The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks!

I’ve been around aviation in one form or another for much of my life. I’ve spent hundreds of hours flying into remote airstrips and large international airports hauling everything from bodies to a small herd of goats. A daily intimacy of airplanes anthromorphizes them. Each one has its own personality made up of idiosyncratic quirks learned by sight, sound, or touch. For me, airports can sometimes be the same.

Templehof airport in Berlin is one of those places. When the Nazis built it, it was the largest building in Europe, so massive that you can easily see the U-shaped colossus on radar. Tempelhof was the starting point for the Berlin Airlift that kept Berlin from starving after the Soviets closed off the city. Nearly 30 years after my last visit it’s no longer a pilot’s ghost town, but a reliever airport to handle spill-over traffic from Berlin’s main airport.

I visited the place several times while in the Air Force. In my day, the Cold War was still on and the Berlin wall stood in all its shameful, ugly glory. You could easily see the difference between bright, modern West Berlin and dowdy East Berlin even if that scar on the face of the divided city wasn’t there.

I remember the end of the runway was lined almost to its boundary by sooty apartment buildings where Berliners sometimes waved from windows and tended to their daily lives. But the most impressive sight was the immense terminal. Massive on radar, it was an awe-inspiring monument to Hitler up close. Albert Spier designed it to emphasize the superiority of Germany and from close up, it’s tempting to say he might have succeeded. His terminal was jacked up on architectural steroids and swelled by grandiose Nazi fervor for a madman.

When we taxied to the parking area, we were alone in a space that could hold hundreds of airplanes. It was easy to imagine the chaos of the Airlift. The Candy Bomber became famous here as the hopeful face of an America that still did good. By the time I arrived, our image was already tarnishing.

With the roar of the engines gone, the place was almost silent - nothing other than some far-off traffic noise and the ticking of our engines as they cooled. Our footsteps echoed as we entered the building. In those days, only a small portion was in use by a contingent of U.S. Air Force and Luftwaffe clerks. The rest of the building was dusty and many of the floor to ceiling windows were boarded up. Ticket counters and shops were shuttered and the guttural German flight announcements were only a distant memory.

Cargo unloaded, we taxied out and left in a roar, back over the dirty apartment buildings and over the wall to our airbase in England. For me, Tempelhof lives on as a memory of grande plans ruined and good people helping others. I knew Tempelhof as a place with a rich history that once played a large role in the history of the planet. From the ugly reasons for its birth to its redemption as a lifeline to the starving, it is - and was - an important place that deserved to live on.

The Berlin city council recently voted to raze it to make way for something modern and no doubt immanently disposable in 20 or 30 years. It’s become an unwanted relic with its historic patina rubbed off. It will succumb to the wrecking ball - dust to dust as it were. And for me, that’s a shame.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

No doubt white men hold a lot of power, but that doesn’t mean they carry the master key to every portal of power. Some actually vote based on nothing more than a belief that one candidate is superior to another based on actual facts and free-thinking opinions. White men aren’t always guided by a hate of women, racial minorities, or anyone else for that matter. There’s no underground club where men meet, drink beer, and think up ways to humiliate women and minorities. There’s not even a secret handshake.

This year, the democrats feature two candidates that not so long ago wouldn’t have been considered as candidates at all, much less having a good shot at the White House. For now, the republicans are sticking with an old white man, but even Crazy Legs McCain is considering a female Veep to bring the Grand Old Peckerheads screaming and kicking into the 21st century. The idea that Carly Fiorina - who more often than not acts like an old white male - is a possibility seems like a romp with the panderbears, but what do you expect? McCain will say anything if he thinks it’s to his advantage. Hell, the man even hugged Bush.

Jiggly Bit Haters?
Nora Ephron - a woman who I generally respect and admire - wrote a HufPo piece last week that accuses white men of being either racists or sexists based solely on their external jiggly bits. In fact, she implies that white men (particularly those living in Pennsylvania) aren’t even people. According to Nora, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men.

Whaaaaaa? By her logic, if I vote for Obama, I’m a sexist. If I vote for Clinton, I’m a racist. If I vote for McCain - something as probable as reversing the spin of Earth - I’m undependable. “The outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain,” she writes. “A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them.” Now I’m just a lowly white male, but that statement says more about her ability to choose boyfriends than it does about how I - or thousands of other white men - will vote.

Hermaphrodite Female Eskimos
I’ve heard lots of hog-swallop this election season that runs along those same lines, but precious little about extending that pretzel logic to where it ultimately goes. If a white female votes for Obama, is she Phyllis Schlafly incarnate? How about a black woman who votes for Clinton? Does she get a complimentary membership to the KKK? My God, could a sudden groundswell of hermaphrodite female Eskimos swing the whole election?!

It’s true that some white males will vote for McCain, just as some black women will vote for Hillary and some white women will vote for Barrack. Elections are like that. They’re a chance to voice opinions about which way the country should head. Mostly these decisions are simply that - decisions. The fact that some actual racists or sexists vote the way they do is something that’ll happen regardless of who’s running, but that’s no reason to blame white males for the outcome.

There was one small statistic that Nora forgot in her article. While there are more registered white voters than black voters, there is one thing clear according to the 2004 census, there are more registered women than men. That would seem to suggest that white men don’t hold all the cards. I can’t speak for all men, but when it comes to black vs. white and male vs. female, we don’t even have a dog in this hunt, so please don’t blame us because women can’t get along with each other.

I’ll go back to being a racist and sexist now. After all, it is what we do.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!

It takes one to know one and George Bush - The Man Who Never Made a Mistake^TM - knows a lot of people of like mind and talent.

Unrepentant neocondinista Doug Feith - Bush’s former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Lunacy - left for greener pastures a while back. Unlike his more well-known, greed-head fellow bumblers he decided to write a book rather than hang around at the K-Street Bar and Grille hustling loose change from guys like Jack “the Hat” Abramoff.

Doogie thinks this whole author thing is a sweet gig too. After all, he gets to complain mightily about what a hash everyone else in the Cabal of Crackheads made of Iraq. Like a true Bush acolyte, his new book says in effect, “Hey, don’t look at me. I was the brightest guy in the room and everyone else was too stupid to listen to me.”

However, he wasn’t a total Kool-Aid drinker. He did imply that El Jefe needed to crack down on insubordinate behavior in the pre-Condi State Department. He just said it using his inside the head voice. Otherwise, he’d have been asked to throw himself on his sword to save the Frat Boy from embarrassment - just like the other surreal characters of the Cabal.

His disses are pretty far-ranging. Powell was an insubordinate. Rummy, Armitage, and Bremer screwed up his well-laid, back-of-the-cocktail-napkin plan to plant the seed of freedom in Iraq’s fertile garden. Tennet was a boob who couldn’t come up with valid intelligence if it walked up and bit him on his well-upholstered kiester and the intelligence Feith produced himself was never vetted by everyone else to make sure the Iraqis had buttloads of WMD launch sites instead of piles of fireworks Saddam was keeping to celebrate his birthday.

Feith’s colleagues didn’t have nice things to say about him either. Tommy Franks said he was “the dumbest *%$# on the planet” and Tennet praised his work as “total crap”. Jay Garner - who held Bremer’s Iraq Uberlord post for about 3 days - learned enough in his whirlwind tenure to pronounce Feith “incredibly dangerous”. You can’t sneak anything past Ol’ Jay, the crafty bastard.

Of course, Feith seals the deal for his Blame-o-Thon with a classic Bushonian statement. He called their penchant for passing blame on to everyone else the, “I was surrounded by idiots” school of blame shifting. So in the end, I guess this must be the most truthful book anyone has ever written about Iraq. Feith claims he was surrounded by idiots and all the other idiots thought he was an idiot. Let’s review, shall we?

Idiots² + Doug Feith = A big frickin’ mess.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me.

The Poobah is a featured contributor at Bring It On!