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Hugh Thompson Jr. died today. We are all poorer for the loss.

In 1998, he received the Soldier’s Medal, the army’s highest award for heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.

But in 1968, he was shunned. His patriotism was questioned. He received death threats. Thompson, a military helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, had protected unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai from a massacre by American soldiers.

Tempers ran high in those days, just like today. Plenty of American hot-heads called Lt. William Calley, who led the massacre, an American hero, and vilified Thompson and the other men who stopped it. Calley was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison, but Richard Nixon commuted his sentence.

From BBC News:

Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968.

He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians.

“There was no way I could turn my back on them,” he later said of the victims.

Mr Thompson, a warrant officer at the time, called in support from other US helicopters, and together they airlifted at least nine Vietnamese civilians — including a wounded boy — to safety.

He returned to headquarters, angrily telling his commanders what he had seen. They ordered soldiers in the area to stop shooting.

But Mr Thompson was shunned for years by fellow soldiers, received death threats, and was once told by a congressman that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai.

…

Mr Thompson died of cancer. He had been ill for some time and was removed from life support earlier in the week.

Even Fox News, whose commentators are quick to question the patriotism of anyone who stands up against the Bush Administration, today called Hugh Thompson Jr. a hero.

The wheel of history turns. Time sifts right and wrong.

Hugh Thompson Jr. was a hero. I hope there will always be Americans like him.

My guess is that Pat Robertson just can’t endure the idea that people aren’t talking about him. He craves that hit of publicity, and he doesn’t care whether it’s good publicity or bad. But he has to say ever more outrageous things:

Pat Robertson suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke was the result of Sharon’s policy, which he claimed is “dividing God’s land.” … Robertson called the 1995 assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “the same thing.”

Update: The company Robertson is keeping these days! From the Washington Post:

The television evangelist Pat Robertson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not agree on much, but both suggested yesterday that the severe illness of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was deserved. Both men’s comments were immediately condemned by religious leaders.

Crooks and Liars has posted a video clip that shows me I should be watching David Letterman. Interviewing Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Letterman said (my transcript, from the clip):

Letterman: I’m not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling about sixty percent of what you say is crap. But I don’t know that for a fact.

Bandleader Paul Shaffer: Sixty?

Letterman: You say sixty percent, Paul?

Shaffer: Sixty percent?

Letterman: Sixty percent. That’s just a — I’m just spitballing here.

Think Progress says the Bush Administration has neglected coal mining safety:

Phil Smith, the communications director for the United Mine Workers of America, said that while citations have been issued, the fines assessed for safety violations are too small to force large corporations to make improvements. “The problem with the current laws is enforcement.” According to an AFL-CIO analysis, the Bush administration cut 170 positions from federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and has not proposed a single new mine-safety standard or rule during its tenure.

And there’s a reason for that. The Washington Post reported that West Virginia coal firms raised $275,000 for Bush.

I wonder whether the Administration will be donating that money to charity now, like some other politically embarrassing contributions.

I’m grateful that twelve of the thirteen miners trapped by a coal mine explosion have been found alive. Prospects had looked very bleak.

(It is not yet known just when George W. Bush will stage his photo op with the rescued miners to try to cash in on their rescue.)

Update: Apparently the early reports were wrong. At this point, only one of the thirteen miners is alive. He is hospitalized in critical condition. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the miners lost in this disaster.

Back in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, but he starved his anti-poverty programs to fund the war in Vietnam.

Today, the Bush Administration and Republicans in Congress are fighting an undeclared war on the poor. They’re winning.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes about the latest battle in that war:

If Congress were merely useless, the country would be better off. But it’s worse than useless. In the iron grip of a Republican Party that is almost slavishly devoted to the Bush administration, it’s downright destructive, especially to the interests of poor and working people.

Consider the budget that will soon be sent to the president for his signature. Members of the House and Senate have agreed on legislation that achieves something approaching $40 billion in savings over five years primarily by hammering the sick, the poor, the elderly and college students and their families.

This is the same Congress that genuflects each time the president asks for yet another gift-wrapped tax cut for the wealthiest among us. The textbooks tell us that the U.S. is a representative democracy, but only the upper strata are truly represented.

…

“The Congressional Budget Office,” wrote Kevin Freking of The Associated Press, “has concluded that [increases in Medicare premiums and co-payments] would lead many poor people to forgo health care or not to enroll in Medicaid at all – contributing to some of the $4.8 billion in Medicaid savings envisioned over the next five years.”

(I listened the other day to a story about a woman who had repeatedly postponed a visit to the doctor because she was broke and had no health insurance. It turned out she had breast cancer. By the time it was diagnosed, the cancer had already spread through much of her body. The prognosis for this woman is not good, and it should not be the policy of the United States government to encourage this kind of situation.)

…

This is ugly stuff: mean-spirited legislators hacking like wild men with machetes at the already ragged safety net. Poor children, the very sick and the disabled are among those most likely to tumble into the abyss.

…

Because of some minor, last-minute changes that have to be dealt with, the House will have one more crack at this bill before it goes to the president. It would be an opportunity for some Republican “moderates,” who should be appalled at what is happening, to step up and be heard.

Don’t hold your breath.

On the Memorial Day weekend of 1974, I took a 12-hour ride on a Greyhound bus to Washington, D.C. It was the first time I’d traveled outside Ohio. I stayed at a cheap hotel and did as many touristy things as I could cram into a long holiday weekend.

I brought back fake parchment facsimiles of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, and I hung them on the wall in my apartment. When a visitor asked where I’d got them, I said I’d taken the White House tour, and someone had thrust the papers at me from behind a door and whispered tensely, “Psst! Buddy! Get rid of these for me!”

Richard Nixon was president then, and everybody got the joke, even if they didn’t laugh. It’s been more than thirty years since I’ve told that joke, but I think it’s time to trot it out again.

From Daily Kos:

Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s secretary during the Iran Contra Scandal, said in her testimony during the Congressional investigation of Iran Contra:

[T]here were “times when you have to go above the written law.”

And defenders of President Bush’s disregard of FISA have adopted this Fawn Hall defense. Of course, Vice President Dick Cheney does not put it exactly that way. Instead he argues that the President is above the law…

…

Cheney suggested that Democrats who push to reduce the powers of the presidency in the wake of the disclosure of the eavesdropping program would pay a political price. “Either we’re serious about fighting the war on terror or we’re not,” he said. “Either we believe that there are individuals out there doing everything they can to try to launch more attacks, try to get ever deadlier weapons to use against us or we don’t. The president and I believe very deeply that there is a hell of a threat.”

Well, Mr. Vice President, either we are serious about following the Constitution and the law or we are not. Either we believe the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and no person is above the law, or we don’t. I believe the Bush Administration is a hell of a threat to the rule of law and the Constitution. And I don’t care if there is a political price for saying so.

…

Privately, administration officials have said for months that they see the anti-terrorism fight as a decades-long struggle similar to the Cold War that dominated the second half of the 20th century.

So the question the Media needs to ask is ‘is the Constitution now indefinitely suspended?’ And when did we decide to do that?

From The Once and Future King:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman looks back at 2005 and says “Heck of a Job, Bushie”:

A year ago, everyone expected President Bush to get his way on Social Security. Pundits warned Democrats that they were making a big political mistake by opposing plans to divert payroll taxes into private accounts.

A year ago, everyone thought Congress would make Mr. Bush’s tax cuts permanent, in spite of projections showing that doing so would lead to budget deficits as far as the eye can see….

A year ago, Mr. Bush made many Americans feel safe, because they believed that he would be decisive and effective in an emergency….

A year ago, before “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” became a national punch line, the rising tide of cronyism in government agencies and the rapid replacement of competent professionals with unqualified political appointees attracted hardly any national attention.

A year ago, hardly anyone outside Washington had heard of Jack Abramoff, and Tom DeLay’s position as House majority leader seemed unassailable.

A year ago, Dick Cheney, who repeatedly cited discredited evidence linking Saddam to 9/11, and promised that invading Americans would be welcomed as liberators – although he hadn’t yet declared that the Iraq insurgency was in its “last throes” – was widely admired for his “gravitas.”

…

A year ago, Mr. Bush hadn’t yet openly reneged on Scott McClellan’s 2003 pledge that “if anyone in this administration was involved” in the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity, that person “would no longer be in this administration.” Of course, some suspect that Mr. Bush has always known who was involved.

A year ago, we didn’t know that Mr. Bush was lying, or at least being deceptive, when he said at an April 2004 event promoting the Patriot Act that “a wiretap requires a court order. …When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.”

A year ago, most Americans thought Mr. Bush was honest.

A year ago, we didn’t know for sure that almost all the politicians and pundits who thundered, during the Lewinsky affair, that even the president isn’t above the law have changed their minds. But now we know when it comes to presidents who break the law, it’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.

Unfortunately, the full column is only available to paying customers. Sorry.

As a farewell to 2005, the Washington Post brings us the year in review, as seen by Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird:

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick told a middle-school class that the U.S. Congress is different from the Texas legislature because in Washington, there are “454” members on the House side and “60” in the Senate.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was on The Charlie Rose Show not long ago, talking about Team of Rivals, her book about Abraham Lincoln.

She repeated a story from her book. Only a little more than forty years after Lincoln’s death, Leo Tolstoy found that Lincoln’s fame had spread to one of the remotest places on earth.

From the book:

In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucusus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”

“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth … his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”

Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not such a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.

“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.

“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow looks back at 2005: part 1 and part 2. He also has a parable of recent American history.

From an email message: Connecticut apologizes.

With thanks to Colorado Jyms, here’s Will Ferrell as George W. Bush, explaining global warming.

From a leftover political ad, here’s Will Ferrell again, as George W. Bush down on the farm.

I’ve linked to this before, but it’s funny enough to watch again: the George W. Bush biopic, Dubya, the Movie.

Finally, a consummation devoutly to be wished:

There are lots more Bush pictures here. Most are pretty disrespectful, which is the only way I’d have it.

Cartoonist Mark Fiore brings us Get Smarter, with “Agent Dubya, smarter than any old law.”

Last week, the Christian Science Monitor looked at the war in Iraq on its 1,000th day. The chart showing the number of insurgent attacks is depressing. Comparisons to other wars are enlightening.

I’d like to wish everyone a very happy Winter Solstice.

Every day since the first day of summer, half a year ago, the Sun has risen and set a little bit farther south, and the noonday Sun has been a little bit lower in the sky. The days have grown shorter and the nights longer — at least here in the northern hemisphere. Today, that changes. The Sun stops its southward movement. Tomorrow, and each day for half a year, the Sun will rise a little higher, the days will grow a little longer, and the nights shorter.

Imagine how happy the sky watchers of ancient times must have felt when they realized that the Sun was returning — that the cold and dark of winter would not last forever. What a celebration there must have been then!

Those ancient people almost certainly believed the earth was flat. How do you suppose they explained the movements of the Sun that governed the seasons? We know that some cultures worshipped the Sun, and made sacrifices to it. Greek mythology says the Sun was the chariot of the god Apollo, but it seems unlikely that many Greeks actually believed that. There were countless other ancient cultures about whom we know little or nothing. I would be fascinated to know how they balanced reason and fancy in their explanations of what they saw.

Ancient people weren’t stupid. They just didn’t know some things that we know now about the reason for the seasons: that the earth is round, and orbits the Sun once a year; that it rotates on its axis, which is tilted about 23.5° relative to the plane of that orbit, so that the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun for half the year, and away from the sun for the other half.

How much effort did ancient cultures put into observing and describing the phenomenon, and how much into weaving intricate flights of fancy attempting to explain it? How many years did it take for those flights of fancy to become dogma? Did they persecute those who doubted? How much has human society lost when mystic certainty has trumped logic and doubt? How often, and at what cost, does dogma triumph over truth today?

Oh, well. You don’t have to be a pagan or a Zoroastrian to appreciate the Solstice. The Sun is returning to the north. There will be brighter days ahead.