As the evi­dence accu­mu­lates on the Follieri/Galante church-for-beach-house devel­oper scan­dal, it’s become some­thing of a par­lor game around the kitchen table to spec­u­late on who will play all the char­ac­ters in the upcom­ing mini-series. It’s only a mat­ter of time really. We’ve got a glam Euro­trash huck­ster, a Hol­ly­wood actress, the Sopranos-like mob vice pres­i­dent, Bill Clin­ton shady deal­ings with his all-but-pedophile drink­ing buddies–and of course the Dio­cese of Camden’s Bishop Galante and at least one dioce­san priest with a fond­ness for play­ing dress-up. It will only become more truth-is-stranger-than-fiction when a few more details work their way from open secret to FBI doc­u­men­ta­tion and NY Post headlines.

So while it’s not a sur­prise, there is a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion in the lat­est media rumor that “Law & Order” is plan­ning one of their clas­sic “ripped from the head­lines” drama­ti­za­tion of the scan­dal:

Raffaello’s arrest was and still is the buzz in New York City’s social circles.…He was the ulti­mate con man; hand­some, rich, smooth and with a celebrity girl­friend to make him seem legit. I’m sure this will be the highest-rated Law & Order episode next season.

There’s enough angles to this story to fill an entire sea­son of tele­vi­sion so we don’t know how promi­nent the Bishop’s part will be. But L&O cre­ator Dick Wolf grew up an altar boy at St. Patrick’s cathe­dral in New York and the L&O cos­tume depart­ment has more cler­i­cal out­fits that Raf­faello Follieri’s closet. Wolf rarely misses the chance to throw a priest into the script. Whole sea­sons of the show were devoted to ripped-from-the-headlines pieces on the priest/bishop sex abuse scan­dal in the early 2000s and I’m sure a follow-up look at the web of finan­cial fraud fueled (or at least jus­ti­fied) by the set­tle­ment pay­outs would be a big rat­ings hit.

I just wish Lennie Briscoe was still around to make the col­lar. BOMP BOMP.

Shortly after the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion took office, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney held a series of secret meet­ings in the White House that have guided America’s energy pol­icy over the last four years. The White House has refused repeated requests for a list of par­tic­i­pants at the “task force” meet­ings. All we’ve known for sure is who wasn’t invited: eniron­men­tal­ists and any­one else who might bring a per­spec­tive crit­i­cal of America’s depen­dence on fos­sil fuels.
We’ve long sus­pected that Cheney’s spe­cial guests were top oil com­pany exec­u­tives and that these con­sul­tants largely wrote the energy guide­lines that came out of the meet­ing. The pol­icy strong favor the eco­nomic inter­ests of “Big Oil” over envi­ron­men­tal or national secu­rity con­cerns. The oil com­pa­nies have repeat­edly denied being at the meet­ings: Just last week, oil indus­try offi­cials from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Cono­coPhillips tes­ti­fied at a joint hear­ing of the Sen­ate Energy and Com­merce com­mit­tees that their employ­ees had been part of Cheney’s energy task force.
Liar liar, pants on fire.
The Wash­ing­ton Post has obtained a White House doc­u­ment that exec­u­tives from Big Oil did indeed meet with the energy task force in 2001. Inves­ti­ga­tions are in order. Sen­a­tor Frank Laut­en­berg of New Jer­sey said “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meet­ings secret, and now oil exec­u­tives may be lying to Con­gress about their role in the Cheney task force.” This issue is impor­tant not only to Wash­ing­ton Belt­way insid­ers but to all of us. Dis­as­ters like Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina and the ongo­ing quag­mire in iraq are fueled by Amer­i­can energy needs. As long as we have Big Oil dic­tat­ing our energy pol­icy we will con­tinue to have these wars and cli­mate tragedies. Peo­ple will die, lives will be ruined and we will all be taxed for our oil misadventures.

Appar­ently the U.S. is pres­sur­ing “Qatar to sell the Al Jazeera TV network”:www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/international/middleeast/30jazeera.html The best line in the New York Times arti­cle:
bq. Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney, Defense Sec­re­tary Don­ald H. Rums­feld, Sec­re­tary of State Con­doleezza Rice, for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Colin L. Pow­ell and other Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have com­plained heat­edly to Qatari lead­ers that Al Jazeera’s broad­casts have been inflam­ma­tory, mis­lead­ing and occa­sion­ally false, espe­cially on iraq.
So I sup­pose Cheney, Rums­feld, Rice and Pow­ell have never given out mis­lead­ing or occa­sion­ally false infor­ma­tion about iraq?
Al Jazeera is watched by 30 mil­lion to 50 mil­lion view­ers. It’s cov­er­age has been inflam­ma­tory and I’m not going to defend that, but it’s the most impor­tant media source in the Mid­dle East and should not be shut down by Amer­i­can pres­sure. Qatar is only con­sid­er­ing sell­ing it, but poten­tial buy­ers for the financially-strapped net­work are few. And the Cheney team wouldn’t be involved if they weren’t inter­ested in mak­ing it’s con­tent more U.S. friendly.

In this elec­tion, reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives were able to craft a mes­sage mak­ing same-sex mar­riages look like an afront to apple pie and base­ball and of course peo­ple voted against it. What if we could have some­how framed this elec­tion with the details of human suf­fer­ing that these laws sug­gest?
Now avail­able for the fash­ion­able Bush-era bumper. Pro­ceeds go to sup­port the Non​vi​o​lence​.org web­sites:
  

Con­tinue…

Pres­i­dent George W. Bush has been re-elected for four more years. The man who led the United States to “two wars in four years”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php and whose poli­cies in Afghanistan and iraq con­tinue to cre­ate chaos in both coun­tries will get four more years to pur­sue his war of ter­ror­ism against the world. Amer­i­cans will not sleep any safer but will dream ever more of con­quer­ing and killing ene­mies. We’ll con­tinue to sow the seeds of wars for gen­er­a­tions to come.
I was wor­ried when Sen­a­tor John Kerry unex­pect­edly picked up in the pri­maries to become the Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. In his patri­cian upbring­ing he was very much like Pres­i­dent Bush, and they actu­ally agreed on many of the big issues — war, gay mar­riage, stem cell research. But in his per­son­al­ity, style and tem­pera­ment Kerry was too much like for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore.
Yes, I know Gore won the pop­u­lar vote in the 2000 elec­tion and that his loss was declared by mys­te­ri­ous chads and a hand­ful of senior cit­i­zen judges in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. But an elec­tion as close as that one should have been seen as a resound­ing loss, no mat­ter what the Supreme Court ver­dict. As Vice Pres­i­dent, Gore had helped lead the nation to one of its great­est eco­nomic recov­ers in our life­times. He was also clearly smarter in the Pres­i­dent, more knowl­edge­able and far­sighted, with more care­fully artic­u­lated visions of the future. But he barely won the pop­u­lar vote, mak­ing the elec­toral col­lege vote close enough to be debated.
Kerry is intel­lec­tual and aloof in the same way that Gore was. And clearly there are a num­ber of Amer­i­can vot­ers who don’t want that. They want a can­di­date who can speak from the heart, who isn’t afraid to talk about faith. They also want a can­di­date who can talk in sim­ple, morally unam­bigu­ous ways about war.
And what about war? Would a Pres­i­dent Kerry have really pulled out troops sooner than Pres­i­dent Bush will? Who knows: Demo­c­ra­tic Pres­i­dents have pur­sued plenty of wars over the last cen­tury and when Kerry pro­claimed he would hunt down and kill the enemy, he spoke as the only one of the four men on the major tick­ets who actu­ally has hunted down and killed fel­low humans in wartime.
We can make an edu­cated guess that a Kerry-led Amer­ica would leave iraq in bet­ter shape than a Bush-led Amer­ica will. Kerry has the patience and the plan­ning fore­sight to do the hard coalition-building work in iraq and in the world that is nec­es­sary if U.S. mil­i­tary power will trans­late to a real peace. But a Kerry plan for paci­fi­ca­tion and rebuild­ing of iraq could eas­ily have fol­lowed the path that Demo­c­ra­tic Pres­i­dent Lyn­don B. Johnson’s did in Viet­nam: an unend­ing, constantly-escalating war.
Did Amer­i­cans offi­cially approve the country’s past two wars yes­ter­day? It’s hard to con­clude oth­er­wise. Despite the lies of mass destruc­tion and despite the “will­ful mis­lead­ing of the Amer­i­can people”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php that Sad­dam Hus­sein was some­how involved in the 9/11 attacks and “pos­sessed weapons of mass destruction”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_weapons_of_mass_destruction_scandal.php, some­thing over 50% of Amer­i­cans thought the Bush/Cheney Pres­i­dency was worth keep­ing for another four years.
But there’s noth­ing to say a pop­u­lar vote grants wis­dom. In the next four years, those of us want­ing an alter­na­tive will prob­a­bly have many “teach­able moments” to talk with our neigh­bors and friends about the dete­ri­o­rat­ing sit­u­a­tion in iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe those of us whose “paci­fism is informed by reli­gious understandings”:www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000462.php can cross the intel­lec­tual divide some more and talk about how our faith gives us a sim­ple, morally unam­bigu­ous way to argue against war. The coun­try needs “strong paci­fist voices”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/philosophy-nonviolence.php now more than ever. Let’s get talk­ing.
ps: …and donat­ing. Non​vi​o​lence​.org is a nine years old peace resource guide and blog. It’s time it gets reg­u­lar fund­ing from its mil­lion annual read­ers. “Please give gen­er­ously and help us expand this work”:http://www.nonviolence.org/support/. We have a lot to do in the next four years!

On Tues­day Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney told an Iowa audi­ence that there would be more ter­ror­ism in the U.S. if he wasn’t re-elected Vice Pres­i­dent:
bq. “It’s absolutely essen­tial that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice,” Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 peo­ple in Des Moines, “because if we make the wrong choice then the dan­ger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be dev­as­tat­ing from the stand­point of the United States.“
His words under­score just how much the Bush/Cheney Admin­is­tra­tion have relied on the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks for their polit­i­cal legit­i­macy. Ter­ror breeds ter­ror and fear, anger and vio­lence esca­lates in its wake. The wars in Afghanistan and iraq are shap­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of Amer­ica haters, as much because the post-war rebuild­ing has been so care­less and self-serving to Amer­i­can eco­nomic inter­ests. War-mongerers in one coun­try sup­port the war-mongerers in another by pro­vid­ing each another with tar­gets and argu­ments. The cycle goes on.

The U.S. elec­tion cam­paign has many ironies, none per­haps as strange as the fights over the can­di­dates’ war records. The cur­rent Pres­i­dent George W. Bush got out of active duty in Viet­nam by using the influ­ence of his polit­i­cally pow­er­ful fam­ily. While sol­diers killed and died on the Mekong Delta, he goofed off on an Alabama air­field. Most of the cen­tral fig­ures of his Admin­is­tra­tion, includ­ing Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney also avoided fight­ing in Viet­nam.
Not that I can blame them exactly. If you don’t believe in fight­ing, then why not use any influ­ence and loop­hole you can? It’s more coura­geous to stand up pub­licly and stand in sol­i­dar­ity with those con­sci­en­tious objec­tors who don’t share your polit­i­cal con­nec­tions. But if you’re both anti­war and a cow­ard, hey, loop­holes are great. Bush was one less Amer­i­can teenager shoot­ing up Viet­nam vil­lages and for that we com­mend him.
Ah, but of course George W. Bush doesn’t claim to be either anti­war or a cow­ard. Two and a half decades later, he snook­ered Amer­i­can into a war on false pre­tences. Nowa­days he uses every photo-op he can to look strong and patri­otic. Like most scions of aris­to­cratic dynas­ties through­out his­tory, he dis­plays the worst kind of poli­cial cow­ardice: he is a leader who believes only in send­ing other people’s kids to war.
Con­trast this with his Demo­c­ra­tic Party rival John Kerry. He was also the son of a politically-connected fam­ily. He could have pulled some strings and ended up in Alabama. But he chose to fight in Viet­nam. He was wounded in bat­tle, received met­als and came back a cer­ti­fied war hero. Have fought he saw both the eter­nal hor­rors of war and the par­tic­u­lar hor­rors of the Viet­nam War. It was only after he came back that he used his polit­i­cal con­nec­tions. He used them to punc­ture the myths of the Viet­nam War and in so doing became a promi­nent anti­war activist.
Not that his anti­war activ­i­ties make him a paci­fist, then or now. As Pres­i­dent I’m sure he’d turn to mil­i­tary solu­tions that we here at Non​vi​o​lence​.org would con­demn. But we be assured that when he orders a war, he’d be think­ing of the kids that Amer­ica would be send­ing out to die and he’d be think­ing of the for­eign vic­tims whose lives would inevitably be taken in con­flict.
Despite the stark con­trast of these Pres­i­den­tial biogra­phies, the pecu­liar logic of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics is paint­ing the mil­i­tary dodger as a hero and the cer­ti­fied war hero as a cow­ard. The lat­ter cam­paign is being led by a shad­owy group called the Swift Boat Vet­er­ans for Truth. Today’s Guardian has an excel­lent arti­cle on the “Texas Repub­li­cans fund­ing the Swift Boat controversy”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1288272,00.html. The New York Times also delves the “out­right fab­ri­ca­tions of the Swift Boat TV ads”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/campaign/20swift.html?ex=1094018686&ei=1&en=691b4b0e81b8387f. A lot of Bush’s bud­dies and long-time Repub­li­can Party appa­ratchiks are behind this and its lies are trans­par­ent and easy to uncover. It’s a good primer on dirty pol­i­tics 2004 style.
One of the big ques­tions about this elec­tion is whether the Amer­i­can vot­ers will believe more in image or sub­stance. It goes beyond pol­i­tics, really, to cul­ture and to a con­sumerism that promises that with the right clothes and affected atti­tude, you can sim­ply buy your­self a new iden­tity. Pres­i­dent Bush put on a flight jacket and landed a jet on an air­craft car­rier a mile off the Cal­i­for­nia beach. He was the very pic­ture of a war hero and strong patriot. Is a photo all it takes anymore?