With the news of Tony Snow’s ultimate departure, we’re faced with yet another round of grappling over how to respond to the death of someone whose temporal behavior enabled dark forces to exercise their plunder and rapine. We are exhorted to hold our tongues out of respect and compassion. And, if we can’t muster that, then out of self-interest, for, inevitably, some day someone we love will be laid to rest. Some day we will be.

Most people who argue, with Chilon of Sparta, that we should speak no ill of the dead put a time limit on their prescription. It’s not that we shouldn’t ever speak ill of the dead, in their view, merely that we should allow the decedent’s family time to get the corpse in the ground before lighting the flamethrowers. It’s understandable in that “we’re all sinners, let God judge” kind of way. Who gets hurt if we roast some war criminal or child molester or lying government shill after the Reaper swings his scythe? Certainly not the target of our wrath. Just kin and friends. What purpose is served by intensifying their grief at its peak? Where is our human kindness?

The trouble with this polite posthumousness isn’t that it gives space to the begrieved, a worthy and understandable behavior. Nor is it that speaking the truth is held in abeyance for a few hours or days. It’s that people who should know better get carried away with themselves. It should be remembered that we’re not talking here about the passing of somebody’s great-aunt Dolores who may have ripped off the collection plate as it passed by or had an affair unbeknownst to great-uncle Phil. We’re speaking of public figures, women and men who so often become saints at graveside services, no matter how despicable their life’s work.

Samuel Johnson famously wrote in 1775 that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce made the appropriate correction: “With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.”

The past eight years proves Bierce’s thesis once and for all.  

The remorseless gangsters currently in charge of the executive branch aren’t the first American leaders to falsely define patriotism to include torturing, racketeering, warmongering, privatizing, fraud, fecklessness, betrayal, incompetence, injustice, absolutism, corporatism, cronyism and horses’ assism. They aren’t the first to wave the red-white-and-blue while committing sedition against the nation’s citizens by lying them into a war. Nor the first to spy on dissidents of that war. Nor to treat the veterans of that war with public accolades simultaneous to budgetary disdain.

Nor, it must never be forgotten, the first to commit war crimes under a patriotic banner.

But these particular scoundrels have managed one new audacity: cramming the full roster of such behavior into two presidential terms. For this Herculean effort, the cabal of grifters who took over seven-and-a-half years ago surely deserve medals.  

Ronald Reagan came into office with three major ideas in mind. Vastly expand defense spending, cut taxes on the wealthy, and do something about the annual budget deficit, then hovering around $80 billion a year. He did increase defense spending, something rightwingers still like to falsely claim sent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. And he did cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50% to 38% to 28%, giving already wealthy Americans gigantic increases in income while starting us down the road toward a Third World skewing of the ratio between rich and poor. He achieved this with the assistance of more borrowing than all the Presidents who had preceded him. Compared with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania, however, Reagan was a piker.

The Great Communicator had image-conscious speechwriters. When Reagan first addressed Congress in February 1981, he said:

I’ve been trying … to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion is.  The best that I could come up with is that if you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 67 miles high.

My stepfather’s brother died with other Marines on the beach at Guadacanal during World War II.

My best high school friend was killed in the early days of the Vietnam War.

These men will be honored at next Monday’s Memorial Day ceremonies along with nearly a million of their soldier, sailor, marine, coast guard and air force compatriots who gave their lives in military service. No distinction is made between the hundreds of thousands who died fighting in wars most Americans would consider righteous and the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the furtherance of bad causes or died in vain because their criminal or reckless leaders sent them into harm’s way for greed, stupidity or empire. Those who fought in gray uniforms in a war of secession are given the same reverence, the same moments of silence, the same commemoration of sacrifice as those who wore blue into battle.

It doesn’t matter whether they were white boys from the First Tennessee Infantry Regiment who fell in the land-grabbing war with Mexico in 1847, or black soldiers of the 93rd Infantry Division fighting Germans in the war to end all wars, or Japanese-Americans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team slugging their way through Italy while their relatives lived incarcerated in camps back home.

It doesn’t matter whether their name was Hernández, or Hansen, or Hashimoto. Nor whether they caught enemy shrapnel or a bullet from friendly fire. Nor whether they were drafted or volunteered. Nor whether they died fighting for liberty more than 200 years ago at Bunker Hill or crushing it more than 100 years ago in the boondocks of the Philippines. On Memorial Day all American warriors who lost their lives are honored because they did lose their lives.  

With one exception.

Back in 1999, when everybody from Stephen Jay Gould to Arthur C. Clarke were arguing over whether the 21st Century began in 2000 or 2001, a great deal of discussion was had over what to call the new decade, whichever year kicked it off. But nobody could agree. The Aughts?  The Oughts? The Naughts? The Naught-ies? The Zeroes? Personally, I liked the idea of calling it the “ut-oh” decade. I think I have pretty good grounds for claiming that, so far, it’s lived up to that name beyond a progressive’s worst nightmares.

Being a Gouldian in this affair, it’s my view that since we’ve now just about completed 100 months in the parade of “ut-oh” years, we’re not likely ever to get anybody to agree on a name for this decade. But how about a signature reform before the second decade of this century gets underway?

Ever since the railroad scandals of 140 years ago, Americans have been periodically encouraged to believe that one more round of reformist tinkering will shield elected officials from the bankable temptations of high office and make them all more accountable to us hoi polloi. Fruitless as these attempts to marry politicians and ethics have been, we keep trying. Tinker here. Tinker there.

They’re so clever. Reforms this morning? Loopholes by noon. And before you can say Credit Mobilier or The Keating 5 or Enron or Tom DeLay, some cheeky new crusader is spurring yet another sure-fire reform into the political arena.

Since about five minutes after Israel sent its warplanes to attack a site near Al Kibar, Syria, became known eight months ago, the speculation has been that Israel took out a nuclear reactor. Although the immediate public response from Washington officials was that the target wasn’t a nuke, we now know that those officials thought they knew better and had for months. The question now is whether this attack last September was a prelude to an attack on a nuclear reactor in Arak, Iran.

Six weeks after the attack, the Institute for Science and International Security provided some details and photos, a “confirmation” that the Syrians had been building a reactor near Al Kibar. Moreover, ISIS seemed to agree with U.S. officials who, in early October had said that satellite photos indicated the Syrian site bore the “signature” of a small reactor. ISIS made clear that this structurally resembled a site in Yongbon, North Korea, where plutonium has been extracted for that country’s nuclear weapons.  In December, Clayton Keir explored Syria’s nuclear capabilities for GlobalSecurity.org.

Hence, senior officials of the Cheney-Bush Administration, assisted with visual aids, didn’t provide any real surprises during Thursday’s  all-day briefing of Congress. No doubt it was nuke, they said. North Korea built or helped build it. And, yes, the White House had held extensive discussions with Israel prior to the September 6 attack. About whether the Syrians were actually pursuing the building of a plutonium Bomb the senior officials were less willing to be certain. That’s because there were some crucial missing pieces, including a chemical reprocessing facility capable of separating plutonium.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, before a television audience, President Ronald Reagan initiated one of the grandest defense boondoggles of all time, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Like many boondoggles, it was couched in sweet talk and lies:

The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression — to preserve freedom and peace. …

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

Those lines and the rest of the speech sure sounded good to many. As had been the case almost since the arrival of Werner von Braun and the other V-2 rocket engineers at the end of World War II, when it came to space, America talked peace and prepared for war. After sputnik went beeping around the planet every 96 minutes in 1957, the effort was greatly intensified, always with the threat of Soviet attack as the rationale. This was true whether it was JFK campaigning about a bogus “missile gap” or a 1980s Pentagon inflating Moscow’s military power at the urging of the Committee on the Present Danger’s nascent neo-conservatives. Reagan’s speech was nothing new on that score.

In fact, U.S. talk about putting weapons onto the ultimate high ground of outer space started well before President Reagan gave his Star Wars speech. In 1947, German Major General Walter Dornberger, who had headed the Nazi rocket program, began officially advising the U.S. Air Force. Like any good Nazi, he recommended putting nuclear bombs into orbit to attack Soviet cities and military installations. He also proposed a space-based defense against missiles, an orbiting ring of hundreds of satellites, sentries armed with small rockets capable of destroying enemy ICBMs.

Across wwwLand and out in the other world, many people said goodbye to John Edwards Wednesday. Some had a tear in their eye. Some had glee in their hearts. Judging by most of what I saw and read, it must have been about the best press John has received since he started his campaign.

His two rivals were gracious in their farewells. Some people who had done their very best to ignore him while he was actually in the campaign said how important his message had been now that he is no longer a candidate. No surprise. As the advocacy-journalist I.F. Stone once said: “Funerals are times for pious lying.” And that was how everybody – including many of Edwards’s supporters – seemed to view the candidate’s announcement, as an obituary, not merely the end of a campaign but the death knell to all the issues he spoke so eloquently and passionately about.

That’s not, I think, how John Edwards saw his speech, as a funeral oration, a-goodbye-so-long-nice-knowing-you-thanks-for-your-efforts-we- fought-the-good-fight-but-now-it’s-somebody-else’s-job kind of speech. Maybe it’s just the superannuated dirty f’n hippie in me, but what he said sounded more like a call to action.

Do not turn away from these great struggles before us. Do not give up on the causes that we have fought for. Do not walk away from what’s possible, because it’s time for all of us, all of us together, to make the two Americas one.

That doesn’t sound like what John was saying meant merely to get behind whichever candidate ultimately wins the Democratic nomination, although he obviously meant that too. And he’s right. Anybody who really truly believes that President John McCain would be better than President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama can ignore that part of John’s advice and stay at home or vote for a third-party candidate come November 4. You would think that we’d had enough of this sow-the-wind, reap-the-whirlwind behavior at the ballot box, but there’ll always be some people who just don’t get it.