Absurd

I have to like Republican candidate Ron Paul, even if many don't take him seriously. He seems to be the only contender with sufficient memory to recall some of what happened in the world before 2001. Things like the US engineered overthrow of elected Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mussadegh and the end of Democracy in Iran. Things like our support for Iraq's brutal war against Iran; all the nasty history the iPod generation is too uneducated to know about and the patriotic revisionists have redacted from the public memory.

When Paul suggested in the May 15th "debate" that they hate us because we're there and because of what we have done, New York's former mayor and drag queen said

"I don't think I've heard that before and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11."

• Absurd:
• ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous.
• having no rational or orderly relationship to human life.

Absurd? Perhaps Guiliani's vocabulary is as idiosyncratic as his sense of logic. The idea that our long history of inept, sometimes brutal manipulations centered around beating the Russians to the oil and making deals with many devils to control the wells regardless of how much oppression was involved has had no consequences, is neither honest or credible. If anything is absurd, it's the idea that "they hate us for our freedom" and that we are above concern or blame for the consequences of our actions. Rudy seems to share in the Bush strategy of saying "freedom" and 9/11 as often as possible whether or not it has a rational or orderly relationship to reality.

A reasonable foreign policy has to include an honest assessment of history. It has to include acceptance of responsibility for that history and for current actions. I have to ask myself how many candidates are willing to go there instead of offering cheap slogans and feel-good esteem builders. At the moment I can't think of one on either side other than perhaps Paul or Gravel who is willing to stop pandering to arrogance, to phobias and obsessions and doctrines and get real. The world isn't about us and we can't control it by building H-Bombs and making threats.

They're delighted we're over there because it's easier to fight us there than over here." suggests Paul. "I'm suggesting we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they're delighted."

I'm delighted to hear someone say it.

I like Mike

I guess Gravel doesn't think he has a chance either. That's what allows him to be honest about his views. That's what makes him such an appealing candidate. Bush should go to jail, the Government should stop criminalizing drug use, Citizens should be allowed more direct control over many government decisions, Savings should be encouraged over unrestrained consumption - what could he be thinking when he talks like that? The sleaze machine will bury him; turn everything he says into a parody of what he means.

Mike Gravel sounds too much like the right thing to do and too little like the hollow, sloganeering ideologues we habitually vote for and we probably all know it. We never, of course, do the right thing; not when flags are waving, enemies are all around us and drums are banging. We want the comfort of being pandered to with the same old familiar slogans. He doesn't have a chance against someone charismatic, presidential, well groomed, folksy, thoroughly incompetent and probably dangerous.

Too bad.