This Train is Bound for Nowhere

It's hard for me to write about the current subway strike.

On the one hand, Fox 5 News (the local Fox station, if you don't live in New York) thinks it's very easy and Manichean -- every five minutes or so they flash the logo "ILLEGAL TRANSIT STRIKE" on the TV screen. Poor Jodi Appelgate sounds so apologetic when she's required to make the point -- over and over again -- that the strike is in fact technically illegal. She must want to go home and take a nice long hot shower after work, to get the slime off.

One wonders how Fox 5 News would have handled Rosa Parks in 1955: "NEGRO ILLEGALLY SITS IN FRONT OF BUS."

But this is a complicated issue -- and what adds to the complication is that it affects me directly. I live in this city and don't have a car or a driver's license, which means that I have to rely on the subway to get around. I find this as inconvenient as anyone.

However, there are a few facts to consider.

The leadership of the TWU (the ones that Mayor Bloomberg refers to as "thugs") are holding up a principle. When they say they were forced into this strike I believe they're telling the truth. And the fact also seems to be that the MTA wants to use this strike as a way of crippling if not breaking the union. They're seeing 1981 and Reagan and PATCO all over again.

They are relying on the fact that the head of the union is a black man with a foreign accent and hoping that, the longer the strike lasts, the more public opinion will go against the union. But judging from the comments I'm hearing from New Yorkers, I'm not sure that's the case.

The MTA went from crying poverty in order to raise fares to claiming a billion-dollar surplus. There have been many claims that the MTA uses -- and this is a euphemism - creative bookkeeping. Witness the fact that the MTA suddenly "found" millions of dollars in extra money to offer the union at the 11th hour on Monday night in the hopes of averting a strike.

Look at it this way. Pensions in America are in peril. This strike is about holding up the principle that people who are not rich but who have worked hard all their lives deserve a secure retirement with a decent pension. Corporate America, with its Darwinian, dog-eat-dog mentality, is trying to take that away from them. The men and women of the TWU are not only fighting for their own pensions -- they're fighting for yours as well. Because if the MTA can get away with gutting the pensions of transit workers, then no pension of any worker anywhere in the United States is safe.

Maybe this strike isn't so hard to write about after all...

Tom Moran

Bush's Latest Bullshit Offensive

The President has been on television making the case for Iraq yet again. Is anybody buying it?

This is something I'd really like to know. Does anyone believe anything that comes out of this man's mouth anymore? Does he have any credibility left? When he utters the word "coalition," can anyone keep a straight face?

I mean, really.

Peggy Noonan wrote a column where she discussed reaction to the president's latest bullshit offensive:

"... Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment, said of the administration that they lied us into war. He left no doubt that he meant they did it deliberately and cynically. But there seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I've never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn't it? Or try to? Yet they were candid."

Ms. Noonan fails to acknowledge, or perhaps she has forgotten, that the media were crawling all over that country with the troops (remember the term "embedded"?), so that the kind of mass deception that she thinks probably should have happened would have been just a tad impractical.

She's also forgetting something else. The fact is that Saddam did let Hans Blix and the weapons inspectors back into the country in November of 2002, and he did it for a reason. He did it because he knew they wouldn't find anything.

Saddam's reasoning was simple, and in theory it should have worked. He lets the inspectors back into Iraq, they look and look, they don't find anything -- and then Bush's hands are tied. Without any evidence of weapons of mass destruction he has no causa sine qua non for war - and Saddam is safe. What Saddam didn't count on, and what no rational person could have expected, was that George W. Bush is not a rational being, and that he was determined to go to war with Iraq -- regardless of whether he had a legitimate casus belli or not.

Bush did lie us into war. 2,000 Americans and God knows how many Iraqis are dead as a result, and I believe that, if the 2006 mid-term election goes the right way, he may well end up being impeached.

And if that happens, all the bullshit offenses of George W. Bush and all of his lackeys in the right-wing media won't be able to stop it.

Tom Moran