The High (Personal) Cost of Corruption

"Republicans in Congress are demanding that President Bush investigate whether the oil companies are gouging consumers on these gas prices. That's a good idea: Republicans asking Republicans to investigate other Republicans. And you know who they're going to blame? The Democrats."
--Jay Leno

"Congress is furious. They want to know how come these oil company profits are so high, but the money they get under the table has remained the same."
--Jay Leno


Recently, according to the Washington Post, Republicans returned to Congress from a two-week break from home feeling a bit, well, relieved. They seemed to think that all the corruption scandals plaguing their party and the following lobbying-reform brouhaha was not going to be that big a deal come November, after all. It seems that, in meetings with constituents, the voters were more concerned with problems like the high price of gasoline and health care issues.

Whew, many of them seemed to be saying. There would be no political consequences, because, they decided, the voters figured it was just all partisan politics and didn't really affect them.

But I believe the Republicans were wrong on two counts: One, that the voters didn't care. And two, that congressional corruption does not directly affect each and every one of us.

If lavish golfing trips, high-dollar meals at four-star restaurants, luxury vacations, sky-box tickets to sporting events, six-figure campaign donations (in $2000 increments, of course), and so on, were all there was to it, well, maybe you or I would not be touched by the extra-curricular activities of congressmen and women. (Okay, mostly men.)

But if that luxury vacation was paid for by, say, a pharmaceutical company, and afterward, that congressman allowed that same pharmaceutical lobbyist to then write legislation for a prescription drug bill which prohibits Congress from shopping around for lower prices for the consumer, and the congressman shoves that bill through committee behind closed doors late at night and rushes a midnight vote on it and the bill is passed, and you or your elderly parent has to deal with the consequences of the resulting bloated, industry-favoring law on a fixed income…then it becomes very personal indeed.

This is what has been going on in Congress--and more--for the past five years.

Today I'm going to break apart the mythology and the madness of the culture of corruption that has taken over this Congress and reached its tentacles into the White House, and I'm going to show just how personal it really is. I'm going to do it in four parts:

Rules, Roll Calls, and Republican Recklessness
The Currency of Corruption
The Personal Price of Porkbarrel
Reform, Republican-Style

So sit back, scroll on down, and fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Rules, Roll Calls, & Republican Recklessness

"The two of us have been immersed in Washington politics for more than 36 years. We have never seen the culture so sick or the legislative process so dysfunctional. The plea deals of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the indictment of Tom DeLay and his resignation as House majority leader, and the demise of Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham notwithstanding, this is not simply a problem of a rogue lobbyist or a pack of them. Nor is it a matter of a handful of disconnected, corrupt lawmakers taking favors in return for official actions.

"The problem starts not with lobbyists but inside Congress. Over the past five years, the rules and norms that govern Congressional deliberation, debate, and voting…have routinely been violated, especially in the House of Representatives, and in ways that mark a dramatic break from custom.

"What has all this got to do with corruption? If you can play fast and loose with the rules of the game in lawmaking, it becomes easier to consider playing fast and loose with everything else, including relations with lobbyists, acceptance of favors, the use of official resources and the discharge of governmental power."
--Norman Ornstein (resident scholar for the American Enterprise Institute), and Thomas E. Mann (senior fellow, Brookings Institute), "If You Give a Congressman a Cookie," New York Times, January 19, 2006.

I'll make it short and sweet. Here are some of the hamhanded tactics the Republican majority in Congress has used to ramrod its policies through. Keep in mind that not every single solitary Congressman is a Republican. Nearly half are Democrats. That means they represent nearly half of the voters in this county. So if one Congressman is frozen out, then all his or her constituents are frozen out as well.

Roll Call Votes and Rule Violations

1. Roll call votes, which are supposed to take fifteen minutes or so, frequently stretch out to two or three hours. Any dissent is stifled, any debate quashed.

2. Omnibus bills, sometimes thousands of pages long, are brought to the floor with no notice, though the rules require at least 72 hours.

3. Conference committees exclude minority members and cut deals in private, sometimes adding major provisions after the conference has closed.

4. Majority Republicans bypass normal procedures and ignore objections. They then reframe substantive issues as procedural matters.

5. When the Republican chairman and two Republican members of the House ethics committee reprimanded Republican majority leader Tom DeLay for at least THREE violations of standards, House Speaker Dennis Hastert fired them all and appointed two members who had given large sums to Tom Delay's defense fund (which was defending him, at the time, for the matter before the committee.)

K Street Corruption

I'll get into this in more detail later, but suffice it to say that the same Republican majority leader Tom DeLay created the K Street Project, to quote Ornstein and Mann in their article, "used its governmental power to demand that trade associations and lobbying groups fire Democratic lobbyists and hire designated Republicans, who could then be expected to show their gratitude by contributing generously to party candidates and committees."

The primary donor being Jack Abromoff.

The Currency of Corruption

"Earmarking--in which members of Congress secure federal dollars for pork-barrel projects by covertly attaching them to huge spending bills--has become the currency of corruption in Congress.

"In Congress these days, you establish priorities by getting money for them. When the carefully designed process of authorization, appropriation and oversight is adhered to, these policies and priorities are given a thorough vetting. But earmarking circumvents that cycle: the Appropriations Committee ensures that earmarks escape scrutiny by inserting them into conference reports, largely written behind closed doors."
--Jeff Flake, Republican representative from Arizona, "Earmarked Men," New York Times, February 9, 2006.

"Never mind the golf junkets and poolside seminars. One of the rawest displays of lobbyist's power in the Capitol occurred when Republican Congressional negotiators tweaked a budget-cutting bill in order to provide the health insurance industry with a $22 billion windfall…bill change was dearly sought by the H.M.O. industry, written by House and Senate Republicans in closed-door, Republican-only bargaining sessions…"
--Secrecy as a Spoil of Victory, New York Times editorial, January 25, 2006.

I know what some of you are thinking. That this is just business as usual, and that the Democrats have been just as guilty as the Republicans, back when they controlled both Houses.

Actually, no.

*Since Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the number of home district earmarks jumped from 4,155 valued at about $29 billion in 1994 to 14,211 worth nearly $53 billion ten years later.

*Citizens Against Government Waste, in its annual "Pig Book" released on April 5, 2006, details $29 billion in pork barrel spending (homestate and home district projects specially set aside in congressional spending measures) in 2005 ALONE.

*Example of pork barrel: the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere"--a $223 million project connecting Alaska's Gravina Island--population 50--to the mainland.

*According to the report, "Earmarks have blossomed under the GOP."

*Earmarks are used as inducements to get members to sign on to larger spending measures. (Jack Abromoff referred to the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee as an "earmark favor factory.")

*The growth in earmarks has paralleled the monstrous increase in federal spending.

*In his first five years in office, President Bush NEVER ONCE USED HIS VETO POWER AGAINST A SINGLE EARMARK OR BILL SUBMITTED BY THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS.

According to the Washington Post, "The link between special interests and members of Congress has grown so tight that nearly a dozen House and Senate members who control federal spending have retained lobbying veterans to raise campaign funds for them, and those lobbyists have secured federal favors in spending bills."

The hunt for earmarks has become so all-consuming on Capitol Hill that, according to some congressional aides, lawmakers are neglecting other duties. Republican Senator John McCain called it "out of control."

The Personal Price of Porkbarrel

If you think all this talk about lobbying reform has caused some of these congressmen and women to be, well, a bit more circumspect, what with it being an election year and all--think again.

According to the Washington Post, business in the Senate came to a "screeching halt" just the other day, when a debate over an emergency spending bill for the military was angrily interrupted by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden who furiously pointed out, in a one-man filibuster, that Republicans had secretly tacked onto the military spending bill, a key oil company subsidy--even though oil is going for $70 a barrel.

So, while professing patriotic concern for our men and women in uniform, the Republicans were still secretly sneaking in more giveaways to the oil industry.

When they holler in front of the cameras about cracking down on price-gouging by the oil industry? DON'T BELIEVE THEM. They're still up to their regular old business-as-usual tricks to benefit their cronies in the "all bidness."

Remember those early days of the Bush administration, when Vice President Dick Cheney invited the CEOs of major oil companies--his old running buddies--to secret meetings at the White House, where they then wrote legislation for the White House energy policy?

Yeah, we're still paying for those secret meetings, every time we fill up our gas tanks.

As recently as eight months ago, oil and gas subsidies were passed by the Republican Congress. Only now, when the American people are screaming loud and long, are they making public talk about rolling back those subsidies.

But as we saw in the earlier example, they are sneaking more subsidies in behind closed doors, late at night, by attaching them to such popular measures as emergency military spending bills.

By the way--this is exactly what happened when Senator John Kerry "voted for the military spending bill and then voted against it." Though he was ridiculed by Republicans and mocked by the media--what he meant was that the bill he voted against had been shackled with all kinds of pork barrel plunder that had nothing to do with the war. And since the bill had been fashioned in secret, he didn't see it until the up-or-down vote was required.

Just so you know.

"Republicans are torn between wanting to show their sympathy for consumers and maintaining their longstanding support for the oil industry…The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated Tuesday that oil and gas companies would receive about $10 billion in tax breaks over the next five years that are specifically aimed at their industry…Many Democrats had opposed the new tax breaks all along."
--Edmund L. Andrews and Michael Janofsky, "Second Thoughts in Congress on Oil Tax Breaks," New York Times, April 27, 2006.

That energy bill we were talking about earlier? The one ex-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney wrote up with is oil bidness cronies? First of all, they got, outright, about $2 billion in tax breaks. And several hundred million dollars in subsidies went to an industry-run deepwater drilling research center…where, boys and girls?

Sugarland, Texas. Home to Representative Tom DeLay.

And Exxon-Mobil, for instance, reported $8.4 billion in profit, first-quarter ALONE, this year. So have they all.

So, when President Bush stages a photo-op at a gas station and pledges to help us all overcome our dreadful addiction to oil and pretends to care that it's going to cost some parts of the country up to $4 a gallon at the pump by summer…DON'T BELIEVE IT.

At this point, it was my intention to go into great detail, explaining just how corrupt people like Tom DeLay and Jack Abromoff were, how they set up fake "family values" organizations which did little more than funnel millions into their own pockets and that of their family, friends, and many, many Republican congressmen--no Democrat received ONE DIME from Jack Abromoff--but gosh, I'm beginning to see what Josh Marshall meant when he said that this administration was sooo corrupt and sold out to special interests that it was too much work for one little lonely blogger to handle, so he had to hire TWO FULL-TIME EMPLOYEES, TO DO NOTHING BUT INVESTIGATE SCANDAL, CORRUPTION, LIES, HYPOCRISY, AND THIEVING from the Republicans in Congress and the White House. So I shall postpone that part of my case for another day. Suffice it to say that an obscene amount of money was lavished on greedy Republican lawmakers, who then were only too happy to pass just about any little old law the lobbyists wanted.

Abramoff was also a Bush-Cheney re-election "pioneer"--meaning, he raised at least $100,000 for the campaign, in $2000 increments.

Oh--before I leave this part of the subject, let me point out that, THREE WEEKS before Abromoff was due to be sentenced, at which time he pledged to name names, many, many names, from Capitol Hill to the White House…the lead prosecutor in the case?

He was given a juicy federal judgeship.

By President Bush.

I would LOVE to see what the Republicans would have said if President Clinton had tried the same thing, under the same circumstances.

Instead…we didn't hear much about it, did we? So much for that pesky "liberal media."

Reform--Republican Style

"The Internal Revenue Service recently audited the books of a Texas nonprofit group that was critical of campaign spending by former House majority leader Tom DeLay, after receiving a request for the audit from one of DeLay's political allies in the House."
"Texas Nonprofit is Cleared After GOP-Prompted Audit," Washington Post, February 27, 2006.

"The Associated Press, The New York Times, and ABC's World News Tonight reported on Republican efforts to present new House Majority Leader John A. Boehner as a clean break from GOP corruption scandals, but they ignored criticism Boehner received for passing out checks from a tobacco industry group on the House floor moments before a key tobacco vote, as well as other ethical questions raised by Boehner's record."
--Media Matters for America, www.mediamatters.org, Febuary 7, 2006.

Just the other day, the Republican-led House passed a bill called the Lobbying Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. The Washington Post politely referred to the bill as, "a joke--or more accurately, a ruse aimed at convincing what the leaders must believe is a doltish public that the House has done something to clean up Washington."

Privately-funded trips, for example, won't be banned.

They'll just be "suspended"--until just after the elections.

Meals and other gifts from lobbyists? No problem.

Flights on corporate jets? Absolutely.

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies that heavily favor Republican congressmen in campaign contributions and all sorts of lobbying perks, continue to benefit from obscene tax breaks and other subsidies while prices at the pump skyrocket.

And Halliburton, beneficiary of a multi-billion-dollar no-bid contract for the reconstruction of Iraq, continues to receive billions in defense contracts even though the Pentagon's own study revealed graft, corruption, and massive failures system-wide.

Pharmaceutical companies, another powerful Republican lobby, manage to convince Congress of the inherent sinfulness of allowing seniors to import their prescription drugs from Canada, or bargain-shop for their medicare prescription-drug costs. Meanwhile, they have been the beneficiaries of $139 billion in windfall profits.

And all along, while vast and obscene amounts of money go to line the pockets of Congressmen and ensure unimaginable profits for their lobbying groups, the Republican Congress slashes student loans, over-time pay for American workers, medicare benefits, veteran's benefits…and the president strives to privatize health care and social security.

And don't even get me started on fat defense contracts for outdated unusable weapons systems while the men and women getting blown up and shot at don't have decent armor or vehicles.

Or how Reservists who are getting their limbs blown off and are being discharged from the service, are then being presented with huge hospital bills.

This is what is happening, ladies and gentlemen. They wave the flag and pound the Bible, then fly off to Scotland for a lobbying-rich golfing vacation…then come home and slash veteran's benefits and medical care.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

We all pay a terrible, and high, personal price, for corruption.

"'Stand firm," DeLay said in his closing. "Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator.' He then departed, to go see a cockfight.'"
"Former DeLay Aide Enriched by Nonprofit," Washington Post, March 26, 2006.
.

MILITARY MUTINY: "I will never trust them again."

"I now know I wrongfully placed my faith and trust in a presidential administration hopelessly mired in incompetence, hubris, and lack of accountability. It planned a war based on false intelligence and unrealistic assumptions. It has strategically surrendered the condition of victory in Iraq to people who do not share our vision, values, or interests. The Bush administration has proven successful at only one thing in Iraq--painting us into a corner with no feasible exit…I will never trust them again."
--Christopher H. Sheppard, former Marine captain who served two tours of duty in Iraq and took part in the battle of Fallujah, November, 2004. Quoted from his piece, "Coming Home--Disillusioned," The Seattle Times, April 12, 2006.

"My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special provinces of those who have never had to execute these missions--or bury the result."
--Lieutenant General Greg Neubold (ret) "Why Iraq Was a Mistake," Time magazine, April 9, 2006.

"Make no mistake. The retired generals who are speaking out against Rumsfeld in interviews and op-ed pieces express the views of hundreds of other officers on active duty. When I recently asked an Army officer with extensive Iraq combat experience how many of his colleagues wanted Rumsfeld out, he guessed 75 percent. Based on my own conversations with senior officers over the past three years, I suspect that figure may be low."
--David Ignatius , "Replace Rumsfeld," Washington Post, April 14, 2006.


This is my first blog entry, other than updates on my friend Jamie Woodard's critically injured Marine son, in almost a month, and there is a reason for that.

I almost quit.

I had this feeling that nobody was out there. Nobody was listening, or cared. That I was a voice in the wilderness, but like the proverbial tree falling in the woods that nobody hears--if nobody CARES, then what's the point?

I had to do some soul-searching and seek to figure out what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it, and why--or if I wanted to do it at all.

And then I read the piece by Leonard Pitts, Jr, in the Baltimore Sun, "Gestures of Conscience Bring Solace," about speaking truth to power, especially when it goes against the accepted grain. He said that, when great injustices are perpetrated upon a people, history often looks back and asks the question, How could that have happened? How could the people have let that happen?

He talked about the era of Joseph McCarthy's bullying, innuendoes and lies that had Americans suspecting their neighbors of being Communists…of the practice in World War II, of shipping Japanese Americans--many of whom had sons fighting in the war--off to live in internment camps on the Pacific coast…of the years of Jim Crow, when African Americans were being strung up and lynched for no other reason than that they sassed a white or gazed at a white woman.

Where were good Americans when these injustices, these TRAVESTIES, were taking place? Did no one speak out?

Mr. Pitts knows that true believers in any president or any cause will not be convinced if evidence is screaming into their faces, and that those who dissent already know and need no convincing.

All true.

But, he adds, "History's verdict is all we have left. And when tomorrow calls today into account, some of us want to say we stood up. We called out. We were not silent. "

Mr. Pitts wants to be counted among the number who spoke out, no matter how unpopular the cause or how disinterested the listeners. "The rest of us are left…trying to make certain that when the official record is written, we are not indicted by our silence."

I consider myself a proud member of what I like to call, The 25% Club.

I am referring to the roll-up to war in Iraq, when only a measley 25% of us openly protested what I called at the time A BOGUS WAR. We did so at great risk of being openly booed, as Michael Moore was when he accepted his Academy Award for Farenheit 911, of being accused of being unpatriotic, as triple-amputee and Vietnam vet Max Cleland was, of being told, if we had loved ones in the military, that we were undermining their efforts and destroying their morale if we did not stand silent and wave the flag.

I actually got into a shouting match with my sister-in-law, Bobbie, about it in May of 2003. At a busy public restaurant. During a family meal. When we were supposed to be celebrating my daughter's college graduation.

And now. NOW.

Now, the numbers are almost completely, well, FLIP-FLOPPED, to coin a phrase. Now something like 75% of the American people question this war, believe this war was a mistake, believe the president and his minions lied us into the war, or at the very least, feel profoundly uneasy and anxious about just how long we are going to be bogged down in it before the comparisons to Viet Nam become more uncomfortably apt.

Only about 25% of the American people still stubbornly believe that the war was a good idea, is being handled correctly, and that Rummy and our commander-in-chief are doing a heck of a job.

Now, we have a right, indeed, a moral imperative, to say, We told you so, but you wouldn't listen.

And let me tell you something. As I write these words, my son is fighting with the Marine Corps in his second deployment to Iraq, after having taken part in the historic battle of Fallujah in November of 2004, and he is sick and tired of the struggle, war-weary to his very bones, angry and bitter that they no longer have any idea what their mission is any more except survival.

Do you think it gives me any great satisfaction to have been proven right? When my son's life is in terrible danger every moment of every day? Do you know how it makes me feel?

FILLED WITH A RIGHTEOUS RAGE. That's how I feel. I shake my fist in the direction of Washington, D.C., and I SHOUT…

Only now.

ONLY NOW.

Only now, I am not alone. Let anyone DARE question the patriotism of no less than SEVEN retired generals from every branch in the service, some of whom served under the mighty Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq…Let anyone DARE accuse them of undermining the troops.

"The cost of flawed leadership continues to be paid in blood. The willingness of our forces to shoulder such a load should make it a sacred obligation to get our defense policy right. They must be absolutely sure that the commitment is for a cause as honorable as the sacrifice."
--Liet. Gen. Greg Neubold (ret), "Why Iraq Was a Mistake," Time magazine, April 9, 2006.

Let anyone DARE accuse them of being political partisans…let anyone DARE say they are merely reflecting a "liberal media."

Go ahead. Say it to their faces--especially you chickenhawks who were so quick to send OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN into battle when you, yourself never served, never sent a child away to die.

You have to understand something about the military culture. Unquestioning obedience is literally brainwashed into every soldier, sailor, and Marine: it is the standout lesson of boot camp.

And there is a powerful tradition in the military of not speaking out in defiance of their commander-in-chief, most especially not during a war. Privately, yes. Publicly, no.

So, for these high-ranking officers, some of whom protested the war from the beginning, to speak out now in clear public forums is not something that they have easily done. It took great anguished soul-searching on the part of each and every one.

But they can't stand by. They can't stand by and watch our boys and girls come home under secret cover of darkness in C-130 planes filled with flag-draped coffins, or onboard medical flights, spidered with tubes and bandages.

Only someone who has known the gut-wrenching terror and glory of battle can possibly understand the high cost of asking someone else to fight your battles. They can't do it any more, and they can't stand by and watch others do it, not like this--with no idea what they're doing there now, or how they got there, or why, or when they'll get out.

They cannot, they will not, be silent.

For the administration to toss aside their protests as so much sour grapes, for the Secretary of Defense to send out memos of talking points to supportive generals so they'll say just the right thing in rebuttal on talk shows, for the president to act as if none of this matters, while every day, more boys and girls die and get shipped off to die…is a profound moral sin.

How DARE they thump the Bible and profess their Christianity loud and clear, all while manipulating and maneuvering a war for purely political purposes, taking advantage of the public trust, spinning lies and near-lies and trumping up false causes, all while lining their own pockets with oil company profits gained from corrupt no-bid White House contracts. (Vice-President Dick Cheney, former CEO of no-bid contract Halliburton, made more than a quarter of a million dollars in profit from that company in 2006 ALONE.)

How DARE they use and abuse our bravest and our finest fighting men and women, dooming thousands to death and thousands more to maiming and mutilation, and almost all of them to lifelong psychic scarring just because, hell, war is good for business. Just ask all those fat-cat defense contractors buzzing around Congress like flies around a corpse. Or just ask the oil companies, who dole out half-a-billion dollar contracts to their retiring CEOs while jacking up the prices at the pump to what is estimated by summer to reach more than $4 a gallon in some parts of the country.

And we all know how good war can be for POLITICS, don't we

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. Tell them they are being attacked, and denounce pacifists for lack of patriotism and endangering the country. It works the same in any country.”
--Herman Goering
Hitler’s Reichmarschall
At the Nuremburg trials.

I am the mother of a Marine Corps fighting man, and I will call out my outrage, I will speak truth to power, I will be counted, I WILL NOT BE SILENT…I will be a word-warrior for the real warriors, I will fight for the fighters...until the politicians who pulled off the greatest scam in this country's military history are not only drummed out of office...but properly burn in hell.

Progress Report & Hospital Address for Injured Marine

Guys,

I haven't posted a great deal in the past couple of weeks because, among other reasons, I have been so distraught over the accident that nearly took the life of Jamie Woodard's Marine son, Ben Hardgrove, just hours after he had returned to the U.S. from his 2nd deployment to Iraq. He was struck by a car and, along with numerous broken bones and collapsed lungs, suffered a severe base line skull fracture in the area of the brain stem.

He has been in a coma ever since.

First, he had to have tubes put in his lungs to breathe, then when that got better--he's off the respirator--the doctors thought he might be at least partially blind. Finally, she sent a one-sentence message: "Too much oxygen loss only by a miracle will he survive."

My sister-in-law, Kay, who welcomed home her son Michael with Ben's unit, said she thought perhaps the doctors were providing the "worst-case scenario" and that Jamie might have been protecting herself emotionally by preparing herself for the absolute worst. "I know it may be Pollyanna-ish but I just can't give up hope yet," Kay said.

Today, Kay forwarded to me the following message from Jamie:

From: Jamie Woodard <bensfamilyusmc@yahoo.com>

Bens great Aunt called Mike today and told him that Bens cousin went to see him earlier today, he said Ben was well aware he was in the room, opened his eyes and looked around the room. The Drs had said he would not be able to do this. So many prayers are being answered. Today had been especially difficult for me,we were supposed to be picking up from the airport right now, so the good news was what I needed. Please continue the prayers for a full recovery. Thank you so much, and have fun with your boys, hold them a little closer and tell them all I said thank you and hello. *(This is directed to the other Marine moms of the 3/7.)*

Happy Easter to all.
Jamie

Of course, none of us can know for sure, but it certainly doesn't hurt to continue to pray for Jamie's beleaguered family at this time. If you would like to send a card or letter to Jamie or Ben, here is the hospital address at this time. They will eventually be moving Ben to San Antonio, but not yet.

Write her at:
Jamie Woodard, mother to patient, Ben Hardgrove
Intensive Care Unit
Desert Regional Medical Center
1150 N. Indian Canyon Dr.
Palm Springs, CA 92262

Phone: 760-323-6511

In the meantime, I'll keep you posted here on Blue Inkblots, and will post a regular blog entry in the next day or two.

Answered Prayer--Critically Injured Marine Showing Improvement

Guys,

I thought you might appreciate hearing that your prayers are being answered. As you may remember, Jamie Woodard's son, Ben Hardgrove, was struck by a car and nearly killed only hours after returning home from his second deployment to Iraq. Just weeks before he got home, his humvee took a direct hit; two of his fellow Marines were killed and one was seriously injured. He told his mother how he'd held in his hands the brains of one of his buddies.

So it was particularly cruel that this terrible thing happened to Ben before he even got the chance to see his family, who were still waiting for him back in Texas. Just after his unit returned to California, Ben was struck by a car and suffered massive head injuries as well as broken ribs, collapsed lungs, and broken arms and legs. He was not expected to survive the night and I asked for your prayers.

It's been a couple of weeks now, and Ben has opened his eyes. He is moving his arms and legs on command, and they have removed his last chest tube--all very good news. However, he can't see yet. The occipital nerve was hurt, and they hope that his blindness might be concentrated in only one eye, but they just don't know yet.

His mother says, "We are still on eggshells, and things are unstable, but we see small signs. His body is functioning, now we must work on his mind."

Our fervent prayers are still very much needed. Keep in mind that Jamie has three children back home in Texas under the age of three, and two in high school. Her youngest is only four months old. And she's been told to expect Ben to remain either in a hospital or in rehab for as long as a year.

Right now, Marine support groups and the Corps are providing for Jamie's support in California, but even when Ben is able to be moved to Texas, he'll be in San Antonio or Dallas--not Paris, Texas, where his big family is--so this is going to be a hardship on their family for months to come.

I will eventually post places where you can send donations if you would like. In the meantime, Ben is at the Desert Springs Hospital in Palm Springs, California. I know his family would appreciate cards and letters being sent to him. I don't yet have an address but will post one.

But pray. Keep praying. The nurses tell his mother that they have never seen anyone fight as hard to live as that boy has. Let's help him in his fight.

All my best, and semper fi,
Deanie

Sunday Stillpoint: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

These events do not reflect God's choices. They happen at random…Fate, not God, sends us the problem…The God I believe in…gives us the strength to cope with the problem.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his groundbreaking bestselling book, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"


In my true-crime book, Faces of Evil, which I wrote with forensic sketch artist Lois Gibson, the first chapter dealt with a horrific case. The body of a six-year old child, starved and shrunken and covered with old scars and breaks, had been dumped like so much garbage in a mud puddle in a bad area of Houston. Lois had been asked to reconstruct the face in a forensic sketch because investigators couldn't identify the body.

Because that sweet child was murdered just three days before 9-11, it took detectives over a year to even find out who she was, because the media coverage of the terrible events in New York City and Washington, D.C. pushed the homicide of a little black girl in Houston onto the back pages. It took many months for the investigators to be able to finally get the media attention they needed that did, at last, land in the living room of that child's grandmother, who identified her. In the meantime, they had taken to calling her, "Angel Doe."

It took several more months for them to track down the miserable lying psychopathic sadists who called themselves Angel's parents, for investigators to find justice for that baby, who had been locked in a closet for the last two years of her life, starved, beaten, tortured with cigarettes, and denied access to a bathroom. If any of her siblings attempted to sneak food to her or bring her a spot of comfort such as a blanket or a baby's potty, they were beaten as well.

After her parents killed her and threw her away, they threatened her siblings with the same fate if any of them ever mentioned having had a sister. In court, they denied even knowing her at first, until one older sister, who had been kind to the child, suddenly threw her head back and wailed, a keen of grief so shattering the judge had to recess the court.

Her rotten parents are rotting in jail as we speak.

I chose to open today's Sunday Stillpoint with Angel Doe's heart-wrenching case because I woke up this morning with a newspaper clipping in my mind. It was a clipping carefully cut out and saved by one of the investigators of Angel's murder. She had kept Angel's forensic sketch pinned up in her office for more than a year and worked tirelessly to find out who the child was and get her a decent Christian burial, which both detectives attended. At the time, her parents--the prime suspects--were on the run.

As the devastated grandparents and other family members wept, the preacher said something to the effect that, "God took her because He needed another beautiful flower in his garden."

Those words, meant to comfort, seemed to reach out from that yellowed newspaper clipping and slap me in the face, because I remember sitting alone in my office reading them, and leaping to my feet, and shouting out loud, GOD HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!

I raged at that clueless minister, who thought he was helping. But anyone with a tiny smidgeon of common sense KNOWS that a merciful loving God almighty would never, EVER, choose to take an innocent child out of this world in such a terrible, lonely, horrible way.

I hear such rationalizations all the time, when tragedy strikes. I hear people utter the same tired old platitudes over and over that are meant to comfort, such as, God had a purpose for this, we just can't know what it is, or, If the hurricane took the lives of your wife and children, God must have spared you for a special reason, or, The tsunami wiped out 250,000 people because most of them were not Christians and God was punishing them, or, You must have lost everything because God is testing you, but don't worry, He never gives you more than you can bear, or, Your baby must have been born deformed because God wants you to develop a special sensitivity to others so that you can help others.

The minister's attempt to give God credit for having "taken" Angel Doe could not have made any sense to those who must have felt shame and guilt for somehow not realizing what was going on right under their noses, and did nothing to ease their terrible grief at her needless suffering.

In his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Kushner, whose own son died a long, slow, lingering, painful death at the age of fourteen, says that such platitudes assume that GOD is the cause of all our suffering, and that these are weak attempts to somehow defend God, or otherwise provide some sort of explanation as to why He would do such a thing.

But what this often does, instead, is cause the suffering person to then BLAME GOD for their suffering, and turn away in rage and grief from the very fount of comfort that might have been available to them.

Rabbi Kushner states instead that: Maybe God does not cause our suffering. Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God.

Like Rabbi Kushner, I have also asked many times, what does it MEAN, There but for the grace of God go I?

If the plane crashes, killing 250 people, and I had a flat tire on the way to the airport and was spared, does that mean that God has some sort of select, special dispensation for me, but that He's decided it's time for all those other people to die, leaving behind countless orphans and widows and grievers?

What possible purpose could GOD have had for allowing the Holocaust, or the attacks on the World Trade Center?

The answer is: none. God did not have a purpose for those terrible events but MAN did. Man is responsible for much of the evil in the world, simply because our Creator has endowed us with the exquisite freedom to choose: We fly the plane into the tower or we don't. People die, or they don't.

Hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and so on…the natural laws governing this planet and universe were ordained by God, and in the natural order of things, sometimes, things go wrong. Our bodies are part of that natural order, and sometimes, our bodies break down, something goes wrong at the cellular structure, or we inherit a bad gene. It's nobody's fault.

Accidents happen. Sometimes they are caused by human error and sometimes they just happen. Tectonic plates under the ocean's surface grind together, causing a wave that takes out a quarter of a million people--NONE of whom were being punished for ANYTHING.

My son is at war. He chose to enlist, and the Marines chose to send him to Iraq. Sometimes he is in situations where bullets fly. Do I believe that those bullets leave their gun barrels with some Marine's names on them and some not? Do I think God hand-selects who will get shot or blown up by an IED on a given day and who will survive?

No.

Those young men and women are well trained, and they do what they can to survive, each and every one of them. They all want to go home to their families. Some get that glorious privilege and some do not.

Does that mean I don't pray that my son will be one of the ones who comes home?

Of course not. I pray every day, every moment.

The question is…WHY? Why do I pray for my son and his buddies, for my nephew and his friends, for our friend Jamie's boy who lies as we speak in Intensive Care after having been hit by a car his very first night home from war?

If God does not hand-pick who's going to live and who's going to die, then why pray?

We pray because GOD IS THERE. He shadows my son's every step. If my son gets a sudden instinct to duck down--even though he can see no danger--how do I know it is not the Spirit of God, as the Bible says, whispering in his ear, saying, This is the way, walk in it.

I want my son to duck. For all I know, God sees the danger even if he doesn't, and sends a warning he should heed. I know Dustin feels the same way, because he has said so. He doesn't question it, he just acts on it.

Do I believe miracles occur? Absolutely.

Recently, there was a much-publicized scientific double-blind study in which a group of heart patients were prayed for, along with traditional medical treatment. It's been much in the news lately that the prayers didn't seem to help because the patients didn't recover any faster or any better than the ones who weren't prayed for.

But how do we know? Maybe in quantifiable ways, the prayers could not be measured, at least not in physical terms. What we DON'T know, what the scientists DIDN'T measure, was what happened to those patients SPIRITUALLY.

Maybe, just knowing people were praying for them lifted their spirits and gave them the energy to take care of themselves. Or maybe, if their bodies were beyond fixing, they were able to rest in the peace that THEY WERE NOT ALONE.

Rabbi Kushner says, Fate, not God, sends us the problem. When we try to deal with it, we find out that we are not strong. We are weak; we get tired, we get angry, overwhelmed. We begin to wonder how we will ever make it through all the years. But when we reach the limits of our own strength and courage, something unexpected happens. We find reinforcement coming from a source outside of ourselves. And in the knowledge we are not alone, that God is on our side, we manage to go on.

When terrible things happen to those we love, it is not our job to explain it. As Rabbi Kushner says, those who are suffering don't need explanation, they need consolation.

Sometimes, in their clumsy attempts to "help," some people actually blame the victim. I knew of one young lady who was brutally raped on her way back from class in college one night, and her family scolded her for being out at that hour, as if she'd had some sort of choice over the sadistic designs of a predator. Rabbi Kushner says, those who are suffering don't need scolding, they need holding.

Terrible things happen. Most of the time, it's not anybody's fault. To say that He never gives us more than we can bear is foolish because He didn't send the problem in the first place, and sometimes, things happen that people just can't bear. Marriages break up, families are disrupted, sometimes, people take their own lives because the pain is just too much for them.

I love a quote the Rabbi gives in the book, from a nineteenth-century rabbi, Menachem Mendel of Rymanov, who said, "human beings are God's language."

"That is," adds Rabbi Kushner, "when we cry out to God in our anguish, God responds by sending us people."

We don't always know WHY bad things happen to good people, but God can speak to the sufferers through our presence, simply holding them, praying for them, cooking a meal or babysitting for them, sending a thoughtful card, or just listening to them. That's all anybody really needs when bad things happen to good people, they just need to know they aren't alone.

And miracles DO happen. The miracle is that God is there, God is always there, in us and all around us, always and forever. It's not God's fault when bad things happen, but His overriding presence can give us almost superhuman powers of strength and courage and healing that can strengthen and sustain us, encourage and empower us.

Through the guidance of Spirit, we can FIND meaning where no meaning exists. We can MAKE a purpose out of the unimaginable.

Through the grace of God, we can walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and fear no evil.

Update on Jamie's Son

Guys, he's still alive, BUT...

First, I want to thank you all on Jamie's behalf for the fervent prayers for her son Ben, who was hit by a car on his first night back in the United States following a harrowing tour with the Marine Corps in Iraq. I know she has felt encouraged and empowered.

The good news is that his condition has been downgraded from grave, but there is still a concern that he could contract pneumonia due to the fact that his lungs had collapsed at one point. He is responding to pain, and he is moving his arms and legs, which would indicate that there was no paralysis, but they don't know if the movements are voluntary or involuntary, so the extent of the brain damage is unknown at this time.

The skull fracture was in the neighborhood of the brain stem, which controls just about everything in the body, but for now, there is no bleeding in the brain and the swelling has gone down.

The good thing about it is that he is a Marine in top physical condition and he is a fighter. But they estimate that, at this time, his recovery will be very long and arduous, and they don't know yet what all it will entail.

The Marine moms who were out there welcoming their own sons home, like my sister-in-law Kay, have taken wonderful care of Jamie, buying her plane ticket out and getting her a place to stay in a house provided for ICU families by the hospital. However, we don't know yet how long she'll be able to stay, because she does have the much younger children back in Texas, and there isn't a whole lot of money to go around indefinitely.

This family, and this young man, will continue to need all the prayers we can all send out on their behalf. This is just the beginning of what promises to be a long, hard ordeal.

I will keep you all posted with updates as time passes. Please continue to spread the word that prayers are still needed and appreciated.

Thank you, again, on Jamie and Ben's behalf.
All my best, and semper fi,
Deanie Mills