The Spanish Fly In Obama’s Ointment

When Barack Obama meets Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in London this week at the G20 summit, it will be perversely interesting to see if Zapatero is greeted with the famous Obama smile or a less-often-seen, steely-eyed stare.

Spanish investigating magistrate Baltazar Garzón – the man who arrested former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 – sent a 98-page complaint to prosecutors asking that John Yoo, William Haynes, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee and Doug Feith plus two unnamed others be investigated for war crimes. One of the two unnamed individuals is said to be former CIA head George Tenet, under whose watch CIA operatives tortured captives. Spain claims jurisdiction because five of its citizens were held at Guantanamo and tortured.

As reported here Sunday, coupled with Canada quietly asking top Bushies including the former president and vice president, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and several others to not enter the country, foreign travel is increasingly problematic for the men who authorized torture and other war crimes during the Bush years. If any of the eight try entering any of the 25 European Union nations, they will likely be arrested and shipped off to Madrid.

While the Canadian admonition was sent privately, the Spanish investigation is very public and adds to the growing pressure on Pres. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to have the United States undertake its own investigation – something the president’s political advisors keep telling him to sidestep as long as possible.

Indeed, Garzón may well prove to be the Spanish fly in Obama’s ointment of trying to avoid naming an independent war crimes prosecutor.

Proactive Obligation

The fact is, under both US law and its treaty obligations, Obama has a legal requirement to proactively investigate what are now truly serious allegations of war crimes committed by high ranking Bush administration officials. Between Cheney’s repeated, public boasting of ordering torture and information contained in the Justice Dept. “torture memo’s” written by Yoo and Bybee, and approved by John Ashcroft and Gonzales, clearly there is a what lawyers call a prima facie case warranting a formal probe.

In other words, as constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley has said repeatedly on MSNBC, the White House has no viable legal alternative but to investigate, regardless of the possible political cost.

One informed observer believes that Obama is undoubtedly aware of this and may be trying to postpone the inevitable until after the 2010 elections when, he hopes, the Democratic majority in the Senate will increase enough so that his legislative agenda can be passed without scrambling for a handful of Republican votes.

“There’s a certain realpolitick about this,” I was told by a friend in Washington who knows both the Obama White House and how Congress works. “Obama knows what he has to do but he also knows that without 60 sure Senate votes, the GOP will tie up everything else he wants to accomplish in political knots.”

Bad Timing

Obviously, The White House would like the timing of the Spanish initiative to be different. But as Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, the “investigation … (is) one that the Obama administration has to take very seriously. And it means that the pressure is increasing on this country to open its own criminal investigation.”

The G20 gathering is starting on a tense note anyway, with Britain and the US unhappy about the tepid response of many European governments about providing greater stimulus to their flailing economies. Spain is one of the nations that Washington and London wants to do more so it is uncertain how – or even if – Obama will raise the Garzon investigation with Zapatero at some over the next few days.

Chances are good that, whatever is said at the G20, the war crimes matter will not go quietly into that good night. Garzón has a long track record of successful prosecutions. In addition to the Pinochet matter, he has overseen human rights abuse investigations of the former military government in Argentina, Islamic terrorists operating in Spain, the armed Basque separatist group ETA, as well as major drug traffickers.

Canada To Bush: Y’all Don’t Come Back Soon.

A few weeks ago, George W. Bush slunk into Calgary, Alberta where he was paid a reported $50,000 to address a gathering of oil men; in Alberta, there’s no such thing as oil women even in the 21st century because the province still savours its rough-n’-ready cowboy mentality. It was his first post-presidency speech and Canadians weren’t happy about it.

In fact, so many protesters showed up at the auditorium that Bush had to be squirreled through a maze of tunnels and back alleys to get from The Pallister Hotel where he stayed the few blocks to the venue.

But protestors on the street weren’t the only group seeking to block Bush’s high-priced speech. They were joined by a group of Canadian human rights lawyers who filed suit, trying to prevent Bush from entering the country or to force the federal government to arrest him on charges of suspicion of war crimes.

Although the legal manoeuvre failed, mostly because it was filed to late, it indirectly resulted in the former president being asked by Ottawa to not return.

Stay Away

Three different sources in the minority Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper – an Albertan himself although he did not attend the Calgary event – confirmed to me that after the appearance, the Canadian government quietly sent word to Bush’s office in Texas saying it would be much happier if he didn’t try crossing the border again anytime soon.

In fact, the government reportedly slipped the same cautionary advice to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld – who’s already been chased once through the streets of Paris by a French prosecutor who wanted to arrest and investigate him for car crimes – Fredo Gonzales, John Ashcroft and reportedly a few others, telling them that it would not be in their best interest to try entering Canada. Since none of the former administration officials are still protected by diplomatic immunity, they could be seized at the border like some aged former SS officer still on the lamb.

“The PM doesn’t need to be confronted by the Opposition asking why he’s letting potential war criminals into the country,” one of the three sources said in an interview this week. Because they are part of the government, none of the three was willing to be quoted by name.

Another of the three sources told me, “Even though Harper likes Bush personally, the country hates him so the PM is trying to avoid what could be an embarrassing cross-border diplomatic incident, doing something that could trigger an election or be seen by the public as coddling a possible war criminal.”

Harper’s razor thin margin of seats in Parliament means he stays in office only with the sufferance of the Liberals, New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois, who will topple the government sometime in the next year when they decide the timing is right.

Canadian Law

Under Canadian law, the Attorney General in Ottawa can investigate anyone anywhere in the world for war crimes and crimes against humanity even if a Canadian citizen is not involved. However, three Canadian citizens were swept up by Bush war crimes: Two were held at Guantanamo – one is still there – and one was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” when he was stopped at Kennedy Airport and then sent to torture chambers in Syria.

If someone suspected of war crimes tries entering the country, the law says they must be detained at the border. Under the narrowest definition of war crimes in Canadian statutes, Bush and other high-ranking members of his administration committed war crimes on at least four different occasions: When he invaded Iraq without UN approval; when his invasion resulted in the deaths of Iraqi civilians; when he ordered torture to be used during interrogations; and when he denied the Red Cross access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and the CIA black sites around the world.

While a significant number of people here, in the US and around the world would be positively gleeful at the sight of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or others on a long list being clapped in irons at the border by the RCMP and hauled off to Kingston Prison while an investigation is undertaken, Ottawa has no interest in prompting a major row with Washington.

It is much easier to ask a handful of potential tourists to stay home.

Republicans Begin Devouring Their Own

It didn’t take the GOP long to begin devouring its own.

No sooner had the Senate passed The Stim yesterday but notorious right-wing funder-in-chief Richard Mellon Scaife’s front organiza- tion, “The National Republican Trust PAC,” sent an urgent e-mail to fellow travellers asking for money to defeat Senators Arlen Specter, Susan Collins and Olympia Snow – all of whom voted for the measure and two of them are up for re-election in 2010.

In large, bold faced type, the e-mail screamed:

We were close to defeating this outrageous plan.

But then three traitorous Republican senators broke ranks to back Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and the Democrats.

Who are they? Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

These three senators have betrayed not only their colleagues but also the basic principles of the Republican Party.

Apparently, to Scaife and Scott Wheeler, executive director at NRTPac, it’s alright to let a coughing, wheezing nation sink into a death throe of unemployment, foreclosures and business failures that would make 1929 and 1930 seem like a garden party by comparison; hell, we’re already teetering on the edge of that particular precipice. Better that than betraying the Republican Party.

But nowhere does the e-mail mention that all of the other House and Senate Republicans – including Specter, Snow and Collins – were busy betraying their country for years while supporting “the basic principles” of their party. Apparently, these basic principles include rubber-stamping everything from the Cheney-engineered and oil industry-written “energy plan” to passing the (un)PATRIOT Act, blindly supporting Bush’s Iraq War folly, turning a blind eye to torture, ignoring Al Gonzales’ crimes at Justice, doubling the national debt and bungling the first half of the Wall St. bailout.

Yes, Mr. Scaife, it’s understandable why you are so determined to rid the party of its few remaining reasonable people and stuff it full of lead headed toadies. Clearly, what will bring the party out of the wilderness voters kicked it into the past two elections are more folks like Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty. Oh, and Richard Mellon Scaife.

Party First, Last, Always

The irrational harangue NRTPac’s Wheeler sent out continues:

Those of us who were forced to watch in pain as liberal Republicans defected to support Democrats now have an outlet for our frustrations.

The truth is that these three liberal Republicans are RINOS – Republicans in Name Only – who are notorious for siding with Democrats when important legislation comes up for a vote.

By supporting The National Republican Trust, you know your donation will be used to punish those RINOs who have sold us out time and time again.

Besides voting to save the Republic from economic catastrophe, exactly how did Specter, Snow and Collins sell out the Republican Party “time and time again”? For a week, Specter blocked the Senate Judiciary Committee from voting on Eric Holder’s Attorney General nomination. Collins pushed tons of tax breaks into The Stim while removing billions for upgrading schools and helping ease state budgets. Snow voted to send Sam Alito to the Supremes.

To Scaife and NRTPac, an elected official’s sole purpose is to support the Republican Party, the nation be damned. To them, the Senate isn’t really “the world’s greatest deliberative body” but a place where Republican Solons do what Rush Limbaugh says.

Really Goofy People

Naturally, NRTPac has its own program to stimulate the economy: More tax cuts for Richard Mellon Scaife and his friends. This despite the fact that economists on the right and left – including Nobel Prize winners – agree that tax cuts won’t get us out of this Republican-engineered economic morass.

But just in case people receiving the e-mail think The Stim might actually be a good idea, Wheeler tosses in the kitchen sink:

It is critically important that we do this, because Obama is planning to push through in the coming weeks for programs like socialized healthcare, reducing our military strength — even legalizing millions of illegal aliens.

Socialized healthcare? When did the president say anything about socialized healthcare? He does believe, like a majority of the country, that everyone should have health coverage but he never whispered a hint about “socializing” medicine.

As for reducing our military strength and legalizing “millions” of illegal aliens, what is Wheeler smoking? Not even socialist Senator Bernie Sanders talks about reducing an overblown military or unconditional amnesty for illegal aliens.

Scaife and Wheeler are really goofy people. What’s sad is there are equally goofy people who’ll read the e-mail and send money.

- With a h/t thanks to Jill Parlee. -

The GOP Floats Out To Sea, Alone On A Shrinking Iceberg

There isn’t much point showing the Republican Party that they’ve lost it completely and are floating out to sea, alone and abandoned on a shrinking iceberg like an aged bull walrus driven from the herd.

After all, new party chair Michael Steele doesn’t know that when you work, you have a job and vice versa; it doesn’t matter who signs the pay check.

House GOP members should split the cost of a dictionary with Steele because many of them harrumph the stimulus is “just a spending bill,” not grasping that stimulating the economy means government spending. I learned that in a Grade 5 unit on the Great Depression.

Even more preposterous, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell decried the stimulus as not being in Republican interests; I guess he forgot that his party spent 12 years enacting laws protecting “Republican interests.” It’s what heaved us into this nose-diving, sink-hole of an economy to begin with.

He also forgot that his party was routed in two straight elections because Americans had their fill of “Republican interests.”

The nonsense being spouted by the GOP might play well in red corners of the South and among well-heeled donors in Houston or San Diego. But when laid against the desperate faces of the unemployed in Elkhart, Indiana or Fort Myers Florida and Peoria Illinois – all cities in counties that voted for John McCain – who jammed civic centers this week to hear Pres. Obama answer questions about fixing their seemingly-hopeless plight, it is easy to see how divorced from reality the Grand Old Poopniks party has become.

Bury Reagan Already

Just as Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover until well into the Sixties, the Republicans have been trotting out Ronald Reagan for nearly three decades without any real reason except he was a kindly old man with hair dyed orange.

But while Hoover let the country slide deeper and deeper into the Depression, becoming the villain of multiple generations of Americans, Reagan did nearly as much harm as Hoover but pulled off creating a much better persona. Ever seen a picture of Hoover smiling or Reagan frowning? As Will Bunch pointedly documents in Tear Down This Myth, despite what Republicans claim today when invoking their hero, Reagan raised taxes, spending and the government’s size during every year of his two term presidency except the first.

In truth, the so-called Great Communicator was just the ultimate flim-flam artist of his time, slicker than P.T. Barnum but just as adept at remembering “there’s a sucker born every minute.”

The trouble with the Republican Party today is three fold:
1. They actually believe the myth Michael Deaver and Nancy Reagan created about Reagan as a low tax, small government prophet.
2. They somehow believe that Reagan did a good job running the nation during his eight years, forgetting Iran-Contra, Star Wars and a tripling of the defence budget.
3. They think he was responsible for ending the Cold War and bringing the Soviet Union to heel even though it was crumbling economically and socially for at least 10 years before Reagan.

The faster Republicans realise that Reagan was the Wizard of Oz, the quicker they will be able to rehabilitate the party instead of remaining a bunch of braying obstructionists yowling at an eager but dwindling band of fellow travellers.

Recognizing Bankruptcy

There are two sure-fire signs the GOP is intellectually bankrupt: Since the election, it asked Joe the Plumber for advice and it touts Sarah Palin is its next Great White Hope. Between them, I’m not sure they have enough smarts to open a childproof aspirin bottle.

Yet the Democrats in Washington still think the Republicans are worth listening to and actually seem to be paying attention to what they say.

According to Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, every dollar of government spending on projects such as infrastructure returns $1.75 to the economy while every dollar of tax cuts returns only 75-cents to the economy. Even a kid running a lemonade stand in front of her home on a hot August afternoon can figure out which is a better deal. So why did Dems allow 42% of the stimulus package to get eaten up by tax cuts? Yes, some cuts will benefit the middle class but, in dollar terms, the biggest chunk goes to the rich and scandalous – meaning GOP contributors and large businesses.

It makes political sense for Pres. Obama to tell audiences that many who oppose his stimulus bill do so from “sincere conviction.” And there may be one or two people in the House and Senate who do have philosophical objections – but no more than that. And Democrats ought to stop molly-coddling them.

John McCain? He’s such a weathered old whore that, in the same speech this week in the Senate, he opposed and supported tax cuts in the bill. Mitch McConnell? Besides looking like he always smells something bad, he hasn’t stood for a principled idea since arriving in Washington. John Boehner? There’s a photo of Boehner next to the word "charlatan" in the dictionary.

Instead of making nice to vulnerable Senators such as Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, Democrats ought to let them know – using every Senatorial courtesy possible – that if they buck Obama on the stimulus, health care reform and other key measures, they won’t know what hit them in 2010 when they’re up for re-election.

It’s one thing to try fostering a spirit of bi-partisanship in Washington. It’s another to give away 45% of much needed stimulus dollars as tax cuts for the wealthy and for business. If this is a start, what will happen when health care finally reaches the Hill?

February Is A Poignant Month

February is a poignant month for it marks my parent’s wedding anniversary and mother’s birthday, and both come a few weeks after the 10th commemoration of her dying. Probably because Barack Obama’s inauguration is still fresh in my mind, and she was a lifelong progressive Democrat, I’ve been thinking a lot about Joyce lately: More than anyone else, even more than events or friends or causes, it was Joyce who gently nudged me further and further left during her lifetime.

It might seem like a long journey from being the youngest daughter in a family that escaped the worst effects of the Depression to a post-war, suburban wifey with two kids playing in the yard who made a mad dash inside when they smelled cookies coming out of the oven, to becoming a woman so vocally and actively incensed by the world around her that she ended up on one of Richard Nixon’s enemies list.

It might seem to be a long journey but it really wasn’t. Well, not for Joyce.

Raised in a family that managed to financially cling to some scrap of the middle-class through the Great Depression, she grew up in a home where her father ruled. Period. If her mother displeased my grandfather – the grandchildren all called him Papa – somehow, he simply refused to speak to anyone in the house. Sometimes, the silence went on for days.

Doing well in school was very important but so was setting the table properly and helping to get dinner ready on time. Evenings were spent doing homework lying on the floor in front of the humungous Stomberg-Carlson radio in the living room. Family vacations were annual, usually in August at a resort near Green Lake, Wisconsin, a small place with housekeeping cabins that barred Jews, Irish and – it goes without saying – blacks. Since my grandfather was Jewish, when they were very little Joyce and her sister needed a bit of coaching before the trip: “We’re Jewish at home but not on vacation.”

Outwardly, mother grew up an ordinary girl in an ordinary home with ordinary expectations and ordinary dreams. And Joyce was well on her way to living the kind of ordinary life her parent’s anticipated for their two daughters.

Until she hit the University of Wisconsin.

An Early Contrarian

Joyce had it in her head that she wanted to study architecture, a dream that lasted until her first meeting with an academic advisor. That’s when she heard, for the first time in her life, there were limits that come with being born female: “Don’t be silly,” she was told. “Girls can’t be architects. Have you thought about teaching or nursing?”

“Have you thought about encouraging students instead of making them feel like a fool?” was her tart response. She rose to her full five feet nothing tall and stomped from his office feeling as if she were a giant.

Thus was the first early budding of a trouble-making radical.

In fact, after her session with the advisor in 1939, she actually tried organizing a campus protest. Unfortunately for Joyce, she was the only girl at UW that year interested in studying architecture, let alone be willing to protest. The whole thing fizzled before it began. According to Joyce, the only protest her freshman year promoted staying out of the new European war, a rally she refused to attend even though her entire sorority went because she thought America would be in the war eventually and ought to start preparing rather than pretend it was an irritating inconvenience involving “foreigners.”

Without explanation or reason, my mind snaps to when my sister and I were kids.

One morning as we were eating a Rice Krispies breakfast, mother heard the garbage truck in the alley over the snap, crackle and pop in our bowls. She leapt from the table as if shot from the Quaker Oats cannon – cereal figured heavily in school day breakfasts – and ran out with a bag that Dad forgot to dump in the pail on his way to work. Wearing no makeup and one of those "lush, plush" Target robes made out of some synthetic fabric that squeaks when you rub it against itself, Joyce headed out the door before she had time to apply make-up. Besides the green robe, she wore a pair of faded, fluffy slippers, her hair was still in rollers. (Remember rollers? I still can't fathom how anyone slept with them in their head.)

Anyway, she dashed down the alley looking like the Mad Woman of Genza shouting, "Am I too late for the garbage?" The guy hanging off a step on the rear of the truck yelled back, "Plenty of room, lady, jump in."

She had a parallel haunting experience with the man who read the Minnegasco meter when I was about 11.

Joyce was carrying a load of laundry to the machine. I had left a bunch of toys around in the family room, through which she had to pass to get to the laundry area. One of the things not put away was my baseball batting helmet, which was supposed to be stored with my other equipment behind the Kenmore washer-dryer. Because her arms were filled, she put my batting helmet on her head.

Unbeknownst to mother, the meter reader had come in the house as he usually did if the door was open and walked downstairs. (Those were simpler, safer times and it was Minneapolis, after all.) Just as he entered the laundry room unnoticed, mother decided there was room to toss her bathrobe in the wash so he caught her standing in a bra and girdle – another bit of remarkable fashion yesteryear – with my batting helmet on her head.

The meter reader let out an embarrassed, “Oh, God, excuse me!” They stared at each other in dumbfounded surprise for a moment or two before the meter reader mumbled, "I hope your team wins, lady" as he ran quickly up the steps. That month, my parents received an estimated bill. And from then on, the meter reader always knocked - even if the door was open.

Now I’m back in 1968 and by the time Dick Nixon narrowly defeated our sort-of next door neighbor at the time, Hubert Humphrey, for president, it was a world where all around people were losing their heads while she kept hers.

Joyce had her first big political fight with dad over dinner one night when she called LBJ a liar over the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Phil, still stuck in a post-World War Two “my country right or wrong” mentality, was apoplectic that his wife, the mother of his children, the woman who kept the home fires burning while he was in the Navy during WW2, not only held an opinion different than his but dared to express it. Publicly. She wrote letters to our Congressman, both Minnesota senators and the local newspapers opposing the Vietnam War. Worse, as far as dad was concerned, she actually defied him and marched in an anti-war parade through downtown Minneapolis.

She knew she was right and history proved her so; eventually, she even convinced her husband.

Say what?

Phil, who spent his life convinced that he knew all there was to know and only god knew all the rest, actually came to see that Joyce was right about the war, if nothing else in their half-century marriage. He pushed through an anti-war resolution at a county Democratic Party convention and between his stand and mother’s letters, they so delighted Tricky Dick they got their mail opened regularly, their taxes audited repeatedly and their name on one of his countless enemy lists.

Tricky Dick And Mom

When the lists were released, finding her name on one was a highpoint of her life.

Joyce has been gone now for a decade. I'm glad I still carry around such vivid memories of her.

Bad Things Happen When Youngsters Write Ads

I know that it's typical in the advertising agency business for creative types to be about 14 years old but the trend seems to be slipping onto the client side, as well. Take the current commercials for the 2009 Lincoln Continental.

Apparently, no one on either the agency side or the account side is old enough to remember - let alone have lived through - the Vietnam War. I'm not sure they even read about the war or how it tore the US apart. But right now, Lincoln is running a spot where the music is an old Vietnam-era protest song, Ground Control to Major Tom. (And, yes, I used to think it was Major Tong, too.) It is an allegorical anti-war song about a pilot who becomes lost and trapped after being shot into space for a mission he doesn't understand.

OK, it's one thing when a major bank used a Bob Dylan song five years ago to attract accounts from then-increasingly wealthy (and now increasingly poor) boomers. But I hardly put The Times They Are A-Changin' in the same category as an anti-war protest song.

Since boomers are the only people who might be remotely interested in driving an overgrown, outsized tank like a Lincoln, why would the agency (or Ford, for that matter) want to dredge up all of those bad old memories of riots and draft cards and draft dodging and the generation gap? Why not something happy like a Beach Boys number (perhaps something like Little Duece Coupe) or even the Stones (maybe Brown Sugar) from the same era?

That the agency pitched the idea is one thing; agencies are always pitching lousy ideas to clients. But that the car company execs bought it is another matter altogether. And we're bailing out Detroit for this? No wonder the auto industry is in such bad shape.

Sadly, it’s becoming a widespread phenomenon not limited to Ford's Lincoln. The new Obama-fied Pepsi campaign is also using a lot of '60s tunes. And, anyway, the music belies Pepsi's current play-on-words tag line: Every generation refreshes itself.

I shouldn't think any of this speaks to the millenial generation. Or even the Pepsi generation, for that matter.

Dubya As Only David Could See Him

Yes, there are tons of 10 best and 10 worst lists around. But David Letterman came up with his own unique version of George Bush's Top 10 Presidential Moments.



We will never see the likes of George again. Hopefully.

Poor Leon Penatta Won’t Know What Hit Him When He Hits The CIA

Talk about setting up a bright, highly competent, loyal, nice guy for failure.

When Barack Obama named former Clinton chief of staff Leon Penatta to run the Central Intelligence Agency yesterday, he picked a man whose biggest plus is having loudly protested the agency’s use of torture including waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” He also chose a man who has deep government experience, a clear understanding of intelligence agency budgets, and skill at managing a bureaucracy.

What Panetta doesn’t have is the foggiest notion about the arcane inner workings and culture of The Company, which can be as complex, subtle, unfathomable and biting as the aristocratic society depicted in Brideshead Revisited.

“One of two things will happen,” an old friend replied this morning to an e-mail I sent after the announcement. The man spent more than 25 years at the CIA, sometimes travelling under false passports, sometimes analysing disparate bits of incoming intelligence behind a desk at headquarters, sometimes running a foreign station. “Either (Penatta) will figure things out quickly and adapt to the culture while he tries fixing it, or it will eat him alive. But, generally, outsiders don’t do well if they’re parachuted into top jobs at Langley.”

The Bush 41 Factor

Yesterday, in boosting Penatta’s likely chances for success, some commentators pointed to the tenure of George H. W. Bush as CIA director as an example of how an “amateur” can grasp the reins of the agency firmly and succeed. Indeed, Bush 41’s time at Langley was so well regarded by the nation’s intelligence community that the CIA’s sprawling, multi-building campus in suburban Virginia bears his name in tribute.

But Bush the Elder wasn’t exactly an amateur.

For one thing, both the Bush and Prescott families had long ties to the secret world, dating back before the days of the OSS in World War 2. For another, besides heading the CIA, Bush Senior was ambassador to Japan. The Tokyo embassy houses what traditionally is the largest CIA station in the Pacific, charged with monitoring China and North Korea. In his position, Poppy Bush worked closely with a wide range of agency types during his tenure in Tokyo, often involved in decisions about which bits of intelligence to pass on and how much local analysis should go in a report to headquarters.

In short, G. H. W. Bush knew the people, the operation and the culture.

Restoring Confidence

Working Penatta’s his favour is that career officers at the CIA know Panetta’s first task is to restore morale, which was devastated during the Bush years because intelligence was so heavily politicized.

His second job is to ensure everyone knows that the Obama White House wants their best work, unslanted and unbiased, and that the likelihood is nil that Vice President Joe Biden will be looking over their shoulders constantly as was Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and David Addington’s practice.

If Panetta can accomplish these twin undertakings in the first year on the job, he’ll buy himself some room to learn – and manoeuvre his way through – the CIA’s Byzantine mores and culture.

“People will be very suspicious at first,” I am told by another intelligence community source.

“They won’t be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt," she adds "Hopefully, he’ll work fast on rebuilding confidence of officers in The White House and DNI (Director of National Intelligence) so he can get on with the real job ensuring the agency produces the best intelligence we can come up with.”

It's Time To Bring Cuba In From The Cold

At the end of the state funeral for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau on October 3, 2000, official mourners were milling about in front of Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica. Cuban president Fidel Castro stepped over to Jimmy Carter to ask a serious political question:

What did Carter think of using the love of baseball shared by Cubans and Americans as a way to begin normalizing relations between the two nations? Castro even offered to send an airplane to bring Carter and anyone else the former president thought should accompany him to Havana for a meeting to begin the process.

Carter thought it a terrific idea and when he returned home, he called Paul Beeston, then Major League Baseball’s chief operating officer. Would Beeston travel to Havana with Carter to cut a deal with Castro? Beeston agreed and when Carter asked the White House for clearance, Bill Clinton green lighted the trip.

But before the meeting could be scheduled, the Supreme Court gave George Bush the presidency. Bush had campaigned hard on a vitriolic anti-Castro platform in South Florida, Between the old cold warriors and neo-cons surrounding him, Bush would never endorse a sensible Cuban policy so Carter and Beeston never met with Castro to work out "baseball diplomacy." The best chance since 1962 to co-exist with Cuba disappeared in a cloud of dust thicker than when David “Big Papi” Ortiz slides into second.

Obama’s Opportunity

David Erickson, a senior fellow at The InterAmerican Institute and author of The Cuba Wars told the PBS NewsHour’s Ray Suarez last week that Cubans in the US and on the island look at the incoming Obama administration with both hope and fear. “There’s hope there will be change in US-Cuba relations and fear it won’t come fast enough.”

Not since Allan Dulles sabotaged Pres. Dwight Eisenhower’s attempt to establish a rapport with the Cuban revolution in 1959 has there been as good an opportunity to put decades of failed American policy in the past. On the NewsHour, Erickson added, “Five decades of evidence shows that the US attempt to starve out the Castro regime hasn’t worked. The United States must take a far-ranging look at its relationship with Cuba.”

The fact is, Cuban-Americans – and Americans generally – simply ignore the countless bans on everything involving Cuba. Travel restrictions? Americans detour through Canada, Mexico or the Bahamas to holiday in Havana or Varadero. Ban sending cash to Cuban family members? Non-US organisations and even Canadians and Mexicans on holiday carry money to the Cuban relatives of Americans. Trade restrictions? Establish a complex web of arms-length, off-shore subsidiaries as difficult to unravel as Rubic's cube.

The policy is a charade.

Moreover, with first generation exiles who fled the revolution dying off, second and third generation Cuban-Americans see the folly in American policy.

“It’s crazy,” a dazzling Cuban-American woman living in Miami told a friend of mine who was sitting with her at the pool bar of a Varadero resort. “I have to fly to Nassau and wait three hours for a connecting Cubana flight just to get here. It doesn’t take you that long from Montréal.”

Priorities and Politics

Adjusting America’s Cuba policy will not be Obama’s top priority, not with needing to get his $800-billion economic recovery plan through Congress quickly, disengaging from Iraq, figuring out what will be workable in Afghanistan, undoing Bush’s damaging executive orders, closing GITMO, and a host of other pressing matters.

Moreover, attempts to change Washington’s relationship with Cuba will run into rear-guard attacks from right-wing Republicans, neo-cons and aging cold warriors. Using high voltage words like “henchmen," former Bush Latin America advisor Adolfo Franco said on the same NewsHour segment that Obama should take the advice of John McCain and not meet with Cuban officials. He didn’t explain why anyone in the White House should listen to McCain on anything.

“This is not the time to infuse the Cuban economy with foreign currency dollars,” Franco stated. “Instead, we should stand with those fighting Castro.”

Except the only people still fighting Castro are his fellow neo-cons and a handful of octagenarians sipping Café Cubana in Miami's Little Havana.

Indeed, to the vast majority of Cubans, the government in Havana is irrelevant to their daily lives. Also, Franco ignored a political reality: By shunning Raul Castro, Washington pushes Cuba closer to Venezuela and Bolivia. The US made the same mistake in 1959, practically shoving Fidel into the arms of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Tse-Tung – and we know how well that worked out; just ask anyone who lived through the Cuban missile crisis.

It’s time to bring Cuba in from the cold. Barack Obama has a chance to fix a policy that’s been wrong – and ineffective – for 50 years.

A Big ‘Hoorah!’ To The NYT’s Dexter Filkins

In a devastatingly critical examination of the narco-state formerly known as Afghanistan, the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins today documents case after case of wide spread corruption on a massive scale in the Afghan government, including officials ranging from low-level, local bureaucrats right up to the brother of President Hamid Karzai. Filkins shows the difficult situation Pres. Obama will face in dislodging a surging Taliban, and the feudal war lords who’ve run the country for centuries, both of which are profiting from opium smuggling, and paying and receiving bribes.

It didn’t take years cultivating sources or meeting a “Deep Throat” in dangerous Kabul alleys for him to pen the piece. Filkins arrived in Kabul only about two months ago following several years covering Iraq, interrupted by a year in the US to write a book. In reading the article, it seems he did much of his reporting simply standing in front of government offices and court houses, talking to people coming out after they paid a bribe to judges and other officials, or refused to do so.

So, why did it take so long for any Western journalist to write this story? Moreover, why did the Bush administration allow the situation to get so out of hand?

Could-a, Should-a

The outstanding Filkins article highlights a major problem in newsrooms today. His article could have – and should have – been written a year or more ago; it’s not as if corruption showed up in Kabul at Halloween as a trick-and-treat handout.

Why has the news media been sleeping, especially since thousands more American troops will be re-routed to Afghanistan from Iraq after the Obama inauguration?

Part of the lack of coverage might be explained by the relatively few number of American, British and European reporters based permanently in Kabul. A perfect storm of tight budgets which means fewer reporters that leads to dwindling international coverage coupled with a lack of editorial interest and a preference for dramatic battlefield stories when reporters are loosed on the country leaves little room for what journalists call “enterprise stories” – those that take time to report and write.

To illustrate the issue, I’ve realised that the BBC has more reporters stationed permanently in Africa than most major US print and broadcast news outlets have in Europe and Asia combined. True, the broadcaster gets generous funding from the British government added to by a license fee levied on each TV set in the country along with ad revenue from some of its networks, but how it allocates its annual budget is very different than the way its American counterparts dole out cash to news operations.

No wonder Americans are so ill-informed about the world. Even if they want to know more, they have to really go out of their way to find key information.

Missed Opportunities

Meanwhile, after the American invasion in 2001, Afghanistan became poppy central, harvesting more plants than anywhere else on earth. While some Western media have covered this angle off-and-on, before Filkins’ story no major newspaper or network has documented in such detail the extent and pervasiveness of drugs-related corruption. Compared to what goes on daily throughout Afghanistan’s government, Rob Blagojevich is a clumsy amateur.

Under George Bush, the American and NATO strategy of dealing with poppy growing in Afghanistan has been to send troops across farmland destroying crops. This did two things: First, it alienated Afghan farmers whose land wouldn’t support any other agriculture. Second, it gave war lords, drug lords and the Taliban an opportunity to say to farmers, “Come join us. We’ll protect you and buy your harvest for cash.”

In yet one more mistake on a long list of foreign policy errors, the White House missed a chance to slow Afghanistan’s opium trade and deny insurgents a ready source of hard currency, which also propels corruption. Instead of burning fields, Bush could have followed the successful lead of earlier US efforts to control poppy growing and opium smuggling in Turkey. Using US money, the Turkish government buys up the annual harvest, handing it over to the Americans who, in turn, sell some to pharmaceutical companies – which uses an opium offshoot in many prescription drugs – and burn the rest.

The strategy works, and it's a lot cheaper than sending in the cavalry: Farmers are content, world opium supplies are cut, crime lords are cut out of the picture and pharmaceutical companies have a ready supply of a much-needed ingredient. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld reportedly vetoed the proven Turkish approach in Afghanistan, just one more tragedy in the long list of Bush administration tragedies.

The way the US government, newspapers, cable and broadcasters have dealt with Afghanistan reminds me of a line from Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant 1971 film, The Hospital. George C. Scott, playing an exhausted and frustrated suicidal physician, decides to quit medicine and run off to Arizona with Diana Rigg – well, she’s reason enough to quit any job and run off anywhere with her – because he realises patients are being “neglected to death.”

Between journalism’s indifference and US government missteps, Afghanistan is being “neglected to death.” Let's all give a very big “Hoorah!” to Dexter Filkins for showing the results.

Fanfare For A New Administration

A hat tip to the folks at the Editor & Publisher blog who thought this piece directed by the greatest maestro of the 20th century, Arturo Toscanini, would have been an appropriate way to mark the arrival of 2009, perhaps as the Times Square ball descended.

I may have a better idea. The music opens the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, to my mind the greatest fanfare ever written. I’d suggest using it to open Barack Obama’s Inaugural Concert at the Kennedy Center.



I used to have a recording of this performance; the boxed album set included Toscanini directing all nine Beethoven symphonies. They were on records and I wish I could find the same set on CD.

“Please Cry For Me, I’m Al Gonzales.”

Like tens of millions – and growing – of his increasingly desperate countrymen, he is out of work and cannot find a job; worse, nobody in his chosen profession will even interview him. His previously good friends don’t want to publish his story so he is reduced to keeping a journal for his sons. He wonders what went wrong with his carefully crafted, uniquely American, tale of the dirt poor boy, son of immigrants, who makes very good. He cannot grasp how his world fell apart, so completely and so quickly.

He actually wonders if he is simply another victim of the times.

At the end of his tether, the man finally goes to a support group luncheon meeting only blocks from the building that once housed his large office, where sympathetic ears listen to his tale of woe. Those gathered around the table nod sympathetically, shake their head in sadness and wish him well when they shake his hand as he leaves.

As the man walked out of the office, I wonder if he heard a twisted version of an Andrew Lloyd Weber song from Evita echoing in his head: “Please cry for me, I’m Al Gonzales.”

Completes The Trifecta

I almost hurled my breakfast when I read an article in the on-line Wall Street Journal about Alberto Gonzales’ meeting with the paper’s editorial board earlier this week. It’s clear that the selective memory of the man who “can’t recall” when testifying before Congressional committees hasn’t gotten any better with the time. He doesn’t even remember the reality – forget about specific facts – of his tenure as White House counsel and Attorney General.

Fredo's whining, coupled with Dick “Dare You To Indict Me” Cheney’s self-admitted war crimes and George “Who, Me Worry?” Bush’s total fogging of the past eight years completes the administration’s Trifecta of distortions, dissembling and dishonesty.

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he sniffed to the editors.

Uhm, let’s see.

There is the politicalisation of the Justice Dept., including widespread employment discrimination and the infamous US Attorney scandal. There was his racing to the hospital bed of an extremely ill John Ashcroft to get the man, still recovering from major surgery, to sign a re-authorization of secret wire tapping that the AG’s temporary fill-in, James Comey, wouldn’t sign. He signed torture memos. He destroyed the DoJ's Civil Rights Division. Things were so bad, Justice’s own Inspector General investigated him on charges of perjury and obstruction, not exactly exonerating Gonzales.

We can add warrantless-searches, the Military Commissions Act, GITMO torture, abandoning the Geneva Conventions and shocking tolerance for corruption of a department that, for the benefit of the nation and the rule of law, must maintain its independence, to the list.

Add in almost no redeeming qualities. As Adam Cohen, chief legal analyst for CBS News wrote not long ago, “He brought shame and disgrace to the Department because of his lack of independent judgment on some of the most vital legal issues of our time. And he brought chaos and confusion to the department because of his lack of respectable leadership over a cabinet-level department among the most important in the nation.

“He neither served the longstanding role as "the people's attorney" nor fully met and tamed his duties and responsibilities to the constitution. He was a man who got the job not because he was supremely qualified or notably well-respected among the leading legal lights of our time, but because he had faithfully and with blind obedience served President George W. Bush for years in Texas (where he botched clemency memos in death penalty cases) and then as White House counsel (where he botched the nation's legal policy on torture).”

The Worst Ever?

Along with John Mitchell, Dick Nixon’s felonious attorney general, Alberto Gonzales may well be among the worst AG’s the nation has had in the past 100 years. Yet, Fredo sees no connection between his lawlessness and why law firms won’t hire him or why publishers are scorning his memoir.

Frankly, he has proven to be such an inept lawyer, I would not let Alberto Gonzales draw up a simple will. And if I were a book editor, I wouldn't trust his memory.

And so, with deep apologies to Mr. Weber, Sarah Brightman and Madonna, let’s all sing in 2009 together:

Please cry for me, I’m Al Gonzales
The truth is I don’t remember
All those bad mem-ries
My lying existence
I kept my promise
To not remember
I kept my promise
Don’t keep your distance.

The 10 Worst People Of The Year; Wait, Actually There’s Only One

I detest the Top 10 lists sprouting up daily this time of the year: Newspapers, magazines, television, cable, blogs, whatever. One acquaintance in New Mexico sent a mass e-mail to everyone in her Outlook directory asking each of us to submit our own Top 10 list of whatever we want to rank.

By December every year, these rankings appear with the punctuality of the tides. Top 10 Films. Top 10 News Events. Ten Best Songs. Best 10 Hackeysack Players. Whatever the human activity, someone, somewhere, is busy listing the 10 best.

It strikes me that if you cannot pick the one best – or worst – of something in the course of 366 days (2008 was a Leap Year), you shouldn’t bother. Ten is both a cop-out and lots of work. On the one hand, it lets the compiler hedge their bet; out of 10 anything, someone will agree with you. But it also takes a lot of Goggling to come up with a list. No one can remember the sum total of events in a category so they can be pared down to 10.

Still, an editor is pressing me for a 10 best or worst or indifferent list so I dutifully pull names from my head: Robert Mugabe, the monster of Zimbabwe; Dick Cheney, destroyer of constitutional government and boaster about it on TV; Vin Diesel, for still duping people into buying movie tickets; everyone responsible for creating i-anything. Once started, names began flowing: Karl Rove; Bill O’Reilly; Sean Hannity; Sarah Palin; James Dobson; the last three presidents of Somalia, Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and Adan Mohamed Nuur Madobe, as a group; the American Enterprise Institute; Bernie Madoff; Ehud Ohlmert and Ismail Haniyeh.

Then I stopped myself. Looking at the names made me realise I had to tear up the list. There’s only one worst person this year, and it’s an honour he’s received every year since 2000.

It’s A Landslide

In the final analysis, there is only one serious candidate: The Current Occupant. With less than 20 days before finally heading off to Dallas with Laura and his new McMansion, George W. Bush is both the worst person of the year and easily the only genuine candidate for worst person of the decade – even with another year to go.

It isn’t even close; he wins the distinction by a landslide.

In the record books, there’ll be an asterisk next to Bush’s name because a lot of what he did as president was plotted and dictated by others. But this is a mere speed bump on Bush’s road to being America's second-worst president ever. (James Buchanan wins by a nose because he allowed the Confederacy to seceed.) During each year of the 21st century, Bush managed to do something that cut another little piece of my heart out, baby, and the nation’s fundamental principles with it, as well.

2000 – Bush steals the presidential election through fraud, legal manoeuvring and running out the clock.

2001 – Bush blocks federally-funded stem cell research. He removes the United States from the treaty creating the International Criminal Court. He drops out of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty. He gets a compliant Congress to approve the first of three massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Oh, and before I forget, the worst thing Bush did this year was casually discounting or deliberately ignoring repeated warnings of a September attack inside the United States by al Qaeda.

2002 – Bush begins shredding the Constitution by getting the (un)PATRIOT Act passed. He starts illegally wiretapping Americans. He lets Osama bin Laden slip into the safety of Pakistan while literally in the night scope sights of Army Rangers watching him in Tora Bora from a distance of about 1,500 feet. He creates GITMO and suspends habeas corpus.

2003 – Bush launches an illegal invasion of a sovereign nation that poses no threat to America and then lies about why he did it. He approves torturing prisoners of war captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. He allows Abu Ghraib to happen, thus becoming al Qaeda’s best recruiter. He turns himself into a cartoon character by landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim “Mission Accomplished!”

2004 – Bush steals a second election, the details of which are just starting to emerge in 2008 except a key witness in a lawsuit – a man who could finger Karl Rove along with other White House and Republican National Committee staffers – is killed in a mysterious plane crash. Bush’s lack of planning for post-invasion Iraq became obvious when the country descends into chaos with Shi’a and Sunni groups battling each other openly while criminals loot and pillage Baghdad, killing or kidnapping citizens by the dozens daily. “Stuff happens.”

2005 ­– A dozen US attorneys are fired for political reasons. He tries privatizing Social Security. More tax cuts for the wealthy. No Child Left Behind is discovered to be a joke, another political stunt.

2006 – Katrina and Bush allowed one of the world’s great cities to drown. The surge, which he called a “success” because by the time Bush escalated the Iraq war, Sunni insurgents were on the US payroll and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad was completed so violence subsided.

2007 – Bush’s zeal for deregulation, which created a massive, unregulated mortgage banking industry, leads to a tidal wave of foreclosures, bursting the housing bubble. A recession begins, noticed by ordinary folks struggling to earn a living but ignored by Bush. Scooter Libby is essentially pardoned by Bush after being found guilty of compromising national security and then lying to a Grand Jury about it.

2008 – Bush sits idly by as the first signs of economic collapse appear. He presides over the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression. In a series of term-ending interviews with national reporters, Bush said he had a fun eight years.

Heckuva Job, Dubya

George W. Bush – along with his puppet-masters, underlings, cronies, cohorts and co-conspirators – did a heckuva job in destroying the very fabric of what is America. The Constitution? “A goddamned piece of paper.” Waterboarding? “We don’t torture.” WMDs? “The smoking gun.” The economy? “The fundamentals are sound.” POWs at GITMO and who-knows-how-many secret prisons around the world? “

Given all this, and more, how could there be nine other people on the same list of “worst people” as Bush?

So, with apologies to Keith, “George W. Bush: The Worst Person of the Decade!”

May you have a healthy, happy and Bush-free 2009!

Charley

Noted Israeli Journalist Slams Her Government On Gaza

Amira Hass, perhaps the best columnist writing in the Jerusalem daily Haaretz, is famed for her reporting from the Palestinian territories. Today, she slams her nation’s government for its repeated attacks on Gaza, beginning with the timing of the initial raid last Saturday – and goes on from there, in increasingly angrier tones.

How We Like Our Leaders
– by Amira Hass

This isn't the time to speak of ethics, but of precise intelligence. Whoever gave the instructions to send 100 of our planes, piloted by the best of our boys, to bomb and strafe enemy targets in Gaza is familiar with the many schools adjacent to those targets - especially police stations. He also knew that at exactly 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, during the surprise assault on the enemy, all the children of the Strip would be in the streets - half just having finished the morning shift at school, the others en route to the afternoon shift.

This is not the time to speak of proportional responses, not even of the polls that promise a greater share of Knesset seats to the mission's architects. This is, however, the time to speak of the voters' belief the operation will succeed, that the strikes are precise and the targets justified.

Take, for example, Imad Aqel Mosque in Jabalya refugee camp, bombed and strafed shortly before midnight on Sunday. These are the names of the glorious military victory we achieved there - Jawaher, age 4; Dina, age 8; Sahar, age 12; Ikram, age 14; and Tahrir, age 17, all sisters of the Ba'lousha family, all killed in a "precise" strike on the mosque. Another three sisters, a 2-year-old brother and their parents were injured. Twenty-four neighbors were wounded and five homes and three stores destroyed. This part of the military victory did not open our television or radio news broadcasts yesterday morning, nor did they appear on many Israeli news Web sites.

This is the time to speak about the detailed maps in the hands of IDF commanders, and about the Shin Bet advisers who know the exact distance between the mosque and nearby homes. This is the time to discuss the drone planes and the hot air balloons fitted with advanced cameras floating over the Strip day and night, filming everything.

This is the time to rely on legal advisers studying the operation to find the right phrasing to justify "collateral damage." Time to praise Foreign Ministry spokespeople who in their polished language, with their elegant South African or charmant Parisien accents, say it is the fault of Hamas, which uses neighborhood mosques for its own purposes.

Talk of double standards has always been moot. Maybe there was a huge weapons store in the mosque. Maybe Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militants met there every night and from there planned to launch their upgraded fighter jets.

Where does the IDF Chief of Staff sit when he draws up war plans? Not in the Sahara, or even in the Negev. What would happen if someone blew themselves up at the entrance to Tel Aviv's Cinematheque movie theater, and those who sent him said sorry, but he was headed for the Defense Ministry down the street?

This is not the time to recall long-forgotten history lessons to say this is not the way to topple a government. Nor is it the time to make rational recommendations for balanced statesmanship. The time for such things has passed, along with the New Order we once arrogantly tried to establish in Lebanon, which only brought us Hezbollah. Along with the Orientalists' plans to reduce the popularity of the PLO, which only paved the way for the emergence of a militant Islamic nationalist movement.

The time of such recommendations has passed, along with the grab of Palestinian lands and hyperactive construction of settlements in the Oslo era, which only laid the cornerstone for the second intifada and the fall of Fatah.

The era of reason and judgment died long ago, even before the targeted assassinations of Fatah activists in the West Bank, which soon turned into shooting attacks on soldiers and the emergence of another few thousand young people taking up arms, not to mention the phenomenon of suicide bombers.

It is never the right time to say "we told you so," because once it is possible to say those words, they are already invalid. We cannot revive the dead, nor repair the damage caused by arrogance and megalomania.

This is the time to speak of our own satisfaction and enjoyment. Satisfaction from tanks once again raising and lowering their barrels in preparation for a ground attack, satisfaction from our leaders' threatening finger-waving at the enemy. That's how we like our leaders - calling up reservists, sending pilots to bomb our enemies and manifesting national unity, from Baruch Marzel to Tzipi Livni, Netanyahu to Barak to Lieberman.

Holiday Greetings From Einer’s Diner

It was 54’ on Christmas Day when I wandered into Einer’s Diner for my annual holiday dinner ritual. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when a chorus of “Happy Canada Day!” greeted me as I opened the door. Canada Day is celebrated in July but it’s easy enough for the regulars at Einer’s to become confused under the best of circumstances and this year’s unseasonably warm December only adds to their general befuddlement.

Hell, Einer’s regulars get befuddled if he moves a salt shaker on the counter, so it’s not surprising that this year’s April-in-December heat wave disturbed them.

Like many of the people who take Christmas dinner there, Einer’s is a place that time forgot. Of course, being located near Queen and Sherbourne in the heart of Toronto’s great hairy metropolis doesn’t help. And if time didn’t forget ‘most everything about the intersection – buildings, store fronts, garbage piled at the curb, the pungent smell, people – it certainly stopped, probably sometime in the late 70s or early 80s.

Still, those are the things that draw me back to Einer’s every year; well, that and a chance to catch up with old friends I haven’t seen since last year, before the fire.

You may remember reading in the paper that there was a terrible fire at Einer’s. Everything burned: The booths with the chipped Formica tables and green vinyl seats with indentations from generations of overweight backsides imprinting them, the counter with its 11 stools, the kitchen with its years of aromatic grime on the walls, the storeroom with the large tins of corn, peas and generic Jell-O powder, the linoleum floor with the deep, black scuff mark in the corner made from more than a decade of Eudora Phipps leaning her left hip against the wall when she wasn’t busy waitressing and shuffling the right heel of the white nurses oxfords she always wore with her uniform back and forth. Everything that smelled “Einer’s” was lost.

The arson squad investigated and concluded without much enthusiasm that the blaze was preventable and caused by carelessness. In one sense, it was: If Einer didn’t have four deep fryers going full blast – well, it was Thanksgiving and he expected a full house – chances are the damage would have been limited. On the other hand, it was really just a fire waiting to happen once the right combination of events happened in precisely the correct combination.

They did.

On the fateful mid-October day, one of those Cooper Mini cars was parked at a meter in front of Einer’s. The owner returned to his clown-sized car, squiggled into the too-small driver’s seat, started the motor and gunned the engine a few times. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a Cooper Mini engine cold start, but what the engineers and designers thought sounded sexy actually makes the same sound as a World War 2 German fighter, the Messerschmitt ME-109.

Now, to most people the sound wouldn’t register anything unusual. But to poor Corny Bledsoe, who’d been gassed in The Great War and enlisted again for WW2 where he spent five years as a private who never passed a promotion exam, the sound of the Mini engine roaring to life meant only one thing. In his head, he was back at Dunkirk.

“The bloody Jerry’s are strafing,” Corny shouted, his eyes wide in terror, his words more garbled and mumbled than usual, even when his teeth are fitting properly. “Everybody dig into the sand!”

Half the people in Einer’s didn’t even bother to look up. They were the regulars accustomed to an occasional, nonsensical outburst from Corny or one of the other diners who carries on intense discussions with people who aren’t in the room.

It was the other half that fuelled the fire.

In one of the booths, Leona Feltmate was slurping her way through a bowl of pea soup when Corny shouted his warning. Leona is about 80. Many decades ago, she had a brief moment of minor celebrity when she received the first breast implants in Canada. In those days, there was only one model: Hard and unyielding. Now, although she had become stooped with age, withered and quite wrinkled, she still has the same near-perfect, teasingly pert, breasts that she paid a small fortune for all those years ago. The contradiction between every other part of her body and her full, upright bodice made Leona the sluttiest looking octogenarian in all of Toronto.

When Corny shouted his warning, Leona leapt to her feet – too quickly. The hem of her dress caught in the heel of her right shoe, and her sturdy, right plastic breast got wedged up against the edge of the table in her booth. She was immobilised. Her two arms and one free leg went splaying all akimbo and poor Leona ended up doing a half-cartwheel out of the booth. Her dress ended up half over her head and half covering Corny’s, which only intensified his panic at being caught out in the open during a raid.

In the process of trying to free himself, Corny – with Leona still attached to him by the hem of her dress which had wrapped itself around his turkey neck – went bouncing over the counter like a beach ball. He and Leona landed with a thud, right on Eudora Phipps’ worst bunion. She reacted by vaulting backwards in the air, yowling in pain and grabbing at her throbbing foot. Corny, seeing a lifeline to safety, grabbed Eudora’s heel which caused her to catapult backwards, hitting Einer as she did.

Due to the noise of cooking and steam in the kitchen, Einer had neither heard nor seen anything that happened up to the moment when Eudora slammed into his belly, followed immediately by a half-blinded Corny Bledsoe who had not stopped screaming, “Take cover, boys!” and then the now shrieking Leona Feltmate.

At the moment of impact, Einer was holding a platter of frozen Tuna Treats. Einer is a large man – tall, round and plush – but even his girth could not slow the momentum of being body slammed by three people. His arms went up in the air, he stumbled, and the frozen Tuna Treats went splashing into the bubbling hot oil of one of the fryers. With a loud “Whoosh!” the oil sent a fire ball to the ceiling. Flaming grease splattered on the floor and into the other fryers, igniting what seemed like a century of accumulated cooking grime and who knows what else.

The rest was in the newspapers. The fire spread, taking Einer’s Diner with it. Fortunately, everyone got out safely. The next day, Einer came back to look at the smouldering ruins. Standing amongst the charred remains, he noticed a handful of forlorn regulars on the sidewalk who had no idea where to eat. Many of them didn’t know there were other places to eat because they only knew how to get from their walk-up flats to Einer’s and back again.

So Einer rebuilt the place, keeping it as close to the original as possible. For one thing, he was no decorator and his personal style – if that’s what you could call it – was a close match to the style of his restaurant. For another, he knew that it would be shiny new for only a week after he re-opened so what was the point? Anyway, he didn’t want to leave his regulars thinking he’d gone uptown on them.

Actually, I almost didn’t recognise Corny. He finally had cataract surgery during the summer so his trademark glasses, thick as the bottom of a pair of Coke bottles, disappeared with the increasingly thick cornea film that blurred his vision for decades and added to the challenge of driving his school bus route every day. The last few years, parents really started complaining about Corny who was having more and more trouble reading street signs along the route so he only sometimes were letting kids at a home close to where they actually lived.

Fortunately for Corny, a provincial law barring discrimination against blind and disabled workers – he’d been legally blind for as long as anyone could remember – meant he was able to keep driving a school bus until he hit his 70th birthday when chauffer licenses are revoked. That’s when he began driving a gypsy cab to earn pocket money. In fact, the first thing he bought after hitting the streets in his old Plymouth Valiant were new pockets: His old trousers were so worn that the pockets turned to fuzz eons ago; change kept slipping out and getting lost, literally costing him “pocket money.”

Such is life at Einer’s this – well, every – holiday season. I hope you and yours have as much fun over the holidays as I did at the diner and may you have a healthy, happy, prosperous and fire-free New Year’s!

White House, US Media, Pick Sides In Israeli Terror Bombings

Three updates are at the bottom of the article.

By now, no one should be surprised that the White House is taking its usual, uneven and heavy-handed approach in reacting to the gargantuan Israeli shock-and-awe bombing of densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip.

Rather than using American influence – if there is any left in the region after eight years of Bush – to try brokering a renewed cease fire between Hamas and Israel, the administration is

Gordon Johndroe, a junior White House spokesman stuck doing holiday duty, says Hamas is responsible for the outbreak of violence, calling its rocket attacks “completely unacceptable. These people are nothing but thugs. Israel is going to defend its people against terrorists like Hamas.”

By “thugs” Johndroe means the Gaza police chief and around 100 of his officers as well as the hundreds of men, women and children killed during repeated Israeli air strikes. If any Hamas extremists were the original target, they were snuffed out only by coincidence.

Condaleeza Rice is chiming in, declaring, “Hamas (is) responsible for breaking the cease-fire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza. The cease-fire should be restored immediately. The United States calls on all concerned to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the innocent people of Gaza.”

A compliant American media is parroting Washington, solemnly ignoring the reality that while Hamas may have fired the first rockets into Israel, they were pushed into doing so by the Attica-like lockdown Israel slapped on Gaza months ago. Except on rare occasions, this keeps even food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching Palestinian civilians.

Balanced Israeli Reporting

Yet in surfing foreign media, I find sharp criticism of the Israeli government and a detailing of the suffering being inflicted. Even Haaretz in Jerusalem is carrying accounts with more balance than we’re seeing in the US coverage.

"A million and a half human beings, most of them downcast and desperate refugees, live in the conditions of a giant jail, fertile ground for another round of bloodletting. The fact that Hamas may have gone too far with its rockets is not the justification of the Israeli policy for the past few decades, for which it justly merits an Iraqi shoe to the face.

“Israel embarked yesterday on yet another unnecessary, ill-fated war. On July 16, 2006, four days after the start of the Second Lebanon War, (we) wrote: 'Every neighborhood has one, a loud-mouthed bully who shouldn't be provoked into anger ... Not that the bully's not right - someone did harm him. But the reaction, what a reaction!' Two and a half years later, these words repeat themselves, to our horror, with chilling precision. Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation 'Cast Lead' is only in its infancy."

In Britain, The Independent writes,

"These bombs were launched by Israel, as we had known they would be. The world watched the situation simmer then boil over, but did nothing. There are some who believe that hell is divided into different classes. The ordinary people of Gaza have long been caught in the tormenting underworld. Now, if the world does not heed what has happened here, our situation will worsen. We will be trapped in the first class of hell."

But words cannot convey the emotion of images and this report from al-Jazeera English shows what is happening in Gaza even as I write this piece.



Ehud Olmert, Israel's caretaker prime minister, is hinting at a wider war as he masses Israeli troops along its border with Gaza: "Israel wishes to make clear that it will continue to act against terrorist operations and missile fire from the strip which is intended to harm civilians."

The Arab League is convening an emergency meeting on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Egypt – until now, Cairo has been cooperating with Israel in sealing off Hamas – is opening its border with Gaza to allow injured people to be treated.

Both Sides Wrong

Before I am deluged with right wing and neo-con e-hate or am accused of being the Jewish Clarence Thomas – a horrid and undeserved curse – let me say unequivocally that both sides are wrong.

Hamas will not improve conditions for its poor, starving people by lobbing homemade rockets into Southern Israel willy-nilly. Nor will Israel find peace for its people by staging massive air strikes into populated areas; indeed, all this strategy will produce is moderates in the Arab world going from trying to find a liveable solution to backing its Palestinian brothers.

Oh, and by the way, somebody might want to remind Olmert – and Washington – what happened the last time Israel thought it could destroy a Hamas faction sitting on its northern border. That folly didn’t turn out so well, as I recall.
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UPDATE 1 (Dec 29 – 09.45EST) – This morning, Glenn Greenwald at Salon makes the same argument as I did yesterday about the Israeli attacks on Gaza. And he received many of the same type of hysterical comments that were posted here. Here is Greenwald’s response to his commentators:

“Many of our nation's most grizzled super-tough-guy cheerleader/warriors -- the ones who insatiably crave those sensations of vicarious power from play-acting the role of warriors from a nice, safe distance – are responding to my post yesterday by beating their chests, swaggering around and citing General Sherman to explain (in their best John Wayne voices) that war is hell. All good warriors (like them) know that anything and everything done to those who "start a war" is justified.

“Of course, if you ask Hamas why they blow themselves up in pizza parlors and shoot rockets at homes in Southern Israel as a response to the 40-year Israeli occupation and recent blockade, they'll tell you the same thing. If you ask Hezbollah why they kidnap Israeli soldiers and lob rockets into Israel in response to Israeli incursions into Lebanon, they'll make the same claim. If you ask Al Qaeda why they fly civilian-filled airplanes into civilian-filled buildings in response to American hegemony (and endless military actions) in their region of the world, they'll explain that jihad is hell and anything done to advance it is justified. You'll hear the same thing if you ask Russians why they destroyed Chechnyan residential blocks, or if you ask Serbian leaders about their genocide, or if you inquire with Rwandan tribal leaders about the brutality of their attacks, or if you ask virtually any other war criminal why they had to resort to such extremes.

“(One person who comments) points out that Professor Bernstein is either ignorant of or ‘pretending not to know the difference between jus ad bellum (justifiable war) and jus in bello (just action in war).’ That distinction, at least since Nuremberg, has ostensibly been central to Western justice. But just like Hamas and Al Qaeda, many blindly loyal cheerleaders for any American and/or Israeli war – as the last eight years conclusively demonstrated – simply don't believe in it. It's clarifying of them to say so this explicitly.”

UPDATE 2 (Dec 29, 14.55EST) – Both leading Israeli newspapers, The Jerusalem Post and, in particular, Haaretz, have criticised the government for overreacting, over-reaching and launching the attacks with no purpose or exit strategy. I’d say to people that jumped all over me – and, by extension, Greenwald – that if Israeli voices of reason are criticising their government then maybe Glenn and I are taking reasonable positions.

UPDATE 3 Dec 30, 16.43EST)– Writing in Haaretz yesterday, David Grossman calls on the Israeli government to announce a unilateral cease fire and negotiate to stop the current carnage.

"That is what Israel should do now. Is it possible, or are we too imprisoned in the familiar ceremony of war?" he wonders.

And another column in Haaretz by Yoel Marcus begins, "When Ehud Olmert declared this week that ‘the patience, determination and endurance of people on the home front will determine our ability to complete the job,’ all my fuses blew. This man dragged us into the 33-day Second Lebanon War and turned the rear into the front. How does he have the nerve to preach to us and tell us what is needed for the war against Hamas to end in victory? What achievement did the Second Lebanon War bring us, other than exposing Israel's soft underbelly and eroding its deterrence?"

Harold And Eartha Have Left ‘The Room’

– Guest post by Denis Campbell, editor of www.vVadimusPost.com

Britons call him “THE” playwright. Americans recognise her more as Catwoman on the TV version of Batman than as the sexy singer who turned heads long into her 70s. Nobel laureate ‘Sir’ Harold Pinter and music legend Eartha Kitt passed away within hours of each other Christmas Day.

We are all the poorer.

Some argue because he turned down his Knighthood in 1996 and the awarding of a CBE in 2002, means he cannot be called ‘Sir.’ But he was always a grand knight of the modern theatre. His body of work includes The Room, The Birthday Party and film’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. They were filled with arching dialogue and gripping characters. An actor himself, he enjoyed honing his craft on the live stage.

His massive body of work – some 30 Broadway plays – and fervent anti-war activism, earned him a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 for his collection Death, Etc. Pinter’s language precision is immensely political. He twists words like “democracy” and “freedom,” as he believes Blair and Bush did over Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people die. When he was presented with the European Theatre Prize in Turin in early 2006, Pinter said he intended to spend the rest of his life railing against the United States.

“Surely,” asked chair Ramona Koval, he was “doomed to fail?”

“Oh yes – me against the United States!” he said, laughing along with the audience at the absurdity, before adding: “But I can’t stop reacting to what is done in our name, and what is being done in the name of freedom and democracy is disgusting.”



Eartha Kitt grew up on a cotton plantation in segregated Columbia, SC. Orson Welles called her “the most exciting woman in the world” and I agree. All it ever took was one deep, sultry, throaty note and you knew you were about to called into her seductive musical world. She teased men and women alike with a blend of raw sexuality that was as unexpected as it was forbidden on stage and television in the 1950s and Sixties. When she donned the skin-tight Catwoman suit, she literally became a cat with her entire being, bringing an otherwise staid cartoon character to life.

As a mixed race child in the south – her father was German/Dutch and Kitt claimed her mother was raped – she did not belong, being ostracised and segregated from both black and white cultures growing up in the 1930s and ‘40s. If anyone understood the confusion Barack Obama experienced during the early days of the presidential race it was Eartha Kitt. During the campaign she confessed a fondness for Obama: “He’s Afro-American and seems rather intelligent.” But experienced enough to be president? “All those guys in the White House now were experienced, and what are they doing?”

Kitt vaulted to prominence during an appearance on Broadway in Orson Welles' Time Runs. She played Helen of Troy and the performance – along with a torrid affair with Welles – saw her tapped for the Broadway review New Faces of 1952 where her number Monotonous stole the show. A record contract with RCA Victor soon followed and her career was off like a rocket.

Harold Pinter’s body of work was long, deep and steady.

He rose to amazing heights and The French Lieutenant’s Woman won him a BAFTA but, sadly, he was closed out of his best chance for an Oscar that year by another British entry, Chariots of Fire. While Pinter has seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, his work on one of my personal favourites, Reunion with Jason Robards, was deserving of awards but, like his other works, always seemed just a hair over the heads of the Academy.

Even his 2007 film remake of Peter Shaffer’s play Sleuth left many folks scratching their heads. The story is about a millionaire detective novelist who matches wits with the unemployed actor (who also ran off with his wife) in a deadly serious twisted game. Unlike the original, it was much darker and contained sparse, cryptic language, significant pauses and, as always, a hint of menace beneath the surface.



In 1968 Ms. Kitt was essentially blacklisted by Lyndon Johnson. She was invited by Lady Bird to a celebrity women’s luncheon at the White House and asked to offer her views on inner-city youth. Taking the event seriously, not as a publicity stunt, Kitt pointedly criticized the Vietnam War and its impact on poor minorities.

An infuriated Johnson put out the word that Kitt’s rudeness reduced the First Lady to tears and Kitt found herself essentially blacklisted across the country. Afraid to incur the government’s wrath, venues refused to book her. It was later revealed Kitt was the subject of a secret federal investigation; her house bugged and she was tailed by Secret Service agents. When the FBI failed to find evidence Kitt was a subversive, the CIA compiled a highly speculative dossier that attempted to portray her as a nymphomaniac. Unable to find work in America, Kitt moved to Europe where she spent most of the following decade.

I was blessed to meet both of them briefly after standing patiently outside a stage door in London in 1978 and New York a few years earlier where two long since lost Playbills were signed by two very gracious and obviously exhausted people.

So, raise a glass of Wassail to the memory of two legends, dancing now together and, as fate would have it, two passionately progressive antiwar voices on two sides of the Atlantic silenced. Rest in the peace that you always stayed true to yourselves and to the rest of us who will miss you.

Ruth Marcus Should Know Better

Last Saturday, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus came up with an unusually convoluted bit of punditspeak about forgiving Dick Cheney his self-admitted war crimes and crimes against humanity including lying the country into war, illegal wiretapping, outing Valerie Plame-Wilson, torturing prisoners of war and – oh, right – telling Fox News’ Chris Wallace that his personal highpoint over the past eight years was 9/11. Conviction on any one of these felonies could land Cheney & Co. in prison for the rest of their lives.

Marcus, who occasionally fills in on PBS’ NewsHour as a “liberal” counterpoint to conservative David Brooks, wrote that she is “coming to the conclusion that what's most crucial here is ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated. In the end, that may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.”

Excuse me?

Marcus argues that because Cheney didn’t think it was wrong to torture and murder prisoners of war held by the United States of America, why not forget the whole thing? Does that mean if someone believes it’s alright to conk a little old lady over the head and steal her purse they shouldn’t be arrested? How does Marcus expect “these mistakes are not repeated” if wrongdoers – and there are legions of them in the soon-to-be-thankfully-over Bush Administration – are not tried and, if convicted, imprisoned?

She should know better.

If she doesn’t, then Marcus better read the history and transcripts of the Nuremberg trials. If she doesn’t have time to pour through the hundreds of volumes, spend an evening watching Judgement at Nuremberg. The whole point of war crime trials is not just punishing the guilty but also to expose truth, put banality on public display, shame the citizens who enabled them, and warn future generations against making the same mistake. Even today, people look back at the Nazi and Imperial Japanese era and wonder, “How could it happen? People must have known. Why didn’t they stop it?”

The world, but especially America, needs both the lesson and catharsis of all five of these following eight years of the Bush-Cheney reign of horror. No future generation should have to look back on this time and ask the same question as it experiences a historical re-run.

Another Reason To Love Rachel Maddow

A few nights ago, Rachel Maddow was discussing the Wall St. bailout on her MSNBC show with guest, Dr. Laura Tyson.

Tyson, a former economic advisor to Pres. Clinton and now a professor at UC-Berkeley, was defending the banks who received bailout money for their total lack of disclosure or transparency on how they were using the cash. What Tyson didn’t disclose – but blogger David Sirota discovered – is that she is a director of Morgan Stanley which received $10-billion from the Treasury Dept. Nor, did Tyson happen to mention that she earns $350,000 annually from the bank in director’s fees and owns 79,000 shares in the company.

When Sirota informed Maddow of this oversight, she did something that few, if any, hosts on cable news would do. She not only admitted the oversight, Maddow chastised herself for not doing a better job of researching Tyson’s background and current business interests. And she didn’t just mumble a hasty “sorry;” she detailed her mistake, aired a response from Tyson and then apologised to her audience.



The Tyson incident is just one more example of why I love Rachel Maddow and, more to the point, why she is one of the best journalists around – cable, broadcast and print.

So Cute I Could Puke

Crank up the schmaltz and mix in a preposterous plot. It’s Christmas Eve and for the next three or four days we’ll be bombarded with movies that give me hives

We have all had the experience of wandering into the wrong bar and immediately realising that unless we leave quickly, something horrid will occur. This happened to me here in Toronto, once in Detroit, twice in Jamaica where every local bar seems to have something bad happening in it, and in Manhattan’s meat packing district. In each case, I sized up the situation fast, realised that my life hung in the balance and beat a hasty retreat.

This is exactly how I feel about Christmas movies.

As soon as I turn on television and the words "John Hughes," "Chevy Chase," "Tim Allen," "Dan Aykroyd" or "based on a novel by John Grisham," pop up, my blood runs cold, my temples throb and I know it is time to switch over to Fat Boy Hackeysack on ESPN2, or an absorbing faux history show such as Ancestors in the Attic, or more bad news from Afghanistan on BBC World, Céline Dion on Ice, or anything else.

Christmas movies have only four plot lines: Cuddly, cloying, cretinous and cute.

It's a Wonderful Life, a story about a small-time banker with a heart of gold, manages to combine all four elements as it inexplicably lionises a mulyak who risks the financial health of his entire community by making a series of bad loans to people who are in no position to repay them. Particularly unsuitable for holiday viewing this year, the 1947 Frank Capra classic should be re-titled It's a Wonderful Subprime Life, with Bernie Madoff in a digitally manipulated cameo appearance.

A Christmas Carol, in any of its myriad manifestations, perpetuates the myth that the obscenely rich can be made to see the error of their ways and rehabilitated even though anyone who has ever dealt with someone obscenely rich knows this is not true.

Miracle on 34th Street, in which a department store Santa goes on trial to prove that Kris Kringle actually exists, has been tugging at heartstrings for so long that everybody’s heartstrings are completely tugged out.

Where Old Stars Die

More recent Christmas movies resemble elephants' graveyards where deposed matinee idols go to die. How sad to see Robert Mitchum, at the tail end of his brilliant career, trading one-liners in Scrooged with a smarmy Bill Murray, before he had learned to act. How distressing to see Jamie Lee Curtis, once the very hottest of the hot, served up as a paunchy sight gag in a skimpy bikini in Christmas With the Kranks. How unsettling to see Robert Duvall in this year's Four Christmases. These are people who used to be stars. Not comedy stars like Will Ferrell or Chevy Chase or Vince Vaughn, but bona fide movie stars. Christmas With the Kranks is so bad that after 20 minutes, I switched from English to French and activated Thai subtitles hoping it would make Aykroyd seem amusing, if only briefly.

Pas de chance.

The kids in Christmas films don't help.

The precocious tyke who rides in Santa's sleigh in The Santa Clause is so overbearing that I keep hoping Dancer and Prancer will leave him behind on an ice floe to get ripped to shreds by polar bears. The moppets in Miracle on 34th Street, Jingle All the Way and Elf make me ask are there no orphanages? Even a film like Home Alone, which was entertaining enough when first released, ultimately becomes impossible to watch. Not only did it lead to Home Alone 2, Home Alone 3 and Daniel Stern's career but because Macaulay Culkin eventually turned into the kind of showbiz monster the entire planet should forget.

Admittedly, my contempt for Yuletide classics may stem from the fact that a niece in my ex-wife’s family was born on Christmas morning. Not long after she first drew breath, I began haunting video stores, buying up every copy of Dolly Parton's A Smoky Mountain Christmas so that she would never witness the holiday depths to which Hollywood could sink. As it turns out, a great advantage of having a niece born on Christmas Day is that Christmas babies, without exception, revile Christmas movies. This is because being born on Christmas is special and brings joy into people's lives, exactly the opposite of what Christmas movies do.

Some Respite

Of course, there are a few Christmas movies that do not induce apoplexy, nausea or hives. Love, Actually is redeemed by Bill Nighy's memorable turn as a washed-up rocker trying to cash in on the holiday season. Once you get past all the bayonets, tear gas and intestines flying through the air, Joyeux Noël – a 2006 French flick about an improbable Yuletide truce during the First World War – is bearable enough. Then there's the strange Un Conte de Noël, starring Catherine Deneuve. Putting Catherine Deneuve in a Christmas movie is a cheap trick by the French because Catherine Deneuve is France’s Christmas gift to humanity, just as Reese Witherspoon is America’s gift to the planet. Merci beaucoup, Tinseltown. Merci, mille fois.

Oh. Before I forget, in Un Conte de Noël Deneuve plays a woman dying of leukaemia who hates her kids. That's the French idea of Christmas cheer.

If I could give a gift to Christmas Day itself, it would be the promise that there would never be another Christmas movie. Obviously I can't do this because Christmas Day is an abstraction that can’t receive gifts and I don’t have the power to make such a guarantee anyway.

Until then, I stick to my all-time favourite Christmas movie: Bad Santa, a vicious, uncompromising attack on the entire genre featuring Billy Bob Thornton as the grumpy old elf in an unrelentingly funny performance on a par with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in The Producers. A particularly acrid feature of Bad Santa is casting child actor Brett Kelly as a dim witted porker who honestly believes that Thornton's debased department store Santa is the real McCoy. My Aunt Fay – who taught me Spanish, the piano and cynicism – was born on Christmas Day. I only wish she had lived long enough to see this film; she would have loved it.