Thank you for sliding into homeplate after the stadium has emptied, and $350 billion in bailout funds went that way.

Paulson, undeterred by his lack of success in jumpstarting the economy, perhaps because he's still trying to figure out what the problem is and making things up as he goes along, has told Congress, it "needs to release the second half of the S700 billion bailout."

In The Sun Also Rises, Earnest Hemingway's character Bill asks, "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways," Mike replies, "Gradually and then suddenly." A decade of reckoning looms.

Gail Vida Hamburg

Perhaps appalled by a South Carolina priest's fatwa to his parishioners informing them that they should not receive communion if they voted for "Barack Hussein Obama" because of his position on abortion, another priest from Modesto, California cast himself as a more forgiving Ayatollah.

"If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion. Don't risk losing your state of grace by receiving sacrilegiously," he wrote in a letter to more than 15,000 parishioners.

A mere seven days after the historic election that apparently made sinners of so many who voted for Obama, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests released a list -- The Ten Most Dangerous US Pedophile Priests. On the honor roll is a priest who secretly fathered triplets seven years ago and molested two of them in recent years. Another, according to SNAP, drugged dozens of boys into unconsciousness and sodomized them. Yet another fathered eight kids with teenagers. All have been accused of sexually molesting children, some have been tried in criminal court, none have been convicted, and each of them walks free.

Run a Google News search for "Catholic Priests Child Molesters," and there are 32 hits from Election Day till today, Nov 30. Among the litany of heinous cases, reports of bishops knowingly sending predators priests to communities without telling parishioners of their criminal past, profiles of children and families destroyed, and their faith dead as dead can be, is one bit of hopeful news. A US appeals court has ruled that the Vatican can be sued for sex abuse committed by US priests. The reason: A Vatican mandate issued in 1962, which became public only in 2003, outlined a policy to treat allegations of sexual abuse by clergy "with the strictest secrecy." According to the Church mandate, anyone who spoke out against the sexual abuse of children by priests would be excommunicated.

Americans who influenced this election by defying so many of their own strongly held beliefs are more than capable of looking at the pro-choice pro-life debate anew, and reach new conclusions about this complex issue, without being bullied into submission by their priests. Women are having this debate every day, just not with their priests. The Founding Fathers in their wisdom called for a separation of State and Church, so we wouldn't one day find ourselves bowing to something like a Taliban.

For the clergy to act like avenging moral authorities on Americans' voting choices, while at the same time disregarding the most reprehensible conduct of their own members, takes a special kind of shamelessness. "You hypocrites! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to remove the speck from your brother's eye." (Matthew 7:5)

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World Mirare Press, a novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives. Her novel, Liberty Landing a social novel inspired by John Dos Passos' USA,is scheduled for release by Mirare Press in 2009.

First published in Huffington Post

President-Elect Barack Obama's intention to bridge the chasm between Republicans and Democrats, by assembling a bipartisan cabinet. is a gorgeous idea.

It's the embodiment of his vision for America to be that 'more perfect union,' the Founding Fathers wished it to be. It is also a testament of his magnanimity and refinement, his political intelligence and statesmanship, his ease and self assurance.

And surprise, surprise, the party of ideological purity that wouldn't yield on anything in the last eight years, has had a deathbed conversion about bipartisan government. What happened to the Republican principle of unilateralism, and contempt for dissent? What happened to "either you are with us or youare with the terrorists/other preferred GOP bogeyman"?

On March 19, Dick Cheney, who was shoveling a large pile of horse manure about progress in Iraq, was asked how his trenchant analysis fit with polls, showing two thirds of Americans opposed to the war in Iraq. "So?" Mr. Cheney retorted. "You don't care what the American people think?" the reporter asked. "We can't be blown off course by polls," he said, once more giving the American public what he felt they deserved from their leaders--the one-fingered salute.

After the President-Elect named Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, Republicans got their collective knickers in a twist. Alex Conant of the RNC and John Boehner, Minority Leader shuddered with outrage. "This decision undermines his promise to 'heal the divides'. Rahm Emanuel is a partisan insider," said Conant. "This is an ironic choice for a President-elect who has promised to change Washington, make politics more civil, and govern from the center," Boehner huffed.

I love their gush of vitriol and lectures about non-partisanship and governing from the center. After two terms of absolute and unconditional power, which they used to serve only their own agenda, Republicans are singing the virtues of collaborative government--citing Lincoln's plan to create a bipartisan Cabinet that would govern "with malice toward none, with charity for all."

Why was bipartisanship hiding like a shy Geisha behind her rice-paper fan, during the attorney general firings and hirings orchestrated by Reptilian Rove and Amnesiac Alberto?

Democrats and Republicans are like the citizens of Lilliput and Blefuscu in Gulliver's Travels, who had doctrinal differences about the proper way to crack eggs.

A bipartisan cabinet is a knucklehead idea. Besides, how will Republicans go through their dark night of the soul and reinvent their party--an exercise best conducted in the wilderness--if they're sitting in the Cabinet?

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World, a novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives referencing Graham Greene's The Quiet American. (Mirare Press, 2007) Her second novel, Liberty Landing -- inspired by John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy -- is planned for release by Mirare Press in 2009

In the sunset of his presidency, George W. Bush who has the singular distinction of being the most unpopular President in US history, and possibly the most reviled and despised American around the world, decided to do the honorable thing and do something he previously took pride in not doing -- reflect, ponder, contemplate.

When I read the headlines, "Bush Recalls Moments of Regret," Bush Speaks of Regret," I broke open the chips and hummus to read his Apologia. This will be good, I thought. The President who once said, "I'm not a guy who looks in the mirror," should have something profound to say... like someone looking past the long shadow of a life to talk about that first love, the one that got away.

A well crafted apology can work wonders. Who can disown a swaggering teenager who takes the family car for a midnight spin, and then cries with great beauty, pearls of remorse streaming down cheeks, when caught? A cheating spouse can redeem him/herself with a good mea culpa and aerobic make-up sex. In Japan, politicians who screw up render public apologies about their misdeeds, and the bravest of them show they really mean it by ending their own lives. This I think is a bit unfair -- to leave the innocent electorate with survivors guilt.

So, lay it on me Mr. President, I thought as I opened the first link. You got us into a war that costs us $435 million dollars a day, $3 billion a week, $12 billion a month. It would be a good thing to apologize for -- at a time when many of us are wondering if we should sell our remaining assets (prized rubber band and CD collections) to make rent. It would reassure those who're worried that Stephen Colbert is right -- that Chinese people may soon be allowed by law to keep Americans as household pets, since they own us by the short and curlies.

Perhaps he'd apologize to our servicemen and women who went to Iraq to fight the good fight -- to avenge 9/11, to find the WMD, to secure the weapons of chemical warfare first touted by Colin Powell during ceremonial waving of perfume bottle at the U.N. Or maybe he'd say sorry to the military families who made the greatest sacrifices, while his acolytes, Ari Fleischer and Bill Kristol,and all the other war-mongering media sat at their computers, sipping cappucino, while pontificating on the price we must all pay for freedom and democracy.

Or, just maybe the President would apologize to the Iraqi people for bombing their country and turning it into rubble, for no reason other than to "kick some ass," as he told former terrorism czar, Richard Clarke days after 9/11.

But, no. The President has regrets speaking in front of a "Mission Accomplished," banner, and he regrets saying "dead or alive," and "bring 'em on." Nothing, it seems, will dim the eternal sunshine in the spotless mind of our 43rd President.

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World, a novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives referencing Graham Greene's The Quiet American. (Mirare Press, 2007) Her second novel, Liberty Landing -- inspired by John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy -- is planned for release by Mirare Press in 2009

To save us all from further excruciating meditations on the meaning of Barack Obama’s capture of the Presidency to blacks, pundits like Maureen Dowd, Roger Cohen, and Frank Rich of the New York Times and syndicated opinionator, Kathleen Parker should be forced at pencil point to make some black friends.

This may be the deep background white pundits need to enable them to analyze Obama's win without sounding like, well, Archie Bunker. News flash for Roger Cohen and Kathleen Parker: black people will tell anyone willing to listen that they don’t ever, repeat ever, want to hear or read stories about your black nanny, no matter how much you loved these women who left their own children to look after you. I mean it. Keep your black nanny stories to yourself.

Dear Frank Rich, trying to explain Obama’s rise through a 41 year old movie about bigotry (Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner) is as relevant as refracting gay marriage in California through Quentin Crisp’s The Naked Civil Servant, a 41 year old movie about homophobia.

In her Nov 8, ’08 column, Ms. Dowd attempted to elucidate the stunning new history of our young country by talking about what Obama meant to African Americans.

By paragraph 3, Ms. Dowd, who clearly doesn’t have any black friends of her own, is forced to rely on white strangers interrogating black people about their feelings on Obama’s victory.

In Ms. Dowd’s D.C., white people don’t know any black people except “a black waitress at a chic soul food restaurant,” and “a black bartender at the Bombay Club,” and “a black UPS delivery guy.” How is it possible that the only black people in Dowd’s DC are in the hospitality and service trades? Couldn't she find a black lawyer or political scientist or poet?

After several paragraphs of this, she debates the pros and cons of asking the “black patron at a downtown restaurant or a movie or the Kennedy Center,” how they feel. Would it be condescending, she wonders.

Finally, just when we think that Maureen Dowd is Archie Bunker with very red lipstick, she decides to prove us all wrong by reaching out to the black friends in her own life. She writes, “I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president.”

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World, a chilling novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives. (Mirare Press, 2007)

No sooner had McCain dropped the bombshell, naming Sara Palin as his choice for VP, Republicans fell all over themselves to justify the logic of choosing the barely housebroken, gun-toting, moose-hunting, home-schooling mother of four … or five, if you believe Alaskans who have known Palin a lot longer than the national media.

Fred Thompson woke up from his extended stupor long enough to appear on Sunday talk shows to say that Palin is extremely qualified because she’s a mother of five. Several Republican windbags said Palin would be strong on Iraq because she has a son who is fighting there. According to William Kristol, “a star is born,” … exactly what this country needs to help us get back on track after the last eight years of wholesale government incompetence, and a war, a deficit and an economy that will bring this country to its knees. Kristol who still believes we’re succeeding in Iraq fights the war like a true neo-con—from his computer in New York. He punctuates his barely-formed, vocabulary-challenged think pieces with phrases like “our troops,” and “our boys,” and somehow believes himself to be a true patriot who is fighting the good fight. Cindy McCain threw her full support behind Palin by stating that the small-town governor with the big hair has national security experience because Alaska is close to Russia.

Let's follow this GOP logic. Since my dog is a mother of five, she's ready to be vice-president. She would be ideal actually, since she knows how to multi-task, and one of her pups loves fighting with the family cat, an Iraq like situation. And why not me for Vice President? While I wait for the call, I'll be practicing open heart surgery at the local hospital, since I live close to it.

I’ve received email from women across the political spectrum, former Hillary supporters, independents, and Republicans. They are appalled that John McCain would be willing to jeapordize the country with this reckless selection, in order to win an election.

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World, (Mirare Press, www.mirarepress.com) a novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives. Her novel, Liberty Landing, inspired by John Dos Passos' U.S.A will be released in Spring 2009.

After a 5-year losing streak on Iraq and an 8-year catastrophe on the economy and foreign policy, one would think Sen. McCain would learn from his party’s abysmal violation of public trust and conduct himself with some propriety.

McCain’s most important task as the Republican Party nominee is to convince the American people that despite his party’s arrogance, ignorance, bad judgment, and corruption, and his own political leanings, he will be someone the American people can count on to correct the terrible mistakes of this Administration. At a time when Americans are united only in their anxiety and fear over the future, and in need of a leader to bind them into some vaguely cohesive national consistuency, Sen. McCain plays the dirtiest, most reprehensible kind of gutter politics.

Bankrupt of a single original idea to end the war in Iraq--other than regurgitating President Bush’s trope about keeping our courage and resolve and winning with honor, McCain accuses Barack Obama of near treason for having the courage and resolve to declare victory and bring the troops home.

Nearly seven years after September 11th, McCain, a senior senator with instant access to the President from 2001 to now, declared this week, like some wide-eyed ingénue just recently arrived to Washington, that he knows how to catch Osama Bin Ladin. Why did he keep this critically important information to himself for seven years? If he had actively campaigned for his plan to catch Bin Ladin when it mattered, it would be admirable. But intellectual and moral impotence during a war of choice -- by his party and his leader -- that has resulted in suffering to countless Iraqi and American lives, and belated boasting about what should have been, makes one nothing but a trash talker.

Mr. McCain’s recent attacks of Mr. Obama, questioning his patriotism, his judgement, and his love for the troops, and accusing him of vanity, deceit, and political expediency are unseemly by any definition.

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World, (Mirare Press, 2007 ) a novel about American foreign policy inspired by Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Her forthcoming novel Liberty Landing, inspired by John Dos Passos' USA is scheduled for a Fall '08 release, also by Mirare Press.

The UK Telegraph reports that our impeached and retired Narcissist-in-Chief, Bill Clinton is furious at Senator Obama for having the audacity to co-opt the Democratic Presidential nomination from his wife.

Evidently, similar to Israel’s Law of Return that enables every Jew anywhere in the world, who expresses a desire to settle in Israel, to do so, the President believes in a law of return for him to re-establish residency at the White House. As Jon Stewart quipped, the Clintons believe the White House to be their ancestral home.

The last time the Israeli law was used on a grand scale was during the famine in Ethiopia. While the rest of us tried to sing, with feeling, all the parts of Michael Jackson’s ensemble song, We Are The World, more than 35,000 Ethiopian Jews were gradually airlifted to Israel.

President Clinton croaking, “I Am The World,” to anyone who hasn’t already tuned him out, has decided that what this country really needs at this critical moment of the 21st century, is more of his finger-wagging, 1950s racism-tinged, leadership.

According to the Telegraph, Mr. Clinton recently told friends that Mr. Obama should “kiss my ass if he wants my support.” While playing the race card yet again to patronize Senator Obama, Mr. Clinton continues to suffer from a persecution complex, claiming that the race card was wickedly used by Senator Obama against him.

America calling Mr. Clinton: Senator Barack Obama is now the legitimate and rightful leader of the Democratic Party. He is the container of the American peoples’ hopes and dreams for their future. For Mr. Clinton to patronize and disrespect Senator Obama shows a lack of respect for the electoral process and the American people. Senator Obama is the post-modern leader we have chosen to claim the Presidency for the 21st century. We believe that he will work hard to return sanity to our foreign policy, steer us from the military industrial complex to intelligent diplomacy, improve the economy, commit to the stewardship of the environment, forge ties across party lines, and reclaim our moral authority in the world.

President Clinton would do well to remind himself of the American people’s needs before his own, so as to maintain one last shred of dignity and the respect of those who support the Democratic Party's legitimate leader and nominee.

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge Of The World
The Edge of the World a novel shaped by war and American foreign policy. She has a forthcoming novel, Liberty Landing, inspired by John Dos Passos' USA, his trilogy about America.

Among the Americans I know, real Americans, hardworking Americans, white Americans, black Americans, and every shade in between, there is a terrible sadness about the Clintons’ racist, take no prisoners bid for the Presidency.

In the middle class neighborhood where I live, we have strived to live respectfully, even harmoniously with each other. The sixth grade teacher raising her adopted daughter from China, the distinguished "Wasp" octogenarian couple whose failing health and eyesight worry us all, the gay Latino engineer who works at a technology company with plummeting stock prices, his partner who works for an airline that is going bust, the Muslim family from Pakistan who live quietly in collective purdah so as not to offend anyone, the industrious, ambitious African-American family with children settled in three top colleges, the elderly grandmother from Bosnia who ritually boasts about the future of her American grandchildren, the artist across the street who cobbles a living out of part-time work, the man on disability who disappears a little each day from lack of comprehensive health insurance, the woman with a brain tumor, happy as a lark, because her son is back from Iraq, are just some of the sixty families who have found a way to co-exist peacefully, respect each other, and search for commonality. We are not so different from each other, we found. We're all worried about the war, about the economy, about our jobs, our children's future, our health, our retirement. We are something close to a tribe, a neo-American tribe stitched together from people of every background.

We would never consider saying the hurtful, racist bile Hillary and Bill Clinton have spewed since the beginning of their campaign to install Mrs. Clinton in the White House. The America we know is better than Hillary and Bill and their unenlightened race baiting. It’s time for the Clintons to stop wrecking this country’s slow, plodding, but inevitable post-modern march towards raceless meritocracy, and return to 1950s Arkansas--where they evidently still live.

Gail Vida Hamburg, author of The Edge of the World, has a forthcoming novel, Liberty Landing, inspired by John Dos Passos' USA, his trilogy about America. Look for Liberty Landing from Mirare Press www.mirarepress.com in Fall 2008.

All this talk by Hillary Clinton about “obliterating Iran,” and Clinton sycophant, James Mushmouth Carville waxing lyrical about Clinton having cojones to spare, worries me. Does the Clinton camp really believe that the answer to eight years of mindlessness and high testosterone swagger is more mindlessness and high testosterone swagger?

In an old episode of Fawlty Towers, the British sitcom starring Monty Pythoner, John Cleese, his slightly crazy hotel keeper character, Basil Fawlty, is urged by an exasperated American guest who is disgusted with the hotel’s employees to “go kick some ass.” “It’s all about kicking ass with you Americans, isn’t it?” replies Basil.

Indeed, it has been throughout the Bush Administration. Former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke wrote in his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror that on the evening of September 11, 2001 President Bush—surely overcompensating for his earlier paralysis while reading My Pet Goat to kindergartners— went into ass kicking overdrive. When reminded of the constraints of international law, our Commander in Chief responded, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass."

Taking a cue from the President, before the invasion of Iraq (sorry Operation Iraqi Freedom), Toby Keith had half the country humming, “we’ll put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way.” It was mindlessness that led us to associate Saddam Hussein with Islamic fundamentalists in the first place. Saddam, who tried to live up to his self-fashioned destiny as “The Lion of Baghdad,” was a known hedonist without a shred of fundamentalist convictions. Cupcake shots of him in testicle-enhancing bikini trunks would have led any mindful intelligence analyst to conclude that the kohl-wearing, henna-mustached former American puppet was not in cahoots with Al Queda.

It is no surprise that President Bush favors C.Q to I.Q when taking the measure of a man. In Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, Bush marveled at British Prime Minister's Tony Blair's cojones, for playing Ted to his Bill in their excellent adventure in Iraq. When Donald Rumsfeld strutted the stage and talked about the benefits of "Shock and Awe," it wasn't just mainstream media who swooned. Our President is reported to have said, "That man has cojones."

If Bush and Cheney hadn’t been so aroused and ready to start a war, they would have seriously considered the reports of Iraq’s then Foreign Minister, who told Western media that Saddam was busy putting the finishing touches to his fourth novel, Begone Demons. But no. We were in full mindless, asskicking mode.

On television, during the run-up to the war, reporters worked the American people into quite a lather. Our military were shown scribbling, “This one’s for 9/11” on missiles, before the invasion of Iraq. And the media induced frenzy left us all feeling that it was time for the foreplay to end and the fun to begin. And so started the invasion of a foreign country that had done nothing to us.

In Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, he cites the asskicking mentality of our representatives in Iraq. Tom Foley, President Bush’s classmate at Harvard was charged by the President to oh, bring democracy to Iraq. A week after his arrival. Foley announced that he intended to privatize Iraq’s state-owned enterprises within thirty days. A contractor pointed out one hardly worth mentioning, insignificant, teeny, weenie detail—international law, that quaint Hague Convention, that prevents the sale of assets by an occupation government. Foley is reported to have replied, “I don’t give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the President that I’d privatize Iraq’s businesses.”

Five years after he waged a muddle headed war punctuated by bouts of lunacy (it’s about defeating evil in the world, democracy blooming like cactus flowers in the desert etc) the President is still full of swagger and hot air. "The economy will come on." "We will prevail." "The definition of success is victory." During a trip to Australia after a fall sojourn in Iraq, the President appraised Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Mark Vaile about the realities on the ground in Iraq. “We’re kicking ass,” our Commander in Chief replied. Reports that the Founding Fathers were rolling in their graves were quickly confirmed.

Tres Cojones Clinton and Mr. Mushmouth, listen up. The majority of Americans would like a new President who thinks deeply, who can add two and two and come up with something besides a rhinoceros, and uses his/her intellect to solve problems instead of running off at the mouth, kicking ass to prove testicular fortitude and cojones, and making a fool of us all.

It’s embarrassing.

Gail Vida Hamburg, a former print reporter, now in science communications, is the author of The Edge of the World, a novel shaped by American foreign policy and war. Visit Mirare Press www.mirarepress.com for details. Gail blogs at www.gailvidahamburg.com

From the Department of Denial, Tangents, and Small Thoughts.

An April 9, 2008 Associated Press poll showed that 28 percent of Americans approve of the overall job Bush is doing.

The cluster survey involved telephone interviews with 2500 residents of Dymphna Meadows, named for the patron saint of neurological disorders and epilepsy; Bernadine Siena Forest, named for the illustrious saint of public relations; Elmo Village, named to honor the patron saint of ammunition and explosive workers; and Justin Park, a township that honors the patron of apologists.

The same survey showed that 54 percent of Republicans from Thaddeus, named for the go-to saint for desperate causes approve of the President’s economic policies. “My stocks took a nosedive and I lost nearly everything, but I've put what's left on laddered CDs earning less than 2 percent. But I feel good, the surge is working and victory is within reach,” said Itsma Story. “I know we’re spending a lot of Yuan in Iraq, but the tree of liberty must be nourished from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” said his partner, Donny Deranged.

The cluster survey respondents said they were pleased that the media is finally focusing on the real story. “We needed someone to blow the lid off the Veep’s sunglasses, and identify the imaginary naked women standing in front of blue sky and no fences,” said Kristol Light, a Dymphna-ite. “I am glad that the Fourth Estate is finally focusing on the real issues,” said Nan Nonsequitor, who wore a shirt with the legend, "Avenge 9/11, Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Gail Vida Hamburg is the author of The Edge of the World, a novel shaped by American foreign policy and war. Visit Mirare Press for details.