the Artful Dodger war wimps are at it again, now as Benedict Arnold CEOs

War profiteering by tax dodge - The Boston Globe -- I follow the GLOBE because of my ties to the New England community--we still have a lot of friends there, and my daily coaching partner is a wirehouse broker who works in the middle of Boston. The GLOBE has surfaced some evidence of the two-faced double-dealing (is that redundant or emphatic?) swirling around Dick Cheney and his assorted band of war wimps, those guys who never served themselves yet continue to promote the war and profit from it at the same time. I have a problem with his draft-dodging back in the '60s--remember his comment that he "had better things to do," and that's why he felt it was OK that the rest of us could go stand in for him. Now, taking a page from Prescott Bush's playbook, here comes Cheney with war profiteering, with emphasis on reaping the benefits of military contracts while fattening the bottom line by not paying back into the American social systems. This is just too clever for words. I guess, once again, he's decided he has better things to do, this time with the money that should be cycling back through our social systems.

Here's the big question: Should we all begin to follow his lead, or should we close the war-wimps' loopholes?

desperately seeking wisdom

OpinionJournal - Featured Article: While we're talking about Mike Dovilla, here's a fairly balanced piece he sent me a few weeks back, from Joe Lieberman in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal on February 26th. Read the whole thing. It speaks to the political environment and the war environment under which Mike and everybody else we've required to serve over there must endure, and we must not jeopardize their safety or compromise the mission at this point based on knee-jerk reactions of the lightweights in the rear; most of them are not leaders, they're merely politicians; many of them don't serve our interests first. One of the worst feelings we all had during the RVN era was having our fate being decided by the politicians--thinking first of their safety, some of them, and then of ours--and by the irate public who weren't there, some of whom had opted not to serve. Here's Joe, who's beginning to show wisdom.

"I understand the frustration, anger and exhaustion so many Americans feel about Iraq, the desire to throw up our hands and simply say, 'Enough.' And I am painfully aware of the enormous toll of this war in human life, and of the infuriating mistakes that have been made in the war's conduct.

But we must not make another terrible mistake now. Many of the worst errors in Iraq arose precisely because the Bush administration best-cased what would happen after Saddam was overthrown. Now many opponents of the war are making the very same best-case mistake--assuming we can pull back in the midst of a critical battle with impunity, even arguing that our retreat will reduce the terrorism and sectarian violence in Iraq."

there's no code of honor among the war-wimps

Ex-CIA agent blasts White House - The Boston Globe -- Gloria summed it up this morning as we were talking over this reprehensible betrayal of a government employee by her employers: They just have no sense of honor any more.

It seems to me that all of these present-day political operatives--the Rove- and Cheney-style war-wimps operating behind the scenes and away from the front lines, as they did during the Viet Nam conflict and continue to do today--had read The Art of War by Sun Tzu and forgotten the ethic, the code of honor, that made America as great as it has been. My biggest problem with Sun Tzu is his amorality: You do whatever you need to do to attain the objective. Remember that this book made him the darling of the investment bankers, especially the leveraged-buyout kings of the 1980s, who took apart the wealth of industrial-age corporations without regard to the moral and social ramifications.

Now, we have the war-wimps running their woosie games, ruining peoples' careers, endangering peoples' lives, and undermining the effectiveness of our government agencies (perhaps this will be an ancillary overall benefit to society, though, in the long run). The code of the American West has been sublimated to things Oriental; the code of the cowboy is supplanted by that of too-clever white-shoe boys riding side-saddle; as a people, we are losing the one thing that made us great, the fact that we were trustworthy.

Here's an excerpt of the GLOBE article:

By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff March 17, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson yesterday publicly accused the White House of destroying her career for political purposes, telling a congressional committee her identity was "carelessly and recklessly abused" by officials who revealed her name to the media.

In dramatic and unusually public fashion, the former undercover spy went before a blaze of camera lights, discussing her ordeal before a hushed, packed committee room. Speaking calmly but with an undercurrent of anger, Plame Wilson described how her "outing" not only derailed her career path in intelligence, but jeopardized the lives of her former contacts as well as future recruitment by the CIA.

Plame Wilson's appearance before the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform ended 3 1/2 years of silence over an episode that began when syndicated conservative columnist Robert Novak identified her as a CIA operative in his column and ended with last week's conviction of a top White House aide who was charged with lying to a grand jury investigating the matter