Theater of the Deaf is in trouble

Many years ago when I was just starting out in journalism I worked for a chain of weekly papers in Connecticut. One story that I particularly enjoyed writing was a feature about a unique theatrical group based in West Hartford that specializes in performing for deaf and hearing-impaired children. The National Theater of the Deaf put on several performances in the towns that I covered and it was a pure delight to watch the children enjoying lively theatrical performances that were geared specifically towards their special needs. Most of the actors in the troupe were also deaf.

So I was saddened last week to see this story in the NYT about the group’s recent financial troubles.

For nearly four decades it has provided a cultural bridge between the hearing and the hearing-impaired, but unless federal and state agencies come to some agreement about its financing, the National Theater of the Deaf may be unable to carry on much longer.

The NTD’s financial woes first became critical in late 2004 when the Bush Education Department notified them that the Republican Congress had eliminated a grant program that had been contributing $687,000 a year to the theater’s coffers.
Recently, though, Connecticut state lawmakers were preparing to come to the rescue with $200,000 in emergency funds intended to keep the theater going for another year or two. Unfortunately, the emergency funding is being held up after the inspector general for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) informed the head of NTD that they were calling in a $75,000 debt the theater owes on a 15-year-old federal grant.

Apparently, the NTD ran into financial difficulties in the early 1990s when a former executive director mismanaged some funds and left the theater unable to pay the old debt. The fact that it is being called in now is highly questionable. The NEA’s role is to promote the arts, not to enforce old budget deals that would result in shuttering one of the only theaters for the deaf in the country.
I, of course, blame President Bush for the NTD’s current fiscal crisis due to his mismanagement of the national budget - the tax cuts for the rich and the exploding deficits - that obviously led to the elimination of the grant program. But I am also suspicious that the NEA’s inspector general may also be a Bush appointee who is carrying out some twisted right-wing agenda with this sudden desire to collect on an old debt that should have been forgiven long ago. I could be wrong, but even if the guy is not a Bush appointee, surely the administration could do something to bail the NTD out of this predicament if they gave a damn about anything or anyone other than their wealthy campaign contributors and their massive tax cuts.

Chris who?

While visiting relatives in Lubbock last week, the gubernatorial race came up during a dinner conversation. Gov. Perry is actually from that part of the state and my wife’s aunt and uncle know Perry’s parents. However, while they tend to be fairly conservative, they expressed disatisfaction with his performance in office and seemed open to the idea of voting for someone else. They talked about Carole Keeton Strayhorn for a few minutes and didn’t seem terribly happy with her either, and Kinky Friedman seemed out of the question. Then there was a lull in the conversation.
Finally, I spoke up and said “What about the Democrat in the race?”
“Who is that?” they asked in all sincerity.
“Chris Bell,” I said.
Blank stares.
“Yep,” I concluded. “He’s the one who’s going to come in fourth.”

It may simply be unrealistic for Democrats to elect a governor in this state any time soon - although if Massachussetts and New York can have Republican governors, I don’t see why Texas can’t elect a Democrat. But putting a one-term former Congressman and political unknown in place as our nominee is clearly NOT the way to make any headway in winning statewide elections.

Santorum gets "Green" boost

Here is more reason for every true progressive to steer clear of the so-called Green Party.

Every single contributor to the Pennsylvania Green Party Senate candidate is actually a conservative -- except for the candidate himself.
The Luzerne County Green Party raised $66,000 in the month of June in order to fund a voter signature drive. The Philly Inquirer reported yesterday that $40,000 came from supporters of Rick Santorum's campaign (or their housemates). Also yesterday, we confirmed that another $15,000 came from GOP donors and conservatives. Only three contributions, totaling $11,000, remained as possible legit donations.
Today, I confirmed that those came from GOP sources.

I’ve previously expressed my disdain and disgust for the Green Party here and here. But I will just say again that anyone who voted for the Green Party in 2000 was a fool and anyone who would still vote for them today is either being stupid or is totally dishonest about their intentions. The Green Party is nothing more than a tool to help “get Republicans elected every November.”

Lieberman’s loss

Just before I left on vacation I picked up the local paper and saw that syndicated columnist Cal Thomas was calling supporters of Connecticut Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont “Taliban Democrats,” while Vice President Dick Cheney was asserting that Lieberman’s primary loss was a victory for the “al-Qaeda types.”
So I’ve been stewing over this for a few days now. The Cal Thomas crack was highly ironic coming from a Hezbollah (Party of God) Republican such as himself. But the Cheney statement was just flat out offensive and should earn him a one-way ticket into political retirement. I believe Sen. Hillary Clinton had the best reaction to Cheney’s comment:

“I don’t take anything he says seriously anymore. I think that he has been a very counterproductive, even destructive, force in our country and I am very disheartened by the failure of leadership from the president and vice president.”

Indeed. But what to make of the primary loss by the former Democratic vice presidential nominee? Is this really such a radical and surprising move? Not really. Lieberman simply adopted too many positions that were out of tune with his constituency back home. It’s really a common malady in Washington and one that conservatives harp on all the time.
Look at it this way: Lieberman was one of the most conservative Democrats (at least on foreign policy) representing a Blue state. He was essentially a Red Democrat from a Blue state. There are lots of other Red Democrats - Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieau, Ken Salazar, etc. But they all hail from Red states. Likewise, you have a few (not as many) moderate or Blue Republicans - Lincoln Chafee, Olypia Snowe, Arlen Specter - but they all represent Blue states. You don’t have any Blue Republicans from Red states, and I don’t believe there were any other Red Democrats from Blue states. Lieberman was an anomaly. His demise in the primary should not have been a surprise once he took such a radically conservative position on the defining issue of this generation.

Now it is still possible that Lieberman could retain his seat by running a successful campaign as an independent, but I expect his bid will start to lose steam now that the media will be forced to give Lamont serious consideration.

Lock-step diversity

The editorial page at my old newspaper The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal has always irritated me. While in Lubbock during my vacation, I had the opportunity to catch up on a week’s worth of the local paper’s editorials and the thing that struck me was the diversity of the syndicated columnists that they use, or rather the lack thereof.
In a typical week, the paper runs eight nationally syndicated columns, plus three local columns and one from Austin. Of the eight nationally syndicated colunists, four are black males and four are women - two Hispanic, one Asian, and one white.
That’s quite a diverse lineup, obviously meant to balance out the fact that the paper’s editorial board is composed entirely of white males. However, while you may have diversity of color, gender and ethnicity, there is almost no diversity of opinion whatsoever. All but one of the eight syndicated columnists are hard-right conservatives. They have three black male conservatives - Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Larry Elder - (Leonard Pitts is the sole liberal); two Hispanic female conservatives - Linda Chavez and Kathryn Jean Lopez; Suzanne Fields of the Washington Times and the loathesome Michelle Malkin. I guess the biggest surprise is that they don’t run Ann Coulter.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always thought that having a diversity of opinion on the editorial pages is a greater service to the readers than anything else.
This brings me to the larger issue that has always bugged me and that is the expectation that so-called liberal papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post must run a balanced editorial section with equal number of conservative columnists to the liberals, while conservative papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times run solidly right-wing editorial sections without the slightest compunction.
Over at the NYT we get John Tierney and David Brooks while The Washington Post has made George Will and Charles Krauthammer into household names and the LA Times gives editorial space each week to Max Boot and Jonah Goldberg, among others. But the WSJ editorial pages and the Mooney Times are certifiably liberal-free. And I bet that if someone did a survey of newspapers across Texas, they would find that the Lubbock A-J is not alone in its lack of editorial diversity.

I’m back

We criss-crossed Texas last week on $3-a-gallon gasoline, driving first to Corpus Christi where we spent a cloudy morning at the beach and a sunny afternoon at the Texas State Aquarium. The next day we drove back to San Antonio to rest up for a day before heading off for a three-day trip to Lubbock to attend the wedding of my wife’s cousin’s oldest son.
We lived in Lubbock from 1995-2000, so it is always fun to go back and see how things have and have not changed. The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal where I used to work hasn’t changed much and many of the same people are still there.
The kids did amazingly well during the lengthy car trip and had great fun swimming at the hotel pools and playing with their cousins at my wife’s aunt and uncle’s house.
I have a lot that I would like to write about and will try to get to it as I have time.

On vacation

I'll be on vacation all this next week, so expect light posting.
I do want to say that I am excited about the prospect of a competitive race in my congressional district.
Of the possible candidates touted so far, I would take any of them over Henry Bonilla. However, my personal preference would be Art Hall, who is currently serving as my City Councilman and is unfortunately term-limted after this year.

I Miss My MTV

MTV officially turned 25 years old the other day, but you wouldn’t know it from watching the channel. That is apparently a closely held secret at the network which doesn’t want its target audience of adolescents to know that it was around long before most of them were born.
I was part of MTV’s target audience back when it first came out in 1981. I was turning 16 that summer and my family had just hooked up to cable TV for the first time. I had a little black and white television in my room that was permanently tuned to MTV throughout my latter high school years and I absorbed as many videos as I could.
I still remember coming home from school one evening shortly after our cable was hooked up and having one of my friends call to excitedly tell me that one of the Go-Gos videos was on.
Interestingly enough, back when it was getting started, MTV was relatively commercial free. I naively thought this was because we paid for cable and therefore didn’t have to watch commercials. Now I realize it was more likely due to the fact that the fledgling channel had not lured advertisers away from the big three networks at that early stage. But very soon I noticed that they would have the video jockeys or VJs hawking Snickers bars in between videos and before long there were just as many ads on cable as anywhere else.
MTV had a huge impact on my musical tastes during that time. I became a huge fan of The Police largely because of the video for “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” Other favorites included Cheap Trick, the Go-Gos, J. Geils Band, Loverboy, Asia, Joan Jett, John Cougar (Mellencamp) and Rick Springfield. I also became very familiar with many other groups that I otherwise would probably never have been exposed to such as Adam Ant, Duran Duran, Madness, Men at Work, The Pretenders, Flock of Seagulls, Squeeze and many others.
When I went off to college in the Fall of ‘83 I missed out on the next couple years worth of MTV since freshmen and sophomores in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M were not allowed to have televisions in their rooms. By the time I got a TV in my junior year, MTV had changed significantly. All the original VJs I was familiar with were gone and they were busy phasing out the whole VJ format. Furthermore, the random and unstructured stringing of videos together that had at first seemed so novel and fresh was now being replaced with niche blocks of video programming with a heavy concentration on rap, heavy metal and alternative music, none of which particularly appealed to me at the time.
So my MTV viewing became much less frequent and by the time they introduced Beavis and Butthead as a regular feature on the network, I was about through with it. I had no interest in the reality programs that they pioneered or the inane Spring Break programming that would last all summer. I feel very fortunate that I totally missed out on seeing the Jackass series (which later became a movie that I have avoided seeing even though Richard Roeper of Ebert and Roeper fame gave it “thumbs up” the same year that he gave Lord of the Rings a thumbs down - Moron!).
Now, even the alternative VH-1 channel rarely shows videos. I feel disconnected from the current music scene because I don’t get to see the videos and can’t even find radio stations that will play current day music most of the time.
So I guess I am just too old now because I find MTV to be unwatchable. Thus I can understand why MTV would avoid celebrating its 25th anniversary. Because the folks like me who would care about it have pretty much the opinion best articulated by Beavis and Butthead: MTV Sucks.

End this madness

It is good to see that there are still some Republicans who do have a conscience.

Urging President Bush to turn all U.S. efforts toward "ending this madness," a leading Republican senator Monday broke with the Bush administration and called for an immediate cease-fire in the Mideast.
"The sickening slaughter on both sides must end and it must end now," Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel said. "President Bush must call for an immediate cease-fire. This madness must stop."

Unfortunately, even if Bush does call for a ceasefire at this point, it is clear that he is so weak diplomatically that we will be ignored by both sides.

CNN is just now reporting that the Israeli defense minister is claiming that the three-week bombing campaign has killed 300 Hezbollah fighters out of an estimated 2,000. Assuming that this is true, the question is whether it was worth the more than 500 civilian deaths, not to mention the wanton destruction of Lebanon’s civic infrastructure. And then one has to wonder if Hezbollah hasn’t gained 10 times that number of recruits since the Israeli bombing campaign began.

This was a seriously short-sighted move by the Israeli Defense Force and one that will most likely weaken its position in the Middle East for years to come. The mass destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure will no doubt end up being repaired with much of the money coming from U.S. taxpayers. If there was any justice in the world, every penny of that money should come from the billions in foreign aid that we send to Israel every year. However, they will likely need all of that aid and more due to the precarious situation that this military misadventure has placed them in.

Beating my head against the wall

I have to admit that arguing with my friends over at All Things Conservative sometimes makes me feel just like the penguin in this cartoon. But sometimes that’s just what you have to do.

Look out, Nacho!

Last week the local E-N political cartoon Nacho Guarache ran a series of strips that tried to make light of the current crisis in the Middle East by having a “sleeper cell” of Hezbollah terrorists move in next door to the lead character.
In the final strip, seen above, we see Nacho smugly noting that he resolved the situation by calling on his friend, the Rev. John Hagee, “who knows some people.” The final frame has the cartoonish terrorists fleeing an onslaught of missiles fired by several Iraqi jet fighters.
Hagee is a local right-wing fundamentalist preacher, recently profiled by the Wall Street Journal, who take a hardline stance in support of Israel.

The thing that struck me about this Nacho cartoon, however, was that to be true to the actual situation in Lebanon right now, the Israeli fighters probably would have shot their missiles at the building where the Hezbollah militants were staying, thus killing not only the three terrorists, but also Nacho and all of his friends and family. I wonder if Leo Garza, the strip’s talented author, considered such an outcome when he penned the strip? Probably not.

The Israli response to the Hezbollah situation so far has been about as effective as going after cockroaches with a sledge hammer. A lot of incidental damage and very little evidence that you are actually eliminating the real problem.

Hezbollah made me do it

Over the weekend, an Israeli airstrike in Southern Lebanon struck a residential building in Qana killing 56 civilians, mostly children.
The outrage over this latest massacre of innocent civilians is almost deafening overseas and it forced the hawkish Israeli government to agree to a 48 hour ceasefire (which they promptly broke) to allow any other civilians time to flee the area.
If they had agreed to the ceasefire last week, perhaps this would not have happened. And yet, as disturbing as this latest tragedy is, it has done nothing to sate the enthusiasm of those here in the U.S. who believe Israel has the right to bomb the hell out of the entire country of Lebanon (and any other country it chooses) as payback for the actions of a small (but growing) band of militant Islamic extremists.
A ceasefire would be a sign of weakness, they argue, and would only allow Hezbollah to recharge its batteries and recoup its strength.
Besides that, they say, the attack was justified because Hezbollah was firing rockets from that area. In other words, the ‘devil’ made us do it.

I’m not sure what the Israeli government thinks it is actually accomplishing with this sustained attack on the Lebanese countryside. So far, Hezbollah does not appear to have been crippled - as is the stated goal of both Israel and the U.S. - however the image of both countries has been severely tarnished in the eyes of the rest of the world and that could mean even worse problems for us down the road.
As the Washington Post notes today the crisis could undercut Bush's long-term goals in the region.

The Israeli bombs that slammed into the Lebanese village of Qana yesterday did more than kill three dozen children and a score of adults. They struck at the core of U.S. foreign policy in the region and illustrated in heart-breaking images the enormous risks for Washington in the current Middle East crisis.
With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.

Although the United States has urged Israel to use restraint, it has also strongly defended the military assaults as a reasonable response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, a position increasingly at odds with allies that see a deadly overreaction. Analysts think that if the war drags on, as appears likely, it could leave the United States more isolated than at any time since the Iraq invasion three years ago and hindered in its foreign policy goals such as shutting down Iran's nuclear program and spreading democracy around the world.

"The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction," said Richard N. Haass, who was President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director. "The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights."

Bombing the U.N.

A most disturbing story today
about an Israeli bomb or bombs that struck a long-established U.N. facility in southern Lebanon killing four unarmed U.N. peacekeepers.
The Israeli’s are saying it was an accident, and perhaps it way, but My Gosh! that was some accident. If initial news reports are correct, the U.N. observers called an Israeli military liaison about 10 times in the six hours before they died to warn that the aerial attacks were getting close to their position. Despite this, they were killed when an Israeli bomb made a direct hit on their bunker.
And then there is this bit of news:

Lebanese security sources told CNN Wednesday at least three precision-guided bombs were dropped by Israeli aircraft on the U.N. observers' bunker.
A Western diplomat familiar with preliminary U.N. assessments of the scene also said that it appeared the munition that hit the bunker was precision-guided.

A direct hit by three precision guided missiles???!!! And this after they had made nearly a dozen desperate calls to their official Israeli contact saying ‘please don’t shoot us.’??!!?? The U.N. facility was clearly marked as such and well know for some time.
So somehow I find it hard to believe that this was just a case of “oopsie!” by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). So when U.N. Secretary-general Kofi Annan calls it an "apparently deliberate" Israeli airstrike, it seems like he may have some justification.

And recall that this is not the first time the Israeli’s have claimed to have accidently attacked a friendly target in the midst of a battle.

War supporters are taking the position that Israel can do no wrong and are dismissing any suggestion that the attack was anything other than a mistake. However, if it was truly a mistake, what does this say about Israeli claims that they are trying to limit civilian casualties with surgical strikes against Hezbollah military installations? It would seem instead that they are just shooting the hell out of anything and everything over there.

It is high time for this military escalation to be wound back down. Unfortunately, the first stab at a peace deal has ended in failure, which is really no surprise considering this administration’s pathetic track record with diplomacy.

Election year grumbling

This is supposed to be a good year for Democrats. By every measure, the signs are pointing toward big Democratic gains in the mid-term elections. President Bush’s approval rating has been stuck in the mid-30s for a couple of months now, the war in Iraq is every bit the quagmire that Democrats warned it would be, gasoline prices are edging toward $4 a gallon and the domestic economy, while not currently in recession, is nothing to write home about.
And yet I’m still in a particularly pessimistic mood about Democratic prospects this year. Maybe it is because I’m living in a Red State where the Democratic candidate for governor is in serious danger of coming in fourth behind Kinky Friedman. Or maybe it’s because I see all the big time liberal bloggers out there right now obsessing over defeating a Democrat - Joe Lieberman - who should he lose his primary race will probably turn around and run as an Independent - and win.
If I had to make a prediction right now, I would say that Democrats will probably fall short of taking either the House or the Senate. I don’t doubt that they will pick up seats this year, but probably not enough to wrest control away from the Republican yahoos who have been screwing things up so royally. I hope that I am wrong, but I would have to bet that the Republican’s advantages of incumbency and corporate financing will continue to prop them up.

From very bad to worse

More than 100 people a day are dying violent deaths in Iraq, according to the U.N.

An average of more than 100 civilians per day were killed in Iraq last month, the highest monthly tally of violent deaths since the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations reported today. The death toll, drawn from Iraqi government agencies, was the most precise measurement of civilian deaths provided by any government organization since the invasion and represented a dramatic increase over daily media reports. United Nations officials also said that the number of violent deaths had been steadily increasing since at least last summer. In the first six months of this year, the civilian death toll jumped more than 77 percent, from 1,778 in January to 3,149 in June, the organization said.

The news is so bad that it is finally forcing some Republican lawmakers to actually face reality!

Faced with almost daily reports of sectarian carnage in Iraq, congressional Republicans are shifting their message on the war from speaking optimistically of progress to acknowledging the difficulty of the mission and pointing up mistakes in planning and execution.

"It's like after Katrina, when the secretary of homeland security was saying all those people weren't really stranded when we were all watching it on TV," said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.). "I still hear about that. We can't look like we won't face reality."

The shift is subtle, but Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war.

Oh, my! It is no longer tenable to just blame the media??? I know a few conservative bloggers who will be most unhappy to hear that news.

Some Republican lawmakers are even beginning to sound like Sen. John Kerry or Rep. John Murtha!

Rep. Gil Gutknecht (R-Minn.), once a strong supporter of the war, returned from Iraq this week declaring that conditions in Baghdad were far worse "than we'd been led to believe" and urging that troop withdrawals begin immediately.

Prepared to spin

Here is an interesting addendum to the blustering last week about the supposed treason by media outlets reporting on the Treasury Department’s program that tracks terrorist financial activities:

That Times Leak Was No Surprise
Before you jump in with those heaping scorn on the New York Times for using a leak to reveal the secret Treasury program to search financial transactions for terrorist activities, know this: The Treasury Department expected it to leak. When the program was developed in 2003, a press plan was included. The goal: Get out front with the spin that there are safeguards to prevent snooping on private accounts, that it is legal, and that there are big benefits to it. "These three elements needed to be in the first-day story," says an insider. The plan worked. When the Times told Treasury it was running the story, top Treasury aides were OK'd to talk to the Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times, which presented the three points. "It was a textbook case of very good PR management," says the insider.

So not only did the administration not try and keep the story from being published by refusing to cooperate with the media, they had a plan all ready on how they would spin the story once it leaked out - which they assumed would happen all along.

Radical Right

Just got “Conservatives Without Conscience” by John Dean for my birthday. Dean, legal counsel to Richard Nixon, makes the same point I’ve been making for sometime - today’s so called “conservatives” are not conservative at all. They are radicals.

Dean summarizes the book in this Boston Globe op-ed piece:

Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest -- none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical....
I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon ``imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

I’ve just started reading the book and the opening chapter talks about how conservatives today are not even sure how to define conservatism. But even though people are not sure how to define it, they have a good reaction to the term and more people are willing to embrace that label than the villified term “liberal.”
I’ve noted many times how I tend to be “conservative” in my personal habits, but “liberal” in how I treat other people. How you treat other people is the key, in my opinion. I can forgive people for their own personal foibles, but I have a hard time when they are in turn intolerant of the foibles of others.
If being conservative means being prudent and efficient with government resources, then I am all for it. But if it means spending billions on military misadventures overseas while being tightfisted with spending here in our own country, then I have a big problem with it.
It grates me the way many conservatives today hyperventilate about patriotism and go on and on about how much they love their country, when in truth the only thing they really love is the symbolism (like the flag) while actually despising most of the people and the institutions that make up the country.

Is Bush losing it?

Or is this just how he normally expresses himself when not reading from a prepared text?

One of those pesky open microphones caught President Bush in a foul-mouthed tirade against Hezbollah the other day.

"See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s--- and it's over," Bush told British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the closing lunch at the Group of Eight summit.

Generally, it is a sign of a poor intellect when someone has to routinely resort to using swear words in their conversations. It means they don’t have a proper command of the language to adequately express themselves and so they fall back on these common words that are considered offensive in polite society. It is sad, really, to know that this is how our President talks to foreign leaders when he is not being scripted by his handlers.

Middle East mess

Civilian casualties in Lebanon are up to 86, including 16 children just today. And the Israelis don't seem to have any intention of letting up anytime soon. President Bush isn't even bothering to suggest that they use restraint on civilians anymore.
In fact, most conservatives act like this is great news. Why is that? Never mind that the escalation has caused the Dow Jones average to plummet, wiping out all of the gains for the entire year, and as oil prices surge towards $80 a barrel we could soon find ourselves paying $4 a gallon for gasoline.

But none of this phases most conservatives - not the civilian deaths nor the economic carnage back here in Bushland. I think Kevin Drum comes closest to explaining the conservative response:

"...most conservatives simply take the uncomplicated stance that Palestinians are terrorists and that Israel should always respond to provocation in the maximal possible way. The fact that this hasn't worked very well in the past doesn't deter them."

And apparently all Lebanese and all Syrians are terrorists, too. Not to mention all Iranians, most Iraqis and just about anyone of Arabic descent. Therefore, civilian deaths in those countries do not matter and they don't merit human treatment when captured by our side either.

It is a sad situation over in the Middle East right now. The folks who touted the Iraq war as some kind of boon to Democracy across the region have a lot of explaining to do right now. Instead of a domino effect of democratization springing up everywhere, we have increased militancy by terrorist groups that are threatening to overthrow the more moderate governments in those countries, not unlike the way Hamas did in Palestine.

Hatfields and McCoys

I’ve been hesitant to comment on the latest fighting in the Middle East, knowing that when I do I will probably be attacked for being anti-Israel or some other such nonsense. But I am thoroughly disgusted right now with the Israeli response to the aggression from Hamas and Hezbollah.
Israel is the strongest and most developed country in the region, both economically and militarily, and thus they should be setting the example for others to follow. By this I mean that they should use more restraint in dealing with these militant groups yapping at their heels and not meet every provocation with an equal and more devestating provocation.
And yet Ehmud Olmert, the new Israeli PM, has let loose the dogs of war at the latest provocation by the militants on their border. Many people will say this is entirely justified, but I believe it will only further enflame tensions in the region and force Israel into an ever increasingly defensive posture. It is unfortunate, because Ariel Sharon would probably have had more leeway to use restraint, but it appears that Olmert feels it necessary to take the “eye for an eye” approach to a whole other level. I just have one question, though. When has “getting tough” like this ever worked to resolve all their problems in the past? I have no sympathy for the Hamas and Hezbollah militants, but wreaking havoc on the entire Lebanese population will only serve to radicalize that population as it has done to the Palestinians and will ultimately drive more and more people into the arms of the militants. Al Quaeda, I’m sure, is overjoyed at the prospect.

I essentially agree with this commenter from TPM:

The larger points in the current Israel/Palestine/Lebanon crisis are two: Olmert's apparent lack of "maturity" as PM for lack of a better word, and seeming inability to measure his govt's response, has escalated the situation close to a point of no return. Given the harsh rhetoric and extreme measures being taken it appears the the situation is being run by the war-makers in the cabinet and there seems to be no countervailing voice of reason, moderation or diplomacy. The other is that the crisis has exposed in stark relief the US' utter inability to influence the situation. Bush has nothing to offer, having bought wholesale into the rhetoric of "terror"-he can't ask for moderation, he can't use any bargaining chips, he can't bully Olmert in any of the ways his predecessors have done.

Bush’s response during this ordeal has been truly pathetic.
The most he will do is to meekly ask Israel to “try to limit civilian casualties” as they continue to step up their attacks.
“Hey guys, Try not to kill too many innocent civilians over there, OK? Thanks.”

Maybe someone else will step up to the plate and try and talk sense to these people. It’s obviously not going to come from this administration. We have done nothing to promote peace and stability in the Middle East and have, by contrast, only stirred the pot of resentment with our unprovoked invasion of Iraq.