Scary Foreign Policy Now 50% Off!

The US dollar is decreasing in value, in direct proportion to the value the US has to the rest of the world. Halliburton is now overcharging the Pentagon in euros. And in light of our reckless and dangerous foreign policy, it seems appropriate that foreigners only think of the US as a great place to get Timberland boots at bargain prices. We've gone from being a beacon of hope and opportunity to the world, to just being a huge clearance sale.

But if you watched the Republican debate, you would think the US is still THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD! And if you judge a country's greatness by the number of detainees held indefinitely at Guantanemo, by our support for torture at the highest levels of government, and our bullying approach to international affairs, then yes, WE ARE NUMBER ONE!

In the last Democratic debate, virtually all the Democratic and Republican candidates(except Dodd, Kucinich and maybe Richardson) favored continuing the inane policy of not having relations with Cuba. The Bush Administration says they won't deal with Cuba until Cuba becomes like the US. To accomplish that, Cuba would have to make its health care and education system worse.

The government of Sudan is guilty of crimes against humanity, but they do have a sick sense of humor. How else could you explain their conviction of a British teacher who committed the heinous sin of asking her students to name a teddy bear?Since many of the kids in the class(as well as tens of millions of boys around the world) are named Muhammad, they went with that name for the stuffed animal. Just as a class in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn would probably name their teddy bear Moshe. And a class in Greenwich, Connecticut would name its teddy bear Biff. Maybe Sudan should focus a little less on teddy bears, and a little more on the hundreds of thousands of real people, who have been killed on their watch in Darfur.

Last Tuesday, the Middle East Summit was held at the ideal place for peace talks, the US Naval Academy. Men and women walking around in military uniforms provide just the right ambiance for negotiating an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After doing absolutely nothing for seven years, Condi Rice is desperate to have something that looks good on her resume when she interviews for a job a year from now. Bush told Abbas and Olmert, "Call me whenever you like", with the sincerity of an ex-girlfriend saying she still wanted to stay in touch. In this era of lowered expectations, the Summit was considered by some to be a success, because the two sides agreed to, TALK! But not too much talk, and don't rush into talking about anything substantive. They pledged to come up with an agreement a year from now. I thought I was a procrastinator. At least when I put off doing things that can further my career, no lives are lost as a result.

But then I saw in Haaretz today, that Olmert thinks an agreement by the end of 2008 is unlikely. So essentially, the summit brought the two sides together not to talk about ending the conflict, but to keep talking until the end of next year, when it would be nice if they negotiated a peace deal, but if they don't, there's no harm done. And they should call Bush whenever they like. Because when it comes to not finding peace, Bush is just the right guy to call.

The Hunt for Illegal Nuts

You can find productions of The Nutcracker virtually everywhere this holiday season.

This item appeared in the New York Times on Thursday:

Israel has asked for help from the United States in cracking down on illegal pistachio nut imports from Iran, after Washington warned that the trade was hurting efforts to curb Tehran's nuclear program.

I think the hunt for "illegal nuts" should focus on the occupants of The White House, who fit that description perfectly.

Israel imports pistachios worth $26 million annually, mostly from Turkey. But Washington says nuts from Iran are mixed in with the shipments, undermining economic sanctions meant to force Iran to stop developing its nuclear abilities.

How fitting that nuts from Turkey and Iran get mixed together. Both kinds of nuts deny genocide. If part of the US's bullying approach to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons involves monitoring sales of pistachio nuts, you have to wonder who the real nuts are.

The latest spin on Iraq this week is that THINGS ARE GOING REALLY WELL NOW! Maybe it's not that progress is being made, it's that eventually even horrible, despicable things have to wind down for the time being. And the so-called progress is 1000 Iraqis returning to Baghdad, out of 4 million who fled the country. The media reports that things are getting back to normal in Baghdad are probably plagiarized from stories like NEW ORLEANS IS READY FOR BUSINESS! The recent election results that gave the New Orleans City Council a white majority, show that New Orleans may be ready for business, but apparently not ready for black people. For most of us, Katrina was a humanitarian disaster. To some Republicans, it was just redistricting.

When President Bush flew over New Orleans after Katrina, he remarked about the partying he used to do there, and also about Senator Trent Lott losing his multimillion dollar Mississippi Gulf summer home. While I felt sorry for Lott's housing loss, I'm certainly not sorry that he announced today that he would retire from the Senate at the end of the year. Lott almost had to resign after he said that our country would have been better off if deceased bigot Strom Thurmond had been elected President. Lott tried to back down. He went on Black Entertainment Television, he changed his name to "T Lotty". But Lott was just showing his true color(white). He once spoke at a white supremacist meeting and afterwards he claimed he had no idea who the group was. I would have thought the hooded sheets might have been a tipoff.

In the Las Vegas debate Thursday, the Democratic candidates had to keep their answers short because CNN didn't want to keep the audience off the gambling floor for too long. Wolf Blitzer started cutting them off as soon as they started speaking. And in the case of Dennis Kucinich, Blitzer barely let him speak at all. He practically prefaced each question to Kucinich with, "You have absolutely no chance of winning but...". The first primary is several weeks away, but the "frontrunners" get much more time to speak than the "second tier" candidates. How can you have frontrunners when no one has voted yet?

General Musharraf wants to keep the state of emergency in Pakistan until after elections are held. What better way to hold a free and fair election than have your opponent under house arrest during the campaign? That means he would have about as many public appearances as Fred Thompson. And Musharraf might decide to put off the election indefinitely, something Rudy Giuliani wouldn't mind, since he talked about postponing the Mayoral election in New York after September 11.

The Annapolis Middle East Summit has been criticized by Republicans like Mitt Romney who revealed his vast knowledge of the conflict when he said, "How could you possibly have a peace conference at this stage? Who would you talk to?" Apparently Romney has never heard of the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, who will be at the Summit and hopefully will be spoken to. What should have been a week-long meeting, now is rumored to only run for a day, and if they listen to ignorant words like Romney's, the Summit might wind up as a 10 minute conference call.

CBS News writers are threatening to go out on strike, which would give Katie Couric a chance to do what she does best- a news broadcast without any news. The best part of the CBS Evening News is the recorded voice of Walter Cronkite at the beginning of the show. Originally they were going to go with a video of Edward R. Murrow rolling over in his grave. But Katie isn't the only one. All the 6:30 PM network news shows fail to report what's really important. I guess the war in Iraq must have ended, because it wasn't even mentioned on tonight's NBC Nightly News. But there was time for a 5 minute story on teenage paparazzi.Thank God, we live in a country that allows a free, independent press to flourish. They don't get to see stories like that in Pakistan.

Although what Musharraf has done is totally reprehensible, it's hard to fear a guy who was a guest on "The Daily Show". And one hopes that even Musharraf can see the irony in appearing on a show that regularly ridicules our President, while doing so in Pakistan results in a three year prison sentence.

And yet I think it's great that the Bush Administration is actively talking with a leader who does things we disapprove of. While they're at it, can't they make time in their schedule for Ahmadinejad? Or do they only talk to world leaders who wear ties?

Department of Torture

You would think that refusing to call waterboarding torture would disqualify someone from becoming the highest law official in the United States, but Michael Mukasey was sworn in as Attorney General this week. Instead of being sworn in with a stack of bibles, he took the oath over a stack of naked Iraqi prisoners.

And our Senator from New York Chuck Schumer happily joined every Republican and several Democrats by voting to confirm Mukasey. Schumer basically said that other than being in favor of torture, he was perfect for the job. He thinks waterboarding's OK, but other than that... That's like saying, "The waiter never brought our food but other than that..." "The taxi never took us anywhere, but other than that..." Senator Feinstein defended Mukasey by saying, "He's a judge, he wants to get all the facts." Mukasey doesn't want all the facts, he just wants to keep half the Bush Administration out of jail. And how could John McCain, a man who was tortured as a POW, support a man who won't condemn torture? I guess, as a Presidential candidate, McCain doesn't want to offend the Pro-Torture lobby in the US.

The previous pro-torture Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said during his confirmation hearing, that even if the US sometimes tortures people, "at least we don't behead them." That's quite a lofty standard to hold yourself up against. And another blast from the past, Donald Rumsfeld, during the Abu Graib scandal, said "I heard about the torture in January, I didn't realize how bad it was until I saw the pictures. Why did he have to wait for the pictures? Doesn't "torture" tell you enough? Apparently Rumsfeld thought, "Maybe it's the nice kind of torture, maybe it's the tickling torture".

And Mukasey is an observant Orthodox Jew. I wish he would also observe that torture is illegal and immoral. In fact, I think God would be happy if Mukasey traded in one of his ritual observances in exchange for condeming torture. How about it's OK to drive on the Sabbath, but not to hold someone's head under water so they think they're drowning? That's a good tradeoff.

As a proud Reform Jew who doesn't keep Kosher, and if he ever drove, would drive on the Sabbath, I despise torture, war, lying, deceiving, and treating human beings in an inhumane way. And after two weeks traveling in Eastern Europe, where millions were brutally tortured and killed, it would have been nice to return home to a country incapable of torture, and incapable of invading and ravaging another country. But my ticket was to the US, not Iceland.

Polish jokes

WARSAW, POLAND.
I'm sitting in the business center(the lobby actually) of the Polonia Palace Hotel in Warsaw, directly opposite a hugh Stalin-era monument that is now oh so appropriately two beautiful theatrical spaces, a multiplex movie theater and a cafe. And across the street from the former Stalin edifice are two(count'em two) shopping centers. What better statement about the overthrow of Communism? And the street we're staying on is called Jerozolimskie, or Jerusalem. Who says irony is dead?

And they must have planned today's parlimentary elections in Poland, just for the American political comedian who just arrived. Although all the returns haven't been tabulated(apparently there were some hanging chads in Lodz), the opposition party seems to have won, thanks to a disastrous performance by the present Prime Minister in a debate. It's nice to know that in Poland,unlike the US, voters actually pay attention to debates.

Here in Poland, the outgoing Prime Minister and President are twins. As incompetent as they turned out to be, at least for a brief time they actually ruled a country. The best American twins seem to do is go into rehab after being child stars.

Warsaw was 80% destroyed during WWII, and during a wonderful walk Ruth and I took today, it has been miraculously restored, especially in the Old Town which Eisenhower said was the most devasated area he'd ever seen when he toured it in 1945.
The buildings were rebuilt to the original pre-WW II designs, and they look like they have been around for hundreds of years in its timeless beauty, instead of the 55 or 60 years since it was rebuilt. Thank God, there is no Donald Trump or Bruce Ratner in Poland, or else they would have replaced the historic buildings with ugly 60 story high rises, and an arena or two.

After enjoying several delicious meals, including potato pancakes and pieroges, I called my parents in Brooklyn tonight(the reception was much clearer than when I call from my Panasonic cordless in Park Slope.) My father said, "Of course you loved the food, it's ours".

So Poland is really not foreign to me. Yes, the language is impossible to decipher(we just mastered "thank you"), but we feel very much at home. In a city where almost a million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis, we are walking its streets, having enjoyable(despite the language barrier) conversations with the people, laughing, drinking fair trade coffee and eating good food.The emptiness of a city without the Jews who once were as integral a part of Warsaw as we are now in New York, is always with you. To forget, or never to have known about, the horror of their extermination is a sin. But we all must also take its lessons to heart. And Jews, like myself, must always treat all people with compassion and humanity. Because we know, better than most, how horrible the alternative is.

Well, as I prepare to leave the lobby, and hope that the internet charges aren't enforced, I close with a bit of hope. Twice during the last two days here, I heard Louie Armstrong's rendition of "A Wonderful World". After all that has happened here in the past, let's hope that the future of that wonderful world is a bright one here in Warsaw.

Debatable Intelligence

The only thing Fred Thompson accomplished in his first Republican debate was to make Rudy Giuliani look really short, and to make himself come across as inarticulate and uninterested. Just the kind of candidate George W. Bush can relate to.

And someone should tell Thompson that "Law and Order" isn't a big enough credit to be President of the United States. Every actor in New York(except me) has appeared on one of the 12 Law and Order shows and spinoffs. So it's not really a big deal. Now if he was on "American Idol", that would be different.

Calling Mitt Romney “an empty suit” is disrespectful to the suit. Romney dresses well and is enthusiastic, but so is a real estate broker. That doesn’t make you qualified to be President. And these days, it doesn’t help you sell houses either. Mitt just likes to run a lot in parades, and chides business journalists for having a “doom and gloom” attitude.

If you’re a good business journalist who knows where our economy is heading, you should have a “doom and gloom” attitude. If Romney is elected, there’ll be plenty of doom and gloom to go around. And why is saying you're going to be just like Ronald Reagan considered a good thing?

When my favorite Republican Ron Paul said the US has never been attacked by another country, Giuliani glossed over the fact that no country was responsible for September 11, when he shot back, ”What about 9/11?” Which is Rudy’s answer for everything.
“What would you do about health care?”
“9/11”
“Education?”
“9/11”

Turkey angrily criticized Congress for calling the mass killings of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey “genocide”. What would Turkey rather call it? “Notanicethingocide”, or “Iwasabsentthatdayocide” or “I don’tknowwhatyou’retalkingaboutocide”.

The New York Times today reported that Israel’s raid in Syria recently was on a nuclear facility. They cited American and Israeli intelligence officials. Why should this intelligence be any more intelligent that the false intelligence on Iraq? And if the intelligence was really intelligent, why does the US and Israel refuse to comment on the intelligence? And will the American people be as dumb about this intelligence as they were about the discredited Iraq intelligence?

And why is it OK for some countries to have nuclear weapons, but not others? Are the countries who can have them more responsible and considerate when it comes to destroying a country in a nuclear attack? The US and Russia recently agreed to reduce their nuclear warheads to about 4000 each. I don't know about you, but that lets me rest easy at night. And the US has recently talked about winning a "limited nuclear war". I think they're all going to be limited. Not too many nuclear wars are going to drag on for days. And when it's over, no one will be around for the victory celebrations.

Ann Coulter said that “Jews needed to be perfected” and that they should all become Christians. After hearing that, Mel Gibson hired her to write his next film. When asked to clarify her remarks, Coulter denied that they ever happened.

Comedians always like to go out on a laugh, but this week I want to pay tribute to two people who helped pave the way for the political comedy you read here and that I perform onstage.

“If I hadn’t met him, I’d be washing cars today,” legendary political satirist Mort Sahl told the New York Times about Enrico Banducci who died on Tuesday. “It took me a long time to catch on, but he gave me the time to find my voice.” Banducci, who owned the Hungry I nightclub in San Francisco, helped start the careers of Sahl, Woody Allen, Shelley Berman(who I will be performing with December 22-25 in San Francisco) and countless others. Brad Rosenstein, who was curator of a 2007 exhibition on Mr. Banducci and the club for the San Francisco Public Arts Library and Museum, said this week that satirical political comedy was “unknown before the Hungry I”. Banducci believed in giving comedians complete artistic freedom, and piano player Don Asher was quoted on SFGate.com as saying, “I must have played for a thousand club and restaurant owners," "He was the only owner who put performers and musicians ahead of the cash register." We could certainly use some club owners like that today, who value political comedy, and who place artistic expression above the almighty dollar.

And Ned Sherrin, who created “That Was The Week That Was”, the British and later American satirical TV show, died recently as well. What Banducci did for live satirical comedy, Sherrin did for television, as TW3 was the first TV show to satirize the political establishment. Except for The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher, that kind of satirical humor is sorely missing from American television today.

Next week, this blog comes to you from Warsaw, Poland where my wife Ruth and I are beginning a two week Jewish Heritage Tour. See you next Sunday.

Doubting Thomases and Other Doubts

Clarence Thomas is a man who admirably lifted himself out of extreme poverty to serve in high level Justice Department positions, but his biggest distinction is being one of the most unqualified people to ever serve on the Supreme Court. In the 16 years he’s been on the bench, the only words he’s ever uttered is, “I go along with whatever Scalia just said.” Yet even though his nomination was confirmed, in his new memoir, he’s still pissed off. Especially at liberals, who he said treated him worse that the Ku Klux Klan ever did. So a man who thinks that Ted Kennedy is worse than the Grand Wizard is deliberating on issues affecting our life and liberty.

There were two Thomases to doubt the past week. Isiah Thomas, the coach and general manager of the Knicks, was found by a jury to have sexually harassed a woman executive at Madison Square Garden. And his defense was that it’s OK for a black man to call a black woman a “bitch”. If Clarence Thomas was the presiding judge he would have probably sided with Isiah Thomas, because that’s essentially what Clarence called Anita Hill. What's next from the boorish, arrogant misogynistic management of the Knicks and Madison Square Garden? Are they going to change the name of the Knicks City Dancers to the Knicks City Bitches? And name Don Imus as their new play by play announcer?

I was at a party last week where inexplicably a boxing match on HBO was on television. In the justifiable uproar over Michael Vick and dog fighting, don’t you think someone should make a peep about humans beating each other’s brains out, with celebrities happily watching ringside? Take away the gloves and the Everlast shorts and what you have is two men or women having the kind of fight someone would try to break up in real life. Maybe it’s time to break up the fight in the ring as well. I hate it when people say that boxing is a ticket out of “the streets”. So is the military, and the end result is essentially the same. You get short term financial stability, so you can injure or kill someone, and quite possibly get injured or killed yourself. And as I watched the fight out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t help but notice that the HBO announcers wore tuxes. When two guys are pounding each other into submission, is formalwear really called for?

I’m glad Senator Larry Craig said this week that he won’t resign. Why should he? If they were going to make Senators resign for “moral turpitude”, he should have been forced to resign with other Senators like him who voted against according gays equal rights and protections under the law. That’s immoral. Tapping your feet in a men’s room stall isn’t immoral, it’s annoying. And even having sex in a stall shouldn't be a crime- it’s just rude. After all, people are waiting who have to actually use the bathroom. It would be great if we lived in a society that didn’t feel the need to have undercover police sitting in men’s room stalls all day waiting for men to tap their feet.

Republicans are afraid it ruins their family values image. Is it really pro-family to send sons off to war for no reason and keep them there indefinitely? And is it pro-family to threaten Iran, by saying we might use our military options, instead of negotiating? Military options is a polite way of saying “Killing men, women and children.” We should make Presidential candidates say those words instead of "military options". Rudolph Giuliani would have to say "We can’t take the killing of men, women and children option off the table.”

New Yorkers seem more devastated by the collapse of the Mets than by the collapse of our moral authority. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world, if people got more outraged by a President who misled us into a horribly unnecessary war, than by a decent and talented Mets manager who couldn’t get his wildly overpaid players to hit, field or pitch a ball? Instead of “Fire Willie”, I’d like to live in a country where 55,000 people in a stadium yelled “Fire Bush and Cheney” instead.